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vaportrails) wrote2021-06-03 08:49 pm
vaportrails) wrote2021-06-03 08:49 pm
Book Thoughts (May 21st ~ June 3rd, 2021)
So apparently I’m back into reading books again! It’s only been like a decade or so since I last read actual, published books this, uh, expeditiously 😹 My brain just decided this was gonna be my new thing for the next three months, I guess. Every time I finish a book all I can think of is “what new book shall I read next?” so I’m taking advantage of this opportunity and just reading as many books as I can before my brain inevitably decides it’s done chewing on this new fixation and spits it out for another one :^)
And what better way to pool all my wordvomit thoughts into one place for ease of reference and posterity than to make a dw account! Right? This is a thing people do now? Or again? Keep a journal of sorts? I’m getting flashbacks to my early days as a baby kpop stan reading super junior smut on livejournal... wow... formative years, truly. Kinda also hoping writing these pseudo-book reviews will encourage me to stop thinking in 280 characters or less and actually, idk, exercise some intelligent thought every once in a while?? Jog the brain muscle a little? I fear this may be indulging my loudmouth tendencies, though... We’ll see how I fare with that 😹 Maybe I’ll actually learn the art of brevity writing these... or maybe I’ll go insane and write gigantic walls of text! (Personally I am placing my bets on the latter).
ANYWAYS, without further ado, here are my very questionable thoughts about all the books I’ve read so far:
Unfinished/Dropped
Um, I picked this up because I wanted to read “gay ghost stories” (literally what I googled while trying to find books) and this came up on a list of sapphic novels that I randomly clicked on. The selling point for this book was 1) the awesome cover and 2) the blurb, which described this book as containing “space necromancer lesbians”, which made me think, sweet, this sounds right up my alley!
Except it wasn’t! Like, it had all the elements of a story that I should’ve enjoyed, but it took me over a hundred pages to decide if I liked the protagonist (Gideon)—and even then, I didn’t really like her all that much 🤕 Also, I wasn’t really buying the enemies to lovers trope with this book? I mean, for one thing, Gideon is Harrow’s indentured servant (did not know that beforehand), which, like, I’m not completely opposed to, but felt pretty uncomfortable with because even after a hundred pages of reading, Gideon and Harrow had barely expressed any sort of positive emotion towards each other? Like, there were hints of Gideon caring for Harrow in the typical tsundere, rough-affectionate sort of way, but Harrow was barely even present throughout much of what I’d read, and given the difference in their social status, I needed to be—I expected to be—sold their relationship pretty aggressively to believe in the romance and accept the Master/Servant thing for what it was. I was also curious to see how the power imbalance would be handled, but they mostly just kinda beat each other up a lot lmao. And whenever they did deign to stop going at each other’s throats (both physically and figuratively), none of it really... landed for me? Like, it all just felt... kind of hollow. There was no spark, no depth, no emotional investment, and I just couldn’t bring myself to really care about the main characters. In the end, I wound up being more interested in the side characters, and one of them DIED LMAO 😹
I might pick it up again, eventually, since I did attempt to read this book back when my brain hadn’t yet flipped the reading switch on, and I’m kind of curious to know more about Palamedes, but another thing I wasn’t super fond of was this book’s writing style. God, it was so hard to read at times? Like, I don’t know if my vocabulary just isn’t up to scratch, but I found myself looking up what a word meant on nearly every page, and the descriptive language just wasn’t jiving with me at all. I couldn’t picture a lot of what the environments looked like, which was a huge detriment to me since I think primarily in images and this story was set in space, on another planet! I wanted to be able to imagine the places they went to in vivid detail, but instead I just found myself zoning out halfway through most of the non-dialogue paragraphs and having to reread some sentences over and over to get them to stick in my head.
That said, I’ve seen a couple of fanarts for this book recently (and I don’t usually see book fanart on my twitter timeline), so some people evidently enjoyed the book. Maybe I just needed to wait and read for a little longer for it get better, who knows? I’m of the opinion that I shouldn’t have to wait for a book/movie/show to Get Good, though; it should just be good from the very beginning? 😹 But yeah, I’ll be putting this book on the back burner for now.
Finished
Started: 5/21/21
Finished: 5/22/21
So I rated this 4 stars to try to be objective but to be honest... in my heart, Mexican Gothic is 5 stars 😔✊ This book just feels like it was tailor-made for me. It had so many elements and themes and tropes to it that I adore (haunted houses wreathed in mist and isolated from the village? Check! Frail, wispy Victorian twinks with a gentle demeanor? Check! Smart and charismatic non-white female protagonist? Also check! SPOOKY DREAMS? Hell yeah, check! A tragic mystery pieced together through rumors and letters? Check check check!!), and I literally could not put it down until I finished it in like one day. And I’ll probably always have a soft spot for this book in the years to come because of how it broke my decade(s?) long reading dry spell LOL. It’s been a while since I read it though, so my thoughts and feelings aren’t as fresh, and I wonder if I’d change my mind about some things on a second read-through 🤔 Oh well! For now, my thoughts as I remember them are:
UM, I was obsessed with the love story between Noemi and Francis? They were actually the driving force for me to finish this book at breakneck speed 😹 Which is unusual, because I tend to be really hard to convince when it comes to romance in novels. They were just so? Perfect? For each other? Their romance was so pure and lovely and genuine, and the progression of their relationship from friendship to Something More to Intense, Requited Love was so?? Good???? I was so taken in by them, I think I screenshotted nearly every conversation they had and read them over and over enough to memorize some passages lmao. There’s this passage in the book where Noemi talks about how she thinks marriage is a “rotten deal” because men would only be dazzled by their wives for a brief period of time before losing interest later on, and then she says:
“Besides, boys her age were dull, always talking about the parties they had been to the previous week or the one they were planning to go to the week after. Easy, shallow men. Yet the thought of anyone more substantial made her nervous, for she was trapped between competing desires, a desire for a more meaningful connection and the desire to never change. She wished for eternal youth and endless merriment.”
Ignoring the foreshadowing in that paragraph, Noemi’s desire for a “more meaningful connection” really stuck with me for a while because that’s what both she and Francis eventually found in each other. And even though the events of the book changed them, they didn’t really have to change any substantial parts of who they were for each other—they simply were exactly what the other needed 🥺 I suppose you could argue that Francis did change for Noemi near the end of the book when he finally decided to Do Something About the Situation (haha, I hope that’s not too spoilery...), but that felt to me like it was as much for himself as it was for her, and in the end, he was still the person Noemi fell in love with and vice versa (though now they also have PTSD to deal with lmao).
Also, all of their conversations and dialogue sounded super natural to me, whether they were just talking casually or having plot-heavy discussions, Moreno-Garcia really convinced me that Noemi and Francis genuinely liked each other’s company 🥺 Noemi wanted a boy who wasn’t dull, who didn’t put up pretenses just to court her but could engage her in intelligent conversation and didn’t talk down to her, and she got that with Francis 😭💖 He was so obviously head over heels for her, probably right from the very beginning, and I just? Adore him? He was so sweet and gentle and soft-spoken with Noemi nearly always, and even though he was timid and shy, he was also disarmingly honest about how much he admired her and liked her, and I just!!! SCREAM. I mean, no wonder Noemi fell in love with him—it just made sense!!! 😭😭😭
Also, he was so ridiculously Careful with the way he treated her?? Not just in speech, but also physically; there’s a moment about halfway through the story where Noemi almost figures out the secret of High Place and Francis panics and grabs her wrists and Noemi just thinks about how she couldn’t remember him ever touching her before then, and I just?? I’m so obsessed??? [Jisung voice] Carefully... as if I’m handling Chenle... Yes, I’m just gonna say it now: Francis reminds me of Jisung and Noemi reminds me of Chenle. Yes, I’m fucking insane, thanks for noticing!
Holy shit, okay this is already way too long for a book that I can barely remember much about, so a quick rundown of my other thoughts:
And that’s it for my thoughts on the book! One day when I do a reread I will probably write another post dedicated solely to Noemi and Francis because I had to cut myself short while writing about them here and I STILL HAVE SO MUCH TO SAY I JUST WANNA READ FANFIC OF THEM BEING THE GRAD STUDENT POWER COUPLE OF THE CENTURY BUT UNFORTUNATELY THERE IS ONLY ONE FIC OF THEM ON AO3 AND I—ahem. Yes, uh....... if I ever write a chenji mexican gothic au in the future do not be surprised 💀
Started: 5/23/21
Finished: 5/24/21
This book was just kind of very disappointing for me. It’s not bad by any means, it just didn’t blow me away like I expected it to, which may have been my fault for having set the bar too high 😹 It just had so much promise in the beginning, I was so intrigued by the mystery of the forest and how the bone houses (aka zombies) came to be, but the story moved so slowly that by the time the main characters actually started on their journey through said forest I was on the last dregs of my patience LOL. I think I actually said the book was starting to feel like a chore to read when I was livetweeting it, but I’d mistakenly bought the book (it wasn’t available on the e-library app I’m using and I was so sure I’d like it... 😔), so I was determined to finish it.
My biggest problem with the writing was probably how straightforward and surface-level it seemed? I tend to really enjoy lyrical, almost musical prose, and the first chapter with it’s fairy tale-esque tone and style kind of tricked me into thinking that’s how the rest of the story was gonna be like, and boy, was I wrong 😹 There were moments where Ryn and Ellis (the two main characters) would talk about objectively Very Sad Things but I just... couldn’t feel anything for them in those moments? Like, they would talk about grief and loss and loneliness and the feeling of never belonging, but the lines felt so stiff and stilted to me, like I was being shown cue cards that said and this is where you should feel sad for the characters or this is where you’re supposed to cry and I just... never felt like I was in the story enough to forget that I was just reading it? If that makes sense, lmao... Not even the Big, Emotional Climax at the end got to me (partly because I think it was supposed to be a big reveal of one of the book’s mysteries but I’d already guessed it beforehand and wasn’t super impressed), which was just... a huge bummer 😔 I also had a problem with the way that scene played out too, which contains a huge spoiler so I’ll be putting it under a cut lmao (not that I think anyone will read this book with my lackluster review on it but... just in case 😹):
So, TL;DR the reason why there are bone houses/zombies in the forest is because many, many years ago, the Otherking’s (a Celtic deity, I think?) cauldron of rebirth cracked and spilled its contents onto the floor when a thief tried to steal it from the woman who owned it at the time. The thief had mistakenly shot and killed the woman’s son, whom she had tried to resurrect with the cauldron. While running away, the water from the cauldron soaked into the thief’s cloak and when he stepped into the lake near the castle, it spread the magic into the rivers and creeks and roots of the mountain, thus resurrecting every dead thing in the forest every night since.
To break the curse, Ryn thought that the cauldron needed to be broken properly once and for all, which turned out to be wrong. The magic that was actually keeping the curse alive came from Ellis’s mother—the woman in the story. Ellis was the once-dead son who’d been shot by the thief. I actually am not quite sure on the details here, but somehow Ellis left the castle where his mother stayed for some reason?? As a small child with no memory of where he came from? He got picked up by a prince that lived near the forest and grew up as a sort-of-but-not-really-noble until he goes on a quest to learn more about his past and find his parents. Earlier on in the book, Ryn tells Ellis that one way to defeat otherfolk or other creatures of magic was to speak their “true name”:
Ellis appeared unimpressed. “So if you were one of the otherfolk, I could say ‘Aderyn’ and you’d be powerless against me?”
She pointed a finger at him. “My name means ‘bird,’ so probably not. But if my name were Farmer, and I was a farmer, and my whole life was farming, then perhaps.”
“So it’s not just a name,” said Ellis. “You have to pin down their role, their identity.”
