themermaddie's reviews
467 reviews

i love this book, possibly more than the last although it's an incredibly close race. mackenzi lee has done it again. science girl gang forever

3.5 stars

i feel like i could've told you Will did it 10% into the book. i wouldn't have been able to explain how or why but it felt so obvious.

despite this, this book did a really good job of keeping me guessing. i feel like the DID and Will twist were kind of obvious, but also i can't fault the author entirely bc she dropped a lot of very subtle hints that i enjoyed picking up on. the unreliable narration was good in the sense that it made me feel incredibly uncertain about everything and paranoid that i was psyching myself out. this book keeps a lot of balls in the air, and for the most part does it well.

the characters aren't very interesting, it's mostly investment in finding out what happens that kept me going, but it was a breeze to get through this book. even though i guessed the main twists super early, i kept revising my theories for what the exact explanation was. i didn't guess that morgan was erin's sister, although in hindsight i feel like i should have so tjat was a fun surprise, although that explanation seemed a little too ... basic. maybe it was bc it seemed obvious from the beginning that Will was the bad guy, but i guess it was literally just bad luck for morgan that Will happened to move to her town? if morgan was trying to warn Sadie about Will, why stop w the picture? she could have spoken to sadie any time within the last few months but she didn't. idk it seemed like a weak explanation. i liked that the clues all matched up well, even if the ending was a little mehhh. it wasn't a bad ending by any means, just a little inevitable/predictable by then.

i wish there had been more to imogen than a red herring. i wish there could've been more text to substantiate her and sadie's relationship in the epilogue, more than just a secret crime binding them together. obviously sadie and imogen are now no longer actively hostile towards each other, but i would've liked to see some warmth between the two of them, they both deserve someone to trust and hold on to. i always liked imogen.

overall, a pretty good thriller. still don't love the prevalence of DID/schizophrenia in psychological thrillers but at least sadie wasn't painted as the villain for her disorder, but that's literally the bare minimum. a good read if you're lookin for a quick thrill.

i feel a bit weird about calling one of the biggest books of the modern day just not that memorable? but it kinda was. it was very entertaining and it was quite thrilling, very much a page turner with interesting plot lines and twists, but my mind's probably not going to linger on it now that i've finished it. incredibly plot focused and well researched, it's very info dump heavy without being tedious or boring, and i actually enjoyed learning more w each conversation the characters had.

4.5 stars

yas prequel! i can't get enough of pip and the gang so this was a welcome surprise. pre-ptsd pip is so young and bittersweet, it was nice to see her again.

there are some concerns that this is a knives out rip off, but i think that's kind of the point? not ripping off knives out, but that this store-bought locked room mystery game is derivative. the whole point is for the game to be just a *little* too simple, too easy, and there are too many plot holes for pip to believe it. THAT'S the whole reason she even starts to look into andie bell's case in the first place. i feel like the KillJoy game is intentionally archetypal: the cheating wife, the gambling brother, the shady cook, the old butler, etc. everyone plays their roles and if no one looks too closely, you'll come to the same conclusion that the game does: bobby remy did it. but not pip, she looks closer than the others and listens to the inconsistencies and plot holes, and that's why she's the main character folks! that's why we love her.

aside from being just a fun story with the gang, this is a great character-building prequel that segues nicely into AGGGTM. it's so fun to see how pip's brain works as she figures out the clues, taking the game way too seriously hehe. it establishes everyone's characters really well, as well as priming the setting of little kilton for the events of AGGGTM. pip is as she used to be, hates being wrong and determined to get to the truth for justice. it was nice to see her this way again.

fuck it, it's stay up all night to finish this book time!

literally unputdownable. the writing is so tense and absolutely superb, between this and pip's ptsd, i found myself feeling physically ill at some points. parts of the first half were especially difficult to get through, being in pip's head was absolutely suffocating, at times i felt claustrophobic. this was significantly darker than its predecessors, and i was hooked.

obviously, if you've read any other reviews you'll know that there's a major twist at about half way, and then it switches genre almost entirely. clearly this has been an extremely polarising choice on the author's part, but i loved it. it made the three books seem more like a cohesive storyline, each one bleeding into the next, and listen i don't want to speak ill of pip, but this felt like a natural progression from the last two books. i certainly don't think any reader was expecting this going in, but this made sense to me thematically with pip's loss of faith in truth and justice. also at least it wasn't a repeat of the last two books as is so common with mystery detective series like this, this feels like a full story arc from book 1 to 3.

