Liz Rapp

I didn't like this as much as I thought I would. I felt most of the essays were very pessimistic, and I found myself either disagreeing with her premises, or confused about what she was trying to say. I also felt she relied too much on quotes from other works as examples instead of using her own writing.

I really liked this. However, I had a real problem keeping the characters straight.

Conversations were kind of a mess. Imagine a rapid conversation between 2-16 newly introduced characters, where the characters are referred to alternatively by their titles, first names, last names, nicknames, or just their house number. I assumed I would adjust as we learned more about each character, but even past the halfway mark I kept finding myself going back to the online character guide to figure out who belonged to what house, who was a necromancer and who a cavalier. At one point I thought that Dulcinea's nickname was Corona, though that is an entirely different character. Later I was often confused if Coronabeth was one of the twins, or the twins' cavalier. It was incredibly confusing to sort out the cast of characters, and thus everyone's motivation except the two main characters was largely a lost cause. I was so relieved anytime it was just Gideon and Harrow cursing at each other, which were also by far the best parts of the novel.

At one point it seemed like even the author couldn't keep the characters straight- Harrow says to Palamedes “Sextus, your necromancer is wounded,” when Sextus is the necro, and his cavalier is the one wounded?

I am looking forward to the sequel. There are a lot of unanswered questions about the universe I am looking forward to seeing fleshed out.

This is a solid Y/A fantasy novel and a fairly quick read. The characters are interesting, but the overall plot was fairly obvious. I found myself skimming sections without feeling like I was missing much. The frequent shifts in POV helped drive the plot along, but also led to a lack of character development and world building.

In the middle of the novel Beru mentions having a train ticket and I was honestly surprised that trains exist in this universe - it otherwise feels like a pre -industrial fantasy world. Trains imply an advancement past the swords and crossbows other characters are using. They also mention one of the graces allows people to create magical inventions, like incandescent lights and trains, but I wish this concept had been more fleshed out. If a graced person makes an incandescent light, do they have to use their own energy to keep it lit? Or does it just exist separately from its creator? Does each train have to have graced person acting as fuel and conductor? Can people pool their esha's together to make bigger things, like the Lighthouse in Nazirah (that is supposedly so impressive, though they never really explain why)? Can people have more than one grace? What percentage of the population is graced? I wasn't entirely sure if it was supposed to be a rare gift, since it seemed like so many characters had it, and other than the Witnesses most people were kind of blase about these magic powers.

The scale of the world was also murky - at one point Jude mentions it will take 5 days to get from wherever their mountain hideout is to Pallas Athos. But later, traveling by boat and train to Nazirah and Medea seems to take no time at all, making it feel like Herat is the size of Delaware.

Also, ends on a cliffhanger, which was frustrating.

The more I think about this book the more irritated I become.

The crux of the novel is discovering that the missing Sylvie commits suicide, which is not exactly a surprise considering that her disappearance is fueling the entire plot. Narratively the options are either one of the other characters has murdered her, she runs away to do something else with her life, or she she has decided to end things. However, it is hard to build any suspense when Sylvie herself is one of the main perspectives in the story. We are less searching for Sylvie that she is just flat out telling us what is happening. She's discovered that her husband had an affair with a 16 year old, loses her job, and her grandmother passed away. All of which might understandably cause grief, anxiety and depression. However, the impetus for suicide was just so weird, it felt like the novel took a hard turn into soap opera territory. Her love interest is revealed to be her half brother, because he notices that she has birth mark that matches his father's? (I actually started googling whether birthmarks can be inherited.) I thought it was a real stretch for both of them to realize “Oh! Look at this funny birthmark, it must mean we have the same dad! Let's not have sex.” I did not understand at all why her reaction was to get in the car and drive into a canal. Why didn't she go confront her parents? Why didn't she use her ample credentials (it was hammered home many, many times about her Ivy League and MIT degrees,) to go find an awesome new job, divorce her husband, and live in a cool new city?

Also, what was the point of the grandmother's “treasure?” Which as described, seemed to be some old gold and jade jewelry? I kept wondering if this was like how my grandma collected china figurines that were probably an extravagance when she bought them, but were really just cute little trinkets? It was such a random plot point that didn't go anywhere. It seemed like the set up was leading towards Sylvie's grandma giving her this jewelry, and telling her to run away and go live her life, but instead....they fake a break in and hide the jewelry so that their aunt can't take it.

I also found some of the character's observations to be really strange. At one point Amy has just landed in the Netherlands, her first flight, customs and airport experience, which I understand can be stressful and novel in a lot of ways. But, she's grown up in New York City, she's not exactly coming from an insular, sheltered location. But she goes to the bathroom and notices that everyone else is so much taller than her, and in fact the sinks are so high she can't even see into the mirror over the sink. What? How tall is she exactly? Are sinks in the Dutch airport dramatically taller than those in New York? Every airport I have ever been in has full length mirrors. This was super minor but I kept finding weird little things that made it seem a bit like the characters were aliens.

