caughtbetweenpages's reviews
676 reviews

Perfect Girl is a fast-paced YA thriller great for readers who want to see an inversion of the Final Girl trope. In addition, the narrative is an exploration of femininity and the societal expectations placed on young girls, and the way those expectations fail girls when things get dangerous: what happens when a girl socialized to be docile and demure is put into a situation where survival depends on her fighting? Perfect Girl combines classic YA themes of discovering one's own identity and puts it on a clock, which our protagonist Jessa can't afford to let run out.

I really enjoyed Perfect Girl's atmosphere. The environment around Jessa and her friends acted as threat and impediment as the story went on, but also set a tense, frightening emotional mood. I found the storm to be a useful tool to  remove the modern day crutch of cell phones as an avenue for communication. The way it was introduced was clever and didn't feel like authorial hand so much as natural consequence to the actions set forth by the plot prior, actions which would've been innocent and harmless under different circumstances. I also loved the themes brought up by Perfect Girl; the entitlement of patriarchy is one of my favorite threats to explore in a story. In classic thriller fashion, I found it to strike the exact balance of over-the-top but technically believable/possible, which is always fun and helps keep the pages turning. I also like what Banghart did in terms of grounding the story in a specific time; the COVID19 pandemic is real and it happened and it's interesting to see the way the anxieties around illness and memories of masking were tackled in a story about kids whose educations and senses of safety were interrupted by this global phenomenon. 

My main problem with Perfect Girl is this: there was one girl too many in the main narrative. I understand Banghart's desire to depict multiple avenues of girlhood and the ways that societal pressures manifest differently in each. However, in the attempt to do this, each girl ended up feeling unidimensional and underexplored: Alexis the Closeted Queer Athlete, Kellan the Outspoken Social Media Queen, Tiny the Troubled One, and Jessa the Quiet Academic. The greatest downfall of this choice is that the narrative didn't get to explore the ways that varying pressures often intersect. I found myself thinking about how much more nuanced and interesting each girl's personal arc would be if they just blended some of their characteristics. What if Jessa had been a closeted lesbian?

David's

desire to possess her and disregard for her autonomy would have gained additional dimension by intersecting Jessa's femaleness with her disinterest in existing as an object of male desire. And what if Kellan, the former star of a family social media page, was also a woman of color? Her pushback against both her mother's and her audience's expectations of her existence as a product rather than a person would have been more interesting to explore, I think. 
In terms of just moving the plot along, I found that one of the quartet of best friends was often missing from the narrative altogether, and in such a way as though she took no action outside of the scene on page (or even worse, while she was on page). When her best friends were all

kidnapped, I'm expected to believe Kellan would be making out with an annoying boy? And Alexis's role in also being in the creepy dollhouse basement seemed mainly to be making it physically harder to get all the girls out of there (not necessary given Jessa's missing glasses presenting impediment enough); she was an afterthought in the climax, where David had to physically leave Jessa's living room to go back and get an unconscious Alexis in the middle of his mother's monologue.

Trimming the four down to three would clean up those logistical problems, and leave room for expanding upon the remaining girls' characterization in a way I feel the narrative needed to increase my personal engagement.

My secondary problem was my overall inability to suspend my disbelief at times when the narrative demanded it if I wanted to stay immersed in the story. The most glaring example of this comes in the form of Johnny, Tiny's boyfriend. I could, perhaps, have gotten over his anachronistic name (hello, 80s!) if his overall description didn't also feel very much out of touch with modernity, and if his role in the story had felt more grounded. After his introduction where he appeared at Jessa's house 

with a knife, beat up the boys, and acted erratically to demonstrate that Tiny is In Trouble with him,  

but then was summarily frogmarched back out again by Alexis and Kellan, I expected Johnny to come back into the story as

more than a name mentioned in passing. I figured he would come back at the end and be crucial for stopping David and his mom, perhaps getting hurt in the process himself, but he just... stopped existing after the dramatic reveal that Tiny was being abused.

