bird > Recent Status Updates

Struggling with the story-within-a-story. Feels like as soon as we get momentum with the romance of our 2 leads, we then cut to a massive info dump about Margaret’s fam tree. And these info dumps are huge slogs— no momentum/ tension/ rising action as Margaret’s story is being told. Just feels like, why am I reading about the genealogy of this fam for 4 generations…? Nothing interesting there

to quote another reviewer: "The title is a play on the words of the Florida judge who called Ted Bundy “a bright young man”. Because the story truly is about the young women here who are the bright ones, finally recognizing their own worth and intelligence. But it’s also a story about male incompetence; men wanting The Defendant to be smart to mask their own mistakes."

SO pleasantly surprised that Sutton foster is narrating the audiobook. She’s doing an incredible job of course.

Love the book so far. Reminds me of Chanel Miller’s Know My Name — proves that every interaction victims have with the system and the media is so deeply flawed, that every institution in this society, knowingly or unknowingly, idolizes these men and diminishes the power of the victims.

So far reads like a syllabus telling me all the stuff I need to learn about but not telling me what that stuff is

Lots of concepts introduced and given textbook definitions that are unclear. No examples. So I don’t know what she means by, for example, thought terminating cliches

struggling not to DNF this, leads just have no chemistry and structurally it feels awkward. reads like a taylor jenkins reid knockoff.

Now ANOTHER friend is holding ppl at gunpoint?

I was really into the setup and characters, but about 30% in there was an abrupt murder side plot? I really hate when romance novels feel the need to add shit like this. I don’t know how this will resolve or how the romance can be the focus from here on out without this being cheesy af

We also have the lover-is-secretly-a-rebel-spy arc from, among other things, from blood and ash, plus dead-brother-isn’t-dead-and-is-a-rebel-fighter from the ember in the ashes series

First 1/4 was a pure divergent ripoff. Now it’s divergent mixed with a few other YA favorites. This may be a straight up amalgamation of all the 2010-2014 dystopian YA trilogies (with a little bit of ACOTAR via fated mates and explicit, ridiculous magical sex scenes) but I will admit it’s super fucking fun and entertaining. It’s fan service to the gen z girls who grew up reading dystopian, but GOOD fan service!