And herein lies my problem with the big emotional climax of the story: to break the “curse” of the cauldron of rebirth, Ellis speaks the woman’s—his mother’s—true name, which was... “Mam.” On the one hand, I get it. She’s unrecognizable by the time Ellis and Ryn find her, literally just bones clutching the cauldron, so it takes a while for it to really sink in that Ellis had really found his mother, that he’d actually learned the truth of what happened to his parents. And that his mother loved him so much she waited for him to come back even in death, and that that love was what kept the magic of the cauldron of rebirth alive all those years. Rereading the scene again, it actually kind of Hits now that I’m reading it without the baggage of my growing annoyance over other things in the book at the back of my mind 😹
But as was stated earlier on in the book, a “true name” entails one’s entire role or identity, your whole life, and I was kind of... disappointed? That Ellis’s mom’s character could be boiled down to just being his mother? 😹 Like, here we have a woman who had to deal with the grief of her husband being unjustly killed by greedy princes who wanted the cauldron, who took her son and journeyed into the forest to find Castell Sidi and hide out there to protect what was left of her family, whose love was literally so strong it defied death, and we’re just gonna say her whole role in the story is to be Ellis’s mom? 😭 I mean, I suppose if you took inventory of the characters and had to assign roles to them like “protagonist”, “love interest”, “antagonist” or whatever, Ellis’s mom would just be “mother” lmfao but idk man... That just rubbed me the wrong way. It doesn’t help that I already found the characterization in the story to be one-dimensional, this was just the last nail in the coffin for me :\
And speaking of the characters—god, Ryn was so annoying!! 😩 I liked her at first, I thought the dynamic of brusque and strong gravedigger girl and injured, amicable noble boy was cute when Ryn and Ellis first met, but as the story went on Ryn just became more and more irritating to me. It felt like the author was trying way too hard to characterize her as being the antithesis of a damsel in distress, but she just ended up being so dull imo, like a caricature of the Strong, Spunky Main Girl™️ character, with stubbornness and recklessness as her most prominent traits... 😩 This might be why I was so unconvinced and bored by the romance between Ryn and Ellis? I liked Ellis a lot more than Ryn at first, but as the story went on I also grew to care less and less for him... I’m rereading my livetweets for this book because I legitimately cannot remember how the romance developed lmfao which probably says it all tbh 😹
Overall, I don’t think it’s a bad book, actually. I think maybe if I were like... thirteen or so years old I might have adored this book, so I don’t wanna lambast it too hard; I think I might just be outside of The Bone Houses’s targeted demographic. If the right person read it they’d probably love it! It just so happens that I was not that person. Oh well 😹
Started: 5/24/21
Finished: 5/26/21
HELP ME THIS WAS ONE OF THE WORST BOOKS I’VE EVER READ IN MY LIFE BUT BOY DID I HAVE FUN HATE-READING & MOCKING IT 😹 About a fourth of the way into the book I realized the writing reminded me a lot of Twilight lmfao... except Twilight was actually better from what I could remember of it! Shocking, I know! Then again, I did read Twilight as a horny preteen so my memories of it are probably embellished HAHA. Anyways, I don’t wanna talk too much about how terrible this book is because I don’t wanna melt my brain down again, so here’s a semi-quick rundown instead:
The first person pov was awful, so grating and so, so soulless. I mean, I already don’t like first person pov unless the narrator is funny or if I’m reading nonfiction, but this was just especially mind-numbing. I did not enjoy being stuck in the mind of a moody and depressed seventeen year old with not a single interesting bone in her body, and—
If I had a dime for every time Penny was described as being #NotLikeOtherGirls and the VERDANT, GREEN color of Bo’s eyes were mentioned I might’ve been able to make a dent in my exorbitant student loans 💀 Then maybe the book wouldn’t have been such a huge waste of my time, but alas... Also, I still want to know what a voice like “cold water from the tap” is supposed to sound like? Truly, what does that Mean...
Um, all of the characters were awful and boring. I know I said the characterization in The Bone Houses was one-dimensional but The Wicked Deep is even worse. Like, what’s flatter than one dimension? Whatever it is that’s the characters in The Wicked Deep. It literally has the most cliche roster of characters possible, from the free-spirited, ~artistic~ best friend, the popular Mean Girls wannabes (whom I suspect actually aren’t that bad; Penny’s just a jealous bitch in her mind), to the Mysterious Pretty Boy From Out of Town with the chiseled jaw and body of a Greek god or whatever. I distinctly remember declaring Penny’s best friend’s mom as my favorite character when she was introduced because she hadn’t said a single word yet. After she spoke I despised every single character all the way until the end.
And speaking of the characters, Hazel (in Penny’s body) and Bo were the most vapid, insipid, and blandest people ever?? Which could be one reason for why they liked each other so much, I guess?? Their romance made absolutely no sense to me, like they barely knew each other for the duration of the Swan Season drownings, yet the book wanted me to believe they were in love with each other? They were certainly physically attracted to each other—they boinked on the floor of Bo’s sandy beach cabin literally almost as soon as they had their first kiss (which they blue-balled me for 300 pages for????), and I was just like ?? Okay?? I hope you two enjoyed scraping sand and hermit crabs out of your ass cracks but y’all know like THREE (3) things about each other, at best. The intensity of their “““love””” was just completely unwarranted. Which was a problem considering the book was first and foremost a love story, I think 😹 (Also, HELLO, THEY DEFILED PENNY’S BODY WITHOUT HER CONSENT???? FUCKING GROSS??????? This is never addressed in the book btw 🙃)
Also, a lot of things in the story just didn’t make sense??? Like apparently Penny’s dad found out the way to break the Swan Sister’s curse just by buying and reading a bunch of books on magic and curses from the bookshop in their tiny-ass tourist town?? Presumably also the library?? In modern-day America???? You mean to tell me if I went and borrowed a bunch of books on magic from the library right now I might be able to break a 200 year old curse too??????? 💀 Anyways, the way to break the curse is apparently, in Hazel’s own words:
“...if I don’t allow my soul to escape but instead let this body drown with me inside, I will be the one to die. Not Penny. I will drown just like I did two centuries ago. And hopefully, if Penny’s father was right, she will survive.”
LITERALLY HOW DOES THAT EVEN WORK??? She has to DROWN IN PENNY’S BODY, like literally DIE while in Penny’s body... Doesn’t that mean Penny’s body dies too????? Otherwise, how...???? This shit doesn’t make sense!!! LMAO I still don’t get it!! 😹
Also, it cracks me up how apparently the reason why the Swan Sisters were so ridiculously irresistible to the men of the town was because of “a charm born into their blood” that originated from... get ready for it: their wildly promiscuous mother 😭 😭 😭 😭 The author really said SLUT runs in the blood, I—do I even have to say any more about this? It’s just straight up stupid lmfao
Anyways, that’s about all I can remember for The Wicked Deep. Boring characters, nonsensical romance, predictable plot twists... I’m never taking any more recommendations from the random booktuber I clicked who recommended this book with glowing reviews 🤕 I only watched like two of her videos but I felt suitably betrayed after reading this book. At least I had fun livetweeting it, though! <3
Started: 5/27/21
Finished: 6/3/21
I’m ~reviewing~ these two books together since I tried to write about them separately and it just didn’t work out 😹 Plus a lot of my gripes with the ending chapters of Six of Crows extended to and colored my reading of Crooked Kingdom so I figure it’d be easier for me to write (and for people to read) my thoughts if I just let them... flow into each other. Warning, though: I talk extensively about very specific scenes and quotes from the books so there will spoilers everywhere. I did not separate them like I did for the other books so... Yeah. If you continue on from here you will be spoiled numerous important plot points 😎
Anyways, let’s start with the things I loved about the books! 🎉
Six of Crows was my second favorite book that I read this month! ♥️ As previously stated, I haven’t read a lot of books in recent years, and even before I stopped I didn’t really read very much YA? I... am not sure how to tell if a book is considered YA, actually 😹 I literally only just now found out that the Bartimaeus Trilogy is YA! I found those books in the children’s section of Borders back in the day so I just assumed they were children’s books 💀 But now that I think of it, it has some similarities to the Six of Crows duology... 🤔 Like the alternating povs, for one... ANYWHO, objectively, I rated SoC 4/5 stars, but subjectively, it’s probably closer to 3 or 3.5 stars for me? I really, really enjoyed reading it, especially after the mess that was The Wicked Deep, but I had some misgivings about the story and the writing particularly near the end that kind of soured a lot of my enjoyment of the book.
Before I get to those misgivings though, I thought the alternating povs were a great way to show all of the action from different angles and keep the readers on their toes in both of the books, but it also kind of dragged on for me, at times? Like, it was fun and interesting to jump from person to person’s perspectives at first, but after a while I just kind of got tired of learning about the characters through flashbacks that were almost back to back? Like... I don’t know, I guess I just get bored easily? 😹 It felt a little too formulaic for me, and after some time started to feel like the characters were being fleshed out primarily through the flashbacks rather than through their interactions with each other in the present—which I personally would have preferred more. That’s part of why I liked Wylan so much, I think. I mean, aside from the fact that he just set off my 🚨 SON RADAR 🚨 almost immediately, he didn’t have his own pov chapters so I barely knew anything about him and could only watch how he changed through the other crows’ eyes. It kept me curious about him (and also worried me because I kept wondering if he might betray them at the end), and I liked learning more about him through the bits and pieces that he revealed about himself in dialogue, rather than straight up being thrown into a flashback like I was with the others. Which isn’t to say I disliked the flashbacks, exactly; they were pretty riveting once I really got into them, it’s just that I wanted... a more interesting way of getting to know the characters, I guess. 😅
But all in all, I thought SoC was rollicking good fun!!! The idea of a bunch of 15 to 18 year olds going on an impossible heist in a frost bitten foreign country was wild, and I loved how distinct each crow was from each other without any of them getting pigeonholed (too much...) into well-known character tropes. Most of the events that occurred in the book also didn’t strike me as too forced, even if I thought it was kind of annoying how almost every stage of the Ice Court plan got messed up in some meaningfully unlucky sort of way that had me thinking lmao what are the chances??
But even though I thought the book was fun, I also wasn’t really that invested for quite a while? It wasn’t until Jesper said that fateful line about how flirting with Wylan might actually be more fun than annoying him that I actually sat up and started caring about the story beyond “this is very well written!” 😹
Despite being mostly invested in Wylan and Jesper’s relationship in SoC though, individually, if I had to choose, I would’ve said that Kaz was my favorite character. And if it weren’t for that conversation aboard the Ferolind that KaNej had near the end of the book, I might’ve said Inej was my second favorite character. Right now she’s actually dead last with Matthias just barely ahead of her in my imaginary ranking list. 😹
For Matthias, I was simply deeply uncomfortable with the imagery of the drüskelle being a blonde-haired, blue-eyed death cult that hunted down people they thought were subhuman 💀 I was sort of able to get past that eventually as I kept reading the book and slowly constructed a more fantasy-like image of Fjerda, but it was very hard not to see the drüskelle as being based off of nazis at first??? And I’m not in the business of wanting to sympathize with former nazis ever, fictional or not, so I was just. Very opposed to the very idea of Matthias for much of the book 😹 I only really started warming up to him when he finally properly denounced Brum and Fjerda as a whole and started to actively try and unlearn all the shit he learned while he was a drüskelle. Also, that scene on the ship when Nina is suffering from withdrawal and he tells her to live so that he can atone for his sins and she says “You can do that without me, you know” and he puts his head in his hands and responds with “I don’t want to”—BROOOOO 😭 idk why that got me so bad, I just really liked the raw honesty and vulnerability in that, I guess...💔 Point to Matthias for getting me to feel something for him there... lmao
As for Inej, I just... whew. I started writing this ~review~ a couple days ago, so I’ve had a lot of time to reorder and reexamine my thoughts about her, and I’ve come to the conclusion that rather than dislike her as a character, I might just dislike the way Bardugo wrote her?
I’ll start off with where it all went wrong for me: chapter 42, that conversation she had with Kaz on the journey back to Ketterdam towards the end of the book. Right up until that chapter I was completely fine with her as a character—like, sure, I didn’t quite agree with every single thing she said or thought, but that’s not really a requirement for me to like a character. It’s just that, there were so many gross implications about Kaz in that last conversation that really bothered me. Chief among those is the persistent refrain of him “not being good enough” or being “undeserving” of Inej, not because of all the murders and crimes he’s committed (because all of the crows have done that to survive), but because he couldn’t... get over his trauma of skin on skin contact for her?? Or at least, that was the impression I got from the writing? Like:
“Stay in Ketterdam. Stay with me.”
She looked down at his gloved hand clutching hers. Everything in her wanted to say yes, but she would not settle for so little, not after all she’d been through. “What would be the point?”
He took a breath. “I want you to stay. I want you to … I want you.”
“You want me.” She turned the words over. Gently, she squeezed his hand. “And how will you have me, Kaz?”
He looked at her then, eyes fierce, mouth set. It was the face he wore when he was fighting.
