E.C. > Recent Status Updates

these dramatic monologues are honestly terrible. I can't deal with a teenager describing his supernatural power making his heart ache "'in the way that it does when you see the sun rising on a cold winter morning, pushing its way above the bare tree branches'". exposition masquerading as dialogue always ALWAYS sucks and makes a decent book barely average

her character and subtext development are so sublime. I feel my only real complaints are picky and stylistic

zero impulse control = buying shit within thirty seconds of being informed it exists. don't regret this particular impulse buy yet... I have high hopes and I hope this meets them!

I told myself I would slow down and savor this book :')

Ode in Reverse

This poem is for everyone in my life--
My sons, friends, mother, siblings, and my wife.
It's a cuff to the head--a self-rebuff.
Dear ones, I have not loved you well enough.

I hhhhaaaattteee when I see people with ADHD compared to squirrels in books.

"Sometimes I wonder if I really heard the sound of the truck hitting [her] (spoiler removed). Could I really have heard that sound, separated from the rest of the crash? Or did my memory just make that up, to help me try to understand the sequence of events? Do I just remember a blunt thud because I think there ought to have been one?"

this a dense little book (in terms of narrative and thematic layers)

this is so brief and didactic there's no time to care about these people as people.

'You don’t have to be making bombs to be an extremist these days. You just have to have the wrong thoughts. And now they can make sure we all die out.'

"Night was some color between clear and cloud." with language constantly like this, who needs a plot??

"I wonder if Deaf people have to learn both sign language and really bad sign language." lol this book reminds me why I always tell people who see me signing at my job that I only speak baby sign. I'm definitely a perpetuator of the latter.

lol I, too, would give anything for a diva cup in an apocalypse

'It’s awful and selfish and heartless, but I have to live. I’m living.'

Bloom, bloom red the last rose.

I like that the main character's hearing damage from early in the book became a tiny but pivotal piece in the scene. attention to detail lends credibility

lol Mormons

'Still a midwife. Thing being born is the world. New, ugly baby world.'
I like this book

The revelation Kasia shares is almost swallowed up by action. I usually like Novik's swift and multifunctional scenes but that piece of character development was nearly too easy to skip over

Endings matter in Latin names... Nouns and adjectives have gender. I mean if you're gonna plunder the lexicon at least take its rules too.

This transition makes Darrow unbearable.

Even Mary fuckin Shelley didn't use the word grotesque this often

After 48 lashes how can he even walk? Or barely mention the pain at all? He literally wonders if people can see his spine through his mutilated back and then he's bandaged and a-okay?

Lol why the suddenly inverted sentence structure? His weird stylistic choices make no sense and seem like someone going through the motions of epic tropes rather than understanding how they work

Random outdated contractions to make the dialogue sound loftier. Those are always fun.

Lol imagine the pioneers arriving to Mars for the first time and going, "Yeah, the redheads should definitely be our cave-slaves," and just shoving them all underground. (I can't think of many genetically viable reasons for them all the be ginger.)

Clearly I'm over-thinking this, but for the second time in twenty pages our narrator has used a pejorative "like a girl." How far into the future is this supposed to be? Why is gender still such a strong dividing line? It reads like the author just copy and pasted his own biases and assumptions without thinking about their world building implications