this is… the first pure romance book i’ve rated 5 stars. and i have to wait weeks to talk about it at book club. as someone who is so overly picky abothis is… the first pure romance book i’ve rated 5 stars. and i have to wait weeks to talk about it at book club. as someone who is so overly picky about men and whether or not i like them can break a book, i can confidently say that iwan is the best man and now maybe i kinda believe in love again...more
Hala Alyan does an excellent job using creative techniques to write about displacement and diaspora specifically relating to Palestine as well as someHala Alyan does an excellent job using creative techniques to write about displacement and diaspora specifically relating to Palestine as well as some more personal struggles she has had with womanhood, most specifically her journey with motherhood. I foundt that her poems about diaspora and the women in previous generations of her family were the most touching and powerful, while the ones that strayed away from Palestine and being the child of refugees were less powerful to me. Overall, this was an excellent poetry collection and used some unique methods--some that I really loved (the “choose your own adventure” style poems), and somes that I didn’t love as much (the medical records ones).
Here are some excerpts from my favorites:
From “They Both Die on Mondays in April”: “… I am never paying attention. I cried because Fatima was already half-gone, because Nadia would later say I was the happiest bride she’d ever seen, because I didn’t recognize the photographs, because I left the wrong country, but hasn’t everything already happened somewhere? Aren’t we all waiting like unrung bells, and hadn’t Fatima already died that night, and Nadia too, and the city, and the house, and in that hotel bed, in that flesh that is their flesh, in that bone that is their bone, their every season, wasn’t I only remembering?”
From “Half-Life in Exile”: “... Everybody loves the poem. It’s embroidered on a pillow in Milwauke, It’s done nothing for Palestine. … The plants are called fire-followers, but sometimes they grow after the rains. At night, I am a zombie feeding on the comments. Is it compulsive to watch videos? Is it compulsive to memorize names? Rafif and Amir and Mahmoud. Poppies and snapdragons and calandrinias: I can’t hear you. I can’t hear you under the missiles. A plant waits for fire to grow. A child waits for a siren. It must be a child. Never a man. Never a man without a child. There is nothing more terrible than waiting for the terrible. I promise. Was the grief worth the poem? No, but you don’t interrogate a weed for what it does with wreckage. For what it’s done to get here.”
From “Brute”: “... I want to fight for a country even if that country didn’t want me even if when my mother bought a patch of land & tried to put my name on it they wouldn’t let me because my name is my father’s name because he was born in Palestine and so impossible and so I am fated to love what won’t have me you know the way our mothers did” ...more
I’ve started losing patience for the sad girl narrators who are stuck wallowing in their own misery, unable to look anywhere but at the past, and thatI’ve started losing patience for the sad girl narrators who are stuck wallowing in their own misery, unable to look anywhere but at the past, and that’s probably in part because I’ve started losing patience for myself in that regard too, which is kind of sad because I am no longer enjoying these sad girl books, but maybe it’s also happy because it makes me want to push myself out of my wallowing. // full rtc in the morn...more
"I needed to keep going too. If I wanted to be ordinary, I had to put the effort into being ordinary."
In a shocking turn of events, I really just d "I needed to keep going too. If I wanted to be ordinary, I had to put the effort into being ordinary."
In a shocking turn of events, I really just don't have much to say about this one. It was a cute read that touched a bit on darker topics, such as suicide, alluding to the way women are treated in Korea, and climate change, but I just found myself wanting more from it.
" 'Because these powers are granted to the weakest people, it just looks like girls are the ones who get to be magical.' " ...more
edit: Starting crying as I was going through my quotes and notes and realized this absolutely deserves to be five stars. Jen, you deserve the absoluteedit: Starting crying as I was going through my quotes and notes and realized this absolutely deserves to be five stars. Jen, you deserve the absolute world ...more
All of the stuff from my review of this last fall got deleted last night?? Rip.
When the skincare obsessed Mirabelle's mother dies in a tragic accid All of the stuff from my review of this last fall got deleted last night?? Rip.
When the skincare obsessed Mirabelle's mother dies in a tragic accident, she heads from Montreal to California to settle her affairs. What she finds there is some magic shoes and a mysterious woman pushing her to follow the path her mother followed before her death. Mirabelle finds her way to the incredibly creepy culty spa that her mother was apart of and is welcomed with open arms. We follow Belle as she moves deeper in this cult, accepting more treatments and becoming more and more flawless as time goes on, but by the end of it she has to ask herself - is beauty worth the cost?
