Lara > Recent Status Updates

Really enjoying it, just have to read carefully to keep track of both timelines. Also, the glossary in the back is necessary, but as complex and intimidating as the Wheel of Time glossary was the first time I read The Eye of the World (25 years ago!)

It will never cease to enrage me how easily women could be institutionalized not all that long ago. Didn't want to have sex? How unnatural, into the asylum. Wanted too much sex? Also unnatural, same. Didn't want to get married, but wanted higher education instead? Must be that wandering womb! Post-partum depression? How dare a woman not be deliriously happy to be a mother! My love of reading would have doomed me...

Mr. Beagle, please don't taunt me. You've been saying you were going to write a book about Sooz since "Two Hearts", and that was 12 years and counting ago. Don't make me have hope.

This alleged "literary tour de force" is not delighting me thus far.

Because A) I want to read it on the off-chance I get to meet Vivian Shaw at Balticon, and B) I am not lugging all nine-hundred-plus pages of hardcover Kingdom of Ash to work with me.

Forging my way past the "She Doesn't Know She's Beautiful" trope. That's right, heroine, men just loathe creamy skin, storm-grey eyes, and cascading black hair with a dramatic white streak caused by an as-yet unconfessed tragedy...

Mallory O'Meara's footnote game is on par with Terry Pratchett's, and I approve.

On the one hand, her not being able to forgive him for bullying her late husband when they were kids is kind of silly. On the other hand, have I forgiven the boys who made my life a misery in middle school? No, no I have not, and if I were seated next to any of those guys at a fancy dinner, I would ask to be moved pronto no matter how cute they might be now.

This book is hard to read. Not because it's bad, but because I feel every casual word and microaggression heaped on the girls like water torture.

"You're daydreaming again. Be better."

"Whatever distress you're feeling, that's no cause to let it show."

"Beauty is your most valuable asset."

"Show how appealing a beautiful, obedient girl can be."

I hope the Academy is razed to the ground.

I love that Rookwood and Corvin's responses to realizing they've been made characters in a Gothic novel is "This is amazing, we will buy a hundred copies and give them to all our friends!" rather than any sort of offense.

I also love Guy and his anxiety. Come sit by me, sweetie, and our brains can run in their stupid fretting panic-wheels in tandem. And then you can go kiss Rookwood.

I have thus far counted three David Eddings references/in-jokes/homages (not counting the dedication), and am utterly delighted.

Look, am I going to love this? Of course I am, The Bombshells series is "DC heroines (and some villainesses) win WWII with the power of female friendship and wlw romance and copious amounts of buttkicking", and Batwoman lives on my desk at work and soon will live in a frame on my wall (thanks Babs Tarr!), and just give me all the Bombshells.

Should have read this yesterday when I was trapped in the house waiting for the mechanic. Cannot stop turning the pages.

Must pause here, as I canNOT read this book in public, my blushing would be seen from space.

More time than I enjoy has already been allotted to the POV of the bitter heretic priest obsessed with Vasya and the demon whispering in his ear. Can we get back to Russian mythology instead of the bog-standard "villain-using-Christianity-for-his-own-twisted-ends' plot?

I am...feeling sympathy for the Prospero character? This has never happened before in any iteration of "The Tempest".

Enjoying this, but between Winnie's looming grief and the depressing backdrop of New Jersey, I need to pause for a bit...

I am here for small-town librarians and the nice men (who were their one-time one-night-stands) who love them. But Scott's mom just went from "charmingly eccentric" to "deliberately causing property damage so he has to move in with her and the librarian because she's fixated on fixing them up", and that's not good. I'm not laughing at her antics, I'm wincing for his septic tank.

"Goblin Market" in a turn-of-the-century Jewish village with bonus shapeshifters. Where has this book been all my life?!?

This reads more like a nonfiction history--in the vein of Alison Weir, for example--than fiction, and I am honestly enjoying it more than I enjoyed the last Song of Ice and Fire novel.

She's still wary of romance after leaving her abusive alcoholic husband!

He's nine years younger than she is and doesn't know how to confront his narcissistic mother!

She finds him gentle, and attractive. He finds her lovely and a balm to his soul.

AND THEY WERE ROOMMATES

Okay, maybe not, but this whole plot is so much catnip for me that I wouldn't be surprised if that trope showed up. *squee!*

ATTENTION HOLLYWOOD, if you do not cast Elizabeth Debecki as Evelyn in the inevitable film version of this fascinatingly weird book, you're not even TRYING.