April & May Reading Wrap Up 📚 so many new favourites!

I found the writing not to be my taste. I did not like the way that the story was told. It felt incredibly repetitive.

I also think the way that this book explores grief is so affecting and so relatable and so painful but also healing and beautiful. There are so many quotes in here that I will come back to many times.

But, yeah, I would say that it was worse than Quicksilver on many levels. especially the writing which was excruciating and I gave it one star.

It's told in a very stream of consciousness sort of style and I found it interesting, but I also think I wanted more out of it in terms of a narrative or character development or thematic content. So for me, this was just sort of a middle-of the road read at three stars.

It's also quite short, but I really loved this. I had a great time with it and I gave it five stars.

For me, this was really great overall and I had a really good time with it even though I had some qualms here and there. And I gave Cleopatra four stars.

I just think a lot of the issues that I had with the first book continued in the second book in a pretty consistent manner. I think the writing continued to feel a little bit more YA than I had expected.

It was heartbreaking and devastating and gorgeous. I thought the characterization was impeccable. I was so immersed from beginning to end.

And I feel like this had a lot of potential, but I'm not sure the execution quite landed for me. I definitely didn't hate the book. I enjoyed it well enough while I was reading it.

I did find that my experience was quite marred by the racism here, despite how beautifully written it was, despite how interesting it was. thematically. So, for me personally, this was a three-st star read.

This is quite a short read but it was very affecting absolutely fascinating and I would highly recommend. Five stars for Calcane.

I thought the execution of this was so poor and I had a very bad time. I honestly kept listening mostly because I was shocked by how poorly executed it was and I was kind of waiting for things to get better somehow or just to crash and burn.

And it is just such an interesting, odd, beautiful book that I really enjoyed spending time with and I would highly recommend. I gave it five stars.

And I remembered my experience with Quicksilver, which was kind of excruciating, but also very entertaining.

It was really immersive and interesting and I was super engaged and I wanted to know what was going to happen next and it surprised me multiple times and just in general was a very unique and interesting experience. I will say though that I was somewhat confused and on the one hand could be user error, could be my fault.

I also really didn't expect this to be as comedic as it was and I felt a lot of tonal whiplash going between almost slapstick comedy to very serious somber moments and back again. This just didn't work for me.

The world building is really fun and fantastic and the characters just jump off the page and it really pulls you in and there are some surprisingly emotionally poignant moments as well. I just think it's amazing and I love it so much.

I would say I did find it really interesting and very eerie and spooky. I found the way that it progressed was quite surprising and it was gripping all the way through. I was very immersed and engaged in it even when I was confused.

So, I will just say for me, despite really loving the cathedral building and the life in the monastery and life in the Middle Ages aspects of this and enjoying many of the characters, my experience was kind of ruined by feeling like this book did not care about how women would feel reading it one iota and that really sucked. So, I gave this two stars.

I thought this was beautiful. It's beautifully written. It very much feels like it's written like a flowing river.

And I loved Amal's previous book in collaboration with Max Gladstone. Is that who it was? This is how you lose the time war.

I loved the characters. I loved the themes it was exploring and I loved it so much. So, go read it.

It's very odd and strange and silly and humorous, but it also has a lot to say and a lot of heart. And it's quite long also and pretty dense, but I just loved it.

But overall, I thought it was really engaging and fascinating. It made me think a lot. It caused me to reflect on a lot of things.

I think overall this was really, really fantastically done. I felt my heart drop into my stomach from basically the first page and it just was stuck there the whole time.