The Neurospicy Bean

  This was a perfectly entertaining, pleasant romance, but it didn’t land for me quite the way the author’s other books have. Eddie in particular I really struggled to wrap my head around as a character – why he behaved the way he did and so on. I also really wish that the rest of the baseball team had played a bigger role – I always talk about how one of the highlights of a really well done romance is the relationships the characters have with people outside the primary romantic interest. That was a little bit lacking here, I think because so much of the focus ended up on Mark’s journey. That said, it’s still a well-written book that was emotionally engaging. In particular there was a scene towards the end about queerness and acceptance and society that really broke my heart. Absolutely worth picking up.

 

  There was so much hype around this book and it just…did not meet my expectations at all. I don’t have a ton to say specifically, but there were a couple reasons it annoyed me. First, there really wasn’t anything to make it unique. It felt as formulaic as a queer period romance can get – two upper-class white leads fall in love, they scheme to find a way to be together, they have sex, they break up at the end of the second act, they get back together. Whatever. There was just nothing to make it unique, nothing that gave it any grab or grit. The second issue is that Beth and Gwen were completely indistinguishable from one another. Aside from which parent they spent time with, there was really nothing about them that made it possible to keep track of who was narrating at a given point. Pro tip: if you can’t write distinctive characters, don’t have multiple POVs. They’re like the characters in a love triangle where the only difference is that one has brown hair (gasp). On another not...

  I’m not generally a big literary fiction person, but wow this book was gorgeous and heartbreaking and fascinating. It takes a bit of time for things to really get established, but once they do the multiple overlapping stories are beautiful and compelling. It’s the kind of book I’d actually want to examine for symbolism, because there’s just so much. I imagine to someone more familiar with Taiwanese culture there’s even more to analyze. I should say that it’s definitely pretty dark at times, discussing rape, abuse, and violence in a very candid manner. It’s quite intense, especially in its depictions of various kinds of violence and cruelty. These scenes are important and they’re never gratuitous, but worth keeping in mind that nothing in this book is romanticized or sugarcoated. The only things I struggled with were keeping track of everything and the ending. I know there’s a reason for all the sisters’ names starting with the same letter (explained in the translator’s note for t...

  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 c...

  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 unt...

  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 sw...

  So I’ve been thinking about this book for a week now and I just don’t know what to make of it. On the one hand, there were elements I adored – Valentin and Carmen were wonderful characters (Carmen was some of the best casual transfemme representation I’ve ever seen), and there were some really beautiful found family moments. On the other hand, the actual plot felt kind of unnecessary, and seemed to resolve too fast – like there was never a real point to it anyway. The vignettes of Poppy’s life l earning to be a vampire were far more interesting to me, and I would have liked to see more. But on the other hand, without a plot to anchor it I think it would have felt adrift and meandering. Which is something I know some readers enjoy, but I personally don’t. I realize this doesn’t sound like much of an actual opinion, but like I said – I just don’t know what to do with this book. I think it will appeal to a certain kind of reader, and I happened to like plenty of it, but I definitel...

  (NetGalley eARC) This is exactly what a retelling should be. One of the challenges that has cropped up with this series of retellings – and all queer retellings – is how to write a queer retelling of a tragedy critiquing humanity’s greatest flaws that’s really just kind of a bummer…without falling into the age-old trap of “bury your gays.” Too much deviation from the original, and you lose the emotional and intellectual core of the story – some of you might remember my frustration with the Great Gatsby retelling earlier in this series. Too loyal to the original, and not only have you not created anything new but you’ve also bought into one of the most insidious, heart-breaking ways that our society tells queer people our existence is inherently a joyless burden. Without getting into spoiler territory, I just want to say: this book absolutely nailed the balancing act. Fundamentally, Romeo and Juliet is a story about young people who are so trapped by their parents and society and...

  I really really liked this but I seriously needed it to be a duology or something. Not because I want more of the story after it ended, but because it got so rushed at the end and it would have been massively improved by just letting it be two books. It has two main elements that are, of course, deeply interwoven. The premise of the book is that a cult popped up through England’s early history who believed that one day King Arthur would return and take his place as ruler of the country, bringing magic back with him. This group is in political conflict with the dominant Catholic Church, which backs Gwen’s father’s right to the throne. Art’s father is a cultist, and Gwen and Art were arranged to be married as children to create ties between the two groups. So that’s one element of the book: a sort of political intrigue storyline. The other element is the relationships between Gwen and the knight she’s been obsessed with for years, Gwen and Art, and Art and Gwen’s brother, Gabriel. ...