“How will you have me?” she repeated. “Fully clothed, gloves on, your head turned away so our lips can never touch?”
He released her hand, his shoulders bunching, his gaze angry and ashamed as he turned his face to the sea.
I just???? Girl, what???? I mean, first of all, you don’t actually have to be physically intimate In That Way to have a fulfilling romantic relationship imo, and second of all, I don’t understand why Inej sees this as “[settling] for something so little”??? Like, what the fuck does that even mean? It’s not as if Kaz is avoiding skin on skin contact for shits and giggles, he’s legitimately traumatized, and she knows this!! She might not know the reason for why he’s traumatized, but many, many chapters back she noted how it took everything in him to stay still and let her touch his cheek back at the Ice Court, so how could she turn that around on him like that?? I just don’t understand? Am I misreading her or the author’s intentions here? Because to me it sounds like she’s forcing him to get over his trauma to get her to stay 🤨 Also, the next couple of lines after that makes my skin crawl too:
Maybe it was because his back was to her that she could finally speak the words. “I will have you without armour, Kaz Brekker. Or I will not have you at all.”
Speak, she begged silently. Give me a reason to stay. For all his selfishness and cruelty, Kaz was still the boy who had saved her. She wanted to believe he was worth saving, too.
I have so many problems with this??? 😹 😹 😹 First of all, I hate the idea of Kaz wearing gloves and keeping mum about his past being interpreted as him having “armor”. I might have accepted this if Kaz himself referred to his gloves and secrecy as such beforehand, but all I really had to go on was that this kid was traumatized at a horrifically young age and didn’t know how else to cope with his revulsion of skin on skin contact except by literally covering his hands and avoiding physical touch. If anything, I feel like he weaponized the gloves, since he adopted the moniker of Dirtyhands and let people guess at what was underneath the leather. And even then, if the gloves and decision to keep his past a secret were his armor, I think it’s fucking wild for Inej to demand such an ultimatum of him? “I will have you without armour... Or I will not have you at all” Like, okay, I get that it’s her right to know more about him if he expected her to stay, but damn, she couldn’t wait and, idk, compromise? Isn’t that part of what love is all about? Figuring things out together?
It’s not as if Kaz doesn’t want to tell her anything, either? He told her about Jordie when they were still on their way to Fjerda, and he thought about what would happen if he moved closer to her. Back when I read that chapter I thought I would see their relationship blossom slowly and naturally throughout the course of the book, but no, I just got that shitty conversation instead 😩 I also thought Inej of all people would be more sympathetic and understanding of Kaz’s trauma given her time at the Menagerie—and she was! ...In Crooked Kingdom when they had the wound tending scene 💀 By the time I read that part I was already pretty tired of their romance though, and rather than change how I viewed this conversation in SoC, I just ended up even more confused as to why Bardugo chose to write Inej like this in SoC? There’s so many things that Inej says and thinks and does that strike me as extremely contradictory, actually, but I’ll get to that later... Right now I am still baffled as to why Inej having an epiphany while climbing the incinerator and finding a Purpose™️ to work towards in her life apparently gives her free reign to demand things of Kaz that he just isn’t ready to give to her yet? And to have that be framed as her nobly choosing what’s best for her, to not “settle for so little” because she’s “too good” for Kaz, who might not even be “worth saving”—because that’s a thing in the book now, I guess? To judge this band of teenage thieves who’ve had to kill people for survival and weigh their sins and tragic pasts against each other to determine who is worth saving or not?? 🙄 Sorry, but... that’s gross..... lmao........
And that’s another thing too that irritated me in Crooked Kingdom. Of the many things that annoy me when I read a book, being told things instead of being shown them is very near the top. And as the story went on from SoC to CK, it just felt like Kaz’s “cruelty” was shown and reinforced less by his actions and more by the words of the other characters. He’s mean, cruel, and evil, all the other characters say. Hell, the book keeps telling me so, too, so obviously it must be true, despite evidence to the contrary! 🙄 Even Inej seems to think even less and less of Kaz as the story goes on? Which confused the hell out of me because literally in the first couple of chapters of SoC when they were introduced, Kaz and Inej have this conversation:
“No one’s setting fires at Nineteen Burstraat.”
“I heard the siren …”
“A happy accident. I take inspiration where I find it.”
“You were bluffing, then. She was never in danger.”
Kaz shrugged, unwilling to give her an answer. Inej was always trying to wring little bits of decency from him. “When everyone knows you’re a monster, you needn’t waste time doing every monstrous thing.”
I thought this was supposed to tell me that Kaz isn’t actually as much of a monster as he would like everyone to think? And that Inej knew that? Or at least suspected it? But by the time we get to the end of SoC we have her thinking “Pragmatic Kaz. Why let empathy get in the way?” despite how his facade actually cracks even more and more to show that he cares for her, at the very least, as the story goes on, like... ???????? Inej, girl, are you blind? Willfully obtuse? The fuck? LOL. I understand that she gets hung up on Kaz calling her an “investment” and deliberately going out of his way to pretend like he’s an inhuman monster, but it doesn’t make sense for her opinion of him to get worse as the story goes on when she sees him have a breakdown and faint in that prison carriage. For him to tell her that Pekka Rollins killed his brother, for him to let her touch his cheek skin to skin... I just don’t get it??? She observes these incidents as being surprising, shocking, even! Shouldn’t those have been signs that his carefully constructed mask was starting to slip???? That his humanity was peeking through? I just got the impression that Inej was way ahead of Kaz on their respective journeys towards healing, and reading that conversation on the ship between them just stunk of Kaz being punished for not being fast enough, for not being at the same point on his journey towards healing as Inej was. I hated it. LOL.
And from that conversation onwards to Crooked Kingdom, the characterization for Kaz and Inej just plummeted for me 😹 I mean, for one thing, the hostage!Inej situation felt really cheap and contrived. After I read The Conversation on the ship, I still thought, well, maybe they’ll work things out more in the remaining chapters and the next book! SIKE Inej gets captured by Van Eck’s lackeys and is away from the group for a solid chunk of CK 💀 I just?? Hello??? After the ingenuity and excitement of all the little adventures the crows had in SoC I had to read about a boring old hostage rescue in CK? 🥱 Kaz also went all-in on his asshole persona during all that time Inej was gone because apparently Inej is the only thing he cares about now! And I quote: “The rest was useless noise.” 💀 I hate that... he became so boring to me?? Lmao. I wanted to see the crows develop their relationships with each other, not watch them argue and fight because Kaz’s could not give a shit about anything or anyone else that wasn’t Inej 😐 Maybe I’m just a sap or whatever, but when I watch or consume media that promises me a “found family” I expect these characters to care for each other lmfao. And maybe Kaz could’ve slowly opened up as the story unfolded, or at least changed in any other way that didn’t have him become a complete fucking asshole to everyone that wasn’t Inej 😑 It was even worse because on the other side of the story Inej was doubting that Kaz would even come to save her!
“Kaz’s course was obvious: Ransom Kuwei, take the money, find himself a new spider to scale the walls of the Barrel and steal secrets for him. And hadn’t she told him she planned on leaving Ketterdam as soon as they were paid? Stay with me. Had he meant it? What value did her life carry in the face of the reward Kuwei might garner? Nina would never let Kaz abandon her. She’d fight with everything she had to free Inej even if she was still in the grips of parem. Matthias would stand by her with that great heart full of honor. And Jesper … well, Jesper would never do Inej harm, but he needed money badly if he didn’t want his father to lose his livelihood. He would do his best, but that might not necessarily mean what was best for her.”
The way she literally finds excuses and concessions for Matthias and Jesper and thinks of them in a positive light while she automatically assumes Kaz would just not give a fuck about her.... GIRL WHAT??? I might have believed the trajectory of her thoughts if this whole hostage situation happened before the Ice Court job, before Kaz’s Dirtyhands facade started breaking literally right under Inej’s nose, but no!! Where does she get off on thinking Matthias has a “great heart full of honor” anyway??? HELLO, HE LITERALLY WAS A PART OF A FANTASY-NAZI DEATH CULT THAT CAPTURED, TORTURED, AND BURNED GRISHA ALIVE??? ALSO, YOU ONLY KNEW HIM FOR LIKE, WHAT, TWO OR THREE WEEKS?????????????????????? Somebody explain this to me LMFAO I DONT GET IT 😹 Whatever happened to Inej “[wringing] little bits of decency” from Kaz???? Did we forget that was a thing she used to do before the Ice Court job?? Do we just ignore how he risked his life to save her before they even left the harbor??? I don’t recall him ever saying anything worse than what he already used to say to her before the Ice Court job, and back then she still tried to see the good in him, SO WHAT CHANGED???? Because Kaz certainly changed on the Ice Court job??? Am I insane for seeing all those moments of him letting Inej touch him, literally asking her to stay with him, that he WANTED her... and thinking those were tremendously significant moments? I don’t understand how Inej doesn’t see those moments as monumental either?? For all the time she’s spent with him over the years, she apparently doesn’t know him well enough to know when he’s acting differently towards her?? I just... [rubs temples] these two don’t make no sense to me, your honor!! 😩
Literally why does Inej even like Kaz if she has such a poor opinion of him in the first place? If he’s really such a terrible person, so beneath her, why in the hell does she like him??? I was never really sold on any of the romances for most of SoC (except for Wylan/Jesper), but KaNej really takes the cake for me because I just?? Don’t even really think they’re friends???? (And they never really got a chance to become friends because of the hostage thing and then the subsequent hullabaloo that happened afterwards!!) I had hopes in the beginning of SoC that they might get closer as the story went on, that I would see an actual friendship form between them beyond their implicit trust and sense of camaraderie for each other, but this. Didn’t happen!!! Or if it did, then I didn’t catch it??? Is it weird of me to want people to become friends or to at least get along with each other first before the romance starts to happen?? I just don’t understand how you can have such strong feelings for someone if you don’t at least think highly of them lmao...
And like, I can sort of understand why Kaz would like Inej, aside from her being Very Pretty, I suppose he must admire her strength and resilience, how she’s so Good™️ despite everything she’s been through. The polar opposite of him, basically—but that line of thought is so... icky to me? I am so tired of the Dude Who Obviously Hates Himself (and Desperately Needs Therapy) falls for Girl Who is Way Too Good For Him dynamic. It’s so ugly and gross and tired, imho. And it’s not even that I don’t think they could’ve worked out, it’s that I think their relationship could’ve been handled more gracefully, more thoughtfully. I hated reading about Kaz thinking about all the ways he couldn’t change or be “better” for Inej and believing himself to be unworthy of her. Like, why does his healing have to hinge on her? Why couldn’t his story have been written so that he could reconcile with his past on his own terms, for his own well-being, at his own pace?
And, even worse than Kaz thinking he doesn’t deserve Inej, all the other characters seem to think this is true, too! Like, on what grounds, exactly? How is he better or worse than all the other characters? Because he doesn’t say Nice Things to them? Because he doesn’t reassure the other characters of their worth, doesn’t validate them, doesn’t verbally tell them that he cares for them like a well-adjusted human being who didn’t have his trust betrayed and have to paddle to shore while clinging to his dead brother’s bloated body at nine years old? Idk man. I just think the whole idea of him being undeserving of things for not coming out of his ordeal retaining his innocence is awful to read. I can’t buy into the romance at all, especially when this is such a big theme for them. It would be different if maybe Inej didn’t think Kaz was incapable of empathy, if she didn’t doubt his every move, if she believed in him when no one else—not even Kaz himself—did, but... alas, that is not the case. I am still just very confused as to why she even likes him if he’s truly such a horrible person who might not even be worth saving. 🤷♀️
And speaking of “worth”, Bardugo seems to have a thing for making one half of her couples think their other halves are “too good” for them? There’s numerous instances of Kaz thinking this, and even one instance of fucking MATTHIAS thinking THIS:
“He only wished she’d separate herself from Kaz Brekker. The girl deserved better. Then again, maybe Nina deserved better than Matthias.”
I—?? Bro???? First of all, Fuck You lmfao who the hell are YOU to say that about Kaz, the fuck... If you really wanna go there, then: at least Kaz wasn’t a fantasy nazi, for god’s sake 🙄 And second of all, I am so tired!!! Of these bitches thinking their significant others are too good for them!!! Good lord!! Even Jesper thinks this about Wylan too????
