v1rgo's reviews
328 reviews

was one of my favorite books as a teenager so i decided to reread. firstly the age gap is pretty gross. but aside from that which is. very bad! um the romance was. too much! taylor's good at establishing mood/emotion obvi v pretty writing but i think a lot of it is put into the romance which the book would've been fine without entirely. i dunno. honestly i never read the second one so i am glad i read this so that i can read the second one but. the romance did make me gag

kind of simplistic but i don't think this was supposed to be super deep. not as well written as chambers's other books though. ehh

natalie portman could never. so much better than the film

she came she saw she yassed. 

read this as a kid. wanted to read again because i remember being irrationally obsessed w the princess as a baby lesbian. rats ARE adorable not ugly and also this is sort of a bummer. if im reading middle grade or children's lit it's as a pick me up. not to feel bad for a rat who is apparently ugly

kind of was trying to read this as an insight into feminist erotic lit history but. regardless some parts of this were very hard to read 😭 um i'm hoping that it's because of the commissioner but i don't know. unsure what i expected considering anais nin had an affair with her father. also my loan expired while i was trying to read this so i had to put it on hold again. thankfully it just took a few days to get to me again probably bc people opened it up, got ten pages in, and were like "what the fuck am i reading". nin was obvi a talented writer lol but. ew to some parts of this. very freudian. interesting to think about how gender was perceived in this.  #releasethenincut  

well. this was sad. man.

well i can't say this was easy to read but it was definitely good. very bleak critique of capitalism and exploration of things like identity and memory. interesting to think about how much of our identities revolve around consumption as a result of late capitalism. i think that's more of a hallmark of being a millennial or gen z considering that we grew up with this sort of environment

ugh. i think i'm through with this sort of ya for a while. i forgot how reading so much of it makes you feel like all you've had for a meal is cotton candy. this was an improvement from the first book in some senses, but i was still kind of let down. the writing had potential like the first book, but was so incredibly clunky. even at like key moments, it felt so.. dull? sludgy? i don't know. the pacing was way too fast too, i still don't have much sense of the characters. it's like when the narrative was in a place that made it so that it'd be necessary to know more about a character, they'd have a end-of-scooby-doo-episode esque internal monologue. and that sort of energy was like compounded by all of the Big Reveals like

marshall's dad

. couldn't super take the Big Reveals seriously bc of that too. like it just wasn't very well done. also full disclosure i KNOW this is a retelling of romeo and juliet but

i was NOT expecting them to acc kill themselves 😭😭. like i just straight up started laughing during the explosion scene i could NOT take it seriously

. the ending also didn't provide me with very much closure. i don't mean in an emotional sense, since this is a tragedy, but just in a plot (as the plot relates to the characters not the city) sense. like you'd think that a book that's entirely plot based would at least be able to offer that. and yes this is me being mad about the fact that great value wesper just got their confession scene and nothing else and that celia did not get a gf!! 

i was talking ab this w someone and we both agreed that celia was the most compelling character, and i do wonder if it's because she wasn't in romeo and juliet so she's entirely an original character. like maybe the author like. ran into issues because she was working within the confines of the original play and was trying to be faithful to it for those characters??? idrk :/ 

i think the series should have been longer. a third book would've helped tremendously. it just seems like the author was trying to do too much. i kind of want to rate this lower than the first book altho it was defo a step up from it because for a finale it was soo disappointing. 

update: i am rating it lower. rated the first one higher because for a first book in a series it had a ton of potential but this wasn't a good wrap up to the first book imo