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a little bit of everything, but mostly literary fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, and romance book reviews 🌿

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Hello hello!!! 👋👋👋👋 It's been a while!! I've been reading a lot of romance lately--frankly I've been reading nothing BUT romance these days, but that's a discussion for another post--and I've done a post before on my literary pet peeves, but this time around I thought I'd do one for my romance pet peeves specifically. All this romance reading has got me thinking about what I like vs. don't like to see in my romances: what I like is pretty much what everyone else likes--the pining, the tension, the slowburn, the...romance, basically, lol. What I *don't* like, though, is more interesting to discuss, so I wanted to share some of these pet peeves here! The first two episodes of Heated Rivalry dropped today so I thought I'd do a little post to talk about how much I love the book + my experience of going to the Toronto premiere of the show + how excited I am for this show. 🏒 I absolutely loved DADDY ISSUES. Here's why: HEART THE LOVER is basically whatever the literary equivalent of Oscar bait is. Imagine if someone was like "what things can i write about to make a book feel Deep and Meaningful," and then included just about everything that could tick those boxes. I can't talk specifics without spoilers, but this is not the kind of novel I expected from a seasoned author like Lily King. It's a novel that presents itself as--and is very desperately trying to be--poignant and insightful, but is actually quite emotionally hollow. A poignant novel is not a novel that contains as many Poignant Things as possible. That's not how storytelling works. To put it more bluntly, this is a lazy book, one that forgoes the work of actually imbuing its story with significance in favour of borrowing significance from its Serious and Literary subject matter. I really enjoyed WHEN AMONG CROWS when I read it last year, so I went into TO CLUTCH A RAZOR expecting to also enjoy it. What I did not expect was to be so thoroughly blown away by this book. TCAR does everything that WAC did--great worldbuilding, fleshed-out characters, memorable scenes--but ups the ante in pretty much every way. The stakes have always been high, and here they are even higher. Where WAC spent some time introducing the world and its characters to us, TCAR picks up from where we left off and immediately gets going. There's a lot that's new here--new characters, story, places--but that's not to say there's no development for the characters we already know, because there is: we learn so much more about Dymitr's family in particular, their dynamics and of course his complicated feelings growing up as a Knight amongst them. Dymitr has always been such a compelling character--still waters run deep, and his waters have long been still--and here he becomes all the more so. To see him with his family only makes his story more poignant, his development all the more earned. KATABASIS by R.F. Kuang is Info Dump: The Novel. It's a novel that seems to mistake information for narrative, so caught up in its ideas and "clever" logic that it loses sight of basically everything else. How could a novel this long have been so allergic to storytelling? I swear, it felt like all the information in this book was delivered through massive chunks of exposition. Explaining how Hell works? Massive chunk of exposition. Exploring the characters' lives and experiences? Massive chunk of exposition. Critical moment where the characters finally talk to each other? Massive chunk of exposition.

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Recent Posts

  • BOOK REVIEW: DADDY ISSUES by KATE GOLDBECK
  • THE HEATED RIVALRY TV ADAPTATION
  • BOOK REVIEW: SOME KIND OF FAMOUS by AVA WILDER
  • BOOK REVIEW: HEART THE LOVER by LILY KING
  • BOOK REVIEW: TO CLUTCH A RAZOR by VERONICA ROTH

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