“I’ll come home, Da. When the city is open again. After Wylan gets settled.”
“He’s a good lad.” Too good for me, thought Jesper.”
I just??? Huh?????? Why is this a recurring thing in a story where no one is free of sin??? It’s so irritating?? It’s such a weird position to put Inej/Nina/Wylan in, to put them on this weird pedestal above their counterparts when I personally don’t think any of them are any worse or better than the others? Even Wylan has killed people by the end of SoC!! And I know nothing about those people!! I can’t say whether he’s done less bad or more good than any of the other characters because I have no idea who he’s killed by the end of the Ice Court job! Sure, they were probably all drüskelle, but since Bardugo made it a point to have Matthias be a character capable of redemption, I can’t exactly write Every Single Drüskelle off and count their lives as worthless! All of the crows have had to do bad things in order to survive, and I can’t begrudge any of them for that or weigh their wrongdoings against each other, so all this moralizing just fucking irritated me while I was reading CK. If it weren’t for Wylan and Jesper I probably would have dropped the book and never finished it, tbh. Especially when Inej was held captive and said this to that one Suli boy who was indentured to Van Eck:
“All I know is that men like you don’t deserve the air they breathe.”
Bajan looked stung. “I’ve been nothing but kind to you. I’m not some sort of monster.”
“No, you’re the man who sits idly by, congratulating yourself on your decency, while the monster eats his fill. At least a monster has teeth and a spine.”
“That isn’t fair!”
Inej couldn’t believe the softness of this creature, that he would bid for her approval in this moment. “If you still believe in fairness, then you’ve led a very lucky life. Get out of the monster’s way, Bajan. Let’s get this over with.”
“You’ve led a very lucky life”..... the dude is literally an indentured servant? The book impresses upon me over and over that to be an indentured servant is to be a fucking slave, just by another name???? Sure, Bajan wasn’t likable, and I didn’t really care for him at all, but what exactly did Inej expect for him to do? Knowing that his boss was literally Jan Van Eck? Lmao??? When they were surrounded by so many of his guards in that moment... what else could he have done? Get killed for her sake? I thought her Suli Saints didn’t condemn people for doing what they could to survive? Also, she literally just described herself when she was insulting him? She’s the girl who sits idly by, congratulating herself on her decency, while Kaz eats his fill. Way, way, WAY later on in the book, when Inej is facing off against Dunyasha (who I thought was a ridiculous and unnecessary new character to bring in, btw?? Literally her only purpose was to have someone slow Inej down?? When this could’ve been achieved by any other thing that would’ve been more interesting?), Inej herself thinks:
“That word sounded a discordant note inside Inej. Was she innocent? She regretted the lives she’d taken, but she would take them again to save her own life, the lives of her friends. She’d stolen. She’d helped Kaz blackmail good men and bad. Could she say the choices she’d made were the only choices put before her?”
She just strikes me as so... hypocritical, with like no self-awareness sometimes 😕 I feel like I’m supposed to see her as unfailingly good, almost infallible, with so many of the characters repeatedly saying she’s Too Good, and I just... don’t really care for characters like that? Even in some of the wysper fics I’ve read she’s been described as a “saint” in a lot of them and.. ugh LOL. It’s not that I dislike her, exactly, I just don’t like characters like her, I guess. And it feels a bit heartless of me to say this, knowing the horrors of what she went through... But I think her strength and sense of justice could’ve been portrayed in better, less contradictory ways. And actually, I might not have even minded that so much if I could’ve counted that as one of her faults—she certainly would’ve been more interesting to me if she was less sure of her righteousness and questioned her morality more often than she did other people’s—but those moments of contradiction seem less like intentional characterization and more like the author couldn’t seem to make up her mind on how to write Inej sometimes? Like, during the bandage changing scene, she and Kaz have this conversation:
“Is that what makes you different from Rollins? That you’ll leave nothing behind?”
“I am not Pekka Rollins or his shadow. I don’t sell girls into brothels. I don’t con helpless kids out of their money.”
“Look at the floor of the Crow Club, Kaz.” Her voice was gentle, patient—why was it making him want to set fire to something? “Think of every racket and card game and theft you’ve run. Did all those men and women deserve what they got or what they had taken from them?”
And then later on at the end of the book when they’re standing at the harbor:
“It’s not just the slavers. It’s the procurers, the customers, the Barrel bosses, the politicians. It’s everyone who turns a blind eye to suffering when there’s money to be made.”
“I’m a Barrel boss.”
“You would never sell someone, Kaz. You know better than anyone that you’re not just one more boss scraping for the best margin.”
Am I... wrong to be baffled by this?? Is she not contradicting herself here? Like, maybe I’m just really stupid and not seeing something very obvious but I genuinely do not understand how she went from saying Kaz is no different from any of the other Barrel Bosses to saying that he is different from them. 😶❓❓❓ Huh?? Also, it’s never really talked about in the books at all, but I find it kind of hilarious that if Jan Van Eck hadn’t double-crossed the crows, Inej and all the others would’ve gotten their money, and Inej could’ve had her slave-hunting ship earlier... by trading Kuwei—a real, live human being, a CHILD—over to the Merchant Council to become a political pawn and who knows what else 😹 Like... does that not also count as selling someone? 😹 Did she not stop to think about that? Am I not supposed to think about how questionable that is? LOL.
TL;DR basically boooo KaNej they should’ve just been friends boo the hostage situation boo the unnecessary Dunyasha character boo the constant moralizing etc etc 😹 I am not kidding when I say Wylan and Jesper hard carried Crooked Kingdom for me. I don’t regret reading it, because I got to learn more about Wylan and Jesper and see them have the most wholesome friendship and romance ever 🥺 I’m still not over Wylan noticing Jesper’s perfect lips upon first meeting him and Jesper thinking of Wylan as a “lost prince who had woken in the wrong story” at the same time.... h E L P I LOVE THEM.... FUCK....ch-chenji au—
OH! Also, before I forget: I thought Matthias’s death was an unnecessary cop out? I was so miffed by it? Like, beyond the fact that I’d grown to like him a lot by the end of Crooked Kingdom, I just think killing him off was dumb and seemed to me like another instance of a story pulling the Death is the Ultimate Atonement route 😑 For him to die while trying to change the mind of a young drüskelle... knowing how long it took for HIM to unlearn his own shit... I just... what? All I could think of was how he said he wanted Nina to stay alive so he could atone for his sins when they were still on the ship, and then he DIES while trying to do good? What the fuck even was the point of his death? To make the story seem more “realistic”? Because it would’ve been too good to be true if everyone made it out alive? I call bullshit on that because the entire fucking story was already unrealistic from the start LMAO. The main characters are fucking TEENAGERS who’ve already pulled off countless impossible missions. Realism is the last fucking thing I was expecting from the story 🙄 It’s not even that Matthias was a favorite character of mine, I just feel offended by how his death seemed to just be a blatant slap to my face intended to make me cry or feel sad. Like, no, fuck you, I will not be sad over something so forced??? Over tragedy for tragedy’s sake?? 😹 Especially because his killer was someone no one, not even Kaz, could’ve foreseen; just some nameless drüskelle kid who somehow managed to tail Matthias and kill him with a single bullet... after everything he’s been through. 🙄 I just. Ridiculous. So obviously shoehorned in just to make readers sad, like oohhh who could’ve seen this coming, sometimes shit just doesn’t work out, blah blah blah... I could say the same thing about all the different ways the crows’ plans got messed up in weirdly specific and unrealistic ways (Brum being alive and happening to remember Nina? Jan Van Eck somehow interpreting Kaz’s glance at Inej as an indication of his “biggest weakness”? (Hated that too, btw), Pekka Rollins just happening to know Kaz and Wylan would break into Jan Van Eck’s study to steal something?), but whatever. As Inej would say, what would be the point?
Anyways... yeah. I can’t remember what else I had to say 😹 I feel like I just ranted more than anything else in this last section but what can I say... I’m a chatterbox with a lot of Opinions 😹 For all my complaints and confusion though, I still really enjoyed the SoC duology 💖 I’m just a very persnickety reader when it comes to published books and also don’t really wish to look into the SoC fandom so I have no idea how common or ridiculous my thoughts are compared to other people’s! 😸 In the end I’m mostly just writing these for my own benefit anyway, so I suppose none of that really matters much.
Oooh, I’m planning on watching Shadow and Bone too, eventually, though I have no intention (for now) of reading any other books from the Grishaverse, but I’m curious to see how I’ll like the show after I’ve read the books! Anu said Jesper is perfect on it so I am very ready to 😻 😻 😻 😻 😻!! Will probably also compare the show to the books a lot, and tbh kind of hoping it’ll sell me KaNej more than the books did 😹 I did watch a couple of movies and animated shorts in May that I wanna write about eventually, so I’ll save the Shadow and Bone commentary for that future post =u= If I recall anything else I have to say about any of the above books, I’ll probably silently add to this post but for now, I think this is all I’ve got. I will seriously be impressed if anybody actually read everything I wrote up to this point 😹 😹 😹 What did I say about going insane and writing walls of text? Jfc...
じゃね 🤠
And what better way to pool all my wordvomit thoughts into one place for ease of reference and posterity than to make a dw account! Right? This is a thing people do now? Or again? Keep a journal of sorts? I’m getting flashbacks to my early days as a baby kpop stan reading super junior smut on livejournal... wow... formative years, truly. Kinda also hoping writing these pseudo-book reviews will encourage me to stop thinking in 280 characters or less and actually, idk, exercise some intelligent thought every once in a while?? Jog the brain muscle a little? I fear this may be indulging my loudmouth tendencies, though... We’ll see how I fare with that 😹 Maybe I’ll actually learn the art of brevity writing these... or maybe I’ll go insane and write gigantic walls of text! (Personally I am placing my bets on the latter).
ANYWAYS, without further ado, here are my very questionable thoughts about all the books I’ve read so far:
Unfinished/Dropped
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (✦✦✧✧✧)
Um, I picked this up because I wanted to read “gay ghost stories” (literally what I googled while trying to find books) and this came up on a list of sapphic novels that I randomly clicked on. The selling point for this book was 1) the awesome cover and 2) the blurb, which described this book as containing “space necromancer lesbians”, which made me think, sweet, this sounds right up my alley!
Except it wasn’t! Like, it had all the elements of a story that I should’ve enjoyed, but it took me over a hundred pages to decide if I liked the protagonist (Gideon)—and even then, I didn’t really like her all that much 🤕 Also, I wasn’t really buying the enemies to lovers trope with this book? I mean, for one thing, Gideon is Harrow’s indentured servant (did not know that beforehand), which, like, I’m not completely opposed to, but felt pretty uncomfortable with because even after a hundred pages of reading, Gideon and Harrow had barely expressed any sort of positive emotion towards each other? Like, there were hints of Gideon caring for Harrow in the typical tsundere, rough-affectionate sort of way, but Harrow was barely even present throughout much of what I’d read, and given the difference in their social status, I needed to be—I expected to be—sold their relationship pretty aggressively to believe in the romance and accept the Master/Servant thing for what it was. I was also curious to see how the power imbalance would be handled, but they mostly just kinda beat each other up a lot lmao. And whenever they did deign to stop going at each other’s throats (both physically and figuratively), none of it really... landed for me? Like, it all just felt... kind of hollow. There was no spark, no depth, no emotional investment, and I just couldn’t bring myself to really care about the main characters. In the end, I wound up being more interested in the side characters, and one of them DIED LMAO 😹
I might pick it up again, eventually, since I did attempt to read this book back when my brain hadn’t yet flipped the reading switch on, and I’m kind of curious to know more about Palamedes, but another thing I wasn’t super fond of was this book’s writing style. God, it was so hard to read at times? Like, I don’t know if my vocabulary just isn’t up to scratch, but I found myself looking up what a word meant on nearly every page, and the descriptive language just wasn’t jiving with me at all. I couldn’t picture a lot of what the environments looked like, which was a huge detriment to me since I think primarily in images and this story was set in space, on another planet! I wanted to be able to imagine the places they went to in vivid detail, but instead I just found myself zoning out halfway through most of the non-dialogue paragraphs and having to reread some sentences over and over to get them to stick in my head.
That said, I’ve seen a couple of fanarts for this book recently (and I don’t usually see book fanart on my twitter timeline), so some people evidently enjoyed the book. Maybe I just needed to wait and read for a little longer for it get better, who knows? I’m of the opinion that I shouldn’t have to wait for a book/movie/show to Get Good, though; it should just be good from the very beginning? 😹 But yeah, I’ll be putting this book on the back burner for now.