. 
Another example is the flashback scenes featuring a different group of girls. Once the conceit of the story became clear and the twist became known to the reader, I thought these scenes would reveal that

David was secretly way older than he pretended to be, because it feels insane that a teenage boy would mastermind the whole kidnapping Jessa operation, and his emotional control over his mother would make more sense that way too. Plus, it would make more sense that he'd have had practice kidnapping other girls, and it would be far more chilling to me if Jessa was just the latest in a long line of false perfect girls who'd "disappointed" him once he realized they had personality and dimension outside of his weird fantasies about them.

. This proved not to be the case, and the flashback scenes thus felt 1. less realistic and 2. less deserving of the page space they got. I would rather the space dedicated to them have been used for character work for the main narrative, where the information presented in the flashbacks could have been summarized on the news/in conversations between people/etc. 
Finally in terms of susupension of disbelief, I'm supposed to believe there were

no fatalities? Really? A group of less than capable teenagers gets themselves into this situation and none of them are permanently injured at least? I found the ending to be too happy, and closed off too cleanly for my liking. I wanted Jessa's backbone to grow sharp, and for her to stand up to her mom by the end.

Overall, a fast read with just enough chillingness to the plot that you can handwave any tropiness of the characters. While it wasn't for me personally, I'd recommend it to readers of Holly Jackson looking for a new voice in YA thrillers to spend a few hours with this spooky season.

A Sorceress Comes to Call is a supernatural thriller written in the style of a regency romance.  The result of the genre blend is a cocktail of dry witted characters with complex relationships, steadily growing suspense, and whatever it is about folklore that makes it feel true without having to bother with logical explanations for strange happenings. The elements made room for one another’s best features; scenes following Hester were all delighted laughter and romantic pining, where Cordelia’s sections encouraged the feeling of being an animal caught in a snare plucking up the courage to chew off its own limb. I don’t know how T Kingfisher makes all the tones and moods work together, but she does. 

I’m a little more confident on the why of my next statement, which is that T Kingfisher is a master of the twisted fairy tale. I’m a big fan of subverting a traditional form to ask questions that preoccupy a modern audience. in particular, I found ASCTC challenges the oft-featured virtues of beauty, obedience, and the sanctity and security of blood-family from fairy tales in a particularly adept way, not by offering answers via counterexample, but by using said examples to ask questions:

What if the most beautiful woman in the room was considered to be so for her wit and warmth and the way she is true to herself (and indeed, she is not the Most Fair Bar None; if you ask Richard, nobody holds a candle to Hester), rather than for being the youngest with clearest skin and purest virtue? 

What is obedience, really, when taken to an extreme, and how much agency can one truly be said to have when they’re being obedient?

What if it is your blood that presents the greatest danger to you and others? Where must your loyalty lie?

At no point did I feel preached at, or like I was reading an essay about fairytale, like old favorite tales with their obedient and lovely and youthful heroines were being looked down upon in the reading of ASCTC. I was just reading a gruesome, lovely story, that happened to be in conversation with ones that came before. 

Any contention I have with the pace at which information about the central conflict was revealed—eg. Penelope’s introduction as a ghost, when no mention of ghosts was made up to that point—only serves to make the story feel more in keeping with fairy tale tradition. The headless horse digs itself up, erupts into demon form, and disappears after being flapped at by a goose? Solid! Doesn’t even break the top 10 most non-sequiter moments of the folktales I’ve read. The fantastical felt true enough for story and rooted it all more in the genre. 

As counterbalance to—or rather, a technique used in tandem with—the use of the fantastical in ASCTC, the realism of the story’s character work helped further root the story in believability beyond the sort you need for a fairy tale. This was true for all the characters, but especially so for Hester and Cordelia, and even Evangeline. Reading Cordelia was heart wrenching in that her POV ran me through an emotional gauntlet; the exhausting, ambivalent feelings landscape of an abused child are difficult to read. She balances a hatred of her abuser, fear, and a desire under it all that Evangeline will stop and love her the way she’s claiming she has been the whole time, all the way through. It is a triumph and a relief when Cordelia realizes that the only way she will ever be free is if she stops hoping for change on Evangeline’s part and instead takes matters into her own hands. For Hester’s part, her anxieties around her chronic pain and aging into oblivion hit as true today as they would in the Regency period. I was delighted to see an “older” woman take up space (both diegetically and as a POV character) and be desired; she’s not taking the usual roles of an older woman in fairy tale (1. Jealous villain, 2. Infallibly wise mentor, or 3. Dead virtuous Saint). The two of these characters in tandem carry the story’s emotional landscape, and I will be thinking about the both of them long after the book’s closed and this review is posted. 