miss jackson had my heart pounding from start to finish, she has a way of writing that feels like her stories are infused with crack, i swear. the first half felt like I was being gaslit the whole time, and the second half felt like I was racing against the clock watching the sand seep too quickly out of an hourglass. everything about this scheme was so clever and thrilling to watch play out; yes I know some of it is kind of unrealistic with the way forensics are so accurate these days, but is it not also kinda realistic to assume that the police might get things wrong sometimes? see: the first two books. i just think that it works out really well thematically this way. this definitely wasn't as light and fluffy, but it makes sense that it wouldn't be; of course I wish there had been more light moments with pip's friends and with ravi, but this whole book felt like one great last hurrah and I liked seeing where everyone bet their cards. miss jackson had me going till the last page, i was about to be so mad if she hadn't included those last two pages, jesus. it's a bit of a bittersweet and open ending for sure, but a book this dark couldn't have ended any other way, i think.

i am very sad to say goodbye to this cast and this universe. holly jackson did not disappoint, not once. in layman's terms, this shit SLAPS.

if i could rewrite the blurb, it would probably go something like "jess joins a youtube reality show to bring awareness to her mother's killer who is still at large, gives some very weak on air taunts to the killer, and then all the clues conveniently fall into her lap leading to the killer's arrest." i've got a lot of things to say about this book, so strap in.

the writing here was just ... not good. writing doesn't have to be sophisticated to be good, but this was just overly simple and the definition of telling instead of showing. it definitely could've used another few passes from an editor bc it was so much longer than it needed to be so the pace absolutely dragged. it was told in first pov and i often forgot that jess was a character because of how bland she was. how are you the main character and still the least memorable person in the story? everything just felt like "i feel scared of the magpie man. i feel sad seeing my dad like this." and it all just felt hollow. i know the short chapters were a deliberate choice, but between a meandering/inconsequential plot and poor writing, the length of the chapters just kept me from ever feeling close to any character. i don't know how else to describe the writing other than like, montage writing? it felt like we were glossing over the entire book, and any direct dialogue was just a break between more montages of jess going to school or
thinking of ways to taunt the killer online or looking at photos of her mom.

i'm so glad that the author cited AGGGTM as an inspiration, because otherwise i would've felt bad comparing this book to it. this book is like AGGGTM's ugly step sister. it lacks everything a thriller needs: no compelling mystery, no suspicious characters, no clever clues, and it was just plain boring. every potentially interesting red herring was immediately cleared up; i was very interested in sonia and the mystery of her, only come to find she's nothing more than a strawman to criticise the way ppl follow social media virality. the threats were interesting, until it's immediately revealed that it was just michael trying to drum up views. none of these clues were drawn out long enough to make enough of an impact. the threats turned out to only be michael, and the newspapers were mr collins, both of whom were innocent. these were the only concrete pieces of evidence that jess was ever in any danger. this means that basically the only threats the killer himself truly made were the note in the newspaper and the one instagram live comment. needless to say, the stakes were not high. not once did i ever think jess was truly in danger, nor did it ever seem like this was an urgent matter beyond the end date of the reality tv competition.

this book pitches itself as a serial killer story told thru a social media lens, and in the words of tyler the creator: so that was a fucking lie. the reality tv show competition plot stops being relevant at less than 50% of the way thru, and even in the first half, it doesn't? do anything? the show only films jess for FOUR DAYS. one monday per week for a month, during which they just follow jess around her daily
life; the interesting stuff doesn't even happen on most of the mondays, and we're still expected to believe this is getting jess all the viewers. and then social media stops even being part of the plot beyond lines like "people took out their phones to film" or "people would come up to me in the hallways to tell me they liked the show", which was just trite and a weak attempt to keep the social media stuff going. even ignoring this, jess spends most of her time on camera lying bc she doesn't want the magpie man to see what evidence she's collected. she tries to act normal so it ends up just being ... a show following a girl going to school. the only way this book uses social media is as a vehicle for other people to deliver jess information. and maybe i'm a grumpy asshole and that's the point! maybe if we all came together through social media we could accomplish more! that's a lovely sentiment, i just dont think it was executed effectively here.

