#vmtbr 2019

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Books I Read in 2019

#131 - One True Loves, by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Virtual Mount TBR (41/48)

Rating: 3/5 stars

What could have been an incredibly powerful story about love, loss, and how a person changes as they move forward was ultimately cheapened by being completely devoid of subtlety. There wasn't a single thing about any of the main characters that I was allowed to interpret for myself from the way they spoke or acted. The book held my hand through every page to make sure that I came away from it with exactly the message that the author wanted me to have, nothing more. Emma's narration explained everything to me with no gaps I had to fill in. That's a damning criticism when leveled at most books--that the author doesn't trust the reader to figure anything out--and it's a serious one here. But still, I was moved. The flip side of the narrative style being so obvious and forthright was that the emotional beats had nothing holding them back from punching me square in the gut, and they did--I cried several times. While Emma could be irritating on occasion, both Sam and Jesse were charming in their own ways, and I could easily see how swoon-worthy they were. I'm a sucker for sweetness and thoughtfulness in a man, so I'd be team Sam in this Husband War, but I can certainly understand the perspective of a reader finding Jesse more appealing. That's the other upside of the style--both men are allowed to be utterly forthcoming about their own feelings (when they choose to be, at least) and that's a level of emotional honesty I don't often see in romance and/or women's fiction.

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Books I Read in 2019

#158 - Wrong to Need You, by Alisha Rai

Virtual Mount TBR (47/48)

Rating: 5/5 stars

First, though, I rarely listen to audiobooks out of personal preference, but that's how I could get my hands on this through my library, so I did. I did not particularly enjoy the way Sadia's POV narrator did male voices, so that meant a good deal of Jackson's dialogue sounded forced and flat. But that's not the fault of the story itself, so I learned to live with it. Oddly, I found Jackson's narrator handled female voices a lot better overall, when I usually hate men imitating women. Chalk it up to professional ability, I guess. If I liked how Rai handled Livvy's depression in the first book, I love how she handled Sadia's anxiety here. Anxiety didn't prevent Sadia from being good at her job, or a good mother, or a good sister--except when it did. For a person who's never suffered panic attacks, that contradiction might be hard to parse, but not only did Rai write about the panic Sadia suffered as a result of overwhelming circumstances, she also included the worry and stress a panic attack causes when it happens--the sense of failure to live up to expectations and meet obligations, the shame of someone else seeing you in such a state, the worry that others will view you differently once they know. I cried through some scenes, to be perfectly honest. They were that real to me. As for the romance? The tone is wildly different from the first book, being just about the slowest of slow burns, whereas sex in the first book happened early and often. But I like slow burns just fine, and Jackson was worth waiting for, so to speak. When the heat was on, things got really hot, and in some unexpected ways I definitely appreciated. The emotional side was just as well developed. Jackson might have been distant and closed off at the start, but he was never cold or "robotic" (as he actually describes Nicholas to be) or as much of an asshole, either. He's not good with words but his actions are generally pretty clear--he lives to support, and eventually love, Sadia. With that motivation wound into the mystery of why what happened to him re: the arson charges and his complicated family history, I wasn't nearly as annoyed by the drama-rama this time around, because I was getting resolution to the extensive setup laid out in the first book. Here, it didn't detract from the story, it enhanced it. Yes, I realize that wouldn't have been possible without laying the groundwork earlier, but it doesn't really change my opinion about the first book, because there was just so much of it and it was so tedious keeping it all straight! And finally, I haven't read a lot of brother/brother's widow romances, though I'm aware it and similar situations like it are a subgenre. I'm not weirded out by it personally, though I'm glad it's acknowledged in a balanced way here. Jackson doesn't really think it's wrong for that reason, it's more about his own relationship with his dead brother than Sadia's status as a widow. Sadia is weirded out by it, because she's handling it along the weirdness of the entire situation they've gotten themselves into, and I think that's a perfectly understandable reaction for someone in her position. And Sadia's sisters, in the big climax of personal acceptance that happens near the end, are all basically "So what?" which is the enlightened, consenting-adults attitude to take. Everyone else generally seems accepting as well, which is a better stance, I think, for the book to take than harping on the "forbidden" aspect and fetishizing it. Which this never did. Especially as Sadia's son develops a strong relationship with his "uncle" long before it's clear that Jackson might end up being his step-dad, too. Because making the kid's relationship with Jackson creepy or complicated would have ruined this in a hurry, but they're sweet and wholesome and so incredibly adorable. What can I say, I have a thing for introverted men who don't do crowds or attention and aren't alpha-male jerks. I see a fair bit of myself in some parts of Sadia, and given the chance I probably would have fallen for Jackson if he were real and in my life. So what do I have to complain about here? Basically nothing.

