Jennifer > Recent Status Updates

Reads like Kingfisher juvenilia, though I'm sure she was an adult when she wrote it. The elements of what I like about her writing are all there, but they don't quite coalesce.

Shelved for now; not in the mood for it and not sure I ever will be.

I'm liking this more than expected, maybe because I loved my medieval lit class at uni and am enjoying the allusions to the large, heterogenous body of Camelot stories that survived the ages. It feels like Harrow's most ambitious novel since The Ten Thousand Doors of January. Like if Possession, Groundhog Day, and Sir Thomas Malory had a kid.

This is very competently written, but it has yet to really hook me, and it's looooong. Tempted to come back to this one some other time.

My head thinks this was worth more than three stars, but my heart wasn't terribly engaged throughout. Least favorite Bennett book is still not bad?

I read this in a day, the same way I might polish off a bag of potato chips in one go and then feel vaguely bad abour it.

I had to return this to the library yesterday, having read 15 pages. I'm not exactly sorry. To be continued, maybe.

First sentence has a grammatical error - the dog lay down, not laid. WTF, editor? The problem with lay/lie is that the present tense of one usage is the past tense of another.

Present: Hens lay eggs
Past: Hens laid eggs
Present: I lie down
Past: I lay down

Clear as mud!

Yeah...I dunno about this one.

Another excellent goblin market! I'm not getting through this book as quickly as I'd like to, but it is thoughtful, clever, and often surprising. Charles Darnay looks so much like Sydney Carton because he is Carton's fairy changeling? Awesome.

It's such a relief to come back to a book with competent writing after the last travesty.

Meh. Approaching DNF territory.

I don't love the writing. It's got too many dialogue tags and adverbs; it feels fussy and clunky, and now that I've noticed it, it's going to bother me the rest of the book (or however far I get).

I hopped on GR just to complain about how dumb this main character is being.

Now she's sleeping with the obviously-not-a-good-idea guy.

You gave your brightest and most ambitious student in your demon summoning class a college textbook on how to summon demons and are somehow surprised that she, well, summoned a demon? jfc. A PhD doesn't appear to be a proxy for sense. Dr Walden is one of those annoying characters who is convinced of her own intelligence but then does extremely stupid things.

More magic, less posh boarding school admin, please.

I actually know a Dr Walden in real life, and she is so, so much nicer (and a truly excellent botanist and researcher) than this stroppy Dr Walden. Is this going to be a long 400 pages?

Yeeeesss, more stegosauruses and fewer tiaras, please.

I already dislike this book. Like, a lot. I'd rather just go reread Holly Black than make it through a third simile in a paragraph.

This sapphic romance isn't really doing anything for me, not that much romance of any kind does.

This slim novella kept surprising me, in the best of ways. I'm used to stale, bloated retellings, and Cinder House is anything but.

Somewhere between Susan Cooper and Daniel O'Malley; good fun as the days grow shorter, but I just keep asking why the main character wants to be ordinary so badly. It's...um...not that great?

A cauldron-born episode on Halloween is actually just what I needed

This is fun, and I'm enjoying it. It does feel rather Susan Cooper in tone - it opens on a birthday, the way The Dark is Rising does, and even if the Mysterious Parentage of the main character goes the I expect it to, I still want to see how it unfolds. Fun fact: the book opens the day before I was born, almost exactly 24 hours.

Seemed like an appropriate time to start this dystopia, though if it hits too close to home, I'm going to find something more cheerful to read

I'm not that horrified, really. Kingfisher's writing is quirky, observant, and imaginative, but I'm a horror wuss and I don't often find her books scary.

Doesn't seem to matter how many times I read this book. I always start off reading one chapter a day and then start flipping pages frantically around Oct 23. It's still that good. Carpe baculum!!

There are easily twice as many adjectives as necessary in this book: "The final course of our meal would invariably consist of the aforementioned Scholar recounting some notable episode from their illustrious career. Few of my peers lingered for this raconteurial repast - but my hunger for gripping descriptions of my mentor's travels could not be sated."

DNF imminent.

Not in love with the convoluted language, random sprinkles of capital letters, or abundant digressions.