Manal

Very quick read. I didn't realize this was YA until I started reading it, nothing against YA but I'd like to be prepared... the writing is pretty amateur but I read the interview with the author at the end of the book and she said she started writing it in high school - unfortunately it shows. A lot of exclamation points and italicized snarkiness. However the story is entertaining enough that I read all 400 pages so there's that. This is NOT for Game of Thrones fans. This is more like the Divergent series, a step above Twilight but not as good as Hunger Games. I am grateful it got me back into the high fantasy genre that I'd abandoned a few years ago. And I liked the story enough that I'm willing to read her new novels, with the expectation that her writing will have improved by now.

Useful to everyone, with caveats:

I'll start with the bad - The author had a good philosophy marred by a blind indifference to the stakes and consequences the average person considers when deciding whether to 9-5 it. But maybe that's the attitude you need to write this kind of book.

The good: While you're reading it you'll be motivated to think about what you want, why you want it, and to take action to get there, but not necessarily the steps in this book. It's not a how-to for everyone even though the author positions it that way. His approach is: here's how you should live your life, and here's the way I accomplished that. He doesn't really make it clear that there are ways other than his own, which can be discouraging if you can't see yourself taking his approach.

I'm being vague for a reason - if I knew his approach before I started reading I probably would never have picked it up, and would have missed out on a really valuable perspective.

I recommend sticking with it to the end. The dark matter/dark energy chapters are fascinating - could have expanded that to the whole book and I would have been happy. Otherwise, it's definitely not for the total science novice but I had enough physics and chemistry background to grasp most of the concepts. Really interesting but I know I won't remember most of it.

This felt like an extended text-version of a John Oliver segment (in a good way). A very quick read, but probably more informative if you haven't taken any (decent) courses on recent US history from the 1950s-1990s. Hayes makes interesting and valid connections between the nation-colony relationship of the Revolutionary era and the state of existing-while-black in today's America. He establishes this in the beginning and then sets out to explore the ways it plays out when policing and policy are grounded in white fear. I think this is a good starter book for diving into the ideas Hayes weaves together (redlining, broken windows policing, the War on Drugs, mass incarceration, gentrification, etc.) but if you just want a basic understanding of the stakes in the fight for black rights and the premise of the Black Lives Matter movement, I recommend this book.

I recommend it. If you're interested in how the 1893 World's Colombian Exposition came to be, this is the book for you. If you're more interested in H.H. Holmes, there are a wealth of other books to choose from. I think if I'd read this cold I'd have enjoyed it much more, but as it happens, I heard about it from several unconnected people who raved, and thought I should give it a shot. It started out extremely well-written and riveting, but eventually the story became lost in the details, to the point where it felt like it was dragging on because the author couldn't kill his darlings. It also felt like the Holmes story was writtten completely separately, like the author knew his book about the world fair needed something to grab the reader and maintain their attention. It worked on me, but it was frustrating to have the majority of the nearly 400 pages spent on the minutiae of getting the World Fair up and running when there was such rich material to work with on the Holmes side of things. Then again it's a matter of setting expectations - I was ready for a lot more of the devil than what ended up in the book.

Read Ibsen's A Doll's House before you read this; it's used as a case study throughout the entire book. This is specific to writing plays but provides a very useful methodology for focusing your storytelling toward a specific goal, and avoiding listless and pointless writing which stems from having no clear conclusion (or conviction) in mind. (It was written in 1942 so it's possible Egri's ideas have been adapted for other mediums.) I recommend it for anyone who wants to write but hasn't had any formal/classroom training.