Joe Kessler > Recent Status Updates

This vaccine conversation is too real.

This book is taking way too long to get to its bloody point.

I'm sorry, the bad guys' plan was WHAT.

Really don't like this protagonist.

This pseudonymous Agatha Christie book might end up as five stars from me. It's everything I wanted from The Remains of the Day and didn't quite get.

This book would honestly be a thousand times better without the romance angle.

Not a fan of Jane Eyre being a book within this Jane Eyre retelling. The characters can't spot the parallels? One is literally named Mr. Rochester.

This employer/employee dynamic is weird from both directions.

This is the worst use of two narrators alternating chapters. Each one keeps getting told what the other one just learned, so readers are effectively hearing everything twice.

Well, it's better than her first novel. But not up to the level everyone's been raving about, IMO.

This feels so middle-grade I'm taken out every time the protagonist mentions she's sixteen and engaged. She reads like she's maybe twelve -- it's the opposite of the Animorphs problem.

This is supposed to be a big twist, but the character has been such a bland cypher till now that it's hard to really care.

Demonic possessor: damn girl, you live like this?? eat something!!

I will RIOT if this asshole priest turns out to be a love interest.

This is like... Garth Nix writing Venom.

How is this book not over yet.

I'm gonna need this book to stop pointing out weird coincidences and actually explain them.

I'll probably expand on this in my review, but it's bizarre how these torturers keep killing their victims before actually verifying the information they've gotten out of them.

Okay, that's maybe a bit convenient. Or, well, not for that guy, I guess. But too coincidental a plot development for my taste.

That is a delightful twist / show of insight on the protagonist's part that bodes well for the rest of this book.

I don't even know how to phrase the CW for this, but making the characters view memories of their own births / breastfeeding is certainly a choice on this writer's part.

Is this the first canonical confirmation that Jake's family is Jewish? The names Jacob and Rachel at least suggested the possibility, but I don't remember explicit mention before this.

But is there ever going to be a plot to this book?

Still really confused about how this guy is a millionaire throwing a sold-out party, but if people don't post enough about it on social media he's somehow going to be financially ruined.

"Let's put Judaism on fleek!" Who can I pay to excise that sentence from my brain?

Wait, your publisher asked you to write a Hanukkah romance and the title you're going with is The Hanukkah Grinch? Really?

I'm officially hate-reading this now. The two main characters are just both so odious, in addition to all the other issues with the book.

I don't understand why there's all this pressure from investors worried they're going to lose money on the event, when tickets supposedly sold out within 20 minutes when sales opened last year.

Oh my G-d, leave that poor mall Santa alone. Do not abuse service workers like that!

This boy doesn't know what a midrash is?

I wrote up some more thoughts over on Twitter https://twitter.com/lesserjoke/status...