bruh i am so heartbroken that this book was kind of bad.

instead of being really action-packed and fast-paced (because, you know, it's a HEIST novel), SO much of the text was taken up by long, repetitive, airy inner monologues about each character's desires and wistful dreams and reflections on their pasts that were simultaneously really on-the-nose and overexplainy and really vague. i don't even know how that's possible!!! i feel like grace d. li didn't trust me as a reader to understand the complexities about how diaspora effects each character differently through subtle characterization so she had to tell us, again and again and again.

plus, i can't count the number of scenes that were building up to a thrilling action scene but fizzled out with a fade to black and another monologue about how a character "spent their whole life" running away/longing/fulfilling expectations, and the next chapter would open on the cool exciting thing being over and having worked out 100% according to plan. it was just so unexciting, and nothing that ever happened held any suspense. i didn't feel scared for the characters once. and i feel like part of that was because i just did not care for these people. the characters and their motivations were not convincing to me at all. like, i understood why most of them would take this job from a morality point of view, but i just do not believe that any of these people could do a heist, or would even be approached to do a heist. they just felt too affluent, and did not come across as the type of sympathetic underdogs who would commit to a real serious crime. honestly, i thought the ending twist of how they pulled off the final 3 heists was kind of clever, but so much of this book allowed for the characters to succeed consequence-free that all of the heists were just so unbelievable and frustrating.

and do not even get me STARTED on irene and alex's relationship. the audacity to characterize irene as a shallow bully to alex and then turn around and make it seem like alex is the problem for hating irene and not giving her a chance at redemption really icked me out. they had to do this to the lesbians, what a letdown.

EVERYBODY READ THIS BOOK!! autobiography about a real life heist!! this book reads like fiction and it's not and its so amazing. i can only dream of a real life adventure like this

the lack of communication pissed me OFF but also why did this book make me sob

LETS GO LESBIANS!!!!!

happy pride month, i went into this reassured that it wasn't an omegaverse book which it isn't really but there were times where i felt a little embarrassed to be reading this in public. my (also queer) coworker saw this in my backpack and just pointed at it and said "mmmhmm?" so there's that. overall it was fine but i gotta stop diving into these romantasy books blind and being shocked when there's suddenly a graphic sex scene.

this book is just vibes of an era but i can't complain. patti smith is really good at transporting you into a moment in time and this book was very beautiful

i read that john green wrote this book as a kind of response/follow up to looking for alaska, since he felt that there were some aspects of the message in lfa that he didn't communicate as well as he hoped, and reading both back to back with that in mind was a really interesting experience. i really loved this book, i've always felt a connection to the manic pixie dream girl trope (i mean, look at me) and its deconstruction and i felt really seen by the depictions of both margo and q. i really enjoyed how the novel builds up this whole lesson about q's selfish, shallow idealization of margo as an idea instead of a person, only to reveal that margo had been doing the exact same thing to him all along - everybody exists in their own head and it takes work and effort towards empathy and understanding. and also i like how the story starts with a very stark divide between popular kids and geeks with margo's whole revenge plot, but that totally dissolves as the story progresses and it stops mattering (& lacey becomes a main character) - very emblematic of this theme. i also love how teen adventure this book is i wish i had this much spontaneous fun in high school.

this book was clearly written with the intention of being read by people who are already big fans of the bands being memoir'd here and not as much for casual listeners or people who are generally unaware of this music movement and hoping to learn more (i.e me). this book is great at curating a vibe of the era but not at telling a narrative sequence of events and i really struggled at times to follow what was happening linearly in history, since a lot of facts about events were foregone in favor of hearing the contradictory POVs of all these crazy rockstars. which isn't necessarily a bad thing, since i think that's what it was aiming for. i just left this book feeling like there was prerequisite knowledge i really lacked.

cat m valente is my favorite author of all time ever and while this book isn't her strongest IMO, she is so good at crafting a world that you want to burrow under the skin of. this book is VERY purple prose-y (like most of her work let's be honest) and is clearly trying to emulate Douglas Adams, and while it's def not the style for everyone it is very clearly a very deliberate stylistic adventure and practically a work of poetry. you can tell she had so much fun crafting the language of this world and each sentence is so full of flavor and color. this book started as a 2-3 star, since i found the plot a little frustrating (also, she say's "sentient" the whole novel when she CLEARLY means "sapient". please look it up) but really grew on me by the end and the ending had me cheering. when is s.j. tucker coming out with the companion album that is the only thing i need for this book to be perfect.

