Jennifer > Recent Status Updates

Struggling hard with the romance this book is trying to sell me. A man crushes a woman's self-confidence and joy in her hard-earned skills, tells her he can't be in a relationship with a woman who's talented and successful and makes him feel lesser than her, then comes back years later to ambush her by stalking her home and violating her boundaries because he's changed his mind, and this is packaged as a love story.

I knew this was going to be a hard read--I can't actually tell whether it's going/trying to be a rape-romance, but having hit the first rape scene, what's sending up red flags is how much of it is coded as the popular media version of BDSM--not true power exchange, with no informed consent, using terms like safeword and discipline without basic respect for what those should mean. I don't think I can stomach this one.

I like the *idea* of this, but it leans *so* heavily on 'girl with a heart of gold, only working for the mob to look out for her family because she's their mother now' in a star-crossed romance with 'boy out for revenge whose tendencies toward destruction are forgivable because he's so damaged and just needs to be redeemed', and that is not anything I need more of in my life. I just do not care about either of you.

This book needs editing *so badly*. Between 1/3 to 1/2 of it could be cut entirely, and the rest trimmed down and tightened up. The romance is unnecessary and doesn't actually progress at all (which the book acknowledges), and the book itself even admits that a large portion of its content is not relevant--it's just the authors having fun being clever and and entertaining themselves.

I am so incredibly disappointed by the erasure of women in this book. There has never been a civilization, to my knowledge, in which women haven't fought for their families, for their homes, and for their lives. All this book does is perpetuate the myth that women should be invisible in history.

You know it's a Sarah Monette book when you've been reading for 4 days and can confidently identify 2-3% of the character and culture names, while the rest continue to sail bewilderingly over your head.

I wanted to like this, but there's so much casually hateful language that I couldn't recommend it. It feels like a graduate school project trying to cram in as many ideas as possible without actually exploring any of them. This either needed to be a novel with a lot more worldbuilding, or - and this is the option I would choose - a short story, because so many of the words in it are extraneous vocabulary lessons.

It's probably a bad sign that I'm more interested in adding yet more books to my to-read list than in actually reading this one. It's not bad at all, it just isn't holding my attention.

It's a seemingly minor thing, but I'm having the same issue I had with Harry Potter--authors suggesting to children that magic caused scientific/historical events. Specifically, giving a white man credit for one of the few recognized achievements of a female scientist; supporting creationism by claiming evidence that humans co-existed with dinosaurs; and denying socioeconomic reasons for the Irish famine. Not cool.

For the record, I would watch the *hell* out of this movie.

I don't think I actually believed that this book could blow me away the way Seraphina did. I was wrong. Race issues, LGBT issues, feminist issues...I have no argument thus far about the way a single one of them is handled in this book. It's the kind of YA all young women should have the chance to read.

The images in this book are so vivid that I almost feel as though I'm watching it on film, which is an unusual experience for me; my primary media is words, not pictures. That being said, I would watch the hell out of this movie.

This wants very badly to be Harry Potter...a trio of two adolescent boys and an overachieving girl solving mysteries and going on quests, competing with magical boarding school-mates in sporting games, being super-special with abusive surrogate parents, etc, but with a good deal more casual murders committed by children, implied rape, and throwaway domestic abuse tossed in for good measure. It is not an improvement.

Dear self, you know you don't like male bravado books by male bravado authors. Kindly stop forcing yourself to read them.

Mr. Gladstone, you just earned 10,000 points for chapters 2 & 3, on top of the 20,000 you already earned for the book cover.

I want to like this book so much more than I do, and I feel so guilty for that. It has a non-white, non-Western complexity of cultures; it has strong female characters who show that strength in different ways; it has elemental magic and ghosts and one of the most creative uses I've seen for gemstones. And yet. I feel as though its soul has been bound in a diamond, and the life is missing from it.