"We do not have the ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do no right with no effort bec"We do not have the ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do no right with no effort because he can detect the obvious."
A few years ago, I watched the first season-ish of the TV show adaptation of this book. Here is what I remember: - scary Nazi man with family - San Francisco - the phrase "the man in the high castle" uttered very ominously - lady leaving her husband, or the home where she lived with him or something - torture stuff - a VERY smooth move performed on aforementioned lady by a non-husband man in which she was crying and sitting on the curb and he, in one motion, wrapped her in his jacket and also IN HIS ARMS!!!
As you can tell, 17-year-old me was most impacted by that last one.
What I don't remember: - an in-depth exploration of morality as it relates to empires, and whether any one side of a war is better than the other; whether it really matters who wins a war, or if we'd be wrapped up in moral complexity and evil and bigotry either way; and how and if humans can steer themselves toward the moral right, and if it really matters if it does.
This book is a game changer for me. At first, I didn't like it. It was slow, and racist, and sexist, and the biases show in it probably even outside of the ways they're intended to.
But...the only way I can describe it is that this book opens up. You know how sometimes you're listening to a song and it gets big? Hannah Hunt by Vampire Weekend, or Titus Was Born by Young the Giant. Just a normal song, and then suddenly - huge and loud and overpowering.
This book did that. It takes everything it's been doing for 150 pages or so, and shows you that something else, something huge, has been happening all along.
I felt really overcome when I finished this book, which was about 8 seconds ago. So I still do.
I had to raise this rating.
Bottom line: This book is tough and difficult and punishing, but it is worth the work....more
it's another installment of project 5 star, in which i revisit all of my favorite books to see if they are still favorhello, masochism, my old friend.
it's another installment of project 5 star, in which i revisit all of my favorite books to see if they are still favorites or if my heart has shrunk even further like a reverse grinch.
today, we're taking on the forgotten emily henry book, which everyone is either unaware of or not a fan of except for me.
let's see what happens.
(updated review to come)
------------------- original review
I love Emily Henry.
Typically, I have reservations about making love-based declarations about people I don’t know on the internet. Seems a lil weird. Like, how would Rami Malek feel if he knew I was writing sonnets about how he manages to be devastatingly attractive even with weird fake teeth? How would Bill Hader feel if he knew about how many clips of his interviews I’ve watched in a row on YouTube?
Both of those are, of course, completely made up examples.
In the case of Emily Henry, though, I’m willing to make an exception. This is for several reasons: 1) Because of the sheer volume of adoring things I’ve written about her and her books, in places like my blog and my reviews and, uh, the comments of her Instagram posts, I’m pretty sure Emily Henry already knows. 2) I love Emily Henry’s books with my whole heart. 3) Emily Henry and her books mean a lot to me.
One of my very favorite movies ever is pretty at odds with everything else I love. It is a movie called “About Time.” About Time is a cheesy British rom-com (brought to you by the mind behind every other cheesy British rom-com) about Domhnall Gleeson as a time traveler and Rachel McAdams as his charming and devastatingly lovely love interest.
I do not cry ever, and I have never seen that movie without full-on weeping.
The ending of About Time is Domhnall Gleeson’s realization that he doesn’t need to travel through time anymore, because the single most beautiful and valuable thing he can do is live through every day and really notice it. Really be present for it. That’s the best possible use of his time.
Granted, because of the specific rules of time travel in this movie, he can’t do much else, but still.
Emily Henry’s books are, in some ways, the equivalent of that movie. And I love them all in the same heart-swelling, out of body way that I love it.
Emily Henry writes characters who are flawed. They’re mean to the people around them, or bad students, or careless. They are human and imperfect, and I adore them all. I have never read an Emily Henry character I didn’t instantly feel and understand. I almost never love book characters, and I always love hers. They’re funny and messed up and lovely and I feel like I know them right away.
She also writes about our world as magical, as a place where we can find adventure and comfort, a place filled with hardship and pain and struggle and also people we can connect with. Her books have romances in them, but more than that, they have family and friends and BANTER. (God, the banter.)
I love About Time because it knows how beautiful the ordinary can be. How an ordinary life, doing what you love with people you love around you, is the loveliest possible kind. Emily Henry’s books know the same thing.