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Books I Read in 2019

#143 - We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson

Virtual Mount TBR (43/48)

Rating: 3/5 stars

I haven't read any Shirley Jackson since seventh grade English class, when The Lottery was in the book of short stories we studied. I enjoyed it but thought it was weird and maybe not as good as my teacher thought it was. All these years later, I feel much the same way about We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I enjoyed it, but it's really weird and maybe not as good as the general consensus would have had me believe before I read it. Some writerly qualities of the book are astounding. Merricat has a distinctive and engaging narrative voice that conveys a blend of childhood innocence, sinister intent, and superstition. At times I forgot how old she was supposed to be, because she could be so child-like, but I don't see that as a flaw in the work, because given her upbringing it's understandable she would be stalled in her emotional growth. I caught some hints of mental illness as well, though that's of course up to reader interpretation, but Merricat's narration reminded me of Auri in The Slow Regard of Silent Things, which spoke to me strongly as someone battling an anxiety disorder, though I don't have OCD. Merricat could, though. The atmosphere is also masterfully handled, with simple but evocative descriptions, careful word choice and even more carefully chosen repetition. I could see this house clearly in my head, but more importantly, I felt this house and its dread in my bones. The "mystery" is weaker. I never really thought Constance had done it, and from there it wasn't a long leap to (correctly) assume the identity of the real culprit and the reasons behind Constance's suspicious actions the night of the poisoning. The reveal is touching, in a way, but wasn't at all a surprise to me. The overall plot is thin and wandering. Framing this story as the origin of a haunted house certainly gives it atmosphere, but not a lot of forward motion. I had no trouble reading this in a few hours because of its length and simple language, but I wouldn't call it a gripping page turner. So I liked it, and there's a lot to learn from it as a writer, even if horror isn't my genre. But it wasn't the amazing classic I had been led to believe it was.        

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Books I Read in 2019

#152 - Royals, by Rachel Hawkins

Virtual Mount TBR (46/48)

Rating: 3/5 stars

It's fluffy, and moment-to-moment I pretty much enjoyed it, but it's got some major flaws. The best thing about it, and I know this is rare for me to say about a YA book, is our narrator-protagonist Daisy. It can be difficult for an adult author to write teenagers, and in my experience they mostly fall into two camps: sounding too adult because the author can't erase their own life experience and vocabulary from their writing, or sounding like whiny bratty elementary-school children because the author overcompensates for that. But here, Daisy struck me constantly as being firmly in the appropriate age group, when she desperately wants some control over her own life but keeps having it snatched away from her, yet understands and to some degree accepts the reasoning behind her lack of autonomy. As a central conflict to the novel, it's incredibly successful. And her personality is snarky and sharp-witted, but she's also strongly empathetic, so she doesn't come across as a brat. Her banter with Miles was entertaining, though I think ultimately the revelation of their romance came a little too late. The pace of the buildup was fine, then they kiss, then they "break up," then Daisy leaves Scotland and Miles comes to the States to be with her (a huuuuuge decision) just a few weeks later. It's thin. What's not so good about this novel? The setting. Now, I'm not Scottish, and while I have some Scottish heritage, it's far enough back that it didn't influence my upbringing in any way, and I'm not out here on the Internet claiming my clan tartan or anything and pretending I'm full of "Scots Pride." But I have a family member who ran a study abroad program to Scotland and traveled there extensively. Nearly everyone but me in that chunk of my family has been there, sometimes more than once, and I've heard enough stories that, even secondhand, I know this AU-Scotland has basically no relation to actual modern Scotland. I also have family who've spent a lot of time in England, and I've been there twice for extended trips--everything I recognized about this setting told me it was British, not Scottish, and the rest (like every woman wearing tartan evening gowns to every fancy occasion) seemed completely over the top. If I can recognize the ridiculousness of this setting as an American who's only tangentially aware of modern Scottish culture, then what do the actual Scots think? (I skimmed some reviews, and generally, they're not complimentary.) So, I read this because I kept hearing great things about its sequel, Her Royal Highness, but my library doesn't have that yet so I checked out a copy of this instead. I still want to read HRH because it's a wlw romance, and there just aren't enough of those in the world. But I am lowering my expectations about its quality, because I know it's got the same flimsy setting as this one.        

