The Neurospicy Bean

  Y’all I am absolutely obsessed with this series, and this book wraps everything up perfectly (although please?? More in this world?? Because there are hints that there’s more to come???). We get lovely flashes from Robin and Edwin and Violet and Maud, including a really heartwrenching sublot with Robin and Edwin. It also benefits hugely from Jack and Alan having been introduced in the last book and having an established relationship to build on. We get thrown straight into a house full of all these delightful characters (there’s a great line from Jack’s POV describing the dynamic between Edwin and Violet as two cats with terrible personalities who have been adopted by two people determined for them to coexist and like if that doesn’t sum up this whole series I don’t know what does. Just a bunch of golden retrievers adopting grumpy cats. Anyway), and then get to watch them trying to solve a mystery when all they want to do is make out with their respective partners. So yeah, the chara

  So there’s this interesting trend of romance books set in reality tv shows over the last couple of years, and the ones that I’ve read have consistently had the same kind of tension. They want to simultaneously be set in a cutesy reality tv setting and be a lighthearted romance while also critiquing the exploitative, voyeuristic nature of reality tv (which from my perspective you can’t really get around). The results vary, and this book did better than some others because it actually addressed the problems that Everly encountered on the show, but there ultimately still tends to be an element of glossing over the more underlying problems. Whatever, I’m sure this doesn’t bother everyone, but it’s always hard for me to put aside. But beyond that, this book did a lot of things really well. It unpacked fatphobia in a really great way and was a lot more diverse than I expected it to be. Also, I do love a romance that revolves around a deeply protective love interest, not to mention a charac

  Big time second book vibes here – this book is working really hard to do the heavy lifting of the trilogy’s plot and world-building. It takes place a year after the first book, with a bit of a surprising twist: Robin’s sister, Maud, is on an ocean liner accompanying an elderly woman who knows where part of the Last Contract is. Except the elderly woman immediately dies, leaving Maud to try to solve the murder and avoid becoming the next target. Luckily, she has Robin’s records of his visions to help her, which lead her to Lord Hawthorne and, somewhat accidentally, the beautiful but guarded heiress Violet. Mayhem ensues, with quite a lot of action crammed into one book.  It was really good, don’t get me wrong – I cannot express how much I adored Maud and Hawthorne’s sibling-ish relationship, and the whole thing was delightfully chaotic. But because it was so plot-heavy, it felt a bit like the relationship got sidelined. I mean, we don’t find out what Violet’s backstory is until the la

  Honestly I don’t even know how to explain what the plot of this book was. Basically, our main character Felicity has returned to her prep school after the death of her girlfriend. When she arrives she discovers that famous teen author Ellis Haley now lives in the same dorm as her. Ellis is working on a book about the “Galloway Five,” a group of suspected witches who died gruesome deaths at the school. Felicity gets drawn into helping Ellis with her method writing as Ellis tries to prove to Felicity that she’s not actually being haunted by her dead girlfriend, and things just get really, truly unhinged. This book was trying so hard to be dark academia that it just came across a bit self-conscious, and all the pieces didn’t quite fit together in a way that made sense. Now I have to admit that it had the misfortune of coming right after quite possibly the best book I’ve read this year, so my perspective was probably warped, but I also just generally had a really difficult time getting i

  OH MY GOD THIS WAS SO AMAZING. This book (and series) is absolutely my new obsession. The perfect blend of intriguing plot, creative world-building, sweet romance, and incredible character development. I could not stop thinking about it for weeks. The way tiny details in seemingly unrelated scenes build up to create an intricately woven plot is just so incredible. I adored Edwin and Robin, but all the side characters were really excellent as well. In fact, the scene that made me laugh out loud was actually one centering Adelaide and Kitty, Robin and Edwin’s coworkers. Honestly I could keep talking about all the things I love, and I have zero complaints, but really everyone should just go read it immediately because it has absolutely everything. My one note of caution is that there is a LOT of quite explicit sex and a lot of the crucial character moments happen during those scenes, so if that’s something that makes you uncomfortable you might not love it the way I do.

  Oh my God this book had no business being this heartbreaking. This poor kid just keeps trying so hard to make things better and help people, and every single time he just gets absolutely screwed over by everyone around him. Honestly it got frustrating after a while, especially because the plot did begin to feel a bit unnecessarily convoluted, but as far as the actual emotional core of the story goes, I thought it was quite good.  From a more world-building/history perspective, it was much weaker. A lot of the dialogue read like modern dialogue with generically old-fashioned words sprinkled in, and it was really jarring in places. Similarly, there were elements that didn’t seem like they’d been fully researched. Now, I’m willing to forgive some of this in a cutesy historical romance, but this book wanted to be doing more than that, and I think it could have been better researched. That being said, like I mentioned above, the emotional core of this story was devastating and sweet and l

This book’s major failing is that the ending was tonally completely inconsistent with the entire rest of the book. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: endings are the trickiest part of a horror novel. My complaint is usually that they’re too confusing and hard to follow. However, the other problem that tends to crop up is an overly happy ending. A horror story cannot have a genuinely happy ending, in my opinion, to be really effective. Without spoiling the ending, I will say that it wrapped things up far too nicely to be a proper horror ending. It took this wonderful, atmospheric, horrifying story about the prices people are willing to pay for security, and then ended in a jarringly cheerful way. It’s like Hide, if Hide didn’t interrogate itself at all and assumed that yes, sacrificing people who can’t consent to preserve a traditional lifestyle is a normal and valid thing to do.  This probably comes across as very harsh, and most of the book doesn’t deserve that; like I said,

  Okay, this was a very interesting approach to a short story collection, and not what I expected at all. It includes a whole range of stories, some that are firmly magical realism, some urban fantasy, some high fantasy, and some that are all three, neither, or too short to really know. Many are tinged with horror; most are pessimistic. Some are nearly thirty pages, while others are under five. While there are some themes (marginalization, dissatisfaction) that run through the book, there are few real continuities. What I love about this is it’s simply a collection of the author’s works, without particular regard for short story conventions; it’s very unique.  Unfortunately, most of the stories ranged from inspiring active dislike to just ambivalence, and I wasn’t particularly compelled by the first two thirds or so of the book. However, towards the end there were a few standouts: I particularly enjoyed “Borealis” (about a sort of modern-day sleeping beauty whose aunt helps wake her fr