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No. Just no.

A refreshing take on the mystery/detective genre.

Rarely do I find it painful to read a book. This took me weeks to read. I'm not quite sure how you take such a cool premise and somehow create something so incredibly dull, but Kuang has done it.

Babel was a masterpiece, so this was certainly disappointing.

I enjoyed this, but I think it could have been so much more. The story should have exclusively focused on Livira. I get why Evar was included, but his character basically only existed for the twist that happened near the end.

I also didn't like how real-world texts were referenced. This is a fantasy. There doesn't need to be a crow named "Edgarallen."

A beautiful end to this saga. A series that started as a fairly contained drama but grew into a decades-long exploration of family, self-discovery, loss, forgiveness, and power. The stakes were real. No characters were ever safe. And the ending shows that sometimes there are no winners or losers, only survivors.

The first installment in this series was really good, but it was kind of downhill from there. More and more characters that I just didn't care about or didn't particularly like, which matters in a story with multiple POVs. Certain storylines needlessly persisted across multiple books while others were just plain ol' unsatisfying.

Series that fizzle out seems to be a trend with Shusterman.

The main character is just a damsel in distress. Maybe that's what the author was going for? I don't know. There's nothing to her. You wouldn't even know that she exists in the novel's world because she doesn't seem to know anything about it.

The love interests are bland and boring, especially Hal. There's far too much focus on the moral grayness of each.

Also, all of the "twists" were glaringly obvious.

How is this rated so highly? The writing is straight-up bad. Every time the main character has flashbacks to the Academy's lessons...cringe. It's like the author opened a thesaurus to brainstorm new adjectives: "the Academy lessons chased me into the steam" or "the lecture from the Academy slithered in," followed by a flashback in italics.

This was a very ambitious undertaking and I think it mostly worked, but there were some weaker storylines.

I initially started this a while ago, but for some reason didn't get into it the first time. Decided to give it another shot and loved it!

Is the main character kind of a Mary Sue? Definitely, but I dig that sort of thing.

A great read to kick off the spooky season! Filled with some of the most vile characters you can't help but root against.

I read the first edition several years ago and recently read this new second edition.

I don't think any other book so coherently weaves together how anti-capitalism is for everybody: cis women, trans people, gay people, racialized people. She provides a materialist explanation (this is important!) for why queer people are oppressed under capitalism and how it's intimately related to the oppression of cishet women.

This was...not good. Both of the main characters were annoying.

This book highlights the sorts of tools and strategies that can be implemented to significantly reduce sexual violence without police and prisons.

It was also refreshing to see the book highlight how fearmongering has often led to ineffective and damaging punitive policies in the context of sexual violence, such as sex offender registries.