themermaddie's reviews
467 reviews

this book.... this book is insane. this is the romance i will be recommending to everyone from here on out, especially for ppl trying to get into the genre bc Beach Read is literally what it's all about. this book absolutely nails why i love romance. this book is therapy for the soul.

i am so in love with both gus and january. both characters are extremely well-developed and nuanced, and i loved uncovering more about each of them bit by bit. they were so realistic and complex, and no reveal ever felt like the extent of their emotional depths. this story felt like getting a sneak peak into a slice of time in their lives, a takeaway which i think is so important. overall i'm a big fan of the book's emphasis on the contradictions of life; you can resent someone and love them, you can make bad decisions and be a good person, and you can want love so badly but still be afraid of it. i love that we started with the romantic/cynic trope and ended up somewhere in the muddled middle, together.

something about grief in romance novels always hits me the hardest. i think maybe the extreme emotion of loss highlights the importance of accepting the love we already have in life, and it makes everything feel so much more potent, raw. i'm glad that january's grief was able to add to the story in a way which informs her character, and that her romance with gus was in no way a grief-rebound relationship. january's grief was more obviously handled since we're in her head for the duration of the book, but gus's own grief was also so skillfully done; i thought his characterisations of childhood trauma and depression/unspecified mental illness was revealed just enough for the reader/january to understand and love him without feeling the need to dig through his wounds for exhibitionist purposes. it made him feel like such a real and well-rounded person, all of his fears and defense mechanisms and difficulties with communication; Absurdly Specific Details, as he would say.


yeah idk man what else to say about this book, i feel like i could talk about it forever. i've definitely written longer reviews for books i've liked less, but i'm just more so overwhelmed with this huge sense of catharsis, like being reminded to breathe after a long time. this one now lives on one of the book shelves in my heart so i can keep it close. i sobbed like a baby reading her dad's letters, i related so much to january and i fell in love with gus too, as well as the idyllic small town setting. what is pitched as a writer vs writer romance novel is actually more of a quiet story about two uncertain broken people trying to figure out how to live life and learning to be happy amidst all life's uncertainty together. it is so lovely, and so warm.

4.5 stars

this book made me so happy i literally just inhaled the entire thing in a couple of hours

i love romance tropes, sapphic couples, strong characters and development, and i love a good sex positive book; this was all of that. this is such a weird quirky book. from the beginning both cade and selena had such strong voices that grabbed me, their contrast was wryly funny and sweet and i loved the development of their relationship. it's definitely opposites attract but without the intensity of rivals to lovers, and any miscommunication falls more under the fear-of-getting-taking-a-chance trope than a true miscommunication trope, thank god. i feel like the tiniest bit of insta love there is gets offset by a) the lesbianism and b) it's mutual attraction fueled by strong emotion and quarter life crises.

i don't know how to describe this, but the sex/lust/yearning or this book wasn't super... horny. like it IS about a sex store so sex talk gets normalised of course, but it doesn't take away from their sexual chemistry. i actually appreciate the way sapphic sex is erotic but not explicit, even when it was. it just never felt oversexualised and the gaze didn't linger where it would've been gratuitous, if that makes sense. there's definitely sex scenes, but it's not exactly erotica. i don't know why this deserves a whole paragraph especially when i can't even fully verbalise my feelings, but i thought the whole book had a lovely female gaze and it was very refreshing.

anyway i accidentally started this before bed and now it's 4 am and i have work at 9, and i do not regret a thing. let that be my endorsement.

really liking the way everything is developing! super interesting worldbuilding and fairytale retellings, and i love all the character interactions, i can't wait to see everyone's stories get tangled up. scarlett and wolf are sweet, even if i basically feel like i'm reading hetero abo lmao. cinder's character stalls a little but but that's ok bc this is mainly scarlett's book, and also i love cinder. i can't wait to see her and kai's next in person interaction. the plot is somehow simultaneously super predictable and entirely unhinged and it's awesome, it's like i'm anticipating the next event but bc this is such a new and interesting world i literally dont know what could happen next.

oh wow, i find it so hard to understand how this book could be anything less than 5 stars.

the world of the jasmine throne is one of those that feels so entirely real that i can't believe it's fiction, tasha suri's imagination is ... unparalleled. this is such a complex magical world, completely organic and believable in its settings and its people. i almost certainly did not grasp all the nuances of the warring factions and the politics, there is so much going on and so many overlapping plots and characters, it's so intricate and well-thought out. the world-building is so insanely thorough and rich, it's so easy to get absorbed in this kingdom and its empire.

the writing is absolutely gorgeous, each sentence almost lyrical in its poetry, bringing the whole story to life. the characters are so detailed and multi-faceted, with conflicting desires and duties that compete to win out. priya and malini are both so wonderful and complicated, their motivations are spelled out so well
and suri leaves so much room for them to embrace their own monstrousness. it's a gloriously feminist portrayal of complex women and the power they hold. it's definitely heavy on the politics and revolution but priya and malini's romance is also so searingly sweet it makes me ache. it's an end-of-the-world, i-yearn-for-you-from-now-until-death kind of love, but still fraught with the uncertainty of their roles in the coming war. i can't wait for the second book.