"I'm wearing a dread of liquid gold that burns like the sun. I'm wearing shoes of reddest blood. The mirrors are cracking all around me. The waves are saying, entree, entree."
Rouge tackles the toxicity of the beauty/skincare industry while leaving one just a little bit more confused about Tom Cruise than they were before this book.
Awad tackles the toxicity of a western beauty standard perfectly especially with Belle, who is half Egyptian (like Awad herself). Belle is a self insert for Awad and it works perfectly. You feel the jealousy she feels towards her "perfect" white mother (who also has severe self image issues that she passed down), her struggling with her identity as a mixed girl with a white mother especially in regards to western beauty standards, her neglectful mother who seems to be more obsessed with making it big in Hollywood and her own reflection, and her feelings of animosity towards her father, who she never met yet who still seemingly runs part of her life.
I found this to be significantly less weird than Bunny and All's Well. Where the other books felt like a fever dream, all the odd things in this one felt more purposeful.
"I'm trying to save you, Sunshine. I'm trying in my broken way. I'm holding out my arms. I'm taking the apple you're handing me. I'm looking into your eyes and saying it's the most perfect thing. Even though you're not hearing me."
If you have mommy issues, prepare to be thoroughly destroyed by this book.
While a lot of this book centers around the toxicity of the beauty industry, it also looks into the of a mother-daughter bond. Awad does an incredible job of portraying a tumultuous mother daughter relationship where, although both parties may not understand each other well, they would each do anything for the other. This book shows exactly how precious a mother's love is and how grief manifests when that force disappears.
While this feels like the most personal of Awad's books and the ending left me significantly more emotional than the others, the middle parts got a bit repetitive and fell flat for me. The last 100 pages were the best part....more
“It’s strange, to not be the youngest kind of adult anymore. I’m thirty-one now and my mother is dead.”
Casey is 31 and has been working on her nove “It’s strange, to not be the youngest kind of adult anymore. I’m thirty-one now and my mother is dead.”
Casey is 31 and has been working on her novel for six years. She spends her mornings trying to write while she waits tables during the afternoon and night. She is dealing with the grief of her mother and the loss of a relationship and she is not very good at letting real things touch her. In short, she is the perfect narrator for a lost-in-your-thirties book. There is so much in these pages that can be so relatable to so many people, including myself. I don't always know how to feel about books about writers, but I really did love this one and the way it was included. It can be so disheartening to be in any creative pursuit until a break happens and this felt like a warm hug just saying "you're not alone."
“It’s a sense of despair about writing itself, a sort of throwing up of hands, as if to say I’ll put this down on the page but it’s not what I really mean because what I really mean cannot be put into words.”
If your name is Kris and you’ve had to deal with me texting you multiple times about how this is the writer version of tick, tick… BOOM! just know that I love you and endlessly appreciate you (even though you didn't like this book). Thanks for putting up with my thoughts. Now let me tell everyone else about how this is the writer version of tick, tick… BOOM! There is often times a glamorization that comes with the idea of a “starving” or “tortured” artist that is directly opposed to the life. The aestheticization of these people who are in bad financial situations by people who are significantly more well off has always felt very empty and weird to me. Like tick, tick… BOOM!, Writers & Lovers does not glamorize the life of people trying to write and get published. In both cases, our protagonist has spent years working on writing something and, having reached 30, are starting to see the majority of their friends “sell out” or get full time jobs for stability instead of continuing their creative pursuits. There’s a sense of being left behind while the world moves forward that always feels so validating to see in media. Casey is losing friends because she can’t afford being in their weddings and isn’t settling down because she refuses to “sell out,” but not selling out comes at a very high price that is not justifiable to a lot of people.
“I look back on those days and it feels gluttonous, all that time and love and life ahead, no bees in my body and my mother on the other end of the line.”
Grief is at the heart of this novel. A few weeks before the start of this book, Casey lost her mom quite unexpectedly. King does a beautiful job exploring how this grief seeps into Casey’s everyday life from not wanting to finish her novel about her mother to wanting to call her mom about the most mundane things. Grief invades every aspect of Casey’s life in such a raw, borderline unmanageable way that I have to applaud. Every single aspect of this book is layered with the grief of her mother.
