themermaddie's reviews
467 reviews

i finally get the regency appeal because this book made me feel like a gossiping housewife and i loved it. i thought the writing was lovely, the depiction of jane and her comphet was very accurate, julietta (while a bit irksome at first) grew on me eventually, william was such a wholesome dad, and i really liked the imagery of emeline's golem. stan ashton for clear skin. this was the (eventual) polyamory rep i wasn't expecting but loved anyway (sorta).
i picked this up bc i heard the audiobook was narrated by katie mcgrath (<3) who did not disappoint.
i took a star off bc i found the borneo story difficult to follow and thus much less engaging, and it felt very disjointed at times bc i didn't feel like the two stories intertwined enough to make it worth telling both in the same novel. julietta and jane were very insta love, which wasn't exactly jarring, i think i just would've liked a little more reason for them to have fallen in love than just julietta liking jane's height and jane liking julietta's beauty.
i also thought that Ross's personality switched up very abruptly and that it felt quite out of character. sure he was kind of annoying and pathetic beforehand but murderously violent? i thought the build up to it could've been done better.

oh boy, this one frustrated me. on one hand, enemies to lovers + secret identities + sapphic women is EXACTLY my type. some thoughts in no particular order:

unfortunately it had way more issues that got in the way, and i feel like they mostly had to do with a misunderstanding of both tropes.
right out of the gate, iliana and rhodes hate each other with so much intensity that it kinda unnerved me how much it focused on their anger w each other. at the same time, they were already so in love with each other online. i feel like the whole point of enemies to lovers and secret identities is to build up the intensity of their dual relationships over the course of the book; when they already start at the extremes of love/hate, where do you go from there?

i was so disappointed by the lack of reconciliation storyline that's usually such a focus of enemies to lovers stories. there was maybe two days between rhodes deciding to help iliana and the capstone project, where i DID like the slowly burgeoning relationship between them, but then they got together too fast and it felt very insta love. their relationship was defined by big explosive events without any of the sweet little moments in between to show why this relationship was worth rooting for. this tends to happen when the characters fall in love BEFORE the events of the book and we're just meant to assume everything was perfect with them. i want to watch them fall in love! that's why i picked up the book!

i feel like sarah turning out to be the saboteur was meant to be more of a bombshell than it was. she was an awful friend from the very beginning (which makes more sense now that ive read the ending) but there were still basically no positive traits about her; neither iliana nor rhodes' perspectives gave me anything to like about her so i didn't particularly care when her and iliana's friendship broke, which was obviously supposed to be an emotional scene. iliana feels guilty at one point for steamrolling sarah for their whole friendship but i literally never saw sarah be anything but manipulative the whole way thru so what is the truth. also there was a random one line thrown in about sarah being in love with iliana and then it's just never mentioned again? why was that there?

neither of the voices were very distinct, which i feel is pretty important in an alternating pov book. i also thought some of the dialogue was kind of didactic and a little forced, but tbh i'd probably let it slide. rhodes' pov was mostly marked by thoughts about wanting to cry all the time, which i guess isn't bad?? but when that's what i look for to remember who's pov i'm reading from, it kinda seems like a bad sign. that being said, i liked the evolution of rhodes' art and her depression, i think she was surprisingly the one i empathised most with in the book. besides griffin, who was lovely, and his and rhodes' relationship was very sweet and perhaps the strongest in the book.

maybe i'm just whining at this point, but sometimes the writing style got a little too simplistic to the point where i just couldn't figure out what was happening. it took me until 2/3 through the book to realise why iliana had gotten arrested, which was WAY too late especially when that particular conflict was raised in chapter 3. i didn't realise that the ink was an actual act of sabotage until it was explicitly stated by one of the characters bc it was written so vaguely that it seemed like an accident. little things like that added up and it made the overall book feel very disjointed.

the reason why this book is a 3 star instead of a 2 star is because i finally started to get sucked into it in the last quarter of the books. this is mostly due to the writing style, it was very flowery and romantic and even if there wasn't a very good base on which their relationship was built, the writing was just so in love with them that it kind of won me over by the end. i'm a romantic ok!

picked this one up bc bojack horseman is one of my favourite shows, and that tone definitely comes through there. i'm waffling between 3.5 and 4 stars for this one just based on overall feelings after finishing the whole thing, but this was a wonderful read. i loved the writing and the stories were all super interesting and original! my favourites were The Up and Comers and Rufus :')
where it fell a little flat for me was some of the shorter stories, they felt kinda like tweets or buzzfeed listicles?? the writing could get a little purple and didactic at times, but overall would def recommend. if you liked bojack or that sort of humour you'll like this <3

