Joe Kessler > Recent Status Updates

I'm mostly enjoying this, BUT these repeated comparisons between the founding of America and that of Israel are really setting me on edge, waiting for that antisemitic shoe I sense in the background to finally drop.

"None houses with left grief" -- really, Tamsyn Muir??

Boy, people weren't kidding about how different this one is from the first book. Not sure yet if that's working for me or not.

Always weird to get plague and protective masks in fiction these days.

This gore is a bit much.

This is already a breath of fresh air just by virtue of telling a YA story from a single point of view, rather than hopping back and forth between two hetero teens you know are going to end up getting together. There's not even a love interest in sight yet!

Not totally into this, but it's getting better.

Equating Qanon supporters with people who thought the Mueller probe could bring down the president is just.... Yikes.

So much of this so far is entirely unrelated to the book's stated thesis.

I'll stick with it because it's short, but this is not nearly as good as my mom made it sound.

So much weird implicit homophobia in a future setting that has purportedly unmarked same-sex marriages.

The first 19 chapters could have been, like... 1 chapter. Maybe 2 at a stretch.

It shouldn't have taken this long for the story to get interesting, but we're at least inching in that direction now.

So far this is like... Red Rising from a less interesting perspective, in a less interesting era.

Wait, WHAT

Girl, the person you're telling about a hidden traitor on the council is obviously the hidden traitor on the council. You know that, right?

I wasn't sure at first, but this is basically Aladdin, isn't it? (Still good, though!)

So far this is even better than I remembered. I might have to bump my rating up to 5 stars -- it'll probably depend on how I feel about the rape and the ending when I get there.

Wait, is the big bad just Amon from The Legend of Korra?

Feels like this is cruising for a 2-star rating. But hey, that's how I felt about the last thing I read, and it got a little better by the end. So we'll see.

This might be a DNF.

Ah, antisemitic apologism. Yep. That's what was missing from this book. Sigh.

This is short enough that I suppose I'll go ahead and finish it, but I'm still pretty flummoxed so far by the appeal.

I am bored out of my mind. What is even the point of this story?

I'm not convinced we needed that much setup for this, what appears to be the actual core plot of the book.

This introductory exposition dump is really tedious.