I can’t pretend I know why Emily Henry writes magical realism and sci-fi, books in which the extraordinary coexists with the ordinary. But I bet it’s because Emily Henry knows the most extraordinary things often seem ordinary after all.
Because that’s what her books are all about.
Here, really, is what I have to say: Emily Henry’s books make me laugh and tear up. They make me feel happy and excited and sad and in suspense, hopeful and satisfied and understood and known. When I read her work, I don’t just want to believe that we exist in the world that she’s created -- I believe that we do.
Bottom line: I hope everyone finds an author for them like that.
----------------------- pre-review
it is with great joy and absolutely zero surprise that I must tell you: Emily Henry has done it again.
this was so f*cking good I can hardly stand it.
review to come (!!!!!!!!!!!!)
----------------------- currently-reading updates
I GOT IT I GOT IT I GOT IT I GOT IT I GOT IT!!!!!!!!!!!!
and I'm reading it immediately.
thank you emily henry I love you
----------------------- tbr review
THIS IS DESCRIBED AS THE SERPENT KING MEETS STRANGER THINGS.
AND IT'S BY EMILY HENRY.
the fact that it is not currently in my possession is my new least favorite thing about the world....more
It’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, plus Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, plus a ton of critical analysiTHIS BOOK IS MY DREAM.
It’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, plus Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, plus a ton of critical analysis and fun facts and biographical info and poetry and background and cultural and period information and bonus illustrations and basically all you need or could ever want to know, except if you’re me and your love for and curiosity about Alice and Lewis Carroll and Wonderland will never be satiated.
And also it’s about a square yard and the font is tiny and it weighs about 30 pounds and takes an eternity to read.
I loved this so much that it made my heart hurt to finish it. My version of paradise is probably something like this, where I’m alternating between reading the original text I love more than anything and eloquent, wise, humorous elaboration on things I had never known. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know.
I guess you could say I grew…curiouser and curiouser.
I love myself.
Anyway, my bookmark for this book was a folded-up sheet of lined paper on which I wrote down the titles and works of art and research queries I wanted to know more about as I read. I filled up both sides of that sheet.
Absolutely every aspect of this book is gorgeous and curated and fascinating. I don’t really know how to review this because it basically transcended reading for me.
It was just a perfect experience.
Bottom line: If you love Alice like I do, or really really like it, you need to read this book. It’s a gift. That’s all I can say.
----------- pre-review
i have never, in my entire life, cried in public over a book.
my skin is clear. my gpa is up. spring has come early. i'm hydrated. i have been cured of my nearsightedness.
i could not have d r e a m e d up a more my skin is clear. my gpa is up. spring has come early. i'm hydrated. i have been cured of my nearsightedness.
i could not have d r e a m e d up a more perfect book.
this book contains: trans women, gay women, bi women, straight women, pan women, black women, asian women, native american women, middle eastern women, white women, autistic women, disabled women. there are living women and dead women and women who are so dead that it's like, maybe she was born around the year 350? there are women i've heard of and women i've long obsessed over and women i'd never heard of because SOCIETY IS UNJUST.
the art is beautiful, whether it's the comic-style panels that make up most of the book or the two-page spreads at the end of every entry, all of which i want to Frame And Hang But Also Print On The Backs Of My Eyelids.
i've been struggling to read a bit this month — no book could catch my attention. i opened the package containing this yesterday, and must have kept it in the back of my mind since, because i picked it up today without thinking. and didn't put it down. through dinner or cleaning or cookie-baking or anything else.
i needed this book in childhood, and i needed it as a teenager, and i need it now and i'll continue to need it forever. i know absolutely that i'll return to this book always.
this is going on my all-time favorites list. this is a book that i will recommend to all women, and all men, and all people of all genders because it is so important and beautiful and necessary.
as i finished this book, i got choked up. because it's over, and because it is such a gift.
at the end, Pénélope Bagieu includes a list of 30 more badass women, and oh my god if this world is worthy of loving Bagieu will write a book for them, too.
bottom line: maybe i will come back and write more later, because i have the feeling i will never be done talking about this book.
thank you, thank you, thaaaaank you to fierce reads for the ARC...more
This is not the last book of the Raven Cycle. It just isn’t. It’s not allowed to be. I didn’t say it was okay if it was and I feel like I should have some say in the matter, considering I like these books a lot and that’s pretty unusual for me.