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Books I Read in 2019

#107 - Saga, Vol. 6, by Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples

Virtual Mount TBR (33/48)

Rating: 5/5 stars

As usual, when I get farther and farther into a series I love, I find it harder and harder to write coherent reviews, as they generally become a list of highlights of my favorite parts. So here's the list for the sixth volume: Ghus is still the best and I love him. I'm happy to see the reporters come back, even if I'm hesitant about what they're trying to do because breaking Marko and Alanna's story could be a triumphant ending or the beginning of everything going horribly wrong--it's not like I can accurately predict anything ahead of time about a story this wacky, as the brilliance of its plotting is best visible through hindsight, not foresight. I definitely love that this series has always surprised me, and still is--Petrichor being an example, not because of the complexity of her identity, but because surprise! she's on the ship now, and that's a new conflict to explore. What else, what else. I'm liking the kid Hazel is growing up to be so far, it's charming to see her so trusting, given her unconventional and event-filled upbringing. I can see the beginning of her trajectory from unformed babyhood toward the narrator we've been listening to the whole time. And her reunion with Marko is just heart-breakingly adorable. I love this series.        

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Books I Read in 2019

#159 - Hurts to Love You, by Alisha Rai

Virtual Mount TBR (48/48)

Rating: 2/5 stars

Such a disappointment after the first two books. Eve is fine as a main character. Yes, she has some mild social anxiety issues stemming from her self-esteem issues stemming from her abuse. She's a complex and well-developed character, even if I did find the level of self-affirmation she used to motivate herself irritating. It's not that the first two books were entirely free of repetitious elements, but this installment was worse, either because there was more of it, or because I noticed it more. How many times can she make her turtle analogies or use the word "like" and "like" about her love interest? It came across as childish, and I know she's young, but since one of her central struggles is to have her family, and her love interest, not regard her as a child, I think that could have been handled better. But the real problem is Gabe. I wanted to like him. He's very likable on the surface. But that's it, that's his mask. And he talks frequently about that being his mask. Underneath he's all pain and brooding about his secret heritage and the complexities of his life because he can't claim his half-siblings. (Oh, by the way, totally called his secret waaaay before it was revealed. I don't know what specifically made it obvious to me but it was the only thing that made any sense.) Eve spends a lot of her time hammering away at that mask, and that's great, and their chemistry just based on that was fine. But main story ends with us just barely getting to peek at who Gabe could be without it, and without the pain of familial separation, and then BOOM EPILOGUE he's spilled his secret and everyone knows who he is and it's all fine. Um, what? Who did he tell first? Did he get everyone together like an intervention and tell everyone at once? How did they react? Who was surprised and who wasn't? WHY DID THE MOST INTERESTING PART OF THAT CHARACTER ARC HAPPEN IN A GAP YEAR BETWEEN THE END AND THE EPILOGUE SO I DON'T EVEN GET TO READ ABOUT IT?!? Also, it's great to have a large man as a main character who doesn't come across as intimidating and doesn't get angry all the time, but Gabe is so soft and forgiving he doesn't even get mad about things he should very well have a right to get mad about, like Eve lying to him about being Ann the app-service driver. Like, that's such a huge part of the beginning of the book, then it's ignored for the entire middle, then at the end he confronts her when he figures it out and one conversation later, where he doesn't get mad, it's all totally fine. I thought that was rushed and not entirely believable. To make their romance worse, a good chunk of the tail end of this book was used to wrap up story lines from the previous two and leave Eve and Gabe by the wayside. Jackson and Sadia get married quietly, sure, fine. Nicholas and Livvy spend a whole chapter hashing out last-minute pre-wedding jitters in a book that's not focused on them: annoying, but whatever. Then they have a five-month old baby, though, in the epilogue? What? At the end of book two when they get engaged, they insist she's not pregnant. They plan the wedding for a month after that. Then a year later, they have a five-month old. The math does not add up. Okay, so that "flu" she got that kept her at home right before the wedding was actually morning sickness, then? But her mother and aunt just happened to have the flu the week before providing her a convenient lie? Am I supposed to be reading between these lines or not? Because I was fooled, I honestly thought the "I'm not pregnant" meant "I'm not pregnant," and it pisses me off on a personal level because myself and so many other women I've known get those looks from idiots who think every illness we get means a secret pregnancy we're hiding and saying "I'm not pregnant" doesn't mean anything to them because all women lie about that stuff, right? Okay, that's a tangent, I haven't even talked about the age gap yet. I told myself I wasn't going to because I had enough other issues with this book, but I shouldn't ignore it. Gabe is 35 and Eve is 24. The math on that barely clears the "half your age plus seven years" rule, if we ignore Gabe's extra half-year. And there is the argument that since he's a commitment-phobe and never had a serious relationship, it brings his effective age/experience down a little. Gabe's single and has a successful business, no kids; Eve is single, has plans to start what will probably be a successful business, no kids. Despite the numerical age difference, they are in similar stages of life, on the large scale. But booooy does Gabe constantly make cracks about how old he is as a defense mechanism against her, which reminds the reader constantly, which either makes it creepy when it didn't need to be or exacerbates the base level of potential creepiness. [Sudden thought: is that why Eve was such a creeper early on, narratively speaking? To balance the creep factor out between them? Do I really even want to be asking this question? I shouldn't need to.] The first half had issues but showed potential, then the second half let me down and the epilogue made me angry.                                              