I recommend A Sorceress Comes to Call for readers who love fallible characters doing their best against stacked odds, and anyone disappointed by the toothlessness of the Grimm Brothers fairytales. 

The prose is so wooden as to be unreadable. No thank you!

 Twelfth Knight is an homage to the 2000s’ Shakespeare retelling movies, keeping the rom-com camp and familiarity of story but updating the world to be more reflective of real life. Vi Reyes, Jack Orsino, and the rest of the students in Messaline High were unapologetically queer, brown, and infused with modern sensibilities and concerns, which informed and added depth to their character arcs while still being rooted in the (cishet and white, yes, but no less profoundly/relatably human) Shakespeare source material. Not that adding representation of other sexualities/races/etc has to “have a reason behind it” (is it not reason enough that our world is diverse?) but Follmuth’s cast of characters all make more sense and are enriched by their backgrounds being taken into account when looking at them. Viola’s identity as a woman of color in nerd spaces informed so much of how prickly she is outwardly and how deeply aware she is of the myriad micro-aggressions coming her way, and Jack’s “don’t get mad where people can see” lifestyle is so much more meaningful when you consider that he is a Black boy. It’s a personal boon for me, but Vi’s femme-person-in-nerd-spaces (and I’m general) woes hit very close to home. Her anger and hurt read very realistically, and anger/who is allowed to feel it was a throughline I thoroughly enjoyed exploring in this story. 
 The characterization of all the primary and secondary characters was pretty top notch. God, its so refreshing that Olivia is nice and smart actually. It’s such a tired and (in my experience) untrue stereotype that The Cheerleader/Pretty Girl is a bitch and dumb and etc. She’s quite sweet and despite knowing Shakespeare’s version of this story I even believed that she and Vi could end up Having A Thing (they bantered just as naturally as V and J! Especially when she and V were making her ConQuest character sheet! Alas, I am no stranger to non-canon ships). And the complexity of Antonia and Viola’s relationship hit me in the heart as well. It’s very emblematic of how teenage girl friendships can go. 
 Overall this was a very teenage story: the texts actually read like teenager texts, the idea that communication would be harder than keeping up a catfishing ruse feels like very pre-frontal-lobe-development thinking, and the slow build of emotions that just overflow between Vi and Jack were such a delight. The book reads fast, and hits all the important beats of two separate coming of age stories that twine together into a really sweet, healthy romance. 
 I think Follmuth’s use of multiple POVs was a great way to transition from play to book, using the novel form to allow for a greater internality of characters and allowing her to make them her own/put her own twist on things. It also allowed for easier differentiation between characters. If I stopped reading in the middle of a section and forgot whose POV I was in, I could figure it out within a sentence or so very early on. Both Jack and Vi are powerhouses. The love and passion that each has for their respective hobby (and later, their shared ones) is great, and described in enough detail that a reader unfamiliar with them can still follow what’s going on. I am not a Football Person, but I cared about it when in Jack’s POV because his passion carried over. This capacity for deep feeling translates to their feelings about one another, too (because jocks and nerds really are two sides of the same coin); when they hate each other, it’s vitriolic, and when those feelings begin to shift… well. It’s very sweet. I rooted for them the whole way through (even if Vilivia still holds my heart). 
 In terms of some stylistic choices, I thought the climax-to-resolution pipeline was a little fast. It was in keeping with 2000s Shakespeare rom coms, and I’m satisfied with the overall ending, but for me personally, that sort of speedy resolution works better in film than in print. Similarly, I wasn’t big on the parenthetical asides to the reader, though they are in keeping with fourth-wall breaking in Shakespeare plays. 
 The nits I’m picking really are tiny, though, because there’s very little to critique in this book. Twelfth Knight does exactly what it sets out to do, and in a satisfying way. It’s lighthearted without sacrificing emotional depth, romantic while also satisfying individual character arcs, and an absolute love letter to people who love things passionately. I’d recommend this book to anyone who’s ever felt like a geek about something (but especially Shakespeare, sports, or nerd culture) and lovers of films a la She’s All That. 