I really enjoyed this, it was one of those books that I could not put down. Definitely has the same world building and drama I enjoyed about the first book.

But now that I've finished it, I'm left wondering why I enjoyed it so much? The ending left me not terribly excited to read the third book. Throughout the first two books people question Jude about her decision to stay in the Faerie realm, when by anyone's standards it is a horrible place. Jude never truly explains her goals, even to herself. I'd be totally fine if Jude just stayed in the human world. In many ways it feels like she's finally been set free by being exiled.

I have a lot of respect for John Carreyrou's work and tenacity in bringing Elizabeth Holmes' fraud to light. The story is a fascinating one, and the book is definitley worth reading, however I feel like it could have been summed up more concisely, perhaps in reading Carreyrou's original Wall Street Journal pieces.

It just became really depressing to read all of the ins and outs Theranos structure, the rate of firings, the many different ways the supposedly ground breaking technology didn't work, the lengths they went to hire lawyers and private investigators to prevent whistle blowers. After awhile I found myself skimming since it was years and years of repeated heinous corporate practices. There's no real satisfaction in learning why Holmes and her partner Balwani acted like such megalomaniacs, similar to how detectives interviewing sociopaths must feel frustrated when asking “Why did you commit this crime,” often there's just no answer to be found.

I was really not feeling this one. The descriptions of falconry sounded horrible, veering into animal cruelty. It was immediately off putting that our introduction to the main characters was while taking their tethered bird to compete in a fighting pit. I thought I'd give it more of a chance, maybe there'd be a redemption arc involving releasing the captured birds at some point? The twin's mother spends the book telling them to release the birds, because she believes that what they're doing is wrong. But they just treat her like she's in some kind of bird liberation cult and everyone else goes on their merry way capturing, fighting, racing, hunting or whatever the heck else you do with birds. Anyway, the actual plot is about hunting down a giant telepathic eagle, that for some unexplained reason is the key to winning a war.

Also, all of the bird metaphors got really old real fast.

And the audiobook narrator did these really insane bird caws, which made me think whole sentences must have been written like “Caw caw caw caw caw SCREECH.”

This story is bananas, and I'm so glad I read it. It's wonderfully written and engaging from start of finish. It has the pacing of a thriller but the subject matter ranges from Victorian hat fashions, rare birds, science and exploration, fly fishing, and museum heists. Highly recommend giving this book a try.

Yeah, it's a heist book. Imagine Ocean's Eleven, but on the moon. And with more welding and less casinos. It will probably be a fun movie, but the book was just ok.

It's fun, but I found the main character to be annoying and hard to relate to, every time she said “I have a plan,” it just kept spiraling into worse and worse problems until the dramatic finale of the novel.

I really enjoyed the style of this book, with Sadie's perspective contrasted with the narrator of a podcast show investigating her disappearance. The audiobook reminds me of Illuminae, in that the fantastic narrators give it the feel of a radio play. You can feel the struggle as Sadie fights to get words out, even as her mental narrative slides smoothly along, it is beautifully acted. Sadie is a wonderfully complicated character, she feels broken and young, and all of her decisions seems kind of crazy but in a really honest way. She doesn't shy away from hurting herself in her pain and rage, blinded by her single minded focus. With nothing left to lose, why shouldn't she put everything into hunting down her little sister's murderer?

Also enjoyed this interview with the author https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/macmillan/the-girls-find-sadie/e/56218100

This was ok. Murder mystery is not my preferred genre, but the mashup of magic style school and crime drama sounded interesting. Unfortunately I found the main character kind of unlikable from the beginning, for example her unrelenting jealousy of her sister was off putting. Though to be fair she does experience a lot of growth over the story.

The novel feels like it was engineered for book club discussions - with topics from adoption, whether a white family should be raising a Chinese American child, infertility, abortion, child custody, poverty, insular rich suburban life... The setting is in the 90s in a suburban Cleveland neighborhood, but it also feels outdated, like I'm reading a book that I've read before, twenty years ago. Nothing really surprising happens, the characters are either boring or unlikable.

The second that the adopted baby controversy was introduced I lost all interest. Mainly because I thought it was unrealistic for Bebe to have any legal claim to her child. She was neglectful to the point of abuse, and then abandoned her child at a fire station. Every state has safe haven laws, which have provisions to handle if a birth parent wants to regain custody later. In most cases “You also have the right to be informed by safe haven staff that by surrendering the child, you are releasing the child for adoption and that you have the right to petition the court in your state (within a set time period, like 28 days) to regain custody.” In that case, she would have had no legal grounds, and a large part of the book was unnecessary. The court scenes where the lawyer asks the adopted parents how they were going to raise the baby with Chinese culture was cringe worthy.

I did enjoy the descriptions of photography and Mia's artistic eccentricities. However, there is a bizarre paragraph mentions how she was the only freshman who didn't blush at nude life drawing because she helped her mother, an RN, with patients at the hospital. Just - what? It would be wildly inappropriate for a nurse to bring a child to work, much less to have an untrained person assist with patients in any way - much less see them in the nude.