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Books I Read in 2019

#108 - Saga, Vol. 7, by Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples

Virtual Mount TBR (34/48)

Rating: 5/5 stars

Stop stomping on my heart like this, please. That ending! Some stuff I like from this volume: Petrichor keeps being interesting. Hazel's first kiss. The line about unfulfilled relationships being "potential energy," that hit me right in the gut. Also being punched in the kidneys by the multiple quiet tragedies that comprised the ending. On a lighter note, the cute little furry people of Phang were so adorable, and then, on a heavier note, that just made the ending hurt more. Seriously, there are only two volumes left, so I knew things had to start going (more) wrong than they had been, but I'm really torn up about this!        

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Books I Read in 2019

#90 - Saga, Vol. 3, by Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples

Virtual Mount TBR (27/48)

Rating: 5/5 stars

I have this feeling, now that I'm three volumes in, that the entire run of the series is going to be five stars for me. I've talked before about how much I love the story, and that hasn't changed here. But as I'm getting more accustomed to the art style, and as I'm also reminding myself to read these volumes a little slower, I'm noticing so much more detail. Visual and environmental storytelling is a subject I'm familiar with in video game design (because I'm a geek who loves to watch YouTube videos about it with my equally geeky husband, we're totally fascinated) but how have I not been applying those lessons to the graphic novels I read? I blame the fact that I never read comic books growing up. I didn't learn to read visually as a child in the same way a comic reader would, and I've been reading adult-level novels, absolute bricks of novels, since I was ten. My skill set never needed visual reading skills the same way. Some of my favorite details from this volume: Marko's new beard as a sign of both time passing, and of grief. Heist's piss-stained underwear, because of course the drunken-author figure can't be bothered to put clothes on and not be a total slob. All the changes in Isabel's face to make her more frightening when she's threatening Honest Cat. And, honestly, the level of detail in the single-panel "vision" of Prince Robot's hallucinatory orgy, there's just a lot going on there and if your brain just glances at it and says "yeah, people having sex, whatever" then you miss so much, because he's apparently a pretty kinky dude inside that television skull of his. And there's more, of course, but those are the highlights. I'm wondering, now, just how much information of this sort I missed in the first two volumes, which I already loved, so how much better will they be when I reread them?            

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Books I Read in 2019

#116 - Saga, Vol. 9, by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

Virtual Mount TBR (37/48)

Rating: 4/5 stars

I was under the mistaken impression that this was the end, until I came to Goodreads to be all like WTF JUST HAPPENED and I saw people talking about the hiatus. I was incorrect, but I have to say, reading this volume under the mistaken impression that it's the final one definitely left me disappointed.