“I hate male cowardice and the way they always have each other’s backs. … And when he got caught, he got a party and a cake.”
Another very prominent theme in Writers & Lovers is about harassment women receive from men and the lack of consequences men face from their actions. There is a particularly gross, anxiety inducing situation that happens at the restaurant she works out that really incredibly highlights why it’s so hard to come forward about issues. Additionally, there is a past situation with her father and the male staff’s reactions that reminded me of how Nickelodeon’s Dan Schneider “exited Nickelodeon” instead of being fired even though there were some very serious allegations against him from minors. This protection of men in power over the children that are being exposed is such a pressing issue and it was handled in a very depressingly realistic way here too.
“I squat there and think about how you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two up in a terrible tangle that’s hard to unravel.”
I find the relationships to be especially interesting in this book because, while they are prevalent, they serve more as a way to explore Casey and her growth instead of standing alone as solid relationships. We see her with Oscar, a successful novelist, and his very sweet young children. With Oscar, we see everything that Casey thinks she wants – namely a family that was healthier than her own. We also see her with Silas, a younger struggling writer like her who she hits it off with immediately. There is this internal battle with Casey choosing between having a place already set out for her in a lukewarm relationship or taking a chance and potentially finding painful heartbreak that I really enjoyed. I think both relationships were handled well and watching how Casey handled both men added more depth to the story.
“ ‘The sublime always tracks you down eventually.’ ”
I went into this book expecting it to be pretty heavy on the romance. I came out of it carrying a profound and heartwarming story about a woman in her early-30’s still struggling to find her place in life and eventually reaching a point where things finally start going right. This is so much of a book and it’s all done incredibly well. I could feel all of Casey’s emotions so clearly and was rooting for her the whole time. This is about a woman waiting for her break and trying to figure everything out along the way. It’s about grief, it’s about friendship, it’s about shitty men, and it’s about loving yourself before anyone else.
“I think of all the people playing roles, getting further and further away from themselves, from what moves them, what stirs them all up inside. And I think of my novel on Muriel’s mail table and I hope that tropical fish guy will leave it alone.”
Discussing this at book club was great fun as there was a 50/50 split on people who loved or hated it so we had a nice heated discussion....more
Reading through my reviews, you may wonder has Liv literally ever felt joy? or does Liv understand that it’s not that deep? and I’m here to tell you tReading through my reviews, you may wonder has Liv literally ever felt joy? or does Liv understand that it’s not that deep? and I’m here to tell you that. . . probably? But not today and definitely not because of this book. To be perfectly clear, this book and I got off on the wrong foot immediately. I, a fool, assumed that the two people on the cover were lesbians, which is pretty much the only reason I requested this arc, so there was already a bit of disappointment when I realized (too late) that this was actually between a nonbinary person and a man, but I figured that there was still hope; I like (some) men and also vaguely identity as nonbinary, so what the hell? What the hell is indeed how I felt about this book, but not in the aloof way I was going for.
Before we get into this review, let’s get a few facts about me straight. One: the ratio of romances I read versus romances I enjoy is abysmally low. I have personal issues with a lot of the ways romance is portrayed, primarily because the things I find attractive and the things romance novels say are attractive rarely align. Two: I tend to be overly nit picky and critical of things that are, as the kids say, not that deep, and it is significantly worse with literature than, say, movies. Romantic relationships tend to get the worst of this aspect of me because of how particular I personally am about romantic relationships. Three: I hate smut in books. I find it cringey at best and nauseatingly gross at worst, and I will always call out when sex is used as a replacement for actual relationship development. I can’t change these facts about me, but I can warn you that I am so far from the target audience of this book and most of my complaints have to do with my preferences, not the actually content of this book. This book was so very much not for me, but it might be for you.
If some demon was looking for the perfect way to torture me for all of eternity, this book has given them the perfect guide. The idea of running into an ex I’m still in love with during a wine tour that would be incredibly inconvenient to leave and immediately entering a “who can sleep with the most people” challenge instead of thinking about talking to each other is my personal version of hell. There is literally not a piece of that that sounds cute or fun. It only sounds like anxiety and pain. And, guess what? Reading it was also anxiety and pain. The entire first half of this book was just a “how much dread can we make liv feel?” challenge. The answer? Infinite. So, even if I loved the characters (spoilers: I didn’t) this was probably going to be a hard sell for me. Call me old fashioned, but talking about how badly you want to fuck other people is my idea of a bad time.
