Joe Kessler > Recent Status Updates

Y'all weren't lying... This feels like it's going to be a 3-star read at best.

Weird side-effect of listening to this series on audiobook: we've switched narrators for this one, and it took me a while to realize that the name Ogion, pronounced like oh-GUY-un, was the same character that the last reader had said like OH-jee-un.

This is like Red Rising with none of the betrayal and bloodshed, and no, that's not exactly a compliment.

"You're jealous! You don't want me to marry anybody because you only want me to love you!" Girl, you are 18 and your sister is only asking you to wait a year before marrying this guy you've known for three weeks. Calm down.

Correction: his comments about Mars were in 1928 and it's 1946 where I'm at now in the text. So Agatha Christie definitely meant that to be already ironic at the time.

This guy in a 1956 novel wondering if humanity is going to be making regular trips to Mars in the next twenty years.... Womp womp

"I've had dreams about killing your boyfriend," much like this guy's earlier classic, "Every time you suggest we get some international food like pho I want to punch a wall" is maybe something you should either keep to yourself or work through with a therapist?

Setting aside the absurd coincidence of your grandmother dying in the same hospital at the same time that your brother's fiancee is giving birth... You're choosing to be in the delivery room and not at her deathbed? Definitely gonna regret that in years to come.

It's okay that you've been logging in with his password and reading his email drafts because he's been logging in with your password and reading yours??

*Gene Belcher voice* Terrible. You're all terrible.

Girl, how are you STILL pretending to like live sports games? If you hated going with your husband and know you'll hate going with your boyfriend, why did you agree to go??

I decided to tough this out instead of DNFing, but it still feels like it's going to be either a 1- or a 2-star from me.

I don't know if I'm gonna make it to my usual 20% through a book before quitting this one. These people are both very hurtful to each other, and have been for the entire 11-year romance we've now seen. I'm not sure if I care about them ~recapturing the magic~ or whatever.

I'm not hating this, but like... there's been no real plot developments, or stakes, or challenges for over a quarter of the book now. What is anyone's goal at this point?

"I had always thought of rainstorms as opening up the sky from above, and even after years of piloting only now understood the sweep of their lateral movement, how they moved not down but across, and how they vanished into the distance without looking back. It made one feel startlingly small, to be a way-stop on that journey—startlingly irrelevant to the movement of the ocean, and of time."

Why is Alekso not interjecting more? I feel like we should be hearing way more from him in Gracia's POV chapters, now that she has the pearl.

GUN!!!

A singer!! But does she have a gun?

So far there have been zero singers and zero guns in this book.

This audiobook reader is not doing enough to distinguish this new narrating character's voice from the main POV.

Well, this plot is certainly moving faster than I would have expected, that's for sure.

LOL at this audiobook reader mispronouncing one of the local Sebastian restaurants. It's Capt Hiram's, not Capt Heerams.

I knew this author in middle school! And the protagonist is from the same part of Florida as us, so it's wild to see all these real places I know in this story.

...This other narrator is going to be an imaginary friend, isn't she?

"I loved her once, and in the absence of love, all its old belongings become excess freight."

LOL, I forgot I started reading this ebook back in October. Gonna try to finish it and the two physical books I started last year, before opening anything new.

A bit late in the book to only now be introducing the night-bird. IMO.

"The strike meeting took place in a basement which was used at other times for wedding feasts and the crowds that could not fit into the little shopfront shuls at Yom Kippur when even the secular people of the Lower East Side remembered that being Jewish included also religion." Lmaooooooooooooo

I would like to amend my previous shorthand: this is not so much a queer Good Omens as a queer cross between Good Omens and The Golem and the Jinni

This is exactly the queer Jewish Good Omens that I wanted it to be.