Treating it as the cliffhanger it's intended to be, instead, I like it better. Unsurprisingly.

So a lot of things happen, as usual, and a lot of them are still unexpected, because this story has a consistent track record of putting together plot twists that make perfect sense in hindsight while being nearly impossible to predict. Lots of characters die in this volume--lots of named, important characters, that is, because the earlier volumes are also filled with character deaths. But this had a far greater impact. (Which was part of me going WTF when I still thought this was the end of the story.)

I'm looking forward to more in the future, but I know I'm going to have to reread everything when the new stuff drops, because there are so many interwoven plot threads, and while there are definitely events I will never forget, there are going to be plenty of references to the story that would leave me scratching my head otherwise. Which means dragging my soul through this meat-grinder of a cliffhanger again, something I can say I'm looking forward to as much.

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Books I Read in 2019

#81 - The Secret Keeper, by Kate Morton

Virtual Mount TBR (25/48)

Rating: 2/5 stars

Too long for the story it told, which I found needlessly complicated. Even the inciting incident, the memory of an unknown man's murder by the main character's mother, was so drenched in nostalgic, atmospheric prose that it didn't have any urgency. I've been giving up on a lot of books lately, though, and enough of me did want to find out the "why" of it that I kept reading. At times, I questioned my decision, because with every new reveal, the story changed, and my theory about who the man was (before that was discovered) and/or why he was killed was supposed to change with it, I guess, and keep me hooked. Problem was, the information we start with is so vague, and the first section of the book includes so many characters being deliberately vague, even to themselves in internal monologue, that I had no real idea what was going on, and the later theories I developed, I wasn't particularly attached to. "It couldn't be that easy," I told myself. And ultimately, it wasn't. Granted, I was skimming by the end, because I just could not deal with entire chapters of journal entries and letters that conveniently contained precisely what the character reading them, years later, need to know. But if I'd been paying closer attention, would I have figured out the final plot twist that sets everything on its head at the bitter, bitter end? Honestly, probably not. It recontextualized everything, yet I don't remember clues leading up to it, and I can see a different ending to the book where it didn't happen quite easily. It's just out of left field. I'm not impressed.        

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Books I Read in 2019

#147 - The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Burrows

Virtual Mount TBR (45/48)

PopSugar Reading Challenge -- A book published posthumously

Rating: 2/5 stars

I started out thinking this book was okay, and liked it progressively less and less as it went on. I don't think this story works as an epistolary novel, or at least, it needs more attention and care to make it work. The letter writers throughout are wildly different people with wildly different backgrounds and educations, and there's a sameness of tone to the entire book that diminishes the variety of character voice. I do think in the first half, Juliet, Sidney, and Dawsey sound distinct, but most of the rest of the Islanders are basically the same, made to sound backwards with a few dashes of poor grammar, and in the second half everyone becomes a muddle. The second problem with the structure is that it made it absurdly easy to skip sections that didn't interest me as I grew less enchanted with the story, because if the letter was to or from Juliet or Dawsey, I mostly stopped caring. I did skim some of the later letters, and I feel like I have a decent handle on the plot without reading every detail of Isola's sudden obsession with phrenology or the ridiculously late and short subplot about Sidney's secretary trying to steal Oscar Wilde's letters. Even once I strip the plot down to its core, there are things I didn't like. The main love triangle was completely without tension, because of course Juliet is going to come to her senses and not marry Mark, he's an ass. Trying to infuse extra tension by creating a second, weaker love triangle around Dawsey was just stupid, it was killing time so that Juliet still had an obstacle after she realized her feelings for Dawsey, and I didn't buy it for a second. I do have a thing for the strong, silent type of hero, so I found Dawsey appealing as an archetype but rather lackluster as an actual character. He seems so vibrant in the first half of the book when we get to read his correspondence, but as soon as he's in the same zip code, so to speak, as Juliet, we barely see his POV again and he becomes a footnote in everyone else's letters, which is nuts, since he's the romantic hero. He doesn't end up with enough actual page time to properly display his affection for Juliet, so their love story is a rushed but foregone conclusion that the book expects me to be happy about simply because it happens, but not because it did the work making it happen. I felt I was expected to fill in far too many of the blanks myself. I have not seen the movie yet, but despite my disappointment with the novel, I do still plan on watching it, because a) I'm interested to see how an epistolary novel like this gets adapted, and b) I think if done well, a movie version would solve a lot of the issues I have with the novel's structure. I haven't looked into any reviews or discussions of the movie, so I have no idea if general consensus on it is good or terrible, but I can probably spare two hours to find out myself. 

