Melissa > Recent Status Updates

This is a criminal amount of pages to spend on people just talking about what they're going to do in this book. For a spin-off series with established lore to draw from, its also pretty clunky with exposition.

Sometimes I wished I could tell her I was a lesbian or something.

Kitty is lamenting her need to excuse herself from life events because of her lycanthropy and she thinks this for no discernible reason. This and the "all the good men are gay" really emphasize the early 2000s of it all.

Sometimes I wished I could tell her I was a lesbian or something.

Kitty is lamenting her need to excuse herself from life events because of her lycanthropy and she thinks this for no discernible reason. This and the "all the good men are gay" really emphasize the early 2000s of it all.

Sometimes I wished I could tell her I was a lesbian or something.

Kitty is lamenting her need to excuse herself from life events because of her lycanthropy and she thinks this for no discernible reason. This and the "all the good men are gay" really emphasize the early 2000s of it all.

“I thought we’d seen the worst when we bought two hundred copies of The Invisible Book of Invisibility—cost a fortune, and we never found them ...”

Maybe this guy was conned, but there's also a book on the syllabus that attacks you and rips out its own pages, so a great deal of The Wizarding World education is just counterintuitive and stupid to begin with. I don't blame him.

I'm all here for dragging Mircea, as Chance's protagonists have all been victimised by him in some form or another, but I'd really love if Dorina's hatred for him didn't just dissolve with a gallant act or whatever. Whether by the end of this book, or two books from now. I need one lead to maintain that vitriolic energy, and my fingers are crossed it'll be Dorina.

[…] my left neighbour once filed a formal complaint against me for listening to nineties female alt-rock without headphones.

One, blasting music without headphones in a public place is a crime against humanity, and two, specifying “female” alt-rock is awkward. It sounds like how some men say female pilot, or female doctor. Stop trying so hard.

[…] and that’s where you’ll find the real moral of this tale: trusting people to stick around is a bad idea. One way or another they’ll end up gone.

Hazelwood can only write ONE protagonist. I’m going to cry.

Her tribute to the Hunger Games of physics

Semi-coherent pop culture references don’t make up for reading the driest breakdown of the clash between theoretical and experimental physics and the scandals therein. The desperation to make a quintessentially unapproachable topic entertaining requires a defter hand and about 99.9 less random pop culture references.

“Team Bellice 4evah”

The cringe is mortifying.

Misery lockpicks Lowe's bedroom with a hairpin and starts molesting all of his stuff... and sneaks back out as if he isn't a werewolf with a preternatural sense of smell. Throughout, this fact isn't mentioned once.

“If you want to think blacks and whites are equal under the skin, be my guest, but it ain’t scientifically so.”

Oh my god, she actually got her only black character to say this. Oh my fucking god. Race is a construct, so no, there is no femur-to-tibia ratio differences concluding shit.

For the love of god, Diana, stop.

The relationship of Claire and Frank has been handled fairly evenly up until this point. Both have more than enough issues, but Gabaldon decides to kick the scales and give Frank a racist rant, which while manipulative, isn't unbelievable. What's bizarre is that with half of his observations, Claire's like, "mean, but true". What the fuck.

I'm Irish with very limited Gaeilge (Hulk-smash levels of linguistical understanding and sophistication), but the conversation with Jamie and Claire about why Jenny calls him "Roy" is wild. Jamie explains she's actually saying "ruagh", the Gaelic word for red, but that's pronounced "rue - a".

How is anyone getting ROY?

I was seeing Jack Randall in a new and revolting light.

Claire says this after Jamie reveals Randall tried to coerce him into sex. Claire has been assaulted and attempted raped by Randall twice, has heard about his previous raping of Jamie's sister, and his brutal flogging of Jamie. The only new information is that he's apparently interested in men.

Claire's just unwittingly time-travelled and her prejudice for the Scottish is making her accept a lot of strangeness from the first group of men she meets. None of them know what disinfectant is and she's like, I knew they were primitive, but this is nearly unbelievable. I'm getting Garth Marenghi "Scotch Mist" vibes.

There is no telling how far we will travel to the arena that has been prepared for this year’s Games.

Oh my god, that sentence! This book is taking me twice as long to get through because of these.

“She hits every one in the eye.”

Suzanne, no. Katniss is not literally bullseye-ing the squirrels she needs to sell so her family doesn’t starve.

There’s skilled with a bow and then there’s superpowers.

This book was published in 2004, so I'm assuming its set then. Jo notices The Twin Towers still existed in the "aetheric" plane because "it lived in the hearts and minds of millions, maybe billions of people..." Yeah, no. Not billions. America isn't the centre of the world.

The hilariously bad reviews made me try this.

The salt of Dorian’s and Chaol’s tears replaced the salt of Endovier […]

That is one of the worst sentences I’ve ever read. Maas needs to reel back the melodrama so much, like almost completely.

And Choal realised that it was indeed a queen standing before them, not the assassin he'd dragged out of a salt mine a few miles down the road.

I feel like I've read this sentiment from Chaol, Dorian—everyone else—a handful of times EACH book, and every time its played like an epiphany. We know.