Despite a plot I didn’t quite connect to, there was still hope as characters are what really make or break a book for me. Unfortunately, the characters are what really broke the book for me.
The first half of the book is from Theo’s pov, a non-binary afab person who is quite literally the worst person you’ve ever met. They are literally a nepo baby with access to so many resources that they REFUSE to use so that they can cosplay being poor, which feels like the biggest middle finger to middle/lower class people. Like how are you going to not use your resources??? Do you not understand how lucky and privileged you are? But, of course, they have a whole complex about this, making them so annoying. Imagine someone with millionaire director parents and millionaire actress sisters coming up to you and complaining about not being able to do their career because they won’t take any money to help with it and they also fuck up all the time. I’m sorry, but there is literally no reason for me to feel sorry for you. Theo feels like the perfect character to have a lot of growth throughout the book because of how insufferable they are, but when they reach their peak shittiness the pov just switches to Kit for the rest of the book and all he does is reassure them that they’re totally not the worst? And then nothing with them gets developed because we are now in the pov of someone who worships the ground they walk on. It’s annoying. I’m annoyed and also refuse to feel sorry for nepo babies when they’re complaining about FINANCES. Get over yourself and talk to daddy. Being in their pov was like watching a continual train wreck and feeling dread and unease 24/7. There were no positives. Well, I'm lying. There was one positive that was almost enough to get me to raise this rating by 0.5 stars: I really love the way that McQuiston portrayed Theo's nonbinary-ness and found myself relating to a lot of their internal monologue about it. It's still rare to find books with nonbinary characters, and therefore even rarer to find ones about characters that you relate to regarding their nonbinary-ness since everyone experiences queerness differently. Even though I really didn't like this, all aspects of queerness here were done really well, and it was nice to relate to a narrator (even if I did hate everything else about them).
The second half is from Kit’s pov, whose only real crime is his god-like worship of Theo. I won’t dwell on him for too long because I really don’t have many feelings about him. His pov was fine in the sense that he was overly horny and literally only thought about this person he was allegedly in love with the in a sexual way or in a way that we, the readers, weren’t really shown. So basically he was a classic romance love interest. I was bored by him but not too offended. The relationship though? I was kind of offended. I just don’t see the value of a relationship that is so defined by sex and lust and I know it’s quite lame of me in a sense but also I just want real, deep feelings and all I got was really horny feelings. This was especially egregious here because of the fact that they allegedly were best friends and had been in a relationship and SOMEHOW barely anything was addressed about it? It was only fond memories and quirky misunderstandings? Like, y’all left each other for a reason and you fought a lot for a reason and it seems like y’all are just avoidant as hell and the exact same stuff will start happening as soon as things aren’t perfect? It just felt so shallow. The entire book was just about being horny or food and wine pairings and the most atrocious avoidant people who spiked my anxiety the entire time. I also hated the smutty scenes more than usual. Before this book, I have never skipped scenes, but this one brought me to my limit and I had to skip pages. My tastes were definitely not aligned with this book. It was definitely not a cute summer read, but also it was my worst nightmare, so that may be a personal thing.
All that to say, I finished this only because it was an arc, and I did have to switch over to an audio version at 3x speed in order to do it, but it also just… wasn’t for me and maybe I should’ve known that.
thank you netgalley for the arc book is out on August 06, 2024...more
“I think I can keep the hysteria at a distance, that it won’t affect me, that I can take the good—the mania, the spontaneity, the laughs—without the b“I think I can keep the hysteria at a distance, that it won’t affect me, that I can take the good—the mania, the spontaneity, the laughs—without the bad—the neediness, the aggression, the cruelty. And maybe people put up with me for the same reason.”
Incredibly sharp yet begging the reader to not take it too seriously, this messy, satirical homage to 60s lesbian pulp fiction is a wild ride as we follow our more than a little unlikeable narrator with some asinine takes as she continually is unable to keep her mouth shut and makes horrendous decisions while she is “trying” to get sober and make better decisions (it’s hard!). It’s an incredibly fun time as we watch Astrid Dahl as she is the worst person she’s ever been and probably ever will be and still somehow root for her to make it out on the other side, changed and okay. I really do love the unlikeable, messy narrator and haven’t read a lesbian one before this, so this was an incredibly fun time, and it was fun to hate, and somehow grow to love, Astrid Dahl.
