Joe Kessler > Recent Status Updates

Already liking this way more than book 3.

Lots of comparisons to Frozen in the promotion and reviews of this series, but it's honestly more like Big Finish's Graceless audio stories -- twin sisters who have extraordinary powers only when they're together.

Well, what is this book going to be about NOW?

I was a little disoriented at first, but this is really growing on me. It could end up at 5 stars.

Way too much worldbuilding exposition so far; not nearly enough plot

Not totally hooked yet, but the genderfluid love interest (?) is a plus.

Still not really clear on why this book was necessary.

Time to dive back into this one, I guess.

15 / 40 stories down (and some have gotten better!) but this is due back to the library now. I've put it back on hold for the rest, but we'll see when I have time and interest to pick it back up.

Eight stories in and this is... not great. Not bad, but not nearly as clever or original as when they did this for A New Hope. I do like the ones told from a Wampa and a Tauntaun perspective.

Finally getting a chance to tackle this ebook!

This book is great all-around, but the mentions of Cheerwine and Bojangles really make me happy. North Carolina through and through.

Really loving the trans representation in so much YA / genre fiction coming out these days. There's still a lot of room for improvement -- a lot of it ends up being bare-bones, with like a single minor character -- but it's so much better than what I grew up reading.

Two out of three protagonists confirmed queer so far! And two other characters with nonbinary pronouns, one of them a love interest.

This is surprisingly gory so far.

Things I was expecting in this Narnia reread:
🔅sexism
🔅thinly-veiled Christian allegories / propaganda

Things I was not expecting:
🔅a spirited defense of shoot-on-sight racial profiling

THIRD MOM.

Oh, good. I was all set to complain about that in my review if it actually headed that way.

I think I'm enjoying this, but the title character has barely been in it so far (and is less interesting than the other stuff).

This is either going to be a one- or two-star rating from me. Can't wait for the endgame to clarify which.

Mention of crosses, churches, and Christians. So... yep, the baptism thing is pretty offensive. Dull worldbuilding, too.

"These monsters are the warped souls of unbaptized infants." Well, that's wildly antisemitic. Anti.... everything that's not Christian, actually.

Really struggling to care about any of this... Nobody seems to have any actual long-term motivation here.

I know I'm not the ideal audience for this book, but could we stop with the idea that it's worse for Christians to be immoral than other people? Y'all don't have a monopoly on principles.

Hormonal apocalypse teens are the worst.

Well, I saw that twist coming, but I'm glad it got here so early and with a minimum of drama. It'll be interesting to see where the next half of the book goes.

And now the protagonist has no choice but to prostitute herself. Sigh. I don't know why V. E. Schwab always goes there.

You know what wasn't necessary in this book? That rape attempt. Ugh.

Zombie robots!!!

I'm still gonna finish this, but I'm not loving it and I just realized it's the same author of another book I DNFed. So at this point I think I'm done with her.