Compelling argument, yeah? Everyone just send this review on over to Maggie Stiefvater and I’m sure we’ll have another installment in the next 12-18 months.
Great. Now that that’s settled:
WAS THIS MY FAVORITE BOOK OF THE RAVEN CYCLE???
Probably not, right? It can’t be. Not when everyone warned me this book was going to be a touch disappointing and I five-starred Blue Lily, Lily Blue and put it on my all-time favorites list and screamed about it from the rooftops. It’s impossible.
But also...this book was so damn good. I’m in crisis. Being in crisis is very normal for me, except usually I am in a negative crisis during which I manage to be somehow astonished that I disliked a book I was looking forward to, even though that’s basically my whole thing.
Currently, I am in crisis because I loved a book so much it’s threatening to break my whole life. This is a YA FANTASY. I don’t love YA FANTASY. I’m not SIXTEEN YEAR OLD. I read YA fantasy and then I write eight-page reviews TEARING IT APART.
Sporadic CAPS to make CLEAR that I am really FREAKING OUT ABOUT THIS.
I’m going to do some categories and hopefully calm down.
THE PLOT
This whole book was very exciting.
That’s really all I have to say. Feels like it shouldn’t be such an exceptional thing, but unfortunately it is. (The nonexceptional thing being “YA fantasy that is consistently exciting,” not “me not having a lot to say.” Although that too if we’re being totally honest.)
Truly, why isn’t all YA fantasy exciting??? That should be #1 on the priority list. First and foremost, nonstop action; next up, love triangles or the not-like-other-girls trope or manic pixie dream girls or whatever other dumb sh*t authors are falling over themselves to include in their books.
But I digress.
This is SO FAST-PACED. For the most part, the other three books have a slow, kind of research-y feeling first half, where our characters are learning stuff and feeling angsty, and then an action-packed second half. THIS BOOK WAS BASICALLY ALL SECOND HALF. Which, stressful. But also awesome.
THE SETTING
I want the setting of this series to eat me, which is just about the highest praise for a fictional setting there is.
I love being wrapped up in this world, and I would 10/10 be okay with living inside it. Not just because Gansey exists in it, but because it’s a world of magic and psychics and forests and sunlight and friendly ravens and dream-things and nature and accents and school uniforms and converted warehouses and miniature cities made of cardboard boxes and tucked-away mansions and perfect trees and talking trees and student housing and long drives and attics and also a pizza restaurant I really have an inexplicable soft spot for.
These books are where 300 Fox Way is, and Cabeswater, and the Orphan Girl, and Chainsaw, and Monmouth Manufacturing.
WHY AM I BEING FORCED TO STOP READING BOOKS THAT LET ME LIVE VICARIOUSLY AMONG THEM???
SMALL COMPLAINTS BEFORE THE BEST STUFF
I have exactly two (2) complaints about this near-perfect book, which is how you know my identity wasn’t stolen. Still the cynical, self-obsessed asshole who won’t let any of us have nice things.
Having said that, here we go:
Complaint numéro un: Piper, the greatest villain ever gifted to the genre of YA fantasy, or possibly any genre ever, is completely and utterly f*cked over in this book. She does not get even a fraction of the attention and love and villainous forehead-kisses she deserves. Which is a massive injustice. I may protest.
Complaint numéro deux: Blue and Gansey are...so gross.
I am very aware that saying this makes me look like a horrible freak monster who is somehow possessive over a fictional boy. That is not the case, and also I love Blue.
Their relationship is just made up of 0% chemistry, 100% them doing gross stuff like staring at each other and rubbing faces and whatnot.
No, I don’t have affection issues. Why do you ask?
THE BEST STUFF (THE CHARACTERS)
The title of this category looks like the weirdest remixed song title in all of history. But whatever. We have more important things to talk about. Namely:
THIS IS PERHAPS THE FIRST YA BOOK EVER IN ALL TIME IN WHICH I HAVE LIKED EVERY CHARACTER.
There wasn’t a single person I disliked. In the past I have made people very very mad at me due to the fact that someone could call either Ronan or Adam a congealing bowl of vanilla pudding to either of their respective fictional faces and I wouldn’t bat an eyelash. Which is to say I didn’t care about them that much. But in this book??? I, uh. I - I liked them both.
