Veronica > Recent Status Updates

Wow the narrator is shocking unlikeable to me from almost page one, I’m really surprised I thought I would be hyped for every word of this

Ummm why is the narrator out to kill every two seconds??? Maybe one of the cases for establishing anti-hero qualities sure, but three separate consecutive times in like 1.5 chapters and one single evening in-story? 💀

Everyone keeps demanding our narrator tell a funny story, and he does tell an amusing tale, and all these losers are like “that’s not funny” EVERY TIME

This is pretty authentically-sounding as a fake medieval document so far, but (idk if I’m just overly sensitive) knowing it’s written in the modern day it’s occasionally a little offensive seeming ngl
But the narrator being yoinked for a Beowulf-based mission because they were all like “hmm we need a foreigner” is really funny, he’s all like “guys I don’t even speak your language why 😭”

[angry buzzer sound] Muslim narrator has referred to a of Muslims as Mohammedans, my literary experience (including recently Orientalism by Edward Said) tells me this would literally never, EVER happen.
Although I guess there’s some fictional layers of translation in there so maybe the final in-universe compiler of the manuscript got super good at translation without basic cultural knowledge I guess

I have just the epilogue of this book left and I just learned that this is a sequel series to a whole trilogy omg. But now I kind of feel like I want to finish it out and then read the original trilogy prequel-style instead of going in order

People in the reviews are comparing this to Between Two Fires which is confusing me quite a bit because I’m not getting any plot similarities besides the main characters suffering from starvation and elements of people holing themselves up from natural and supernatural threats (with low success rate there)

I don’t DISlike her but I don’t know why 3+ ladies are falling all over themselves with fascination to Voyne, she’s not that interesting other than I guess being a muscular lady. Which is great don’t get me wrong but not particularly unique ?

I thought Trelia was gonna be an annoying POV but I’m actually really into her, and I thought her sort of possessive flirtation with that one guy (no spoilers) was gonna be cringe and annoying but I’m really into it too actually

Not sure if it’s a bit of purple prose going on or if the audiobook narrator is just hamming it up a bit extra (he has a good voice for storytelling though) but something about this is a little overly dramatic lol. A few minor cliches too, but I’m still enjoying it overall

Horror booktok swore this was a really good book so if they lied to me I’m never gonna trust a recommendation again

Halfway through the Afterward and it’s surprising me by being extremely helpful in digesting and retroactively understanding the full book

Reached the part about the US tradition of orientalism and let me say that there is hope in the world because my own experience doing Middle East + North Africa studies in a university setting involved a diverse group of students and much critique of the preceding intellectual history, but dang is that intellectual history embarrassing as hell, I’m cringing just hearing it broken down for this chapter

So far a very small proportion of these were actually genuinely pretty good, a couple of them are extremely bad (just finished “snake’s tail” which was painfully stupid and pretentious), mostly it’s been kind of meh and one or two have been unfinished-feeling. I’m surprised how many are not even a little Christmas-themed which is weird considering the collection theme

It’s not a prominent subplot but I’m not into the first cousin romance ngl