Julie > Recent Status Updates

If I had anything else to read, I’d be abandoning this. It’s not horrible, but I just don’t care. I am so neutral that I am pretty much on the verge of rooting against both main characters.

The author is hitting the reader over the head with the girl power message. Same for the evils of Christianity. I can’t help but hope that some subtlety or nuance comes into play soon.

Yeah, I don’t think I can go on. This book sucks. The first person narration is just lazy writing. And the plot, ugh! Ancient wise man who’s the last of his people: “you two kids can’t watch the sacred ceremony so scram”. Teen boy: I will stomp my foot and refuse to leave. Ancient wise man: “Oh, okay; you can stay”.

I don’t know if I can force myself to keep reading. It’s just so trite. And the three points of view would be impossible to follow without the chapter headings; everyone’s voice sounds the same.

It’s a slog. I switched to the abridged audiobook; much better!

I’m going to put this one aside. It’s cute; and boring.

The narrator of the audiobook is awesome. The magical creatures have no purpose yet which is disappointing. All the teachers are terrible in both Germany and England. Of course he’s bullied by the wealthy school boys. Yawn.

The protagonist is so self-righteous about wearing her mask to protect herself from COVID — outside. I low-key hate this chick. Also, what seven year old speaks like: “But that has nothing whatsoever to do with what your name actually is.” “Names are powerful. They’re more powerful than one opinionated man” ???

I’m thinking about abandoning this book. It’s kinda a snooze fest.

I’m thinking about abandoning this book. I’m roughly halfway through. It’s kinda a snooze fest.

I switched to audio book so I could finish this turkey faster. How do people take these a**hole characters seriously?! Jackass is literally burning thousands of dollars. Wish I had the Cliffs Notes for the last 4 chapters because this is torture.

Not an enjoyable read. The very beginning hooked me in because I liked Steinbeck’s vivid descriptions of the landscape. The people he introduced were interesting enough. But then Cyrus died and the book took a nose-dive for me. His son’s, Adam and Charles, are buffoons; Catherine is just flat, simply evil with no nuance. I’m not sure why I kept reading.

I’m ready for it to wrap up and there’s still 230 more pages to go. I kinda don’t care about this kid. It’s not an unpleasant read so I will continue.

Suffering through this. Just get through the first section they said; it gets better. Well, get through the first two sections, it really picks up after that they said. So far I have “gotten through” four sections of this book and I am still not enjoying it. It feels pretentious. It’s a slog. But I have nothing else to read right now so I continue.

I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt primarily because I don’t have anything more exciting in my TBR pile.

This book is awful! Too many characters. None of them remotely realistic or likeable. Perspective shifts every page and a half. And if the reader is actually being given any clues, they’re so buried as to be nonexistent. Bottom line, I am more than halfway through the novel and I couldn’t care less about the so-called “mystery”. I am baffled at this book’s award-winning status. End of rant for now.

This one is more difficult to follow/ hard for me to care about characters when I can’t keep them straight.

It’s okay. What’s bugging me is that Ivy knows that her sketchbook contains “secrets” she’s not ready to reveal while at the same time she doesn’t realize that she has romantic feelings for June; she just describes the “storm” in her stomach as if she has no idea why her body feels that way. This dissonance is causing me to not trust Ivy - is she supposed to be an unreliable narrator??

At 80% and I’m considering abandoning this book. It was fine for a while, but now I’m getting sick of it. The “good guys” are acting like a-holes and if they can wipe Mertagh’s memory of their location anyway, why not let the dude leave?