FINE, EVERYONE. YOU WIN. I LIKED THEM AFTER ALL. But I didn’t like them when you said I would, so. Take your victory with a grain of salt.
Adam/Ronan is the best and I am glad we’re getting more of them because that felt a touch: rushed. Which was maybe just me internally justifying the fact that suddenly I can’t get enough of RONAN??? AND ADAM??? Last-year me fresh out of Blue Lily, Lily Blue would never have been able to IMAGINE.
There is not NEARLY enough of Noah, my small and spooky son, in this book. And that, alongside the dire lack of Piper, f*cking sucks.
But there is also good news. Here is some good news: - Blue is still completely rad - Blue’s family of powerful women psychics = also still rad - A boy named Henry Cheng appears, apparently for the sole purpose of bringing an even higher level of rad to the table - And, of course: - GANSEYGANSEYGANSEY.
If you need to read me being disgusting about my love for a fictional character, please visit: literally any of my other The Raven Cycle reviews. I don’t have it in me right now. I am too devastated at my own loss.
As this book says:
“Gansey.” A pause. “That’s all there is.”
In conclusion: Please give me more Gansey. I need more Gansey.
And everyone else is pretty cool too.
FINAL EMOTIONAL RAMBLINGS, OR “THOUGHTS”
Usually when I finish a series I really love, I feel an overwhelming sadness and slump forever and never ever want to read anything again except more books in that series and then they DON’T EXIST which cue sadness again. It’s a never-ending cycle of suffering.
And don’t get me wrong, I am goddamn miserable that I finished these books. (The Gansey withdrawal alone is insufferable.) But this book actually managed to pull me out of my slump, not put me in one.
Magic.
Bottom line: I miss everyone already and I’m sad.
--------------- pre-review
I had tears in my eyes when I finished this book.
TEARS.
IN.
MY.
EYES.
I'm furious and also I loved every second of it so stupid much. Review to come
-------------
I'M DOING IT.
More than a year after finishing Blue Lily, Lily Blue, I'm finally attempting to finish this series.
First off, this book is teeny as all get out and oh MAN I love a short book!!!
Come to think of it...I really love a short book. Three five star ratings so far this year, and they’re clocking in at 173 pages, 181 pages, and a whopping 190 pages.
Maybe I just hate reading?
No no no no I will not get distracted from the fact that this is the literary equivalent of someone hacking my Ok Cupid profile to build my perfect match. (I do not have an Ok Cupid profile.)
In addition to being the perfect length (which is to say, just a touch above nonexistent), this is also my ideal genre??? Say it with me: WELL DONE MAGICAL REALISM BABY!!! (Sorry if the improvised “baby” prevented you from saying it with me.)
This book is about a boarding school for children who have fallen into other worlds (magical ones!) and been unceremoniously dropped back into our boring old magic-less one. (Boo! Can you imagine.) Think Wonderland (!!!), Narnia, etc.
Which brings up two MORE ways this book is perfect for me! One, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (my favorite book ever of all time, in case you’re new here) is canon in this world. Two, MAGIC BOARDING SCHOOL. Who doesn’t loooove that trope.
Another perfect thing: a touch of MURRRRDERRRR?!?!?!?! Yes! Murder! We have blood and mystery on our hands folks! (Hopefully not literally. That sounds unpleasant. You may want to hand sanitizer that sh*t. Except not actually because that cute lil keychain Purell you’re holding is CONTRIBUTING TO ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE YOU LOON.) (Sorry for all the caps lock in this one. I’m excited.)
And perhaps the most perfect thing of all: This book is so diverse it puts literally every other book ever to shame. In 173 pages, this story contained more solid representation than pretty much every YA fantasy I read last year COMBINED.
Our protagonist, Nancy, is asexual. A pal of hers is trans. Essentially every single character is of color or non-gender-conforming or non-straight and there is so much mental illness rep it makes me griiiiin EAR to EAR. Which is actually a very off-putting image. But don’t let the creepiness of my physically improbably smiling deter you from this book please.