Finished
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (✦✦✦✦✧)
Started: 5/21/21
Finished: 5/22/21
So I rated this 4 stars to try to be objective but to be honest... in my heart, Mexican Gothic is 5 stars 😔✊ This book just feels like it was tailor-made for me. It had so many elements and themes and tropes to it that I adore (haunted houses wreathed in mist and isolated from the village? Check! Frail, wispy Victorian twinks with a gentle demeanor? Check! Smart and charismatic non-white female protagonist? Also check! SPOOKY DREAMS? Hell yeah, check! A tragic mystery pieced together through rumors and letters? Check check check!!), and I literally could not put it down until I finished it in like one day. And I’ll probably always have a soft spot for this book in the years to come because of how it broke my decade(s?) long reading dry spell LOL. It’s been a while since I read it though, so my thoughts and feelings aren’t as fresh, and I wonder if I’d change my mind about some things on a second read-through 🤔 Oh well! For now, my thoughts as I remember them are:
UM, I was obsessed with the love story between Noemi and Francis? They were actually the driving force for me to finish this book at breakneck speed 😹 Which is unusual, because I tend to be really hard to convince when it comes to romance in novels. They were just so? Perfect? For each other? Their romance was so pure and lovely and genuine, and the progression of their relationship from friendship to Something More to Intense, Requited Love was so?? Good???? I was so taken in by them, I think I screenshotted nearly every conversation they had and read them over and over enough to memorize some passages lmao. There’s this passage in the book where Noemi talks about how she thinks marriage is a “rotten deal” because men would only be dazzled by their wives for a brief period of time before losing interest later on, and then she says:
“Besides, boys her age were dull, always talking about the parties they had been to the previous week or the one they were planning to go to the week after. Easy, shallow men. Yet the thought of anyone more substantial made her nervous, for she was trapped between competing desires, a desire for a more meaningful connection and the desire to never change. She wished for eternal youth and endless merriment.”
Ignoring the foreshadowing in that paragraph, Noemi’s desire for a “more meaningful connection” really stuck with me for a while because that’s what both she and Francis eventually found in each other. And even though the events of the book changed them, they didn’t really have to change any substantial parts of who they were for each other—they simply were exactly what the other needed 🥺 I suppose you could argue that Francis did change for Noemi near the end of the book when he finally decided to Do Something About the Situation (haha, I hope that’s not too spoilery...), but that felt to me like it was as much for himself as it was for her, and in the end, he was still the person Noemi fell in love with and vice versa (though now they also have PTSD to deal with lmao).
Also, all of their conversations and dialogue sounded super natural to me, whether they were just talking casually or having plot-heavy discussions, Moreno-Garcia really convinced me that Noemi and Francis genuinely liked each other’s company 🥺 Noemi wanted a boy who wasn’t dull, who didn’t put up pretenses just to court her but could engage her in intelligent conversation and didn’t talk down to her, and she got that with Francis 😭💖 He was so obviously head over heels for her, probably right from the very beginning, and I just? Adore him? He was so sweet and gentle and soft-spoken with Noemi nearly always, and even though he was timid and shy, he was also disarmingly honest about how much he admired her and liked her, and I just!!! SCREAM. I mean, no wonder Noemi fell in love with him—it just made sense!!! 😭😭😭
Also, he was so ridiculously Careful with the way he treated her?? Not just in speech, but also physically; there’s a moment about halfway through the story where Noemi almost figures out the secret of High Place and Francis panics and grabs her wrists and Noemi just thinks about how she couldn’t remember him ever touching her before then, and I just?? I’m so obsessed??? [Jisung voice] Carefully... as if I’m handling Chenle... Yes, I’m just gonna say it now: Francis reminds me of Jisung and Noemi reminds me of Chenle. Yes, I’m fucking insane, thanks for noticing!
Holy shit, okay this is already way too long for a book that I can barely remember much about, so a quick rundown of my other thoughts:
- Overall loved Moreno-Garcia’s writing style!! <333 It was simple enough that I didn’t get confused at any point in the story, but still richly evocative and just the right amount of atmospheric to completely immerse me in the world and story <3 I also thought all the references and nods to classic gothic novels and tropes were really fun to pick out, too. I was surprised by how much I could recognize from when I took a class on gothic horror back in uni. I almost want to read Wuthering Heights again but I don’t think I’d enjoy it as much as I did this book lmao 😹
- I really liked how amidst all the spooky supernatural shit going on, the ever-present, looming threat of whiteness, colonialism, and racism—all very real things—were at the root of the horror in the story. Because in the end, what’s scarier than a racist old colonialist white dude practicing eugenics amirite 😭 The simultaneous disgust and desire the Doyles had for Noemi’s brown body was also interesting to read in the context of eugenics because of how their efforts to preserve their whiteness and “superiority” (through inbreeding... help) eventually led to them needing “inferior races” to continue their legacy, which... like, lmfao. The irony 😹🤌 (also, side note: I thought it was fucking hilarious how being able to speak Spanish was one of Noemi’s advantages in the story 😹 I can’t remember ever seeing the ability to speak more than one language used in a horror story in this way before, so I thought that was really cool!)
- I’m used to psychosexual trauma and fuckery in horror so I wasn’t really surprised by all the attempted rape and sexual assault in the story (though they were still hard to read; I admit I skimmed some scenes lol), but I did not like the implication that deep down beneath her fear and hatred and disgust, Noemi had some sort of primal, carnal desire for Virgil?? I know she was an unreliable narrator during those parts because of the Gloom’s growing influence on her mind, but I still personally couldn’t appreciate it even from a plot point perspective 😔 I’ve just read too many things where the victim has thoughts about wanting to indulge in some unnamable, animalistic lust for the person literally trying to rape them and I just. Am done with that lmao. Oh, I guess this could count for why I took off a star on the rating! :D See, I did have a reason 😹
- I REALLY LOVED THE ENDING??? 😭 It was a little bit open-ended, with some hints of possible roadblocks for the main characters in the future, but the hopeful, gentle note of the last paragraph just struck me as so heartfelt and sweet and so full of belief in love that it banished all my worries for the characters and just... fit? So perfectly for the ending? 🥺 I was wondering if Moreno-Garcia would do that thing horror writers sometimes do where they pull a SIKE BITCH YOU THOUGHT at the end of the story and reveal that the bad guys are actually not dead yet, but she didn’t—but she also did not completely tie up every single loose end in the story, which was just *chef’s kiss* 🥰
And that’s it for my thoughts on the book! One day when I do a reread I will probably write another post dedicated solely to Noemi and Francis because I had to cut myself short while writing about them here and I STILL HAVE SO MUCH TO SAY I JUST WANNA READ FANFIC OF THEM BEING THE GRAD STUDENT POWER COUPLE OF THE CENTURY BUT UNFORTUNATELY THERE IS ONLY ONE FIC OF THEM ON AO3 AND I—ahem. Yes, uh....... if I ever write a chenji mexican gothic au in the future do not be surprised 💀
The Bone Houses by Emily Llyod-Jones (✦✦✧✧✧)
Started: 5/23/21
Finished: 5/24/21
This book was just kind of very disappointing for me. It’s not bad by any means, it just didn’t blow me away like I expected it to, which may have been my fault for having set the bar too high 😹 It just had so much promise in the beginning, I was so intrigued by the mystery of the forest and how the bone houses (aka zombies) came to be, but the story moved so slowly that by the time the main characters actually started on their journey through said forest I was on the last dregs of my patience LOL. I think I actually said the book was starting to feel like a chore to read when I was livetweeting it, but I’d mistakenly bought the book (it wasn’t available on the e-library app I’m using and I was so sure I’d like it... 😔), so I was determined to finish it.
My biggest problem with the writing was probably how straightforward and surface-level it seemed? I tend to really enjoy lyrical, almost musical prose, and the first chapter with it’s fairy tale-esque tone and style kind of tricked me into thinking that’s how the rest of the story was gonna be like, and boy, was I wrong 😹 There were moments where Ryn and Ellis (the two main characters) would talk about objectively Very Sad Things but I just... couldn’t feel anything for them in those moments? Like, they would talk about grief and loss and loneliness and the feeling of never belonging, but the lines felt so stiff and stilted to me, like I was being shown cue cards that said and this is where you should feel sad for the characters or this is where you’re supposed to cry and I just... never felt like I was in the story enough to forget that I was just reading it? If that makes sense, lmao... Not even the Big, Emotional Climax at the end got to me (partly because I think it was supposed to be a big reveal of one of the book’s mysteries but I’d already guessed it beforehand and wasn’t super impressed), which was just... a huge bummer 😔 I also had a problem with the way that scene played out too, which contains a huge spoiler so I’ll be putting it under a cut lmao (not that I think anyone will read this book with my lackluster review on it but... just in case 😹):
BEWARE OF SPOILERS
So, TL;DR the reason why there are bone houses/zombies in the forest is because many, many years ago, the Otherking’s (a Celtic deity, I think?) cauldron of rebirth cracked and spilled its contents onto the floor when a thief tried to steal it from the woman who owned it at the time. The thief had mistakenly shot and killed the woman’s son, whom she had tried to resurrect with the cauldron. While running away, the water from the cauldron soaked into the thief’s cloak and when he stepped into the lake near the castle, it spread the magic into the rivers and creeks and roots of the mountain, thus resurrecting every dead thing in the forest every night since.
To break the curse, Ryn thought that the cauldron needed to be broken properly once and for all, which turned out to be wrong. The magic that was actually keeping the curse alive came from Ellis’s mother—the woman in the story. Ellis was the once-dead son who’d been shot by the thief. I actually am not quite sure on the details here, but somehow Ellis left the castle where his mother stayed for some reason?? As a small child with no memory of where he came from? He got picked up by a prince that lived near the forest and grew up as a sort-of-but-not-really-noble until he goes on a quest to learn more about his past and find his parents. Earlier on in the book, Ryn tells Ellis that one way to defeat otherfolk or other creatures of magic was to speak their “true name”:
Ellis appeared unimpressed. “So if you were one of the otherfolk, I could say ‘Aderyn’ and you’d be powerless against me?”
She pointed a finger at him. “My name means ‘bird,’ so probably not. But if my name were Farmer, and I was a farmer, and my whole life was farming, then perhaps.”
“So it’s not just a name,” said Ellis. “You have to pin down their role, their identity.”
