The Neurospicy Bean

  While this book isn’t doing anything particularly new or unique, I thought that what it is doing, it does well. In particular, it’s an effective, if not particularly subtle, critique of the true crime genre obsession. It’s set at a true crime podcast’s competition to find the remains of a serial killer (this doesn’t seem like it can possibly be legal for a recent case, but whatever), and over the course of the novel we watch the competitors slowly unravel. Whether it’s a desire for power or romanticizing the killer, the distance between the competitors and the subject of their obsession slowly narrows, and although there’s a supernatural element at play, the reader is left to wonder how much of that unraveling is because of the supernatural and how much is simply the consequence of a culture that idolizes murderers. Balancing this out somewhat, though, is Caroline, who uses true crime as a processing mechanism for her very real trauma. This book does a nice job of walking the lin...

 

  Yeahhh this was a bit too much in the string of cis white lesbians for me. I don’t know why precisely but this one in particular just felt incredibly cisgender. I should have flagged some of the particular moments that rubbed me the wrong way and I didn’t, but there were definitely a few instances where it just didn’t feel like the author had ever considered the trans perspective. Similarly, it often seemed that the author was lumping bi and pan people in with lesbians, which…let’s maybe not. Also, I really struggle with speculation about celebrities’ sexuality. It’s one of my least favorite forms of discourse because a) it inevitably leads to accusations of queerbaiting and b) oh my God you are not entitled to information about anyone’s sexual orientation ever. Even if they seem really super queer. Even if they’re in the public eye. Even if you think it would be really super good for the queer community if someone with that level of influence came out. I. Don’t. Care. It’s not ...

  So I’ll start off with the fact that there is a good chance I’m really not the target audience for this book. I really do not care about astrology even a tiny bit. I can tell you I’m a Saggitarius and that is literally it. And I have a suspicion this book is a lot more entertaining if the reader has any idea what the various stereotypes of all the different signs are, blah blah blah. I do not. So already not the best start. But I could absolutely set that aside if the rest of the book were amazing (see previous review about baseball). Unfortunately, this was not that book. First of all, Gray really irritated me. There was a whole lot of ‘cis lesbian trying really hard to be a trans ally’ in a way that got on my nerves. I don’t remember every instance of this, but one example was a conversation in which Gray is talking to her best friend Cherry. Cherry asks her if she’s still identifying as a lesbian, and Gray says she’s open to dating anyone except cis men, but that she still ide...

  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...

It takes a bit to get going, but once it does, this book is absolutely gorgeous. I should say – although this book is labeled as mystery/thriller, those genres are relatively small, subtle aspects of the story. The emphasis is much more on the main character, Jess, her relationship with her older sister, Liz, and the two of them navigating grief. There’s also a healthy dose of exploring small town prejudice. None of this is to say that there isn’t a mystery – there is, and the main characters work to solve it – but the mystery is for the sake of the characters’ growth, not the other way around. So I wouldn’t recommend going into the book with a mind towards a traditional mystery, because I don’t think that will get the best experience out of it. As far as what I really liked, I thought the depiction of grief was beautifully done – all the small things that bring it back, the way that it colors a person’s whole experience of life. I actually enjoyed Liz as a character more than Jess, be...

  Man, there was so much hype surrounding this book (not to mention the gorgeous cover), and it just didn’t live up. Given the whole context and aesthetic it sets up, I was looking for something with a sort of Moulin Rouge vibe – overwrought and angsty and dramatic. But I guess there was just way too much going on to really establish a coherent vibe. Basically our main characters Esme and Sybil, roommates and best friends who are also in love with each other, get roped into a scheme to steal Queen Mab’s jewels for the owner of popular club The Absinthe Underground.  There’s a lot of jumping around, from the streets of Severon to the Absinthe Underground to the main character’s brother’s house to Fae and back again. And there are so many different dynamics going on – Esme and Sybil’s relationship, Sybil’s family history, all the dynamics of Severon, the worldbuilding of Fae, the characters in Fae, and there just isn’t  room for them to all get fleshed out properly. There’s...