To conclude: amazingly short + wonderful magical realism + Alice + boarding school + murder + mystery + effortless immersive diversity = I am one happy camper. Dare I say...the happiest camper....more
There are a lot of movies about boring white-straight-male aspiring writers in their 30s being taught how to LIVE WHIMSICALLY by a manic pixie dream girl. There are books about the beautiful wonder of a child’s perspective. There are millions and millions and millions of TV shows depicting the dramatic trials and tribulations of the high school experience (as lived by gorgeous twenty-three year olds).
But none of it feels true. Maybe only Neil Gaiman can remember what it’s like to be a child.
It is wondrous, and beautiful, and whimsical, and even dramatic. But it’s also dark and scary sometimes. Inexplicable things happen, and the world seems uncontrollable, which is magical and horrifying. That’s childhood.
That’s also this book.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane is actually terrifying.
It’s magical, but probably not in the way typically associated with fantasy novels narrated by children. It’s magical in the way that I felt the world was when I was a child. As it turns out, that’s much more magical. And much more amazing to read about.
This book is so, so short, and so devastatingly lovely. It’s beautifully written and emotional. It made me scared and it made my heart hurt and it made me smile.
I want to quote more of it, but really I want to quote everything. Maybe I’ll just excerpt ever-longer passages until I trick you into reading it?
So, better idea, just read it yourself.
Bottom line: It’s 181 pages. What would it hurt to read it read it read it read it read it?
------------------------- pre-review
things this book has in common with the graveyard book:
a) by neil gaiman b) first 5 star rating of the year c) totally f*cking rad
Sometimes, a book just clicks. Right away. No work required: it grabs you from the beginning and absolutely refuses to let go, even when you’re like, Sometimes, a book just clicks. Right away. No work required: it grabs you from the beginning and absolutely refuses to let go, even when you’re like, Uh, hey, book? I have to go to sleep. It’s three a.m. Or, Excuse me, book? If you could just...I don’t know, chill out for a second? I have places to be and cupcakes to sell and you’re making it impossible for me to put you down thankssomuch.
This book is a monster and did not even PRETEND to listen to me. Repercussions of this book’s asshole-ish-ness include: my tip jar was relatively empty on that particular Saturday, and I had one of the most fun reading experiences of my entire human existence.
It is, honestly, a fair trade. I simply do not have the time to explain that the pink frosting is just vanilla getting in the Valentine’s Day spirit when I could be squeezing in a few more pages of nonstop adventure.
I am now questioning whether the cupcake-selling motif of this review is muddling the point. I work in a cupcake shop? So that’s why I’m being like this.
Anyway.
I should not be surprised at all that I loved this so much. This book follows a band of child pickpockets, living in Marseille, France, in 1961. The cover is beautiful.
(And so are the ILLUSTRATIONS, for God’s sake. As if it weren’t enough for this book to have illustrations generally (as every book should) (yes, double parentheses, because f*ck you), IT IS ILLUSTRATED BY THE MASTERMIND BEHIND THE ART IN THE MYSTERIOUS BENEDICT SOCIETY. If you don’t know how I feel about The Mysterious Benedict Society, you don’t know me at all. Technically that series makes up 5% of all the five star ratings I’ve ever given in all my life??? So pretty much YOU SHOULD STOP READING THIS RIGHT NOW AND GO READ THE MYSTERIOUS BENEDICT SOCIETY. IMMEDIATELY. You absolute fool.)
Forcing myself to move on: Its cast of characters is completely full-on amazing. I’m talkin’ adolescent vagabonds ranging from identical Senegalese twins to a Southern belle to a cockney girl who can disappear in any crowd to a Russian kid they call The Bear to KID WITH EYEPATCH.
Also, it is FUNNY. And since when are books funny? Like don’t get me wrong, huge book fan over here, but they’re not exactly a nonstop barrel of laughs. It’s just hard to laugh when you’re also holding a brick of pages in your hands and reading words off of them? Is this relatable or not?
All of this is to say that this book made me laugh. Against the odds, apparently.
And the WRITING! Oh, man, the writing. The descriptions. The narration. The second-person addresses to the audience! I could straight up write a love letter to the voice of this story. Adding it to my to-do list now.
But most importantly of all: this book never stops being exciting.
I talk about how much I love middle grade adventure almost as much as I talk about my adoration of well done magical realism, but there’s a goddamn reason for it my guy. Middle grade adventure is what YA could never be: an exciting read with no gross heavy romance to detract, a lot of solid friendships, typically a good sense of humor, and a pretty consistent dose of diversity.