~ received an ARC via Netgalley in exchange for honest review ~

 Don’t Let the Forest In is great as a piece of speculative horror fiction. Drews’s writing brings together the visceral agony of anxiety so emblematic of being a teenager and feeling like the heart of you is antithetical to fitting in (AND that your otherness is visible to everyone else, too) with the dark atmosphere of the haunted forest. They don’t let the reader look away from scenes of body horror, from the monsters tearing apart two young boys determined to protect each other, but who are wildly outmatched by their foes. I felt lasting and immediate concern for both Andrew and Thomas’s wellbeing while reading, and that tension carries through both in the forest and out of it/in the school setting. I found the monsters themselves very imaginative, both those that drew upon existing fairytale mythos and those fully of Drews’s own design. Tying them to the creative work of the protagonists was lovely—they literally have a hand in their own destruction, and are tied directly to the horror of it all. 
 Where I struggled with DLTFI is in the character work. I found a lot of the dialogue to feel very stilted/scripted, especially between A and T, which was a shame because that made it harder to root for them as a couple, because I couldn’t feel their chemistry together. It’s doubly a shame, because there were moments of it (chapters 4 and 5 stand out especially, because they show the relationship as it was in the past and contrast it to now, as opposed to just saying outright that A would do anything for T and vice versa) so I knew while reading that Drews COULD do character work, and just didn’t in some scenes. 
 And then, very often, characters just DONT talk to each other, seemingly for the purpose of building tension. They just keep burying secrets and not saying them. The lack of communication means there’s not enough info to be intriguing, it’s just repetitive and gets tiring, and there’s not even drama between the characters as a consolation prize. I especially felt the absence of Andrew and Dove’s relationship in the story. I feel like a lot of A’s feelings about her and T (the romantic jealousy and worry about their friendship outside of A) could be fixed with a few Dove scenes (eg. A actually asking T to bring D in on monster hunting instead of just thinking about it and T saying no vehemently. A assumes T wants to keep her from the monsters and keep her safe and jealousy ensues! Or Dove trying to join them here and there while they’re both being all secretive before stubbornly going “who needs y’all” and avoiding them back instead of just not being around from the jump) As it is now, she feels like a convenient way for Andrew not to notice Thomas has feelings for him, another thing we’re told rather than being allowed to feel naturally. 
 The “telling” also slowed down the pacing of the plot, especially in the first half. I found myself tiring of the lampshading of “the thing that happened last year” without being given an explication which would allow closer readers to infer more about how that past ties into the main plot of this book. 
 I also found myself frustrated with the confused/changeable characterization of the protagonists. It felt like their personalities and closeness to one another and etc switched depending on what the plot needed in that moment. Eg. At one point I. The narrative Thomas, who until that point had been described as an effective protector for Andrew, is described as one who “bites people only for attention”. It feels that a lot of those inconsistencies are done to make the prose lovely, but the pretty phrasing gets in the way of clarity of characterization, and in the way of continuity (chapter 12: “Andrew would’ve noticed the lack of charcoal smudged sleeves and paint in [Thomas’s] hair”, but only a few pages earlier, Andrew DID notice even from a distance.)
 I really do enjoy the prose though, and I feel it’s a good match for Andrew’s anxious, sharp, surprisingly tough character. The asides to his stories he wrote were lovely and I liked tying them to the supernatural elements that come later on in the book. They feel like special hints of what’s to come and I found them especially lovely. It’s impractical, but I do wish we got T’s illustrations to accompany them too. 
 I know I mentioned the dynamics being stilted earlier, but Drew’s did a great job seeding the obsession between Andrew and Thomas. Their dynamic is entrenched (ch 4), and I loved the internal tension of Andrew’s shame at his dependence at first, and how that changes and develops. His devotion is what he gravitates toward: Being Thomas’s. 
 I did like how Andrew changed as the stoey progressed. Taking the agency to go after Thomas and take up monster hunting of his own volition was great to see. 
 Overall, I think DLTFI is a story that has so many lovely elements, from the supernatural/fantasy horror to the teen drama to the exploration of queer identity, and I think that for another reader, they could come together to perfection. It just wasn’t quite right for me. I would recommend it to teen readers with an interest in queer narratives that don’t completely center on queerness, and fans of fairy tales with haunted forests. 

