Bethany > Recent Status Updates

I really love the voice the narrator uses for Martok. It is very soothing to listen to.

It's still a bit difficult to tell who is speaking, especially since the chapter titles give no clue.

It's not always easy to tell which author's work is being read and when the editor is editorializing between bieces.

Henry's voice makes him sound like a total idiot.

Aren't you charming? Describing a generation so deeply in debt many will never be free of it as "slackers," "hangers-on," and "adult children who refuse to flee their cosy nest...so busy buying avacado toast that they have to rely on the Bank of Mum and Dad" reads as shockingly out of touch (and if it was meant to be ironic, it didn't come across).

Poor baby had to spend NYE at home with her family, having a bonfire on the beach. How my heart bleeds for her.

This woman not only blames saunas for what sounds like her failure to follow directions, but dislikes Halloween. Ma'am, you are insufferable. May you never visit the Blue Lagoon again. You don't deserve it.

Two books about recovering from difficult things simultaneously is a terrible idea, even if one is fiction and one is nonfiction. Both women seem incredibly spoiled, self-indulgent, and irritating.

Henry sounds boring as heck and I am tired of dream sequences.

Okay, the book mostly redeemed itself by everyone being a ball of anxiety who's just playing it cool for the cameras and not nearly as two-dimensional as they appeared at the start.

I like how Cerys' experience with the fandom Discord develops, even though I roll my eyes at the way she keeps resisting just enjoying the series in whatever way she enjoys it and acting like science fiction/fantasy fandom is some secret shame and not incredibly common.

Do teenagers really still get weird about other teens dressing in emo/goth/Wiccan styles?

(Also, are these people in college or high school? I really cannot tell.)

I am seriously side-eyeing an English professor who names her son Heathcliff and writes a YA romantasy retelling of Wuthering Heights while she's breastfeeding him. The squickiness of writing spicy scenes about a character who shares a name and inspiration with my (theoretical) infant son cannot be overstated.

I have no doubt there'll be a turnaround, courtesy of Max, but I'm kind of icked at how Cerys has been friends with Jake for years and taken apparently zero interest in the things he loves. What did they even talk about/spend time doing together? All her stuff, I guess?

Was that...Princess Donut?

This is a very easy book to put down.

It's petty. I know it's petty. But I believe this book is set in the late 1800s? And a character mentioned that a Hound was created as revenge for destroying an ecosystem. The term ecosystem wasn't introduced until the 1900s. Similarly, one character keeps claiming to have a good metabolism, and while the word metabolism was introduced in the 1870s, only scientists would have known the word or used it.

So much filler. Either tell the story of the library fire or tell the history of the library or tell your navel-gazing personal relationship with books and libraries, but switching between the three in a single volume feels like 2/3 of the book is padding. (No, the *full* history of the library is *not* relevent to this *one* event in its history over a hundred years after it was founded. That's just fluff.)

Astonishing how long it took one of the elemental masters the series is named for to appear, only to have him disappear within the same chapter, presumably for another third of the book if other reviews' timelines for things finally happening bear out.

Why are the boys named alphabetically but Elena's name just jumps in with the letter E? I thought her name might be Helena (which would have fit alphabetically) and I was just mishearing it on the audiobook, but no. It's apparently Elena with an E. This irks me out of all proportion.