stories_of_the_soul27's reviews
265 reviews

A solid YA romcom debut. It had its cute moments and I liked the Singaporean heritage and love for food bubbling throughout the story. Recently I gave a few books centred around Mooncake festival try and I am very much in love with this festival and hoping to someday enjoy the Festival in someway. The two main characters were adorable and together with the side characters, they formed an overall heartwarming bunch. The pacing was fast and I was able to breeze through the book over the weekend. It did give me a warm space. 

However, a plot wasn’t that much new to me. There wasn’t much going on with the characters. In the past few months I have read quite a good number of YA books which has set the bar high for me. So I was hoping for more tension and character depth & development. 

Nevertheless, I am very excited to see what more this author brings to life!

This was SoC lite version. Honestly it was way too close to SoC and in a very distasteful way. We have Arthie who is supposed to be a mastermind criminal and Laith who can climb very high walls, Jin who is a charmer, Matteo who is a vampire and keeps on saying Darling (that is the only thing he has going on and oh he also roams around half naked) and Flick who is from a highborn family and has fraught relationship with her mother. I do not have to tell you who is what in comparison to SoC! 

I did enjoy some parts of the book, but overall I was eye rolling hard. It was all tell and no-show. Everyone in the book was just worshiping the ground that Arthie walked and I just couldn’t understand why. If you keep using the word secrets so much and keep on writing about how Arthie knows everyone’s secrets and trades with them, then the action starts losing its novelty. I started getting irritated by Arthie towards the end with the way the three men were just swooning as if even the way she takes breath is outwardly or something.

I didn’t hate the characters necessarily but honestly if they were written as less than perfect and shown more flaws then they would have been more interesting. Instead we have a bunch of characters who have no depth and some sobbing backstory that is somehow supposed to make us relatable to them but massively fails to do so. I cannot even say the book was character driven because all I can say about them is that they had a messy childhood. 

I won’t say much about plot because heists go way above my head. I only like the high stakes part in a heist book. But here, not even the stakes were high. Arthie took a job from someone she has never met or heard about, her planning wasn’t even that grand because when the heist started it looked liked she went into it blindly, nothing was going wrong in a massive way, the twists and turns were convenient, mistrust was forced upon unnecessarily so better option was to show camaraderie but unfortunately in that front too we get nothing, guards were stupid, the supposedly high alert and well protected event wasn’t even protected that well etc etc. 

Also this is my first time reading about vampires who are so so stupid. I thought they had heightened senses so how can they possibly miss even minutest sounds when the said sounds were happening in the same room as they were?! How can they not catch a human running away? What are these new species of weak vampires? 

But nonetheless, I am really hoping that 2nd book will be better. 

I am going to start this review by bowing to R. F. Kuang! What a plot! What a story! It feels crude to comment on a story about wars being fought with barely 20 year olds at the helm but that is the fact about wars - it concerns us all. The book clearly laid out the nature of colonialism, invasion and the lamentable fact that the rich survives and the poor dies. The military and strategic aspects were fascinating to read about. I also liked how towards the end the narrative focused on how within a country there sometimes remain a division that indicates that people belonging to certain regions are favoured more than others. 

Why does everyone call Rin the immoral character when in fact, almost everyone in this book is equally immoral as Rin is?  Everyone was being high and mighty and judging Rin for wiping out the entire Muganese population which consisted mostly of women and children back at home, but they are the ones who had no qualms about killing the Southerners when it came time to save their own skin. Even Kitay who was so angry at Rin, who is always portrayed as a good one, the one with the brains, the one with the moral judgement intact in him, the one who judged Rin the most, even when Rin killed the Hesperian soldier for raping Nikara woman just because he thought that now the hesperians will withdraw their support. Nezha was a coward, though I understand the pain and the trauma he went through when he was just a child, and I understand where his disgust comes from, but that doesn’t negate the fact that he should have had the spine to go against his brother Jinzha who was making one mistake after another and saved the Republican Army at the crucial time. He spoke up way too late and had the audacity to judge rin who at least had spoken up before. I have zero sympathy for Nezha who is  just an optimistic fool, and so blinded by his father’s ideology and incapable of forming his own opinion. I will never be a champion of this ship Rin x Nezha. 

I was mad at Rin too when she did not stand up for the Cike who had given her a home when she had none, and even when she got back her power and called her herself a speerly, she couldn’t even had the might to fetch extra food for her brother. 

I simultaneously loved and hated the three characters in this book that goes to show that in a war, no one is able to keep their moral judgement intact. Everyone has blood on their hands whether you are fighting for a good cause or not. R.F.Kuang left no stone unturned in building the story and the characters in this book.