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Books I Read in 2019

#112 - Muse of Nightmares, by Laini Taylor

Virtual Mount TBR (35/48)

Rating: 4/5 stars

In the first book, a number of oddities and mysteries were set up, leaving me eager for the rest of the story. I can say the conclusion does pretty much answer all of them, but it takes a weird and twisting path to get there.

I feel like this story, despite having clear goals to accomplish, is ultimately less focused than the first book. Nearly everything there was framed around the relationship between Lazlo and Sarai--even before they met, it was clear they were going to meet, and that was the moment we were hurtling toward in the beginning. (For long enough to make you maybe-forget about the very beginning of the book, when Sarai's death is laid out neatly as a spoiler, but with absolutely no context.) Other characters occasionally had POV scenes or chapters when the plot demanded it, but on the whole, it was the Lazlo and Sarai Show, with each chapter generally sticking to one or the other.

Muse, on the other hand, jumps between characters and story threads constantly, even to the point where in a single scene where many characters are present, there's extensive head-hopping. I hate head-hopping. I hate having to readjust my perspective to align with a different character with no warning, especially multiple times on a page. And I get it--when the big stuff goes down and you've got Minya and Nova and Sarai and Lazlo all in the same place, all thinking/feeling important things that the reader needs to know, head-hopping is the easiest way to get it all on the page.

But it's kind of a mess to read, and I didn't enjoy that part of it. It robbed the climax of some of its thrill and emotional impact, when I constantly had to sort out who I was suddenly supposed to be focused on.

The story is still interesting, and I'm still invested in these characters--mostly. I think I never felt as much sympathy for Minya as I was supposed to? The relevation about her and the Ellens felt flat to me. On the other hand, Thyon got way more sympathetic and fascinating and I honestly wish there had been more time spent on his development, though I don't know where it would have fit. And I'm thoroughly delighted by the direction of Eril-Fane and Azareen's subplot. So there's plenty of good to balance out my frustration with the bad. And the bad is a pretty minor bad, all things considered. But this wasn't the same ecstatic thrill ride I experienced in the first book.

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Books I Read in 2019

#103 - Saga, Vol. 5, by Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples

Virtual Mount TBR (32/48)

Rating: 5/5 stars

By opening with a short meditation on the reasons people become soldiers, the progression of war from an immediate and visceral concern to a mere background noise to daily life, Volume 5 has jumped back up to five stars, where the series had dipped slightly for me in the middle. This felt grounded, which is a weird thing to say about a work that thrives on covering serious issues through ludicrous situations. This series is almost nothing but high drama and action, yet it's constructed on a firm thematic base that supports it, that reminds you the story might look insane on the surface, but it has something to say. In this volume, particularly, I appreciate Hazel's occasional spoilers in narration, how unflappably awesome Ghus is at all turns (new favorite side character? quite possibly!), the relatively nuanced look at drug usage (for the short span given to it, anyway,) and the effective use of dreams/nightmares/drug trips to convey the personal history of a few characters. I'm just freaking impressed, because I've got a thing about dreams as a trope, they're almost never as good on the page as the author wants them to be, but here? Fantastic. Looking forward to the next volume, already got it checked out on Hoopla.        

