Reviewing the 41 books I read from January to March... Q1 Wrap Up 📚

I do think overall the book was quite easy to read, pretty enjoyable overall. I do like Gabriel a lot as a protagonist.

I enjoyed the first book of Mice and Murder, I think it was called.

So all of that being said, while I can see what this was trying to do and I can appreciate aspects of it, it just went too far for me personally. I was not able to really handle and process the content.

I did find the ending very abrupt. I was sobbing, feeling so many emotions, and then it was just over. I found that jarring.

I love the setting. I love the political world building. I love the religions and the way they intertwine.

I thought that I'd found my favorite ever Stephen Graham Jones when I read The Buffalo Hunter in 2025, and I still love that book.

I really like it still. It was a very high four star, but I did have a few critiques mostly about the actual structure, pacing, craft of the story and how it was packaged more so than the story itself.

I think the writing was quite beautiful. I think the characters were really interesting. I think the system as was explored was quite visceral and intense and makes you think and feel a lot of things.

I think there were aspects of this that were maybe a little bit less focused than I have found some of her other work to be, but I couldn't help but love it and find it so fascinating and I was deeply immersed in it. So, I gave death of the author five stars.

I gave it five stars. Thought it was really interesting and also made me cry a couple times.

And I really didn't like this. I didn't like this at all. Didn't like the characters.

It was definitely a little bit more lacking in the plot department than I expected, and it did feel a little bit like something was missing for me in that area, but otherwise, I really enjoyed it. I found it super interesting, and I gave it four stars.

I also read her YA romance, highly suspicious and unfairly cute, I think is what it's called, which was very cute, as the name would imply.

And I found this really interesting. It was a different take on witches than I have personally read about.

I found it pretty subpar all around in both the execution and the representation and all the characters were terrible people.

I liked our protagonist a lot. I liked the setting a lot. I think there were lots of interesting factors and some really cool ideas and reveals.

It was very vague and I wanted a little bit more from it, but I did like it a lot. I ended up giving it four stars, but I do have a longer review including spoilers in my other video if you want to watch that.

I still found it interesting. I still liked the characters and wanted to follow what happened with them and again the world building was amazing. It just felt like something was missing.

This is the best Steven Graham Jones I've read. For me personally, in my personal opinion, I thought this was really fantastic. and also very emotional.

So, all I'm going to say is I really liked all three of them. I gave them five stars, four stars, and five stars.

The writing was pretty straightforward but very engaging. I found the story propulsive and immersive. The setting was enjoyable of this small, close-knit Irish town with lots of secrets.

I just decided to accept that these are who these characters are even if it is very implausible and I ended up appreciating their sort of unlikely friendship and the story of the past timeline which was quite endearing and sweet. It brought tears to my eyes at least once near the end but it also felt like it was trying really hard to make me cry and that kind of annoys me.

And this was endearing and hilarious and very creepy at times and really great and I loved it a lot and I gave it five stars and I'm very excited to read the next volume and I would highly recommend this team if you're looking for some horror graphic novels to pick up.

And it's really fantastically done and very relevant to read right now despite the fact that it was written in the late 1800s. It's masterfully done. It's fantastic.

And I loved the idea of it, but I hated the execution so much. I did not like our protagonist at all.

It's also very tender and endearing and wholesome and made me feel very seen and I loved it. And it's also beautifully written and has a strong sense of place and I can totally understand why it became such an important piece of queer literature in the8s and I loved it a lot.

I still liked a lot about it, but I did find it very slow and kind of boring in the first half. I really wanted to be as immersed in it as I was immersed in book one, but it just was kind of not capturing my attention as much.

It fell a little short of my expectations, but I did find it to be a fun, quick, easy read. So, this was a three-st star read for me.

This was much more emotional and vulnerable and tender than I expected it to be. I was very emotional reading it. I was so engaged and so immersed.

I can see the comparisons to The Handmaid's Tale. It's definitely inspired by The Handmaid's Tale in many ways, but it also is very much its own thing, especially because it is specifically talking about the intersections of gender and race.

I read it very quickly. I thought it was a really interesting premise and I thought it was executed quite well.

I loved the characters. I loved the world building. I loved the romance.

The Handmmaid's Tale was pretty foundational to me. I read it in high school as a bonus assigned reading from my teacher for extra credit and kind of exploded my brain and perspective on the world in a bunch of ways.

At the end of the day, I thought this was a good memoir, but I didn't think it was exceptional.

So, all I'm going to say is I really liked all three of them. I gave them five stars, four stars, and five stars.

I also felt like our sappic romance that I really loved in book one, I thought that their chemistry was amazing. I loved both characters. I thought their dynamic was great.

There is a really great story in here and I kept seeing glimpses of it but I was just so exhausted from the effort of trying to understand it and just read the text and get through it and follow what was happening that I couldn't really appreciate it while I was reading.

But I also found it moving and endearing and hopeful and full of love and tenderness and genuine emotion and vulnerability. And I thought the characters were really well done.

You know, I really like Talia Hibbert's writing style. I did think the romance part of this was really endearing and lovely. This is a pretty short book, but the end was very sudden.

I love this book. It is very pretentious, but purposefully so for effect. Part of what it's doing is commenting on the futility of this sort of self-absorbed pretention, especially in very young adults who don't have a lot of perspective on the world yet.

I thought it was interesting. I appreciated it. I'm glad I read it, but I probably will never read it again or will wait a very long time to read it again.

I didn't care about the characters. I wasn't drawn into the relationship. I didn't feel anything other than annoyance reading it.

I thought it was very poorly done. The witches didn't need to be there. I didn't think this book handled the subject matter very well.