“I never thought I’d be one of these people: threatened by the blank page. I used to love the blank page! Pristine and uncorrupted and filled with possibilities. But now all the possibilities seem certain to end in one way: with me embarrassing myself.”
Published author who is trying to write more and is in the middle of discussions for a movie deal, Astrid Dahl’s worst enemy is herself. She verifiably cancellable, doesn’t know how to keep her mouth shut, and her biggest vice is the Patti Highsmith—Adderall, alcohol, sativa, and cigarettes—which she is currently off of because of previous (problematic) things she has said and done while on it. She must be completely clean and take a break from the media in order to secure this deal and continue her deal. The issue? She can’t write without the Patti Highsmith and she is pretty shit at keeping her mouth shut. Self-described a being like Kanye West (eugh), Astrid kind of sucks right now and everyone is just tolerating her no matter what she tries. As she tries to stay clean, her older nosy neighbor, Penelope, and the 27-year-old newbie in her old writing group (once dubbed “the Lez Brat Pack,” now “Sapphic Scribes”), Ivy, as well as the stresses that are coming from being in the spotlight as an author are combining to make healing nearly impossible. As Astrid begins to succumb to her vices, things start going more and more downhill as she begins to lose herself more and more. This is more harmful for Astrid notes, “This is the hard part of being a writer for me, that idea that people can google me, that they might have a preconceived notion of me based on the things I type or say when I’m extremely caffeinated or very fucked up,” creating a bit of an endless cycle as being talked about is so hard for her so she gets messed up, then the things she says when she’s messed up get her even more talked about. While I started this despising Astrid and her views (she has some incredibly bad takes), this downward spiral started to make me. . . root for her? I started wanting so badly for her to get help and start succeeding and become a better person, which was honestly really nice for such a train wreck of a book. In some ways, she is just a relatable, messy, brutally honest character, which mixes really well with the parts of her that are quite awful. Even small moments like, “I put down Jeanette Winterson and my phone and open the door,” when she was “reading” all day made me warm to her a bit more, making sure she wasn’t a complete hateable menace.
“I’ve ordered a bunch [of perfume sampler sets] because I can’t commit to one scent, which is probably a metaphor, but anyway. . .”
As a perfume girlie who also has a completely normal amount of perfumes/samples (see image below), I have to give a moment for the perfume mentions, the tons of samples that Astrid goes through, her ability to detect notes and the perfumes that people are wearing, and just the way perfume is used throughout the book. While it isn’t a huge part of the book, it is such a fun little addition especially as it, as Astrid says, used a bit metaphorically, showing how she feels towards people and her own transition in life. I also now have notes on some of the perfumes mentioned that I absolutely need to try, which I love.
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“I finally understand why people don’t black out. Sometimes life is worth catching.”
It's pulpy, it's satirical, it's a trainwreck, but what makes this book work so well for me really is the ending. This is the end of a messy person’s messiest time and we follow her as she really does start to learn a bit. It takes a while, but there is a relief at the end and a knowledge that maybe, just maybe, everything will be okay. While it is really fun to watch Astrid falling in a downward spiral, there is something really compelling about slowly growing attached to this privileged white girl who continually fucks up and seeing her begin to grow into someone who not only the reader, but Astrid herself can love and be at peace with.
“Exiting the freeway, I experience a brief moment of gratitude that I’m a lesbian. That I don’t have to get Botox or filler or a ponytail facelift because to do so would invite the male gaze, and it’s the female gaze I’m after, and we just want compelling, which is energetic and cannot be reduced to a visual. How a year ago I was so crushed to be thirty-five, I thought it indicated that my youth was over, that my life was over, that I’d aged out of being a party twink and therefore had nothing to look forward to. But now I realize my life is just starting. I’ve stopped being a dumb little provocateur, I keep my rude thoughts to myself, I’ve just written a love story, and men have finally stopped looking at me. I never believed Dan Savage when he said, ‘It gets better,’ but maybe I just hadn’t waited long enough.”
“Her name was Jenny Hauser and every Wednesday I put pickles on her pizza.”
Pizza Girl is an A24-esque short book that follows our 18-year-old pregna “Her name was Jenny Hauser and every Wednesday I put pickles on her pizza.”