- good and helpful that Mosscap is the one in crisis now, but Dex is still not 100% healing is neither linear nor a thing with a fixed end goal
- idea of commerce in a post-capitalist world really cool, ditto reactions to disability
- awareness is good, but doesn't necessarily help with the self care
- expansion of world, not just seeing new people and new settlements, but watching them, those established things, react to something new
- good that we're in Dex's POV--we're like them--but it's Mosscap's story, M's growth, M's reckoning with itself
- sometimes there are no answers except that you love someone else and the two of  you get to exist joyfully even when things are hard

I knew if I was ever going to read this book it would have to be after the hype for it died down, because having a neutral opinion when the trend is to be performatively low- or high-regarding of a thing is seen as dishonest. And that's what my assessment of Zenith is: completely neutral. 

Regarding characters, I found Andi to be pretty flat. She was definitely at her best with her crew, Lira, Breck, and Gilly. While Breck was mostly Just There and Gilly was an eye-rollingly precocious murder-brat, Lira was a rather well rounded character in her own right, with a complex backstory and bonds outside of the crew which (if allowed to hold more conflict and take up more space in the narrative) could have been quite interesting. But the four of them together had an organic chemistry. Did it make sense in terms of them being Hardened Space Pirates? No. (But neither does the Night Court in ACOTAR--everyone loves to have the veneer of badassery without doing anything to back it up in books like this, and I just have to make my peace with it). Andi was at her worst with Dex, the love interest so bland that I truly have nothing to say about him. The dialogue throughout the book was stilted, but when it was an Andi and Dex scene it became so... scripted feeling? Performative? Beyond stiff. There was absolutely zero chemistry between them and I kind of wish he hadn't been part of the story at all. 

Who else is of note... Andi's parents are flat characters sans substance, the General is slimy... I did like Nor and her mother, in terms of making things happen. Nor actually lives up to her reputation, though I wish the moments of humanity and anxiety about her rule we saw actually came to more fruition. And her mom is fascinating, though the rape she does to 

the General by mind controlling him into impregnating her with Valen

was awful. I wish there'd been a TW for that, and I worry that it wasn't warned about because it was a woman committing it against a man. Still, the two of them were interesting. Valen was too, and while I understand to some degree the criticism of his repeated line, it's made very clear that that's a thing he's holding on to to keep from losing his identity while being tortured in prison. If you're fine with Arya Stark having a list of people she wants to kill that she repeats every night but not this, consider that your critique is maybe with the authors and not the literary device of repetition (it DOES happen too often on one page to be ok, I will admit). 

I think the worldbuilding was rather thin. Part of this may be that the novel was going to be a serialized self-pub thing, and then it was speed written in like 2 months before being put on a crashed publishing schedule. Your plot and characters mustn't fall flat, so if you have to put anything by the wayside, I get why instinct would be to ditch the world, but in SFF especially that's a BAD IDEA. I found the book to be bloated at the length it was, but if there'd been less repetitiveness between Andi and Dex's arguments or Andi moping about the killing she's pretty willingly done, there'd have been room freed up to expand on the world and earn this page count. As it stands, this could've been 200 pages shorter, easy. But it did read fast. The book was not unenjoyable for the flimsiness of the setting; the world not enriching the story didn't make it egregious (harping on moon chew when it's clearly a chewing tobacco corollary is worse reviewing than writing moon chew is writing, actually), and I found the scene-setting to be fairly vivid and colorful overall, if, again, flat in terms of narrative utility and resonance. Pretty set dressing, if you will.

