halia > Recent Status Updates

helene and laia are really starting to bleed together… and i’m getting tired of this elias laia separation and then getting back together thing

please tell me helene elias and laia end up in a polycule

hmmmm

so like 3/4 of the way through and i’m not convinced peter is an actual person… i fear this is going to be like her other standalones for me…

still feels a little instalove-y, but i do enjoy the plot…

and all the enjoyability is slowly slipping away each time we interrupt the narrative to go into a pages-long explanation or backstory. at least in babel this shit was in the footnotes…

elinor is like anne and jane and lizzie in one… tbh not my favourite heroine (the “poor elinor” thing, even for the bit, gets a little tired) but still a fun one. marianne is ridiculous and i love her

much much funnier than i remember it being. perhaps i was not reading closely enough before…

interesting premise, hope this doesn’t end up insta love as so many other sapphic fantasies have. but i have faith in tasha suri to make even insta love interesting so we shall see

first time rereading this one. one of my professors last semester said it was his favourite austen, so we’ll see! perhaps my opinion will change with my age? (last time i read this i was younger than marianne, and now i am older than elinor…) i imagine the whole colonel brandon thing will still be an eh to me later on, but for now im enjoying the humour

emotional cheating final boss holy shit 😭

so i fear this one is starting off worse than the others despite its premise being more promising 😭

it’s that time of year again…

for a book this long that “romance” went from 0 to 100 so fast. wtf happens in the rest of the book. i feel like it could be 400 pages shorter bc half this flashback is just repetition of various tropes.

worldbuilding is actually horrible, very difficult to read this as an original work. also like… was ivf not an option…

yk what this is actually the first emily henry i’ve been really enjoying rather than slogging through

i did in fact read the original fanfic and i dearly hope the mmc is a grovelling man and that fmc is actually, like, her own person. which was the reason i liked the original fic anyway.

well-structured collection. his writing was very made for people who read a lot of english lit…

so many cuts to amar you really have to wonder why the title isn’t the adventures of amir hamza and amar…

should be adventures of amar tbh i feel like hamza is barely relevant

idk if it’s just the translation, but some of the characters are really vapid and insufferable. should be titled “men of riyadh”.

interesting discussions abt translation and american marketing systems to be had abt this one. despite the characters supposedly having different personalities, they all tend to bleed into each other. choice of marketing as “sex in the city but the city is riyadh” is definitely something…

there r eowyns everywhere for those with eyes to see them

he’s finally dead omg rostam was one annoying guy…

lamees when her sworn enemy is her mom’s boyfriend…

nikeya…

i always seethe when we get to the marriage because wdym…

on some occasions the prose bothers me, so i feel like this is shaping up to be more 4-star than 5, but still enjoyable