2.5 stars

if you're here bc you liked the movie, be forewarned that this is nothing like that. this reads far more like a textbook than biographies of the women who were sidelined by history.

there was no central plot; rather, it felt like a series of events tangentially related to the advancement of NACA and other technological developments in relation to four main women. their narratives eventually intersected with one another, but only a few times, which made the whole book feel more disjointed. this wasn't helped by the timeline of the story, which wasn't told in chronological order but rather jumped around in a seemingly random order. sometimes a story would be taking place in the 60s and then get derailed by another long anecdote from ww2.

this book's saving grace is shetterly's writing. a large majority of this book describes detailed technical procedures in great depth which was quite dry and boring most of the times, but her writing really shined when she was talking about the women and their lives. you can see that shetterly is quite a beautiful writer, she has a lovely way with words and every now and then she would throw in a fantastic turn of phrase that i just thought sounded wonderful. unfortunately, these moments were few and far in between, drowned out by the enormous amount of extraneous technical information.

because of this, i actually thought the intro and the epilogue were the most compelling part of the whole book. here, shetterly gets to talk at length about not only these individual women, but their impact on future generations and the roads they paved for future success of other minorities. these parts felt far more heartfelt and engaging, as i cared about these women, and not so much the theory of aerodynamics. shetterly also mentions that she cut out a whole section about gloria champine, which is such a shame because i would have much rather heard more about her life and her relationship with christine darden instead of what we got in the end.

this is still an incredibly well-researched and thorough book written by someone who clearly can write compelling material, but unfortunately the experience of reading was overall, a bore.

a sweet holiday childhood friends to lovers romance!

pros:
- sweet main couple, very steamy and likable
- the plot is largely driven forward by mae's actions and trying to figure out her mid-twenties crisis and inability to chase the things she wants
- i liked the writing
- builds the sexual tension rly well
- catharsis for decades of romantic yearning, soulmate-in-love-for-permanent kind of love
- if you're into big romantic gestures, you'll love this
- if you're super into christmas, you'll love this
- mixed family dynamics, healthy and supportive family relationships
- overall just a tooth-achingly sweet romance with a HEA

cons:
- i wish the other characters had been better developed; there was a decent cast of characters which were fine on their own, but i thought the relationships between them could've been stronger. this con is mainly for theo; his friendship with mae should've been given more screentime. it's constantly emphasised how "falling for your best friend's brother is so complicated", but theo and mae never really feel like best friends which kinda takes the sense of urgency out of the trope. it wasn't until the very end that i thought theo was anything more than just an asshole. the pitch was about mae being trapped between her best friend and her best friend's brother, but that trope just felt sort of hastily discarded; it never evolves into an actual issue except for one brief scene where the main issue was actually miscommunication. i actually felt kinda bad for theo by the end; we're just not gonna mention that he pined over mae the way she pined over andrew for decades? and he's just supposed to get over it in a day and be happy for them? don't get me wrong, i loved mae and andrew's romance, but lowkey rip theo :/ i wish that whole had been handled with more nuance

- the time travel: the groundhog day trope was DEEPLY under-utilised here, i'm on the verge of calling it misused. mae realises she's in a time loop super quickly, and only relives the day three times, which doesn't feel nearly long enough for her to arrive at the conclusions she does. it's not long enough to enjoy the chaos of time loops in the first place; she doesn't even relive the days enough time to reliably know what's going to happen before it does, which is the main appeal of the trope imo.

- second time travel con: it doesn't make sense. i know this trope is rarely given an actual scientific explanation, but usually it at least follows some rule, however arbitrary (the day resets at the end, you die when you get killed by the person chasing you down, etc). there was no rule in this book; mae was allowed to live thru several days (almost a week?) without any resetting. at some point i forgot this was even a time loop story. basically i'm trying to say that in a time loop story, the time loop was not present nearly
often enough. this leads me to

- third time travel con: weirdest conflict ever. despite the logistical issues i was having a grand old time with this, then the climax happened and i was so confused. mae confesses about her time loop situation to andrew, and instead of focusing on the time loop (which he hardly even believes at first) he's hung up on the idea that mae kissed theo in a hypothetical different timeline??? firstly, they've had really good communication for the whole book up till now, and for some reason this is andrew's breaking point. mae even explicitly says that she does not feel that way about theo, it was a drunk kiss, and they both hated it. maybe this is just me but if i had breakups with every best friend i've drunkenly made out with, i would have no friends left. it wasn't even a true love triangle, because mae and theo were never romantically involved, emotionally or physically. and yes, i recognise that andrew was upset bc he thought mae kissed theo bc she assumed she couldn't have andrew without even asking andrew, but he literally didn't tell mae how he felt either! i don't feel like
he has a lot of room to complain! his high horse is literally on the ground! it just felt like a silly conflict to have andrew storm out, when present-day mae was standing there telling andrew that she loved him. it was, as mae put it, the equivalent of getting mad at someone for something they did in a dream.

verdict: this is steamy, atmospheric, and romantic. just don't think about it too hard.

well my heart has definitely stopped because i am not fucking breathing! these are my boys now!

i definitely should be sleeping but these boys... they are my everything

wholesome wholesome wholesome

i'm so proud of them! and i'm happy that alice oseman is taking time to recharge and putting her mental health first <3