Nrosenberg > Recent Status Updates

“He even brought European earth here.”

5 bucks says they’re vampires.

Sometimes Miranda can be so bitchily incisive that Mikey swears there’s gotta be a tiny little gay man pressing buttons somewhere in a corner of her brain.

I know it’s extremely cliche and overdone, but a precocious tween always makes me laugh in a book. I love when a writer just writes a kid as a mini adult. Is it lazy? Maybe! But it nearly always works.

Thank god for ARCs!

“I’m pretty sure somewhere in the Torah, it says that when you retire, you must move to Florida and constantly kvetch about the heat. Also, you must hound your child to marry and produce grandchildren. My mother’s biggest wish? For me to have a husband. Or at least a boyfriend. Good luck.”

“They are trafficking people,” he said finally. “Honeybliss is a network and a club for the galaxy’s elite…”

“They’re all beyond the law. They practice trafficking of every sentient species. They take slaves. They rape and break and kill people…”

Man, I’m reading for escapism. I don’t need this queer sci fi novel to be about the Illuminati and Jeffrey Epstein.

If this book takes us to space Epstein Island, I’m going to lose it.

There’s a non zero chance this started as a Red White and Royal Blur fanfic where Alex and Henry compete for Nora’s hand in marriage… (complimentary)

Honestly, kissing someone once a year and a half ago and losing your shit about it still where you can’t even be in the same room as them without pining is the gayest shit ever. Give me yeaaaaaarning via IV, please. 🥵

Don’t disagree with anything said so far, which may be the problem. Don’t need to convince me that there should be a bigger emphasis on the “we” than the “me”!

“In the future, after years of War [in Palestine], the plants would mark those places where an Arab farm or town had once stood, a melancholy reminder that the beginning of one dream was the end of another.”

oh

This is exactly why I’m cautious of calling Zionism a colonial project, per se. Colonialism implies some benefit for the host nation and the colonists. Jews had nowhere else to go. It’s also why Zionism and Israel are inevitable, for better or for worse.

And Cohen states the fact that fifteen hundred Jews were killed in the years after WW2 as they returned to their homes. A specific example is the massacre in Kielce, Poland after a blood libel in 1946.

As Cohen states: “… a sign clear enough for every Jew to read: Get out of Europe!”

“Even after the Second World War, Europe remained treacherous for the Jews.”

- Poles were not suddenly sympathetic to Jews
- Germans were not instantly convinced they were wrong and, Cohen argues, “the descent Germany that appeared so soon … was an American construct”

Reading about Gens is so frustrating (for lack of a better word) in this current day…

And so relevant to the arguments of working within or against the system. A Jew working with the Germans to preserve the peace…

As Coben writes, Gens is not a bad guy. He tried. And failed miserably and fed Jews to Hell.

About members of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that followed the German Army and killed every Jew and communist:

“They were bland psychopaths, squads of nobodies. Before the War, they had been shoe salesmen, bank tellers, telephone operators.”

“But you are in Jerusalem.”

“A Godless city. Petty politics, one rabbi against the other, and the word of God is lost between the struggle for votes and fighting the unorthodox, but it was God’s will to bring me here and I shall manage. Perhaps we are not fit yet to witness the return of Zion.”

Incredibly stated and sadly prescient of the Netanyahu era.

SPOILERS (maybe)

James killed Richard to protect Oliver, calling it here, folks

“Uncharacteristically, I turn down food.”

At what point does an author who wants to bring more “fat positivity into fantasy” cross the line into just being mean to fat people?

Barely into the book and if I hadn’t bought it, I’d be DNF’ing it. It’s giving two star review.

… and she misses her bae…

I think I hate this book

Throwing your hands up at an organization like the KGB was no way to solve anything. You had to join, and then you did as many good things as you could, until the evil was a little bit less. He believed that. Or, he had used to. The fact was that to a little girl whose parents were taken away and whose dog was shot, it didn’t matter if the person with the gun was a psychopath or someone who wanted to do good.

“…That means you will probably die of it. Do you know what dying is?”

She nodded again. “You stop, and you turn back into stars. Mum says everyone’s made of stars. Is that true?”

(After three books by Pulley, I’m still not convinced that she has ever actually met a child or spoken to one)

It was a truth universally acknowledged that beautiful women tended despite their natural disadvantages to be virtuous, while beautiful men were invariably bastards.

Every other chapter of this book just has me like Selina Meyer laughing nervously and saying “what the fuck?”

It is dangerous to assume anything like this is ridiculous. It is the very fact that so many people believe some things are unthinkably ridiculous that makes them so vulnerable to those who are willing not only to think but to do the ridiculous thing. That’s how Stalin arrested tens of millions of innocent people without provoking a revolution; it’s so absurd that people didn’t believe it was happening