This did unfortunately mean the plot, which centered on the aftermath of an intergalactic conflict, was built on shaky ground. This would normally require higher than average levels of suspension of disbelief (why are each of these planets ruled by One Guy? Why are these rulers so universally Bad At Their Jobs any why are some of them beefing with teenagers? How can space pirates be both "just smugglers looking for the next job to put enough fuel in their ship to get them to their next gig" and also "hardened criminals leaving a galaxy of blood behind them"? And how can just 4 girls man an entire spaceship if they're the latter sort, with only a captain, a pilot, and two gunners as the crew? At least that last fact is why it's so painfully easy to take them over...). However, because the worldbuilding was so flimsy, and thus the contradictions in character and plot specific points were so ubiquitous as to be expected (and thus ignorable), that actually fell by the wayside. Much like Sarah J Maas's Throne of Glass, this was very much book candy: no substance, all aesthetics.

And I say SJM specifically; from the glass spaceship (yes, like the glass castle) to the white blonde sword-wielding (yes, swords in space against guns)  trust-me-i'm-baddass space pirate protagonist (yes, like the white blonde sword-wielding trust-me-i'm-baddass king's assassin protagonist), to the paper thin world and plot, to the... well, the frankly unbelievable (given we're in space and there's aliens everywhere) cishet whiteness of it all, Zenith is remarkably like ToG. I think if people weren't ready to scrutinize it so deeply given the YouTube success of one of the authors, the same audience that got their start in reading fantasy with TOG and love it would've liked Zenith, too. A little less, perhaps, because Zenith suffers, like Fourth Wing does, from the authors clearly being aware of SJM's success and perhaps parroting it a little too closely. But the quality is pretty comparable, both in terms of overarching craft structure and in terms of writing skill. As I said, book candy.

Will I be continuing on? ...maybe? Certainly not any time soon. But I am a completionist, and it's only a duology, so I just might. I read all of ToG after all, and this is a much smaller lift. Never say never.

The Shift series takes place on an Earth town known as Pine Falls, which feels very Pacific Northwest town, except instead of the Twilight vampires, we have a town full of best shifters. These shifters live right alongside the human population and in theory it's meant to be a secret (but they do a pretty bad job of keeping it so, at least within the context of these novellas). 

Again, sometimes what you need from your entertainment is a little bit of predictability, a little bit of knowing how the story is going to go, and Ruby Dixon just always delivers for me, what can I say? The Shift novellas were quite distinct from her sort of Risdaverse, books in that the shifters are simply different; the bear shifters are far more human-adjacent, not just probably from living in such close proximity to humans, but because they have a literal human form (albeit one that's quite large and sort of ursine.) But I think having more of a tether to humanity allows for Ruby Dixon's bear shifters to... well, be a little bit more human. to be a little bit more varied and complex and to have those humanlike quirks that we have, for better and for worse. 

Where it's familiar (and where Ruby's books shine for me) is in the male leads' devotion towards their partners. It does, in the case of the shifters, veer a little bit towards territorial the way that it does in Ruby's dragon books more so than in her masaka books. But because it's less "fated mate"-y, and because the shifters are more human, the level of obsession is just a little bit toned down, like they're a little bit more normal about it? Not that they're normal about it at all but, like, I'm not normal either so like? who am I to judge? 

These novellas were spicy, but they were also very very sweet, and they put me in mind of a certain Baldur's Gate 3 druid who I just love so so so dearly. 

I think part of the reason that I enjoyed the Shift novellas so much was because we were on Earth rather than in the wide galaxy where humans are at such a distinct disadvantage species-wise. These human women were allowed to have more agency and sort of exist on their own turf and, thus, not be in sort of constant survival mode and fear mode. At no point do any of Ruby's relationships ever feel non-consensual or like dubiously consensual, but I feel like she doesn't shy away in her sort of Risdaverse series from telling you "no, the world is bad, actually. Like, it's really rough to be a human out here." And while those women do love their partners, the partners also in a very real and tangible sense offer them a tremendous amount of safety that they wouldn't have otherwise. In the Shift novellas, that safety was sort of understood as much as safety is for any human woman, and I think removing that sort of looming sense of danger allowed for the romances to take more Center Stage if that makes sense. I had an absolute blast with these.