probably the most heinous crime is the fact that this book just! does not! have! a! plot! yes i could tell you what events happened but that's all they are; there was no cohesive mystery, it just felt like reading a laundry list of things that happened. it just meanders until jess stumbles onto something useful. if it hadn't been for ross reaching out, she would never have met the other victims' families. if clara hadn't reached out to jess first, they NEVER would've caught elliot. everything else was pure luck. jess didn't even go to clara's house bc she suspected elliot, it was literally coincidence that she happened to find evidence that it was elliot. (don't even get me started on the "evidence" in this book, it was all circumstantial and would never hold up in court unless elliot had a deeply incompetent lawyer.) jess was a passive player in this whole book, which is why her final statement that "i caught the magpie man" feels so deeply unearned and laughable.

the explanation for the magpie man's murders was incredibly scooby-doo. congrats, you just unmasked the bogeyman and he was ... a bad guy. no nuance or grey area, just straight up a dude who sucked. jess's mom just happened to be in the wrong place in the wrong time, and then this guy just decides to keep killing after her. no explanation, he's just evil. i don't know if i mentioned already or maybe just inferred it, but the events of this book are extremely unrealistic. everything goes a little too right all the time. i cannot believe how fast he gets charged for murder, not to mention that they are somehow able to nail him for ALL SIXTEEN murders? yeah sure ok.

i felt like this book wanted to be a grief therapy book and a thriller at the same and failed at both. i completely understand wanting to foreground the families of the victims, and i can see that's what the author tried to do when jess did her "alive" tshirt stunt w the families, almost like inspiration grief porn. but you can't have jess simultaneously trying to move past and live with the grief while also supposedly hellbent on catching w killer. it weakens both of her arcs; either she's still so torn up about her mother's death that she keeps pursuing her killer or she's learning to make peace with her loss and backing off to keep herself safe. you just can't have these moments of jess feeling safe and healing in the middle of book, what's meant to be the height of tension, if the whole point is catching a killer out to get you. i know i'm beating the dead horse into the ground now but i just really want to communicate that these "healing" moments were intensely cheesy and absolutely killed the pace of what was meant to be a quick paced thriller.

some less important rants: but what the fuck was up with danny? why the fuck would you suggest that jess and danny were flirting and/or into each other? she is 17 and he is in his 20s and it never even goes anywhere so why would you include this except to gross me out? BAD. and while we're on the subject of love interests, jamie is somehow even more boring than jess is. he was IN the final showdown with the killer and more than once i forgot he was even there. a lackluster romance between two lackluster characters. Also, what was the point of mayfield? it felt incredibly out of place in the story as a whole. bernie only got alcohol poisoning so we could meet elliot for the first time, and only in a throwaway paragraph. bernie had a weirdly big speaking role despite not actually having anything to do with anything at the end.


ok i'm going to shut up now, ive talked for long enough; i didn't like this book and you get it. i was debating giving this book 1 or 2 stars, but i felt bad about giving it a 1 star because i only give those to books i genuinely hate. i dont hate this book, i'm just disappointed it was so boring.

i simply ... need more vera kelly in my life. so atmospheric with sharp writing and a beautifully fleshed out setting and it's just such a lovely read. it's not quite as action packed as jessica jones but i love "ex-cia, new private investigator" for her, she's smart and she does the job. this book is more straightforward and linear than the first book's intersecting chronological narratives, but i'm so much more comfortable in it now. i love vera kelly.

4.5 stars

this is such a cool world and story!! the world building here is intensely complex and so interesting, i love how meta it gets. it's a wonderful little homage to the art of storytelling and the writing is beautiful and lyrical, with the occasional dip into purple prose (but it fits the theme of the book).
i really enjoyed the arc of all these characters, i loved how self-aware they were about playing into the archetypes of their characters, but i had trouble connecting with them emotionally. i had to get pretty far into the book before i started to get invested in the characters themselves, and even then it was more about intrigue than them tugging on my heart strings. the character development is very much there tho, and i will still probably read the next book, but i'm way more invested in the world building of this series than the characters. if the idea of magical libraries, war between heaven/hell and angel/demon, and navigating different afterlives through the power of storytelling sounds interesting, this book might be for you.

what can i say about this book that hasn't already been said? i truly did not intend to read this all in one sitting, but good stories like these demand to be read.

i consumed this voraciously. TJR has a way of creating the most insanely vivid settings, from the 50s to present day, i am absolutely blown away by her ability to create so much with so little. the characters are so painfully human, i never come away thinking that i know any character entirely. especially evelyn, who only ever wanted to be her truest self with her family, and with monique's biography, was finally demanding to be humanised beyond her celebrity. all her mistakes and choices are laid out bare, the beauty and the ugliness of everyone's life, and TJR makes you care for them anyway.