Pizza Girl is an A24-esque short book that follows our 18-year-old pregnant pizza girl as she forms an obsessive connection with a new customer, Jenny, who orders pickles on pizza every Wednesday for her son. It’s a bit of an unsettling ride as we watch our avoidant main character latch onto this middle-aged woman who she has fed her delusions into instead of facing her own fears of being 18, pregnant, and completely terrified about every aspect of her life. As she grows more and more distant with her boyfriend and mom, these fears fester in her as all she begins to see in herself is her alcoholic late father.
“I had my father’s hands, and in my dark, honest moments at 3:00a.m. googling, I worried they weren’t the only things of his I had… I felt it strongly in the car. Dad was always going for drives late at night. I stared hard at my hands, our hands, gripping the steering wheel. He didn’t just go for drives late at night, he went for those drives in the very car I was sitting in. I nearly ran into a lamppost.”
Throughout the book, we get a sense of how like her late father pizza girl is. As she continually breaks her boyfriend and mother’s hearts, we see this untouched pain that is ripe in her, threatening to tear her apart. There is this self-hatred stemming from a hatred of her alcoholic father who she hasn’t yet allowed herself to grieve because she only really remembers the worst parts of him and her similarity to him. As she continues down a path more and more like his, getting up in the middle of the night to drink beer in his old shed and avoiding her family, we see her reach an almost breaking point. This relationship with her father elicited the most emotion out of me and I particularly loved how her mother was allowed to hold space for him to be seen in a different light while still not excusing all he did.
“He got me roses a few weeks back just because, roses that I never put in a vase, just let sit in their wrapping on the windowsill slowly wilting until they were brown and their petals had fallen in a dead heap on the floor. I never saw him clean them up. I just woke up one day and they were gone.”
There is something a little extra heartbreaking about people doing everything in their power to make someone happy due to no fault of their own; it’s just not working. That is the case with pizza girl’s mom and her boyfriend, Billy. As pizza girl pulls further away from them and continues to not confront anything, we see the heartbreaking reality of their situation and what it means to them to have pizza girl continually ignore and not want to spend time with them. It makes it incredibly hard to root for pizza girl as she is stuck in a quite delusional life, but does make one wish for her to get help at the very least so her family will know peace. There is a lot of nuance added with this everyone-is-miserable-but-I-promise-they’re-trying-their-best situation.
“They could support a teenage pregnancy, but not this, not a person who drifted from one moment to the next without any idea about where she was headed.”
Lostness is at the center of this book as pizza girl continually reflects about how she never really had any dreams and how, even if she hadn’t gotten pregnant, she would still be here, selling pizza, with no goal of anything else. Where she would be content, this festers in her as her boyfriend has to give up his dreams of a good school to care for her and her child and as she feels continually on edge about everyone pushing her, at least in her mind, to want and be more. The feeling of lostness really is a driving force in this, pushing her further and further to the oasis that Jenny and her son are.
“I almost told her that, yes, it was absolutely her fault I was in that position. That if she’d never called in to Eddie’s, never left me alone with Adam, if she’d never kissed me back, if she hadn’t made me feel special, like the things I did and said mattered, I would’ve been okay. But I knew that was a lie and that, even if I’d never picked up the phone and heard her voice on the other end, I would’ve found something else to lose myself in—if you were pushed off a cliff, you’d grab hold of anything resembling safety.”
While Jenny and her son, Adam, are conduits for pizza girl’s avoidance and powerful fixations, they aren’t really the point. As pizza girl herself brings up, they were what was there when she was (and still is) falling down into this dark place of feeling lonely and unknown and confused and like a problem to everyone. The way they represent an easy escape from her feelings and allow her to be more avoidant is the true beauty of them. There’s a scene in the epilogue of the book where we learn pizza girl’s name for the first time because Jenny had never bothered to call her anything other than pizza girl. And with that comes this acceptance that they never really were anything, pizza girl just needed an escape.
3.5/5 While this book was really really good at hitting on hard issues being faced by the protagonist and still keeping it a love story at its core, I3.5/5 While this book was really really good at hitting on hard issues being faced by the protagonist and still keeping it a love story at its core, I found the first 2/3 to be just very “tell not show” and the same descriptors being used for Yuki and Grace kind of got too repetitive for me at some point. That being said I think I might just not be a fan of romance books because this was one of my favorite romance books I have read....more
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