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Books I Read in 2019

#67 - The Kiss Quotient, by Helen Hoang

Virtual Mount TBR (20/48)

PopSugar Reading Challenge -- An “own voices” book

Rating: 5/5 stars

This came so close to being a one-afternoon read for me. I didn't want to stop but had to, to engage in real life again. I finished it this morning. I loved it. I loved it so much I checked negative reviews for mentions of flaws I obviously overlooked, found a few I agree with and a lot I don't. None of them retroactively make me love the book any less. It helps that I love smut, because this book is NOT shy about sex, even if Stella starts out that way. The story is an interesting push-and-pull of communication issues. Michael is excellent at talking about sex, and gradually shows how great he is at being attentive. While that comes from his job (both of them, as it turns out,) he's never portrayed as sleazy because he's a sex worker, and that attentiveness is what makes his building trust with Stella believable. Stella is great at being bluntly honest, and she's upfront about most of her issues without ever defining herself with a label. Both characters spend most of the book failing to reveal their true feelings because of personal insecurity, which makes them a great pair on the page, even if it's easy for me, the reader, to shout "just talk to each other already!" They're so good about that up to a point, then they completely fall apart. Which, again, is believable. Most people find it hard to open up about their deepest issues. I'm just such a sucker for romances where I can actually see the couple falling in love, instead of just falling into bed together. I realize that's a low bar to set in general, but so many books fail even at that, while this one clears it by a mile.   

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Books I Read in 2019

#115 - Saga, Vol. 8, by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

Virtual Mount TBR (36/48)

Rating: 4/5 stars

It's not that I don't still love this series, because I do, but something about this volume felt off to me, and I didn't love it as much as most of the earlier volumes. Something about the pacing made this read so fast, it didn't have as much impact, or I didn't feel as satisfied at the end.

Still, it's full of the fun twists we've all come to expect in theory without necessarily being able to predict in practice. I did see Petrichor and the Robot Prince getting together, but only a few pages before it actually happened, so it's not like the pieces weren't there for me to put together. Ghus is still amazing and I love him. When Squire called Hazel his "fair maiden" I was like, "oh no tell me that's not where this is headed" but she (as narrator) immediately refers to him as her brother, so good, that's not where we're headed. And given the brotherly-love feeling of most of this volume, I look forward to seeing that plot line in the future.

But there's not much future left at this point--how could the story possibly end? Maybe that's where some of my dissatisfaction with this particular volume is coming from, I can't picture an ending coming from this. The most basic story trajectory has always been obvious and firmly in place--it's Hazel's story, from conception and birth through childhood, at least, so far. But when will it end? With only one volume left, at the pace we're going, she's not going to die peacefully of old age. I don't even know that we're going to see her as an adult, and I sure hope we're not going to see her kick the bucket as a kid, or at all, really. But I have no basis for predicting how far the story still has to go, even with most of it done. That unmoored feeling of being unable to form expectations about a story never sits well with me, though Saga has been fun, interesting, and inventive enough to distract me from it this whole time. In this volume, perhaps, maybe it didn't accomplish that as well, and that's what's left the faint irritation in my brain that says I should have liked it better.

[elenajohansenreads]

Books I Read in 2019

#93 - Saga, Vol. 4, by Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples

Virtual Mount TBR (29/48)

Rating: 4/5 stars

Right after I said in the review for the third volume that I expected five-star ratings across the board, I end up not liking this one quite as much. I'm still trying to pinpoint why. Some of Hazel's narration seemed off (and some of it deliberately tricksy, which I was fine with) but I don't really like the red herring of Marko potentially cheating that got dangled in front of me. It's not even that I'm wholly anti-cheating in general, it's actually that it didn't feel like a plausible turn for the story to take, so I couldn't treat the possibility seriously. Alanna's drug problem, on the other hand, was totally believable and in keeping with the pressure she's under. I liked the time we spent with her on the Circuit, and I wish we could see more without that extra time completely breaking the pacing (which it would, I know, it's just such an interesting bunch of characters, I want more of them.) I think the larger, systemic problem I had with this volume might be how fractured it felt. The main arc is the separation, fine, but all the subplots seem to be going in wildly different directions here, with assassinations and kidnappings and a few side characters dying (lots of not-quite-random violence in this one) but with little cohesion binding them together. To be honest, I feel like I'm missing something that makes this make sense, in the larger fashion that the first three volumes gave a satisfying tale told in each one. Here, I feel like I read a lot of loose ends. Which, to be fair, where still cleverly written, brilliantly drawn, and full of the detail I've grown to appreciate so much. My vague dissatisfaction could simply be that we've reached the point in the overall story where things have to start going wrong very quickly on all fronts, which is why this volume in particular was hard-hit by that violence and messiness. When I have the whole story in front of me, perhaps this slice of it won't seem weaker.