And herein lies my problem with the big emotional climax of the story: to break the “curse” of the cauldron of rebirth, Ellis speaks the woman’s—his mother’s—true name, which was... “Mam.” On the one hand, I get it. She’s unrecognizable by the time Ellis and Ryn find her, literally just bones clutching the cauldron, so it takes a while for it to really sink in that Ellis had really found his mother, that he’d actually learned the truth of what happened to his parents. And that his mother loved him so much she waited for him to come back even in death, and that that love was what kept the magic of the cauldron of rebirth alive all those years. Rereading the scene again, it actually kind of Hits now that I’m reading it without the baggage of my growing annoyance over other things in the book at the back of my mind 😹
But as was stated earlier on in the book, a “true name” entails one’s entire role or identity, your whole life, and I was kind of... disappointed? That Ellis’s mom’s character could be boiled down to just being his mother? 😹 Like, here we have a woman who had to deal with the grief of her husband being unjustly killed by greedy princes who wanted the cauldron, who took her son and journeyed into the forest to find Castell Sidi and hide out there to protect what was left of her family, whose love was literally so strong it defied death, and we’re just gonna say her whole role in the story is to be Ellis’s mom? 😭 I mean, I suppose if you took inventory of the characters and had to assign roles to them like “protagonist”, “love interest”, “antagonist” or whatever, Ellis’s mom would just be “mother” lmfao but idk man... That just rubbed me the wrong way. It doesn’t help that I already found the characterization in the story to be one-dimensional, this was just the last nail in the coffin for me :\
And speaking of the characters—god, Ryn was so annoying!! 😩 I liked her at first, I thought the dynamic of brusque and strong gravedigger girl and injured, amicable noble boy was cute when Ryn and Ellis first met, but as the story went on Ryn just became more and more irritating to me. It felt like the author was trying way too hard to characterize her as being the antithesis of a damsel in distress, but she just ended up being so dull imo, like a caricature of the Strong, Spunky Main Girl™️ character, with stubbornness and recklessness as her most prominent traits... 😩 This might be why I was so unconvinced and bored by the romance between Ryn and Ellis? I liked Ellis a lot more than Ryn at first, but as the story went on I also grew to care less and less for him... I’m rereading my livetweets for this book because I legitimately cannot remember how the romance developed lmfao which probably says it all tbh 😹
Overall, I don’t think it’s a bad book, actually. I think maybe if I were like... thirteen or so years old I might have adored this book, so I don’t wanna lambast it too hard; I think I might just be outside of The Bone Houses’s targeted demographic. If the right person read it they’d probably love it! It just so happens that I was not that person. Oh well 😹
The Wicked Deep by Shea Ernshaw (✦✧✧✧✧)
Started: 5/24/21
Finished: 5/26/21
HELP ME THIS WAS ONE OF THE WORST BOOKS I’VE EVER READ IN MY LIFE BUT BOY DID I HAVE FUN HATE-READING & MOCKING IT 😹 About a fourth of the way into the book I realized the writing reminded me a lot of Twilight lmfao... except Twilight was actually better from what I could remember of it! Shocking, I know! Then again, I did read Twilight as a horny preteen so my memories of it are probably embellished HAHA. Anyways, I don’t wanna talk too much about how terrible this book is because I don’t wanna melt my brain down again, so here’s a semi-quick rundown instead:
The first person pov was awful, so grating and so, so soulless. I mean, I already don’t like first person pov unless the narrator is funny or if I’m reading nonfiction, but this was just especially mind-numbing. I did not enjoy being stuck in the mind of a moody and depressed seventeen year old with not a single interesting bone in her body, and—
SPOILER ALERT
I know it was because the author wanted the Big Reveal of Penny being possessed by one of the Swan sisters to be as shocking as possible, but the idea of a 200 year old vengeful spirit’s thoughts and emotions being virtually indiscernible from some random 17 year old in Oregon’s was kind of hilarious to me? Like you would think the mind of a Swan sister would be more interesting... but nope! The hole my dog dug on the beach to bury my wild-caught pet crab was deeper than Hazel Swan’s psyche tbh. And it was not a deep hole.If I had a dime for every time Penny was described as being #NotLikeOtherGirls and the VERDANT, GREEN color of Bo’s eyes were mentioned I might’ve been able to make a dent in my exorbitant student loans 💀 Then maybe the book wouldn’t have been such a huge waste of my time, but alas... Also, I still want to know what a voice like “cold water from the tap” is supposed to sound like? Truly, what does that Mean...
Um, all of the characters were awful and boring. I know I said the characterization in The Bone Houses was one-dimensional but The Wicked Deep is even worse. Like, what’s flatter than one dimension? Whatever it is that’s the characters in The Wicked Deep. It literally has the most cliche roster of characters possible, from the free-spirited, ~artistic~ best friend, the popular Mean Girls wannabes (whom I suspect actually aren’t that bad; Penny’s just a jealous bitch in her mind), to the Mysterious Pretty Boy From Out of Town with the chiseled jaw and body of a Greek god or whatever. I distinctly remember declaring Penny’s best friend’s mom as my favorite character when she was introduced because she hadn’t said a single word yet. After she spoke I despised every single character all the way until the end.
And speaking of the characters, Hazel (in Penny’s body) and Bo were the most vapid, insipid, and blandest people ever?? Which could be one reason for why they liked each other so much, I guess?? Their romance made absolutely no sense to me, like they barely knew each other for the duration of the Swan Season drownings, yet the book wanted me to believe they were in love with each other? They were certainly physically attracted to each other—they boinked on the floor of Bo’s sandy beach cabin literally almost as soon as they had their first kiss (which they blue-balled me for 300 pages for????), and I was just like ?? Okay?? I hope you two enjoyed scraping sand and hermit crabs out of your ass cracks but y’all know like THREE (3) things about each other, at best. The intensity of their “““love””” was just completely unwarranted. Which was a problem considering the book was first and foremost a love story, I think 😹 (Also, HELLO, THEY DEFILED PENNY’S BODY WITHOUT HER CONSENT???? FUCKING GROSS??????? This is never addressed in the book btw 🙃)
SPOILER ALERT
Also, a lot of things in the story just didn’t make sense??? Like apparently Penny’s dad found out the way to break the Swan Sister’s curse just by buying and reading a bunch of books on magic and curses from the bookshop in their tiny-ass tourist town?? Presumably also the library?? In modern-day America???? You mean to tell me if I went and borrowed a bunch of books on magic from the library right now I might be able to break a 200 year old curse too??????? 💀 Anyways, the way to break the curse is apparently, in Hazel’s own words:
“...if I don’t allow my soul to escape but instead let this body drown with me inside, I will be the one to die. Not Penny. I will drown just like I did two centuries ago. And hopefully, if Penny’s father was right, she will survive.”
LITERALLY HOW DOES THAT EVEN WORK??? She has to DROWN IN PENNY’S BODY, like literally DIE while in Penny’s body... Doesn’t that mean Penny’s body dies too????? Otherwise, how...???? This shit doesn’t make sense!!! LMAO I still don’t get it!! 😹
Also, it cracks me up how apparently the reason why the Swan Sisters were so ridiculously irresistible to the men of the town was because of “a charm born into their blood” that originated from... get ready for it: their wildly promiscuous mother 😭 😭 😭 😭 The author really said SLUT runs in the blood, I—do I even have to say any more about this? It’s just straight up stupid lmfao
Anyways, that’s about all I can remember for The Wicked Deep. Boring characters, nonsensical romance, predictable plot twists... I’m never taking any more recommendations from the random booktuber I clicked who recommended this book with glowing reviews 🤕 I only watched like two of her videos but I felt suitably betrayed after reading this book. At least I had fun livetweeting it, though! <3
Six of Crows (✦✦✦✦✧) and Crooked Kingdom (✦✦✦✧✧) by Leigh Bardugo
Started: 5/27/21
Finished: 6/3/21
I’m ~reviewing~ these two books together since I tried to write about them separately and it just didn’t work out 😹 Plus a lot of my gripes with the ending chapters of Six of Crows extended to and colored my reading of Crooked Kingdom so I figure it’d be easier for me to write (and for people to read) my thoughts if I just let them... flow into each other. Warning, though: I talk extensively about very specific scenes and quotes from the books so there will spoilers everywhere. I did not separate them like I did for the other books so... Yeah. If you continue on from here you will be spoiled numerous important plot points 😎
Anyways, let’s start with the things I loved about the books! 🎉
Six of Crows was my second favorite book that I read this month! ♥️ As previously stated, I haven’t read a lot of books in recent years, and even before I stopped I didn’t really read very much YA? I... am not sure how to tell if a book is considered YA, actually 😹 I literally only just now found out that the Bartimaeus Trilogy is YA! I found those books in the children’s section of Borders back in the day so I just assumed they were children’s books 💀 But now that I think of it, it has some similarities to the Six of Crows duology... 🤔 Like the alternating povs, for one... ANYWHO, objectively, I rated SoC 4/5 stars, but subjectively, it’s probably closer to 3 or 3.5 stars for me? I really, really enjoyed reading it, especially after the mess that was The Wicked Deep, but I had some misgivings about the story and the writing particularly near the end that kind of soured a lot of my enjoyment of the book.
Before I get to those misgivings though, I thought the alternating povs were a great way to show all of the action from different angles and keep the readers on their toes in both of the books, but it also kind of dragged on for me, at times? Like, it was fun and interesting to jump from person to person’s perspectives at first, but after a while I just kind of got tired of learning about the characters through flashbacks that were almost back to back? Like... I don’t know, I guess I just get bored easily? 😹 It felt a little too formulaic for me, and after some time started to feel like the characters were being fleshed out primarily through the flashbacks rather than through their interactions with each other in the present—which I personally would have preferred more. That’s part of why I liked Wylan so much, I think. I mean, aside from the fact that he just set off my 🚨 SON RADAR 🚨 almost immediately, he didn’t have his own pov chapters so I barely knew anything about him and could only watch how he changed through the other crows’ eyes. It kept me curious about him (and also worried me because I kept wondering if he might betray them at the end), and I liked learning more about him through the bits and pieces that he revealed about himself in dialogue, rather than straight up being thrown into a flashback like I was with the others. Which isn’t to say I disliked the flashbacks, exactly; they were pretty riveting once I really got into them, it’s just that I wanted... a more interesting way of getting to know the characters, I guess. 😅
But all in all, I thought SoC was rollicking good fun!!! The idea of a bunch of 15 to 18 year olds going on an impossible heist in a frost bitten foreign country was wild, and I loved how distinct each crow was from each other without any of them getting pigeonholed (too much...) into well-known character tropes. Most of the events that occurred in the book also didn’t strike me as too forced, even if I thought it was kind of annoying how almost every stage of the Ice Court plan got messed up in some meaningfully unlucky sort of way that had me thinking lmao what are the chances??
But even though I thought the book was fun, I also wasn’t really that invested for quite a while? It wasn’t until Jesper said that fateful line about how flirting with Wylan might actually be more fun than annoying him that I actually sat up and started caring about the story beyond “this is very well written!” 😹
Despite being mostly invested in Wylan and Jesper’s relationship in SoC though, individually, if I had to choose, I would’ve said that Kaz was my favorite character. And if it weren’t for that conversation aboard the Ferolind that KaNej had near the end of the book, I might’ve said Inej was my second favorite character. Right now she’s actually dead last with Matthias just barely ahead of her in my imaginary ranking list. 😹
For Matthias, I was simply deeply uncomfortable with the imagery of the drüskelle being a blonde-haired, blue-eyed death cult that hunted down people they thought were subhuman 💀 I was sort of able to get past that eventually as I kept reading the book and slowly constructed a more fantasy-like image of Fjerda, but it was very hard not to see the drüskelle as being based off of nazis at first??? And I’m not in the business of wanting to sympathize with former nazis ever, fictional or not, so I was just. Very opposed to the very idea of Matthias for much of the book 😹 I only really started warming up to him when he finally properly denounced Brum and Fjerda as a whole and started to actively try and unlearn all the shit he learned while he was a drüskelle. Also, that scene on the ship when Nina is suffering from withdrawal and he tells her to live so that he can atone for his sins and she says “You can do that without me, you know” and he puts his head in his hands and responds with “I don’t want to”—BROOOOO 😭 idk why that got me so bad, I just really liked the raw honesty and vulnerability in that, I guess...💔 Point to Matthias for getting me to feel something for him there... lmao
As for Inej, I just... whew. I started writing this ~review~ a couple days ago, so I’ve had a lot of time to reorder and reexamine my thoughts about her, and I’ve come to the conclusion that rather than dislike her as a character, I might just dislike the way Bardugo wrote her?
I’ll start off with where it all went wrong for me: chapter 42, that conversation she had with Kaz on the journey back to Ketterdam towards the end of the book. Right up until that chapter I was completely fine with her as a character—like, sure, I didn’t quite agree with every single thing she said or thought, but that’s not really a requirement for me to like a character. It’s just that, there were so many gross implications about Kaz in that last conversation that really bothered me. Chief among those is the persistent refrain of him “not being good enough” or being “undeserving” of Inej, not because of all the murders and crimes he’s committed (because all of the crows have done that to survive), but because he couldn’t... get over his trauma of skin on skin contact for her?? Or at least, that was the impression I got from the writing? Like:
“Stay in Ketterdam. Stay with me.”
She looked down at his gloved hand clutching hers. Everything in her wanted to say yes, but she would not settle for so little, not after all she’d been through. “What would be the point?”
He took a breath. “I want you to stay. I want you to … I want you.”
“You want me.” She turned the words over. Gently, she squeezed his hand. “And how will you have me, Kaz?”
He looked at her then, eyes fierce, mouth set. It was the face he wore when he was fighting.
“How will you have me?” she repeated. “Fully clothed, gloves on, your head turned away so our lips can never touch?”
He released her hand, his shoulders bunching, his gaze angry and ashamed as he turned his face to the sea.
