Kara Fraser > Recent Status Updates

OMG WE GET IT FREYA! You miss the person you were and you’ve been out of the game for too long 🙄 While I am actually enjoying the story, this horse long ago succumbed to its injuries but the author keeps beating it. Let it rest for God sakes.

(Part 2) The love the characters feel hasn’t felt earned & this *plunker* of a sentence just completely took me out of the moment: “OUTSIDE, she couldn’t even make out the lawns or the maze anymore, because the mist OUTSIDE had gotten so thick, drifting over the glass, adding over the grass OUTSIDE as though the entire house were encased in a cloud.” Um is the editor in the room with us? Or are they OUTSIDE?!

(Part 1 of 2) Sterling does sexual tension SO well and those moments in this book are still magic (pun very much intended). But it also feels like she’s phoning this one in.

Roughly halfway through and this book is tantalizingly fucked up. Mind, I say that as a compliment to its give-and-take perspective changes. I’m hooked.

Author Andrea Cremer is either ham-fisted with love triangles, or I am far too old for young love (¿Por qué no los dos?). That being said, I repeat my sentiment from Book 2 Review - the lore underpinning this story is well done (see: fate of Boston and the Liberty Tree). My read at this point is that the author has obvious talent but she lets good thematic fruit die on the vine while devouring underdeveloped ones

I don’t typically make these mid-read updates but I just have to say - the scene where Charlotte gets drunk (and honestly something similar to roofied) is funny, accurate, and much more upsetting than I realized until I was writing this silly update. Her outbursts remind me of the drunk scene in Roman Holiday with Audrey Hepburn. It really is relatable as well as very humorously written (until the last paragraph).

The storyline has not earned any of the passion it keeps trying to impress upon the reader 🙄 #StillDontCare

So far I’m plodding through. Both the prose and the metaphors are VERY obvious and uninspired. You can tell this is the first novel of a PoliSci scholar, not an author. I’m unsure if the intended audience is YA; if so I’d be willing to fault part of my boredom to having outgrown the genre, but I think the truth is somewhere in between. I’ll continue to plod and see where it gets me.

I’m less than 100 pages in and am already eking it out. It’s exceedingly dumb. I can’t imagine what surprises the next 300 pages or so hold - as in the character development is shallower than an oil slick and the plot so predictable that “revelation” is merely a book in the Bible. I hate to quit books but this one will likely join the handful I never finish 💩

Just read the chapter “All Birds?” and it’s devastated me in the way all the best writing can. Up until this point I’d been thinking of this book as a solid 3 - I’m going to finish it and be happy to do so; there are some parts I really love but I keep putting it down. This chapter may have single-handedly bumped it to a 4. As a Very Millennial, it hit me in All The Feels. Bravo Ms. Renkl.

Still on hiatus from the Christmas season. Will check it out from the library again in the new year

I was only going to report after I'd finished but oh my god. I'm crying. I just found out about Augustus. I can't say I didn't see it coming but the heartbreak is still profound. Damnit I love this book but Hazel and Augustus deserve better. So many millions deserve so much better.

I am absolutely in love with Augustus and Hazel. Their love so far is this beautiful, real thing with just a perfect tinge of bittersweet mixed in. I have this awful feeling one of them is going to die and that's heartbreak; but then I wonder if that's really the point of it all. Life is finding beauty amid tragedy and I think this novel will leave me with a contented longing and a full heart.