As a thriller I did enjoy this book! The anticipation was real and the threat loomed so large and stakes got so high that I was glued to the book for quite a while. I did quite like the last 10% of the book. 

But when you portray a book as a feminist and centre it around a group of women during the 90s, then I would damn sure get into the nitty gritty of it and judge it based on it’s characters, settings and overall message and not simply whether it was thrilling enough for me. 

- [1] Gore : loved it. It was so disgusting to read about and that’s why I loved it. Except the r@pe and the pedophile aspects of it 
- [2] Female friendships : started strong but fizzled out. Patricia’s concerns were not taken seriously by her friends and while they did stand together when facing their husbands, it wasn’t much of a proof of friendship. Seeing these 5 women together reminded me of Desperate Housewives where none of the women were perfect and many times they were unaware of the events going in the lives of the other girls but when faced with a common adversity they came together and so I must say the friendship in this book was paltry compared to how strong female friendships could be. None of them, except one, came to visit Patricia in the hospital and all were quite oblivious to what the others are going through in their lives. One of them was dying and it took so long for them to come visit her. 
- [3] The women were quick to blame each other whenever someone didn’t want to take a stand or follow in their direction. It made me laugh because how could you be judging someone who has an equal standing and almost similar lifestyle to yours? I hated the blame game and the lack of trying to understand the differing perspectives. 
- [4] Racism : the vampire was attacking only the black people and was also targeting them as the perpetrators of the heinous crimes - I’d say it as a portrayal of how during those times a villainous person would choose only black or coloured people as victims because the Police were insensitive towards their problems and newspapers were less likely to report the incidents. But none of the characters acknowledged this problem.  They themselves were pretty racist too seeing that all of them were reluctant to accompany her to Mrs. Greene’s house. Their refusal to believe Patricia was all because it was a white man she was accusing of committing the crimes. Even towards the end they said they were embarrassed and hence didn’t take any action but we all know that y’all were just being racists!
- [5] The real villains were the husbands. Chapter 21 made me want to throw something at those 5 men. Carter was such a piece of shit. He thinks he knows people just because he’s a psychiatrist?! He carefully orchestrated events so that his own children can undermine and disregard their own mother! To do that to your wife is such a cruel thing! And every time Korey or Blue behaved in unruly way, he was so quick to blame Patricia for it. That was his only concern - how to pin blame on his wife. Leland is another waste of oxygen! He said he wouldn’t know what he would do without Slick but the moment she gets diagnosed with a disease having no name, all he starts caring about is his reputation. Then comes Bennett - the wife beater asshole. None of the husbands provided a space where their wives could share their troubles with them. And so my point is what was the point of showing so much sexism and misogyny if you aren’t going to do anything with it in the book? 
- [6] You can really tell that the book has been written by a man. When it came to the point that the only way they could get close to James Harris is by letting Patricia pretend that she wants him, is when I put up my hands and go fuck off. And only a man thinks that writing men as sexist, misogynistic piece of shits is the only way to write a book centred on women empowerment. In that way you don’t have to write strong female characters, you just have to make the men look bad enough. And so that was the point of having so many men practicing sexism daily towards the women in their lives so that we can pity the women in this book. 

I could have been just okay with being thrilled by the horror & suspense parts of this book, without going so deep. But it left a bitter aftertaste in my mouth. 

I loved the writing style. The prose was lyrical and beautiful. I wasn’t aware of the Ariadne’s myth in great detail so this retelling made a good impression on me. The dialogues between Ariadne and Dionysus were very tender and heartfelt. 

However the pacing of the book was an issue to me. It was very hard to go through the middle part of the book. Since it’s a retelling so I will talk about character development a bit, in the sense that Ariadne had none. I expected her to do more and really become her own person. Instead her journey always seems to be revolving around men who disappoint her in the end. This book was marketed as feminist retelling but nothing was delivered in regard to that. 

I don’t know how to describe this book. It was bizarre and an excellent blend of intriguing plot with mundane events and a touch of weirdness. The story slowly sucks you up and all I can say is that a lot of things must happen in Yoko Ogawa’s brain. There was another story happening within the book and that was equally compelling. 

Maybe if I had read this book back in 2017 I would have enjoyed this more because the plot twist at the end made me eye-roll hard! 

Bumped it up to 3 star because I was happy to see Quincy break up with that boring stupid Jeff! He annoyed the hell out of me every time he opened his mouth! 

Lately authors seem to pluck this seemingly good natured guy who are barely there, who you forget about the moment they leave the scene, the ones whose presence add no depth whatsoever to the development of the protagonist- to be the bad guy in the end. I am done with stories like these.