I just???? Girl, what???? I mean, first of all, you don’t actually have to be physically intimate In That Way to have a fulfilling romantic relationship imo, and second of all, I don’t understand why Inej sees this as “[settling] for something so little”??? Like, what the fuck does that even mean? It’s not as if Kaz is avoiding skin on skin contact for shits and giggles, he’s legitimately traumatized, and she knows this!! She might not know the reason for why he’s traumatized, but many, many chapters back she noted how it took everything in him to stay still and let her touch his cheek back at the Ice Court, so how could she turn that around on him like that?? I just don’t understand? Am I misreading her or the author’s intentions here? Because to me it sounds like she’s forcing him to get over his trauma to get her to stay 🤨 Also, the next couple of lines after that makes my skin crawl too:
Maybe it was because his back was to her that she could finally speak the words. “I will have you without armour, Kaz Brekker. Or I will not have you at all.”
Speak, she begged silently. Give me a reason to stay. For all his selfishness and cruelty, Kaz was still the boy who had saved her. She wanted to believe he was worth saving, too.
I have so many problems with this??? 😹 😹 😹 First of all, I hate the idea of Kaz wearing gloves and keeping mum about his past being interpreted as him having “armor”. I might have accepted this if Kaz himself referred to his gloves and secrecy as such beforehand, but all I really had to go on was that this kid was traumatized at a horrifically young age and didn’t know how else to cope with his revulsion of skin on skin contact except by literally covering his hands and avoiding physical touch. If anything, I feel like he weaponized the gloves, since he adopted the moniker of Dirtyhands and let people guess at what was underneath the leather. And even then, if the gloves and decision to keep his past a secret were his armor, I think it’s fucking wild for Inej to demand such an ultimatum of him? “I will have you without armour... Or I will not have you at all” Like, okay, I get that it’s her right to know more about him if he expected her to stay, but damn, she couldn’t wait and, idk, compromise? Isn’t that part of what love is all about? Figuring things out together?
It’s not as if Kaz doesn’t want to tell her anything, either? He told her about Jordie when they were still on their way to Fjerda, and he thought about what would happen if he moved closer to her. Back when I read that chapter I thought I would see their relationship blossom slowly and naturally throughout the course of the book, but no, I just got that shitty conversation instead 😩 I also thought Inej of all people would be more sympathetic and understanding of Kaz’s trauma given her time at the Menagerie—and she was! ...In Crooked Kingdom when they had the wound tending scene 💀 By the time I read that part I was already pretty tired of their romance though, and rather than change how I viewed this conversation in SoC, I just ended up even more confused as to why Bardugo chose to write Inej like this in SoC? There’s so many things that Inej says and thinks and does that strike me as extremely contradictory, actually, but I’ll get to that later... Right now I am still baffled as to why Inej having an epiphany while climbing the incinerator and finding a Purpose™️ to work towards in her life apparently gives her free reign to demand things of Kaz that he just isn’t ready to give to her yet? And to have that be framed as her nobly choosing what’s best for her, to not “settle for so little” because she’s “too good” for Kaz, who might not even be “worth saving”—because that’s a thing in the book now, I guess? To judge this band of teenage thieves who’ve had to kill people for survival and weigh their sins and tragic pasts against each other to determine who is worth saving or not?? 🙄 Sorry, but... that’s gross..... lmao........
And that’s another thing too that irritated me in Crooked Kingdom. Of the many things that annoy me when I read a book, being told things instead of being shown them is very near the top. And as the story went on from SoC to CK, it just felt like Kaz’s “cruelty” was shown and reinforced less by his actions and more by the words of the other characters. He’s mean, cruel, and evil, all the other characters say. Hell, the book keeps telling me so, too, so obviously it must be true, despite evidence to the contrary! 🙄 Even Inej seems to think even less and less of Kaz as the story goes on? Which confused the hell out of me because literally in the first couple of chapters of SoC when they were introduced, Kaz and Inej have this conversation:
“No one’s setting fires at Nineteen Burstraat.”
“I heard the siren …”
“A happy accident. I take inspiration where I find it.”
“You were bluffing, then. She was never in danger.”
Kaz shrugged, unwilling to give her an answer. Inej was always trying to wring little bits of decency from him. “When everyone knows you’re a monster, you needn’t waste time doing every monstrous thing.”
I thought this was supposed to tell me that Kaz isn’t actually as much of a monster as he would like everyone to think? And that Inej knew that? Or at least suspected it? But by the time we get to the end of SoC we have her thinking “Pragmatic Kaz. Why let empathy get in the way?” despite how his facade actually cracks even more and more to show that he cares for her, at the very least, as the story goes on, like... ???????? Inej, girl, are you blind? Willfully obtuse? The fuck? LOL. I understand that she gets hung up on Kaz calling her an “investment” and deliberately going out of his way to pretend like he’s an inhuman monster, but it doesn’t make sense for her opinion of him to get worse as the story goes on when she sees him have a breakdown and faint in that prison carriage. For him to tell her that Pekka Rollins killed his brother, for him to let her touch his cheek skin to skin... I just don’t get it??? She observes these incidents as being surprising, shocking, even! Shouldn’t those have been signs that his carefully constructed mask was starting to slip???? That his humanity was peeking through? I just got the impression that Inej was way ahead of Kaz on their respective journeys towards healing, and reading that conversation on the ship between them just stunk of Kaz being punished for not being fast enough, for not being at the same point on his journey towards healing as Inej was. I hated it. LOL.
And from that conversation onwards to Crooked Kingdom, the characterization for Kaz and Inej just plummeted for me 😹 I mean, for one thing, the hostage!Inej situation felt really cheap and contrived. After I read The Conversation on the ship, I still thought, well, maybe they’ll work things out more in the remaining chapters and the next book! SIKE Inej gets captured by Van Eck’s lackeys and is away from the group for a solid chunk of CK 💀 I just?? Hello??? After the ingenuity and excitement of all the little adventures the crows had in SoC I had to read about a boring old hostage rescue in CK? 🥱 Kaz also went all-in on his asshole persona during all that time Inej was gone because apparently Inej is the only thing he cares about now! And I quote: “The rest was useless noise.” 💀 I hate that... he became so boring to me?? Lmao. I wanted to see the crows develop their relationships with each other, not watch them argue and fight because Kaz’s could not give a shit about anything or anyone else that wasn’t Inej 😐 Maybe I’m just a sap or whatever, but when I watch or consume media that promises me a “found family” I expect these characters to care for each other lmfao. And maybe Kaz could’ve slowly opened up as the story unfolded, or at least changed in any other way that didn’t have him become a complete fucking asshole to everyone that wasn’t Inej 😑 It was even worse because on the other side of the story Inej was doubting that Kaz would even come to save her!
“Kaz’s course was obvious: Ransom Kuwei, take the money, find himself a new spider to scale the walls of the Barrel and steal secrets for him. And hadn’t she told him she planned on leaving Ketterdam as soon as they were paid? Stay with me. Had he meant it? What value did her life carry in the face of the reward Kuwei might garner? Nina would never let Kaz abandon her. She’d fight with everything she had to free Inej even if she was still in the grips of parem. Matthias would stand by her with that great heart full of honor. And Jesper … well, Jesper would never do Inej harm, but he needed money badly if he didn’t want his father to lose his livelihood. He would do his best, but that might not necessarily mean what was best for her.”
The way she literally finds excuses and concessions for Matthias and Jesper and thinks of them in a positive light while she automatically assumes Kaz would just not give a fuck about her.... GIRL WHAT??? I might have believed the trajectory of her thoughts if this whole hostage situation happened before the Ice Court job, before Kaz’s Dirtyhands facade started breaking literally right under Inej’s nose, but no!! Where does she get off on thinking Matthias has a “great heart full of honor” anyway??? HELLO, HE LITERALLY WAS A PART OF A FANTASY-NAZI DEATH CULT THAT CAPTURED, TORTURED, AND BURNED GRISHA ALIVE??? ALSO, YOU ONLY KNEW HIM FOR LIKE, WHAT, TWO OR THREE WEEKS?????????????????????? Somebody explain this to me LMFAO I DONT GET IT 😹 Whatever happened to Inej “[wringing] little bits of decency” from Kaz???? Did we forget that was a thing she used to do before the Ice Court job?? Do we just ignore how he risked his life to save her before they even left the harbor??? I don’t recall him ever saying anything worse than what he already used to say to her before the Ice Court job, and back then she still tried to see the good in him, SO WHAT CHANGED???? Because Kaz certainly changed on the Ice Court job??? Am I insane for seeing all those moments of him letting Inej touch him, literally asking her to stay with him, that he WANTED her... and thinking those were tremendously significant moments? I don’t understand how Inej doesn’t see those moments as monumental either?? For all the time she’s spent with him over the years, she apparently doesn’t know him well enough to know when he’s acting differently towards her?? I just... [rubs temples] these two don’t make no sense to me, your honor!! 😩
Literally why does Inej even like Kaz if she has such a poor opinion of him in the first place? If he’s really such a terrible person, so beneath her, why in the hell does she like him??? I was never really sold on any of the romances for most of SoC (except for Wylan/Jesper), but KaNej really takes the cake for me because I just?? Don’t even really think they’re friends???? (And they never really got a chance to become friends because of the hostage thing and then the subsequent hullabaloo that happened afterwards!!) I had hopes in the beginning of SoC that they might get closer as the story went on, that I would see an actual friendship form between them beyond their implicit trust and sense of camaraderie for each other, but this. Didn’t happen!!! Or if it did, then I didn’t catch it??? Is it weird of me to want people to become friends or to at least get along with each other first before the romance starts to happen?? I just don’t understand how you can have such strong feelings for someone if you don’t at least think highly of them lmao...
And like, I can sort of understand why Kaz would like Inej, aside from her being Very Pretty, I suppose he must admire her strength and resilience, how she’s so Good™️ despite everything she’s been through. The polar opposite of him, basically—but that line of thought is so... icky to me? I am so tired of the Dude Who Obviously Hates Himself (and Desperately Needs Therapy) falls for Girl Who is Way Too Good For Him dynamic. It’s so ugly and gross and tired, imho. And it’s not even that I don’t think they could’ve worked out, it’s that I think their relationship could’ve been handled more gracefully, more thoughtfully. I hated reading about Kaz thinking about all the ways he couldn’t change or be “better” for Inej and believing himself to be unworthy of her. Like, why does his healing have to hinge on her? Why couldn’t his story have been written so that he could reconcile with his past on his own terms, for his own well-being, at his own pace?
And, even worse than Kaz thinking he doesn’t deserve Inej, all the other characters seem to think this is true, too! Like, on what grounds, exactly? How is he better or worse than all the other characters? Because he doesn’t say Nice Things to them? Because he doesn’t reassure the other characters of their worth, doesn’t validate them, doesn’t verbally tell them that he cares for them like a well-adjusted human being who didn’t have his trust betrayed and have to paddle to shore while clinging to his dead brother’s bloated body at nine years old? Idk man. I just think the whole idea of him being undeserving of things for not coming out of his ordeal retaining his innocence is awful to read. I can’t buy into the romance at all, especially when this is such a big theme for them. It would be different if maybe Inej didn’t think Kaz was incapable of empathy, if she didn’t doubt his every move, if she believed in him when no one else—not even Kaz himself—did, but... alas, that is not the case. I am still just very confused as to why she even likes him if he’s truly such a horrible person who might not even be worth saving. 🤷♀️
And speaking of “worth”, Bardugo seems to have a thing for making one half of her couples think their other halves are “too good” for them? There’s numerous instances of Kaz thinking this, and even one instance of fucking MATTHIAS thinking THIS:
“He only wished she’d separate herself from Kaz Brekker. The girl deserved better. Then again, maybe Nina deserved better than Matthias.”
I—?? Bro???? First of all, Fuck You lmfao who the hell are YOU to say that about Kaz, the fuck... If you really wanna go there, then: at least Kaz wasn’t a fantasy nazi, for god’s sake 🙄 And second of all, I am so tired!!! Of these bitches thinking their significant others are too good for them!!! Good lord!! Even Jesper thinks this about Wylan too????
“I’ll come home, Da. When the city is open again. After Wylan gets settled.”
“He’s a good lad.” Too good for me, thought Jesper.”