2.5 stars

gahhhhh i really wanted to love the sequels, as i desperately want more lisbeth salander, but this just falls short for me.

initially i was inclined to think it might be a translation issue, but the more i read, the more i became convinced this was not the case. i think the main problem this book suffers from is its lack of all the subtlety of larsson's original books, and as a result, his cast of morally grey characters are painted in starker black and whites, which is far less interesting. the word evil is thrown around a lot, letting us know in no uncertain terms who the bad guys are; for this reason, most characters (good and bad) end up feeling more like caricatures of their past selves. this book is just as long as the others but i felt like i hardly spent time with anyone at all; they were just going thru the motions without me ever understanding their psychology. the strength of larsson's writing for me always lay in his ability to reveal a person's true character thru their routine of mundane things. lagercrantz attempts to mimic larsson's style of giving background on every minor background character, but because it never delves into their psychology, it comes off as dragging rather than endearing.

from the beginning, i was wary of august. i've grown very tired of the autistic savant child being prized for his gifts and not valued as an actual child. frans even acknowledges this at one point, but it doesn't excuse the fact that august is undeniably used as a narrative prosthesis to move the plot along. the autistic superhero in particular is a trope that irks me, so the fact that the entire "car chase" of a plot, as it were, is based around trying to convince this nonverbal savant child to draw the face of his father's killer did not sit right with me. there was an opportunity to discuss his autism in relation to lisbeth's own — i know her diagnosis hasn't been made explicit, but it was all but confirmed in the last book by andersson — but that too fell flat. her interactions w august feel more transactional with the mathematics they do together, and august is once again prostheticised in effort to illustrate his "usefulness". this is supposed to show that despite his autism and nonverbal behaviour, he has value; i feel like i don't need to explain why this trope is continually harmful.

plot wise: what the fuck is going on? the appeal of lisbeth salander novels is her strong moral compass and desire for justice regardless of the law; she is the woman who hates men who hate women. why are we getting into AI/religion/the meaning of being human? which isn't to say that there can't be overlap, it just feels like a strange swerve. of course, at the end you find out that lisbeth had been hacking the nsa to expose Camilla's role in the spider conspiracy, but even that felt out of character.

i feel like i shouldn't be surprised that camilla ended up being the big bad, but i am, and i'm a bit disappointed about it. as much as i loved the zalachenko storyline, i feel like making camilla a sociopathic sadist like her father was ... strange. i think it could've been done well, but the way that camilla was described was almost laughable. she's described as beautiful, charismatic, and manipulative; whenever people meet her, they instantly fall under her spell and swear she can do no wrong. i do mean her spell: the descriptions of camilla from other ppl's pov feel so absurd it sounded like magical realism. her beauty was so great it caused people to push aside the red flags they recognised and ignore gut feelings that someone was wrong? yeah, okay. the descriptions of her made her out to be this magical femme fatale, which is another trope i'm tired of. again, i think a camilla story line could be done well, but it would really have to be done explicitly pitting the sisters against each other and contrasting each other's strengths and weaknesses. at this point, neither of them seem genuinely formidable to me, but i would love for them to be.

back to plot: lisbeth's meddling landed mikael the perfect scoop but only served to annoy camilla; it seems like it was done for mikael's benefit, but there's no way lisbeth would conduct this entire operation for him, nor would she concoct a half-formed blow with how much consequence analysis she does.

so let's talk about the elephant in the room: this is not the lisbeth you know. the lisbeth here is shockingly sloppy and strangely proud. she shows off when she hacks the nsa, which leads to her identity as Wasp being compromised by an nsa worker. lisbeth's whole thing is being inconspicuous, and she's just uncharacteristically sloppy. she talks way more in this book, and gives away a lot of her secrets unnecessarily in this way. the way she threatens lasse and roger are through unconvincing threats of physical violence, and it makes me wonder how this is the same girl who punished bjurman. lisbeth has always treated physical violence as a last choice resort, this kind of aggression makes her seem like a cartoonish vigilante. which, you know what, might actually have been the point since they've decided to make lisbeth's literal origin story marvel comic books?? like. okay. it's not the worst thing ever, but in light of the rest of the choices made, it just feels like a stilted vigilante superhero story instead of political conspiracy thriller.
i'm also disappointed that lisbeth's neurodivergent traits were toned down here. all of her "unsurly" behaviours were emphasised without any of the insight into lisbeth's pov that makes up the payoff for this cruel treatment of her. thru her pov, we can understand how her brain works and have empathy for her neurodivergence and her trauma. this version of lisbeth salander just feels like a shell thru which the author doles out justice to corrupt authorities.


