Nrosenberg > Recent Status Updates

After just finishing an awful book, this is the palate cleanser I need. I hope. It is about Hades and death after all.

This is just a slog to get through and Cliff is just too unlikable of a character to spend this much time with.

Sooo close to DNF’ing this but I am invested in Miles’s story. If he doesn’t have a happy ending with Joey, this will be a two star book. Ugh.

Enemies to lovers because they just don’t understand each other yet??

Tap my veins and inject that shit right in it

This author overuses “their expression softened” and its variants waaaay too much and it’s driving me crazy

Just because your characters are acknowledging how fast they’re moving does not mean it makes it any more believable and less annoying. You met a day ago! You’re not falling in love! Shut up!

A surge of faith is swelling over the Low Countries like a wave that will swamp them all. Even in Brugge, especially in Brugge; today’s Mass was so crowded, they ran out of altar bread. It has been a week since anyone was murdered. He needs to stop this. They might wake God up with their fervor.

The others seemed confused. Then the glow became brighter: a holographic golden sickle with a few sheaves of wheat, rotating just above Meg McCaffrey.

A boy in the crowd gasped. “She’s a communist!”

Asdfggggggh

Oh, no… this book is making me like Mr. Collins! Justice for this awkward gay man on the spectrum. 😭

“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.