I just??? Huh?????? Why is this a recurring thing in a story where no one is free of sin??? It’s so irritating?? It’s such a weird position to put Inej/Nina/Wylan in, to put them on this weird pedestal above their counterparts when I personally don’t think any of them are any worse or better than the others? Even Wylan has killed people by the end of SoC!! And I know nothing about those people!! I can’t say whether he’s done less bad or more good than any of the other characters because I have no idea who he’s killed by the end of the Ice Court job! Sure, they were probably all drüskelle, but since Bardugo made it a point to have Matthias be a character capable of redemption, I can’t exactly write Every Single Drüskelle off and count their lives as worthless! All of the crows have had to do bad things in order to survive, and I can’t begrudge any of them for that or weigh their wrongdoings against each other, so all this moralizing just fucking irritated me while I was reading CK. If it weren’t for Wylan and Jesper I probably would have dropped the book and never finished it, tbh. Especially when Inej was held captive and said this to that one Suli boy who was indentured to Van Eck:
“All I know is that men like you don’t deserve the air they breathe.”
Bajan looked stung. “I’ve been nothing but kind to you. I’m not some sort of monster.”
“No, you’re the man who sits idly by, congratulating yourself on your decency, while the monster eats his fill. At least a monster has teeth and a spine.”
“That isn’t fair!”
Inej couldn’t believe the softness of this creature, that he would bid for her approval in this moment. “If you still believe in fairness, then you’ve led a very lucky life. Get out of the monster’s way, Bajan. Let’s get this over with.”
“You’ve led a very lucky life”..... the dude is literally an indentured servant? The book impresses upon me over and over that to be an indentured servant is to be a fucking slave, just by another name???? Sure, Bajan wasn’t likable, and I didn’t really care for him at all, but what exactly did Inej expect for him to do? Knowing that his boss was literally Jan Van Eck? Lmao??? When they were surrounded by so many of his guards in that moment... what else could he have done? Get killed for her sake? I thought her Suli Saints didn’t condemn people for doing what they could to survive? Also, she literally just described herself when she was insulting him? She’s the girl who sits idly by, congratulating herself on her decency, while Kaz eats his fill. Way, way, WAY later on in the book, when Inej is facing off against Dunyasha (who I thought was a ridiculous and unnecessary new character to bring in, btw?? Literally her only purpose was to have someone slow Inej down?? When this could’ve been achieved by any other thing that would’ve been more interesting?), Inej herself thinks:
“That word sounded a discordant note inside Inej. Was she innocent? She regretted the lives she’d taken, but she would take them again to save her own life, the lives of her friends. She’d stolen. She’d helped Kaz blackmail good men and bad. Could she say the choices she’d made were the only choices put before her?”
She just strikes me as so... hypocritical, with like no self-awareness sometimes 😕 I feel like I’m supposed to see her as unfailingly good, almost infallible, with so many of the characters repeatedly saying she’s Too Good, and I just... don’t really care for characters like that? Even in some of the wysper fics I’ve read she’s been described as a “saint” in a lot of them and.. ugh LOL. It’s not that I dislike her, exactly, I just don’t like characters like her, I guess. And it feels a bit heartless of me to say this, knowing the horrors of what she went through... But I think her strength and sense of justice could’ve been portrayed in better, less contradictory ways. And actually, I might not have even minded that so much if I could’ve counted that as one of her faults—she certainly would’ve been more interesting to me if she was less sure of her righteousness and questioned her morality more often than she did other people’s—but those moments of contradiction seem less like intentional characterization and more like the author couldn’t seem to make up her mind on how to write Inej sometimes? Like, during the bandage changing scene, she and Kaz have this conversation:
“Is that what makes you different from Rollins? That you’ll leave nothing behind?”
“I am not Pekka Rollins or his shadow. I don’t sell girls into brothels. I don’t con helpless kids out of their money.”
“Look at the floor of the Crow Club, Kaz.” Her voice was gentle, patient—why was it making him want to set fire to something? “Think of every racket and card game and theft you’ve run. Did all those men and women deserve what they got or what they had taken from them?”
And then later on at the end of the book when they’re standing at the harbor:
“It’s not just the slavers. It’s the procurers, the customers, the Barrel bosses, the politicians. It’s everyone who turns a blind eye to suffering when there’s money to be made.”
“I’m a Barrel boss.”
“You would never sell someone, Kaz. You know better than anyone that you’re not just one more boss scraping for the best margin.”
Am I... wrong to be baffled by this?? Is she not contradicting herself here? Like, maybe I’m just really stupid and not seeing something very obvious but I genuinely do not understand how she went from saying Kaz is no different from any of the other Barrel Bosses to saying that he is different from them. 😶❓❓❓ Huh?? Also, it’s never really talked about in the books at all, but I find it kind of hilarious that if Jan Van Eck hadn’t double-crossed the crows, Inej and all the others would’ve gotten their money, and Inej could’ve had her slave-hunting ship earlier... by trading Kuwei—a real, live human being, a CHILD—over to the Merchant Council to become a political pawn and who knows what else 😹 Like... does that not also count as selling someone? 😹 Did she not stop to think about that? Am I not supposed to think about how questionable that is? LOL.
TL;DR basically boooo KaNej they should’ve just been friends boo the hostage situation boo the unnecessary Dunyasha character boo the constant moralizing etc etc 😹 I am not kidding when I say Wylan and Jesper hard carried Crooked Kingdom for me. I don’t regret reading it, because I got to learn more about Wylan and Jesper and see them have the most wholesome friendship and romance ever 🥺 I’m still not over Wylan noticing Jesper’s perfect lips upon first meeting him and Jesper thinking of Wylan as a “lost prince who had woken in the wrong story” at the same time.... h E L P I LOVE THEM.... FUCK....ch-chenji au—
OH! Also, before I forget: I thought Matthias’s death was an unnecessary cop out? I was so miffed by it? Like, beyond the fact that I’d grown to like him a lot by the end of Crooked Kingdom, I just think killing him off was dumb and seemed to me like another instance of a story pulling the Death is the Ultimate Atonement route 😑 For him to die while trying to change the mind of a young drüskelle... knowing how long it took for HIM to unlearn his own shit... I just... what? All I could think of was how he said he wanted Nina to stay alive so he could atone for his sins when they were still on the ship, and then he DIES while trying to do good? What the fuck even was the point of his death? To make the story seem more “realistic”? Because it would’ve been too good to be true if everyone made it out alive? I call bullshit on that because the entire fucking story was already unrealistic from the start LMAO. The main characters are fucking TEENAGERS who’ve already pulled off countless impossible missions. Realism is the last fucking thing I was expecting from the story 🙄 It’s not even that Matthias was a favorite character of mine, I just feel offended by how his death seemed to just be a blatant slap to my face intended to make me cry or feel sad. Like, no, fuck you, I will not be sad over something so forced??? Over tragedy for tragedy’s sake?? 😹 Especially because his killer was someone no one, not even Kaz, could’ve foreseen; just some nameless drüskelle kid who somehow managed to tail Matthias and kill him with a single bullet... after everything he’s been through. 🙄 I just. Ridiculous. So obviously shoehorned in just to make readers sad, like oohhh who could’ve seen this coming, sometimes shit just doesn’t work out, blah blah blah... I could say the same thing about all the different ways the crows’ plans got messed up in weirdly specific and unrealistic ways (Brum being alive and happening to remember Nina? Jan Van Eck somehow interpreting Kaz’s glance at Inej as an indication of his “biggest weakness”? (Hated that too, btw), Pekka Rollins just happening to know Kaz and Wylan would break into Jan Van Eck’s study to steal something?), but whatever. As Inej would say, what would be the point?
Anyways... yeah. I can’t remember what else I had to say 😹 I feel like I just ranted more than anything else in this last section but what can I say... I’m a chatterbox with a lot of Opinions 😹 For all my complaints and confusion though, I still really enjoyed the SoC duology 💖 I’m just a very persnickety reader when it comes to published books and also don’t really wish to look into the SoC fandom so I have no idea how common or ridiculous my thoughts are compared to other people’s! 😸 In the end I’m mostly just writing these for my own benefit anyway, so I suppose none of that really matters much.
Oooh, I’m planning on watching Shadow and Bone too, eventually, though I have no intention (for now) of reading any other books from the Grishaverse, but I’m curious to see how I’ll like the show after I’ve read the books! Anu said Jesper is perfect on it so I am very ready to 😻 😻 😻 😻 😻!! Will probably also compare the show to the books a lot, and tbh kind of hoping it’ll sell me KaNej more than the books did 😹 I did watch a couple of movies and animated shorts in May that I wanna write about eventually, so I’ll save the Shadow and Bone commentary for that future post =u= If I recall anything else I have to say about any of the above books, I’ll probably silently add to this post but for now, I think this is all I’ve got. I will seriously be impressed if anybody actually read everything I wrote up to this point 😹 😹 😹 What did I say about going insane and writing walls of text? Jfc...
じゃね 🤠
Re: the soc tunnel vision is real
i was plainly blindsighted bc it's not common to see a representation of strong, ethnic, brown girls with their cultures and their religious sentiments in ya media typically and i saw so much of what a younger version of me wanted to see in ya in her
I think this is a pretty good reason to like her tbh! and it’s not like i want anyone else to dislike her just bc i dont like her or anything, I’m rly more just frustrated by the way the author chose to write her than like... dislike her for being herself? If that makes sense? And i completely understand the immediate attachment to a character u see so little of in media—I’ve done that myself! 😹—but I’m also very wary of how these characters are written bc i don’t want them to become a figurehead written for the express purpose of diversity or representation; i just want them to be fully realized & complex characters on their own u__u
esp i am not responsible to fix him sentiment through "i will have you without armour" thank you for once i'm glad to see a girl not all over the boy with a blatant disregard to herself
Also, i get what u mean here (& i think that’s what Bardugo was intending to convey w the line too), but i disagree w the phrasing & execution of the sentiment mainly bc i don’t think inej staying w kaz in ketterdam would’ve “fixed” him anyway? And i don’t think he ever asked her or even needed her to fix him either? bc he was already taking (very tiny) steps to become the kind of man he thought she deserved before this whole conversation—& even during it, actually, when he held her hand of his own volition & plainly admitted that he wanted her to stay & that he wanted her specifically; the kaz before the ice court job would’ve never done any of that, i think :\
I also just think that’s a weird condition to set in a story where every character has experienced some sort of trauma? Like even tho i think it’s perfectly fair of inej to want More out of a relationship w kaz, i have problems w the way that’s conveyed w that line bc there might never be a day where kaz can ever be completely free of his “armor”. Recovery & healing isn’t a straight line from A to Z, & some ppl might just never make it to Z, & i think that’s... perfectly okay? Especially bc he was already putting in the effort to improve on his own, & to say such an all or nothing line as “I will have you without armour... or I will not have you at all” is ridiculous to me bc it’s not as if a relationship b/n people who are struggling & Not Completely Okay is impossible? Like, i think the very understandable belief that a woman should not have to fix a man at her expense could’ve just been expressed in a better, more thoughtful way that didn’t ignore all the work kaz was already doing on his end. Their whole relationship to me just feels like a very clumsy attempt at feminist writing tbh lmao... there were some moments that had potential imo, like how understanding inej was of kaz’s aversion to skin on skin contact during the bandage scene in CK, but then that just made no sense to me bc of how it happened after their conversation in SoC & seemed to contradict the adamant & final tone of inej’s statements to kaz... Just overall messy writing... 😹
they were all incredibly morally grey characters but bardugo had some clear favourites i guess
I actually don’t think she had favorites tbh! :o i mean, maybe she did, idk but that wasn’t the impression i got 😹 it seemed to me more like she just didn’t know how to weave certain beliefs/ideas she had into her characterization w/o hammering me over the head w them LMAO
ALSO BIG FUCKING MOOD ABOUT THE WYSPER KISS I AM STILL . I STILL THINK ABT THAT PASSAGE EVEN NOW, THEY WERE SO MUCH... “Jesper’s mind emptied” BRO MINE TOO LITERALLY JUST NO THOUGHTS HEAD EMPTY EXCEPT FOR WYSPER KISS 😭
Thank u for ur two cents on shadow & bone i will keep ur thoughts in mind & definitely lower my expectations b4 going in !!! I kinda figured the crows wouldn’t get as much of a spotlight in the show bc i was under the impression they were supposed to be side characters but that is somewhat disappointing re: kaz u_u also LMFAO both u & ever have said that s&b sucks ass so i had no intentions of ever bothering w the trilogy but now I’m kind of curious... ig ill leave it up to the show to try & convince me to read the books 😹 ty for reading this post btw heLP icb u actually read all of... That. Incredible 😹