i did read it all in one day what of it

i'm actually a little glad that this has been sitting on my bookshelf for 6 odd years and i didn't read it back in high school when i bought it because frances and i are more alike than i'd like to admit, even more so when i was 17, and i think this book would have wrecked me for the rest of my life if i read it in a place where i was less emotionally stable than i am now.

also girl i am begging you turn off anonymous asks

shoutout to my bestie PK for recommending me this book and ruining my life. this book is soooo good guys pls read it, awesome historical fiction about the bubonic plague in 1340s england

reread for the Daisy Jones & The Six shrine. i don't think i need to write a review about how much i love this book seeing as i already coded an entire fake wikipedia page from scratch about it

if you like musical theater and insane drama this is a MUST READ nonfiction memoir! craziest shit ever

also hands down the best part about this book is how glen berger clearly is in love with julie taymor but refuses to say it. so much of this book is between the lines of this man's delisional narration its so funny

this book does NOT come with a warning about how much explicit smut there is in it. jumpscare while reading this on my parents' couch

the T in "The Wizard of Oz" stands for trans rights

i love a long-ass novel that i could probably sum up in 2-3 sentences. when will anything happen

also my copy is a misprint and the final line of the book is just a bunch of squiggles. funniest way for the book to end hands down

why are there so many main characters

also ive been team human this entire time and im glad that im finally being recognized as correct over here. the only thing that would have made this better is if amy got to extensively cuss out bronte

this is the septimus heap book i remembered the least, partially because i was a syrah hater (sorry) and partially because this one really creeped 11 year old me out

im really beginning to love the slow-burn genius of this series... so many things that i was frustrated about not being very developed/explored are clicking into place

the kids at my summer camp are obsessed with this series so i thought i'd give it a go. did it knock my socks off? no. did i devour it in 3 sittings? yes

easily my new favorite book of all time. it's literally perfect. if you like fairytales and myths and legends and nesting chekhov's guns that all come together in the most satisfying way possible this book is for you.

this still rules

after loving the first book since childhood i finally got around to reading the two sequels lol. lived up to the hype, very satisfied

aaaah! darwinism!!!

read for my thesis. whooo boy what a novel amiright.

read for my thesis but ultimately did not end up being included in my thesis but who cares because i love this book!! this book so so FUN and DIFFERENT i love meta narrative fourth wall-y fake non-fiction books, if that wasn't clear by the fact that i wrote a thesis on them.

i loove gay cyberpunk <3

it really dragged and lowkey disillusioned me with the first book

i can't decide if i like mary wollstonecraft or not. understand her? yes. feel for her? yes. but like her? ...

YEAAAHHHHH EAT THE RICH!!!!

(4.5 bc what the fuck was that ending)

anti-mormon literature is my favorite kind of literature

while rereading this i had a very vivid memory of when i was like 10 and trying to solve the pythagorean problem but i didn't own a calculator, so i was fighting for my life trying to solve it by hand and it got to the point where i had to recruit several adults to help me, none of whom could solve it either. good stuff.

sometimes you need to reread a kids mermaid book. for your mental health or whatever

i'm starting to think that it's not a coincidence that so many of the audiobooks i've loved lately were narrated by rebecca soler. this was incredible. i was hooked on this. the mushroom reveal?!?!?!.... girl. . this is my official pledge to worship rebecca soler as her loyal servant until the end of days.

i was super excited for some nautical summery action with this one but unfortunately it just missed the mark. the romance went from 0 to 100 in an instant and it was so out of nowhere that i was uninvested for the rest of the book.

also, the terrible YA fantasy names in this book were off the charts. i swear, pretty much every man's name was 2 syllables and most of them ended with -an, -en, -in, -on, etc (Draxen, Riden, Kearan, Enwen, Vordan, Ulgin, Niffon, Holdin, Tylon, Liomen - bonus points for Alosa's surname Kalligan). the ones that don't often end in -is or -or. not a sin or anything but once i noticed i couldn't stop and it did make me giggle.

i read this book for the first time when i was 11 and i sincerely believe that it is singlehandedly responsible for shaping me into the person i am today

this book hooked me hard but i'm kind of disappointed by the reveal (the second to last one). hover to read spoilers:

the mr. ward reveal just really pushed my suspension of disbelief too far. the fact that pip came up with this outlandish theory that turned out to be 100% correct made it all feel off to me. i also found mr. ward's whole kidnapping thing to be just wildly out of left field, like it belonged in a completely different book. i just couldn't believe it, i kept waiting for the book to pull a "gotcha, this isn't real" but nope. it was real. wack

this book took me 5 months to read. worth it

i had to read it twice to get it but once i got it holy shit