this book tackles so much, and does it all well. evelyn has woc/lgbt rep, and explores celebrity culture, old hollywood, romantic and platonic love, female ambition and sexuality, divorce, even assisted suicide. this book says fuck the patriarchy! this book is about evelyn warring with her two selves and trying to be true blue in a world which views her a very specific way and has her on a very high pedestal. it is heartbreaking, tragic, and just above all, painfully human. what an absolute breath of fresh air.

i really really wanted to love this book, instead i found myself impatient for it to be over. i'm going to try and be kind about it in this review, mostly bc i am unsure of why this book did not work for me.

firstly, i do think that nell stark can write. i think that her writing can be quite nice, i like the way she set up these characters and their background, i just dont think the follow through was very good. her writing isn't clunky or repetitive, just kind of ... dry. it was like like if someone was baking a cake and they have all the right ingredients but used the wrong amounts of everything, this was supposed to be a steamy romance and i'm sorry to be blunt but tell me why my coochie was BONE DRY the whole way through. it was mechanical, it was boring, and i skimmed the sex scenes, i'm sorry!!! the dryness of the writing made it also feel kind of unemotional so i didn't really care about the characters.

probably the worst offender is the insta love. i've read insta love before but THIS was egregious. are you telling me that kerry was just SO UNDENIABLY SEXY that sasha was compelled to whisk her away and woo her? they meet in a CLUB in the DARK and say precisely TWO LINES to each other before sasha's like "yep this is the one, drop the anchor" when she is a closeted princess, make it make sense!!! i simply refuse to believe that one kiss was so good that sasha was like fuck it imma risk the monarchy. this, of course, was not helped by the fact that sasha and kerry have zero chemistry lmao. their dialogue is so weird and stilted, i don't know what either of them see in each other. wow, kerry is sexy and made u feel not shitty about your dyslexia? i'm sure that is good grounds for wanting to renounce your claim to the throne. also I'm sorry, because apparently I am going to rag on the writing: their romantic dialogue was so cringey. at one point they literally did speed dating questions like "what's your favourite book/movie?" "how many siblings do you have?" and "what's your greatest fear?" like PLEASE spare me this dry ass conversation. in what world is this supposed to convince me that they have a burning passion for each other that's so bright it could take down the monarchy.

i can kinda see why sasha might continuously seek out kerry, but i cannot for the life of me explain why kerry complies?? she's a supposedly studious rhodes scholar who has worked extremely hard to get to where she is, only to never be seen working hard in the book. at the end she's like "my grades are exemplary" and like WHEN have you been studying?? we never see her do anything without sasha, which is kind of another issue with the book. every scene that doesn't have sasha and kerry in it is skimmed over, like the writing itself sort of glosses over other events happening; i'm convinced that if this were a movie, these scenes would be depicted through montage. sometimes one of kerry's classmates would be mentioned and I would be like "oh yeah she has class." even Harris was just a GBF honestly.


i thought the plot point of Sasha renouncing her claim to the throne was kind of anti-climactic, I know it was supposed to show her devotion to kerry and how much she would be willing to give up for her, but it was just so weird that she was going to do it even when they weren't technically together and Arthur was in a coma. I know she said that she was giving up the crown to be able to "live her truth" but I don't buy it? the stakes just felt so low bc i wasn't convinced by the media portrayal in this book. i know it's hard to depict fame, but sasha didn't seem like a royal, just a rich person with other responsibilities. i hope you can recognise the nuance, bc while she kept going on about everything that was expected of her and needing to wear a wig outside, sasha basically roamed around and did whatever she wanted to. kerry also agreed to go public and wasn't concerned in the least about the amount of attention she would get from it, which just seems unrealistic for a commoner to just jump on board with that, no questions asked. sasha lived too normal of life to convince me that she's a royal.

i'll refrain from picking apart every little thing now. this is one of those books on my classic lesbian lit shelf that i never read and finally got around to, and i am truly bummed that i didn't enjoy this book. especially bc it started off so strong! the first
few chapters are so good, they do a wonderful job establishing all these character traits and motivations, all of which just seem to disappear as the book goes on. what happened to sasha's party planning business? i thought she wanted to prove to her father that she truly loves her job and that this isn't just another excuse to go party. instead it appears that this detail was only introduced so that Sasha could plan the Scottish getaway for kerry. what happened to kerry's studious manner that led her to being a rhodes scholar? i loved that she was so ambitious and determined, and she's really into soccer and running, but all she does is follow sasha around as emotional support for the rest of the book. such a shame.