anyhoo i'm still gonna read the rest of them

4.5 stars

WOW!! okay, i regret not reading this earlier now, the hype is so worth it. i was expecting a dense scifi space story, but the martian was so entertaining and accessible, everything was well explained so that the stakes were easily understandable. not a single moment was wasted, the story was interesting and fast paced. the alternating povs would normally annoy me but they work so well here, i loved jumping around. i didn't expect how funny this book would be, i had some genuine laugh out loud moments. overall, this was an incredibly fun read.

what a ... bizarre story. i just finished a different clare lydon book that i loved and find it hard to believe these were written by the same person.

the writing is about as subtle as a gun, and it honestly feels like it could have used another round of edits. there was loads of repetition that definitely wasn't stylistic; they just kept repeating the same talking points, like why so and so shouldn't be together, why this situation was awkward, what happened 30 years ago etc. all the dialogue strangely stilted, as though the characters themselves recognised which roles theyre meant to play in the story; things like "because we're unfinished" and "let's drive to the next part of our lives" that just feel absolutely unrealistic. none of the characters feel like real people, nor did i particularly care about any of them. i love a good romance about older wlws, but this was just a weird story overall.

a steamy sapphic romance about a professional bridesmaid who falls in love w a bride to be! think: 27 dresses but throw some lesbians and comphet in there too. i just needed something light and fluffy and this delivered.

this book is 25% will-they-won't-they, 25% pining, and 50% horny. i do mean this in the best way; much of the book is spent with abby and jordan hyperaware of how much they CANNOT act on their attraction because a) abby is getting married b) jordan is helping her get married and c) abby's fiancé is employing jordan to get abby to the altar. as a result, their yearning for each other gets suuuuuper horny bc it's forbidden and honestly, i respect it.

the romance itself is light, fun, believable, even if i-love-yous are exchanged a little early for my taste, but it's fiction so i can indulge in a little fantasy now and then. i think abby and jordan are well-suited for each other, and i'm glad that they had a basis for their attraction beyond the physical. i appreciated that they both had lives outside of the romance aspect, and that they were both able to grow as a result of their mutual attraction. i'm also glad that marcus was a nice man, so it was clear that abby was choosing between a good safe man, or someone who was a risk but made her feel excited and alive for the first time. the side characters also all felt believable to me and padded out the world nicely.

this was a 5 star romance for me until about the last 1/4 of the book; after the hen do it kind of went downhill for me. it felt a bit silly for miscommunication to suddenly become a concern when their communication had been a strong point for them previously (which is also what made their chemistry so sexy!). both of them continuously changing their minds over and over was also more confusing and frustrating than a sexy little tease for the reader. it got to the point where i had lost track of who had decided what by the time the climax happened.

the last quarter is also when things started to get a little melodramatic, bit like a soap. everything messy happened in one scene and then suddenly everything was wrapped up nicely and neatly. i wouldn't mind it so much if the actual scene had been more satisfying. instead, the climax doesn't deliver the necessary catharsis; there's no satisfying confrontation or teary confession, it felt as though this was the drive thru version and everyone was trying to rush through the emotional climax of the novel. basically, it was just fine. which was disappointing considering how well the rest of the novel had built up this moment. the resulting HEA was also fine, even if it was more fanciful and unrealistic.

it was still a very good sapphic romance, it was super steamy and fun and checked all the right boxes for sapphic yearning that i love. it might not have stuck the landing 100% but i would still wholeheartedly recommend it if this is a trope that piques your interest. obviously there is cheating in this book (kinda comes with the territory of this trope) but it honestly barely feels like it bc marcus is so nice he feels like a caricature of a Good Man™. i also don't think it's a "cheating bisexual" trope; abby questions her sexuality but never labels it explicitly, however she does describe a lot of what sounds like comphet, so personally my money is on lesbian.

in short: i see we're u-hauling today, ladies?

IS THIS BOOK LACED WITH CRACK????

seriously what the FUCK did andy weir put in this, i am literally at this book's mercy. i would do unspeakable things for more of this world and ryland and rocky, i was devastated that it ended.

this was an amazing reading experience. it was just so FUN and geeky and enjoyable, i love the accessibility of weir's writing, it makes you feel in on the science and that really enhances everything.

the plot of this story is insane and addictively paced, i cannot believe it isn't real, i just got so sucked into the science and the world. i thought the martian was smart and inventive but project hail mary blows the martian's creativity out of the water! this is a page-turner that's impressively researched as well as just a fantastic rollercoaster.

i'm obsessed w this book. i want to hug it forever. i'm such an arts kid that i have to admit that i've never understood the attraction of science before but i've turned a new leaf now, i completely get it now. i want more rocky soooooo bad, ERIDANI TOUR WHEN