And this book is one of the best examples of that potential for magnificence since its royal highness The Mysterious Benedict Society itself.
ONE OF THE MOST FUN READING EXPERIENCES OF MY LIFETIME.
Bottom line: My new master plan, after conquering the world and forcing everyone to give Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland five stars, is to make all of us start being middle grade book bloggers. Stuff like this is just way too good to miss out on.
4.5
--------- CURRENTLY READING UPDATE
truly this book had me at "band of child pickpockets"...more
How did I wait so long to read it??? How was it so good???? How can I pull the high school experience of the protagonTHIS IS THE BEST EMMA MILLS BOOK.
How did I wait so long to read it??? How was it so good???? How can I pull the high school experience of the protagonist out of this book and live it for myself, despite it being fictional and me being in my twenties?????
My ability to work out such questions is even more ineffective than usual, because I have DIED of CUTENESS. I have only recently been resurrected from DEATH ITSELF, because this book is so overwhelmingly ADORABLE it MURDERED me in COLD BLOOD.
Sporadic CAPS for EFFECT.
You can tell just from the number of shelves this is on that it's got the Me Endorsement. Let's do a list of them, for proof (and flair).
- 4-and-a-half stars: That's a high-ass rating, boi! - auto-buy-authors Emma Mills made it to this list because her contemporaries are mediocre-to-good and the covers are beaut as hell. GUESS WHAT. This is my least favorite of her covers but the word mediocre belongs nowhere near this book I'll tell you that much! - best-contemporaries Yeah. I said it. It’s going on the most coveted shelf of all. (Just kidding favorites would be that, or at the very least favorites-2018, but please let’s not be ridiculous and just be grateful for what we have.) - couldnt-wait-to-read Honestly this shelf and its brethren, cant-wait-to-read, are lies. There is not a book on Earth I can’t wait to read, because this book came out a million years ago and has been on my TBR since pre-release and look how long it took me. BUT STILL. It conveys an excitement. - funny BOOKS ARE ALMOST NEVER FUNNY. Do people ever laugh at books?? I don’t. Except this time! Fooled you. This book is very hilarious. - i-love-these-characters This is...actually perhaps the highest praise I can offer any book. I Never love YA characters. They are always boring and interchangeable. Except, guess what, AGAIN NOT THIS TIME. This book: defying all expectations I set up for you in literally the previous sentence. - recommend Obviously.
THIS BOOK IS SO GOOD. The friendships are amazingly well-done. The family relationships (okay maybe not parents but definitely siblings) are fantastic. Gideon, the love interest, is the crown prince of my heart and my new favorite YA guy of all time, or at least this moment before I forget. Like, a boy with...charm? A personality? A sense of humor? In my YA? It’s more likely than you think.
I would say “book boyfriend,” if I didn’t hate that term and find it unbearably cringey/cheesy/embarrassing.
But I do, so.
Also there’s a FF relationship between two supporting characters (one of whom is indicated to be bi) and it’s just the sh*t. It does seem like Emma Mills may keep on writing hetero-ass romances for all times, but I’ll be more okay with that if she keeps giving me this fantastic adorable LGBT+ rep along the way.
The relationship development and the character development and the friendship development...it’s all just. <3.
The fact that I am losing the ability to use words and am instead using vintage-style pre-emoji emoticons is not a good sign. Time to wrap it up. EVEN THOUGH I COULD GUSH ABOUT THIS BOOK FOR A THOUSAND MILLION YEARS.
Bottom line: YESYESYESYESYESYES YESSSSSS!
--------------------- pre-review
THIS IS THE BEST EMMA MILLS BOOK!!!
HOW DID I WAIT SO LONG TO READ IT!!!!
REVIEW TO COME, ONCE MY ENTHUSIASM LEVELS DIP JUST ENOUGH THAT I CAN TAP THAT CAPS LOCK KEY AGAIN AND STOP SCREAMING AT YOU ALL!!!!!!!!...more
I am not even talking about the cover - although actually, let’s take a second to talk about the cover. LOOK AT THIS COVER! This book is so beautiful.