  For whatever reason, nothing about this one clicked for me. The premise – girl from a family of brujas doesn’t want to be a bruja, casts a spell that accidentally banishes her family, and has to save them from dark forces – is perfectly compelling, and I genuinely did quite like the wide variety of mythological creatures that were incorporated into the story. There were beings and creatures that rarely come up because, frankly, Latine mythology just isn’t that written about (though this is changing!).  But I found Alex really frustrating as a main character, and Nova was flat-out unlikeable – I know we were supposed to get a flirty banter, rivals to lovers kind of vibe from his dynamic with Alex, but I just didn’t get it. But then the other love interest, who may have had more potential, wasn’t there for half the book! So we didn’t even really get to see her dynamic with Alex much at all, which was disappointing. Beyond that, something about the pacing just felt awkward. I 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...

  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 getti...

  I did not expect this to be so good. So often queer YA set in the real (ish) world either wants to pretend that queerness is totally normal and accepted and causes no problems, beats the reader over the head with how traumatic it is, or falls into this weird space of making really unsubtle points about how queerness is hard but also cool and sort of reads like it’s written for someone who wants to feel like they’re super in touch with the queer youth. This book was none of those. It did an absolutely amazing job of weaving queerness into the plot in subtle but crucial ways, and it doesn’t shove aside the challenges of being a queer teenager for the sake of focusing on the plot, but the homophobia wasn’t overwhelming and it never felt preachy. It just felt really refreshingly honest.  And that balancing act applied to the other elements of the story as well: the chaos and drama of teenage relationships melted smoothly into the witchy whodunnit mystery, as the main character H...

  This was so thoroughly not what I was expecting it to be. We’re introduced right off the bat to Tamsin, who’s just the most irritating girlboss, treats all her coworkers like crap, and also is working to conceal from the public the fact that the city is sinking and no one knows why but it might be related to her research. As I said. Girlboss. But then an apparent clone of her shows up from the door that has mysteriously appeared in her basement and things get REALLY WEIRD. A lot of the book (maybe more than necessary) is spent watching Tamsin’s classic descent into madness. Which she also works to conceal from everyone around her, including her handler, Lachlan. I have to say, Tamsin’s relationship with Lachlan (and Lachlan as a character) was actually the highlight of the book for me, and I really wish there had been more of it. It became shockingly sweet and gentle, and also I really want a tall hot lady with a prosthetic arm to come busting into a basement to rescue me.  ...

  So I’ve seen a lot of stuff pitching this as lesbian Ted Lasso, and alas, it simply is not. The side characters are charming enough, but they lack the brilliance of the Ted Lasso ensemble and aren’t given much attention throughout the book. Grace and Phoebe are very much the primary focus, and almost every scene revolves around them. And yeah, it is a romance, but those of you who follow my reviews will know that I firmly believe that the best romances have excellent side characters and spend time developing other relationships – not to mention, other aspects of the characters. This book is trying to touch on some of those things, but the proportions weren’t quite right for me.  For instance, one plot element is Phoebe and Grace exploring their potential neurodivergence. I didn’t realize that would be a plot point going in, and I was excited when it was, but it wasn’t explored as much as it could have been. Grace in particular is really reduced to a throwaway line about mayb...

       So once in a while there will be a detail at the beginning of a book that sort of sets me against it and I can just never get over it, and that happened here. Basically the entire premise of the book is that the main character, Jade, has to go stay with her dad in Vietnam in the French colonial house he’s renovating so that he’ll pay for her tuition at UPenn. She explains that she’s lied to her mom that tuition is fully covered when in fact it’s actually still around $30,000 for her freshman year, but she doesn’t want her mom to have to take out loans, and that she has no money for her own tuition because it all went to school application fees.      So, I happen to have some quasi-personal experience with this, because my girlfriend actually goes to UPenn and most of her tuition is covered by financial aid. I actually directly asked her how much financial aid a student coming from a family with three children raised by a single mother who works ...

       So alas, I just could not get into this book. It might be because I read it over a really extended period of time – but part of the reason for that is because I just wasn’t compelled to pick it up. It was fine, there wasn’t anything actively wrong with it really, but there was also nothing special.      So basically it’s about Olive, a nurse who’s terrified of flying, and Stella, an airline pilot. On Olive’s first flight ever she ends up saving the life of a man who works at Disney World and goes viral. She ends up getting a ride from Stella to Disney World so that she can run their half marathon like she promised her brother, but then Stella disappears from her life – or so she thinks. Later, Stella turns up to ask Olive to be her fake girlfriend so that she can get the attention she needs to finally get the promotion she’s been working for. And then all of the classic fake relationship drama ensues. A couple of things were generally missing th...