I think Chuck Tingle did a great job with the tension building and the building to horrific moments; when he puts you in one of those horror scenes where something absolutely nasty is happening, you can't really look away. He forces you to just sort of be in that scene and I found that in the horror books that that I like to read, I enjoy that feeling; that's the sort of thing I go to horror for. I felt actual concern and even fear for Rose and the other characters when they were in these dangerous or sort of horrific circumstances, not only from the Demonic creatures that haunted them, but even from (or rather I should say especially from) the wealthy people in power who are trying to get them to pray the gay away (and some of whom genuinely believe that they are helping the queer youth they're "converting"). 

I did struggle a little bit with feeling like my hand was being held and that I was being told what to feel about certain things rather than just letting the thing I was shown be bad enough to stand on its own self. I feel like systemic homophobia and a conversion camp are horrific enough. I don't need to also be told this is bad; it's very clear the stance Tingle is taking, the sort of ethos of the story is pointing in that direction. I don't feel that the inclusion of a conversion camp in any way intends to condone the existence thereof. 

Also, because we were in Rose's point of view and she is both autistic and actively deprogramming herself from this awful cultish Evangelical upbringing, I was a little more forgiving in the fact that we got some of that telling rather than showing in terms of figuring out her identity as a gay woman, her <spoiler? parents' role in placing her at Damascus , and the cruelty of homophobia and the empowerment that comes with self-acceptance and finding comunity. Shifting from one paradigm of thinking into another paradigm of thinking does (at least in my experience) have a little little bit of that black and whiteness, but I also kind of struggle with the stereotype of the hyper-clinical autistic person,  mainly because there's simply not enough alternative autistic representation in books, so there isn't as much to battle those sorts of stereotypes. It's not a red flag but it is something I don't necessarily love , neither in terms of storytelling nor in terms of characterization for an autistic character in particular. But again, because Rose is being fully deprogrammed from a cult, I'm a little more forgiving of it in this circumstance.  I do sort of wish other feelings had been elaborated on, like the feeling of well being deprogrammed of losing that sort of built-in sense of community, especially when you are leaving behind the comfort of everything you've ever known (and even though that comfort is a cold one, there is still a tremendous amount of upheaval and difficulty to losing a community like that, even if it harms you). But I get it there was plot to get through, and there wasn't necessarily enough room to dive into those things and still have, like, a good horror genre fiction piece.

And as a piece of horror fiction, I feel that it did a great job. I think the prose read a little bit YA and simplistic for my personal tastes. I was kind of surprised when I saw that this wasn't listed under the young adult category on goodreads but rather the adult category. because I truly felt it read more YA. Despite Rose being 20, she was quite juvenile, simply because that is how she as a young woman in this Evangelical cult was raised to be which... the way that learning that she was 20 made me absolutely shudder given the way that she spoke? excellent job Chuck Tingle. The tension that grew not only as Rose began to cotton on about her sexuality and the demon

that possessed her became more and more present and began to physically harm her and those around her

, but in the way that the adults in her community began to watch her for signs that she needed to be re-programmed... It was chilling, and I had a hard time putting the book down because I didn't want to leave her there, being watched like that by people with so much systemic power over her. The normalization of everything from Rose not being allowed a door to her room to literal flies erupting from her mouth, all being swept under the rug by the "God works in mysterious ways and it's a sin to question Him, or me as your human father, actually" fundamentalist thing? Even more horrifying than the demons! At least the demons, you can kill. 

Contrast that with the love and mutual care of Rose's found family. The circumstances by which they come together is Bad, but they love one another the way they need to be loved, and they literally help one another slay their demons in order to live an honest, free, joyful life. It's the queer dream!

I think A Crown So Cursed did a pretty solid job of concluding the plot that was going on, and it did a pretty solid job of concluding Alice's arc in specific, but I felt that there were some threads left untied from the previous book that I really wanted to see closed up in this one, so I'm hoping that we either get some sort of spin-off or bonus book in The Nightmareverse to wrap up all those final loose ends and explain some things a little further that I felt were kind of neglected within A Crown So Cursed.

My series review wraps it all up in more depth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkE_D01YUPY