I am not even talking about the cover - although actually, let’s take a second to talk about the cover. LOOK AT THIS COVER! Are you seeing it? So lovely. So so pretty. Looooook aaaaaaattttt itttttttt.
Okay, now that we’ve done that.
This book is so beautiful.
I don’t know what I expected. I honestly don’t really know why I picked this up, besides the aforementioned pretty-cover thing. I’m not a huge sci-fi person. I’m definitely not a huge post-apocalyptic dystopian person. (We all lived through the time when YA just seemed like different iterations of the exact same dystopian plotline. Like, were there not at least two years in which every YA book was the Hunger Games and Divergent under a different title, but somehow increasingly bland? Anyway.)
I don’t know what tempted me to pick this up, but good golly am I glad I did. (And good golly am I sorry I just used the term “good golly.”)
Because, again, this book is so, so beautiful.
It’s gorgeously written. Every time I stumble across a beautifully written book, I feel so lucky about it. It’s hard to stumble upon truly lovely prose, and I certainly never expected it from an Apocalypse Book, but holy sh*t is it what I received. The writing is enchanting.
It’s also gorgeously characterized. There are a lot of characters in this book, many of whom are introduced all at once, and many of whom get very little coverage in the book. But somehow……..none of them feel flat. They’re not easy to confuse with one another. Somehow, without your noticing, this book will get you to care about a dozen or so people. (And they really feel like people.)
And its themes are gorgeous, too. I can’t imagine anyone coming out of this story and not feeling newly in love with life and with the world. Civilization just seems so wondrous after this. I looked at so many commonplace things in a whole new light.
This book is sad, and lovely, and exciting, and slow, and true, and earnest, and caring, and sweet, and cruel, and real, and above all it is so, so beautiful.
Bottom line: Everything about this is an unexpected gift.
---------------- pre-review i am Overwhelmed by Beauty and Meaning and Good Things and there is simply no way i can really rate this at this time, let alone review it.
review (& final rating) to come, when i've redeveloped some semblance of personhood
---------------- tbr review
honestly can't believe i've waited so long to read a book with a cover this pretty...more
“They were smiling at each other as if this was the beginning of the world.”
There are very few writers whose careers you can trace through their work “They were smiling at each other as if this was the beginning of the world.”
There are very few writers whose careers you can trace through their work like F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The kind of charming immaturity of This Side of Paradise; the polished, profound (if a little thematically evident), career-defining The Great Gatsby; Tender is the Night, a decade’s attempt to live up to Gatsby; and, finally, The Last Tycoon, the book that finally would’ve done so.
AND FITZGERALD JUST HAD TO GO AND DIE IN THE MIDDLE OF IT.
I do not know how to review this book. I am completely, truly, one hundred percent sure this would have been Fitzgerald’s greatest. Maybe not his most well-read (Gatsby is perfect for high school underclassmen reading lists - theme-filled AND obvious) but definitely his best.
“These lights, this brightness, these clusters of human hope, of wild desire—I shall take these lights in my fingers. I shall make them bright, and whether they shine or not, it is in these fingers that they shall succeed or fail.”
This book, even in its incompleteness, is so subtle and evocative and nuanced. The characters are what Gatsby’s could have been if they were more people than images. Fitzgerald treats his women better, even his minorities better.
1930s Hollywood is as glamorous and seedy and fascinating as one of Gatsby’s parties - and as Fitzgerald himself pointed out, a much needed escape from the war burgeoning as he wrote.
“People fall in and out of love all the time. I wonder how they manage it.”
Reading this is an experience. It’s kind of like if you were assigned a translated book for school, and you read two thirds of the wrong translation before giving it up and Sparknoting the rest. Thorough Sparknoting, but Sparknoting all the same.
It’s interesting, and it provides a unique look, but god the whole time I was just wishing that Fitzgerald lived to finish this work.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he would have gotten too wrapped up in it - made it too much like Gatsby, rewritten the themes as too obvious, changed the ending or added more motifs. Maybe Kathleen would have gotten the treatment Daisy Buchanan did. Maybe it would have always been way too overshadowed by Gatsby to get any attention.
But we’ll never know. And it feels like the worst thing ever that we’ll never get the chance.
Bottom line: I loved this so, so, so much. Fitzgerald, man. If only you had another year.
“How different it all was from what you'd planned.” ...more
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