lenorayoder's reviews
120 reviews

A lot more focused on a married-with-kids household than I thought - I live with my sister so I was looking for something that can be adapted to that, roommates, friends living together, etc. I’ll be doing that, but the book doesn’t even mention such a situation which I think is a huge blind spot, especially since the subtitle of the book doesn’t indicate that this is just a book for married couples, and the vast majority of the time married parents. 

A little longer than it needed to be. The book spends a lot of time explaining how the author developed the method and I wish more of that time had been spent on giving examples of the method once it was in place, or how some people have personalized it. A lot of topics were repeated several times while others were never mentioned. 

I started this book thinking it would be 5 stars. I love the movie, and I liked all the additional details/context this book gave me, and a lot of the writing is enjoyable and funny. However, parts of this book, especially the frame story, have just aged pretty badly. Parts feel racist, sexist, fatphobic, etc. all for throwaway jokes that are barely funny, if at all. Also in this 25th anniversary edition we get more frame story and a pseudo-sequel. These do more harm than good, and the author's character becomes 10x more annoying to read about - I would recommend sticking to the original story.

As the book goes on its sexist nature gets more and more obvious. I think because the movie streamlines everyone's characters Buttercup feels just as fleshed out as everyone else, but in the book it's obvious that none of the few women characters get the attention that the men do. For a book titled "The Princess Bride" it never feels like we're in Buttercup's head the way we are Inigo, Fezzik, Humperdinck's, etc. Buttercup frequently isn't really around, and when she is it feels like the author kind of forgets she's there and a person. Also

Westley slaps Buttercup???

and we just glide past it.

Given this book is subtitled "Tale of True Love and High Adventure" I also expected more romance/true love. All of the adventure in this book feels shown, while all the love feels told. Westley seems to mostly love Buttercup because she's beautiful - her beauty and that she loves him is all he thinks about when

he's distracting himself during torture in the Zoo of Death

. A lot of this didn't bother me at the beginning because I thought eventually the book would delve deeper into their relationship and we would see them interact more, but that didn't really happen. The ending of the book is all adventure that isn't as good as the Guilder sequences and cuts off abruptly. I'm left not really believing that Westley and Buttercup make it past the 3 month mark as a couple. 

This book has such huge potential and I'm glad I read it once, but now that it's done I'm honestly left hoping a woman will give it a rewrite at some point. I'm glad I have extra info to enrich the movie-watching experience. 

Takes a while to get going but even the slow beginning is well-written. Every character feels like a real person. Good depiction of both the obvious and subtle mistreatment certain groups of people suffered in early 1900s Britain. That these depictions feel so real and relevant to today makes this a bit of a depressing read, but it’s worth it. Bittersweet but appropriate ending. I felt so bad for Klaus the whole time,

and I’m sad his story ended that way, even though it was realistic and the right ending for the book’s themes.

Thank god I had this on hand to read after the disappointment of the first two ACOTAR books. I was so hungry for good characters and narration and Simonson delivered. 

Subpar characters and plot. Okay-ish worldbuilding, but I suspect that’s because a lot of this world’s elements are “borrowed” from other media. None of the twists felt shocking, and I outright predicted all but the one that involved characters I didn’t care about at all. 

Thoroughly disliked everyone except Amren. Feyre makes for an insufferable narrator. While the second half of the book was more enjoyable than the first, I’m not forgetting the 300 pages of absolute nonsense I had to wade through to get there. It was so hard to get through the first half of this book that it set me 8 books behind on my reading goal. Both books in this series are way too long for their plot - I won’t be reading anything else by Maas. 300 pages of no-plot is not okay when your characters are so bad I’m actively hoping they get killed off. 

If you love these books and think they’re the height of fantasy, know that much better is out there and you just haven’t read it yet. Please expand your horizons, you’re missing a lot. 

At no point in this book was I surprised or intrigued. Neither the plot nor the characters are developed well, and a good book needs at LEAST one. Full of cliches and things I've seen before, down to

the curse

feeling like a

Beauty and the Beast

rip-off, and Rhysand's

use of body paint

being taken straight from

The Mummy

movie. Just a bunch of things I've seen before, and liked better elsewhere. 

I read this because I heard the second book was interesting and I was generally curious about the hype, but goddamn does booktok need to find better material to gush over. Not a single character in this book felt like a real person and that made it really difficult to care about anything, much less a mediocre plot. And it must be said that Feyre makes for an unpleasant narrator.

If I were more interested in nature, biology, and/or the areas of the U.S. that this book takes place in, this book would have 4 stars. I would recommend to anyone interested in the above, or who has the patience for a book that takes its time with its story. Subject matter aside, there's some really nice writing on display here.

The parts of this book from Raven's perspective are fascinating, and some of her writing and self-reflection hit really hard. There were occasional lines and sections that made me tear up, or that I felt compelled to read aloud to others. 

I would have liked this book more if it was entirely from her perspective instead of imagined animal perspectives, especially since the entire book already has a lot of talk about nature (specific plants, animals, and locations) I don't understand. I understand why those animal (mostly Fox) perspectives are there, they just weren't my cup of tea. 

I also found some of the non-linear storytelling confusing, especially since I think Raven was giving timeline clues in the form of nature details that I don't know enough to decipher (such as when certain plants are mentioned in certain scenes that I'm guessing would only be present during certain times of year). 

This book feels like the author wrote out a personal fantasy, then added a mystery around the edges when she realized a book actually needs plot. We get endless descriptions of irrelevant details like the outfits everyone is wearing, the hallway layout of a lawyer’s office the characters visit once, the furniture in every location, hairstyles, teapot and cup and plate designs, etc. etc. I  don’t share in this very specific daydream, and therefore spent a lot of time skimming over extraneous descriptions of things like “trendy” outfits that already feel dated, waiting for something interesting to happen. Meanwhile, we get very few details about the murder, and the sudden reveal of the culprit has nothing to do with any kind of detecting skills the main character might have. 

The writing overall feels very amateurish, for the content reasons mentioned above, but also technically. There’s a lot of clunky dialogue and exposition, and the author frequently tells instead of shows. At least the read was quick. I won’t be checking out anything else in this series or from this author.

It’s clear from the introduction that this book is supposed to be funny. It’s not funny, or even entertaining. The author’s voice/writing style is boring and doesn’t add anything to the stories, and its lack is especially obvious in the book and chapter introductions. 

There are several stories in this book that feature injured or dead people who didn’t do anything stupid. They’re only included because something about their death/accident was deemed “weird” or “funny” by the author, but in actuality these stories are just the author punching down at people who aren’t mainstream/conventional. Annoying that this subpar book can’t even stick to its only rule. 

This is probably the last shopaholic book I'll be reading. I'm tired of plots that rely so heavily on miscommunication. It's disappointing to see Becky repeat the same mistakes book after book - she always seems to forget the lessons she just learned. It's tiring to watch her create disasters because of her own delusions, and then have those disasters solved because of luck or other characters bailing her out. 

These books are just so disappointing. In some aspects Becky incrementally improves from book to book, but her main character traits stay exactly the same instead of developing, and it really cripples the series. It also has the side effect of making Luke's character worse as time goes on, and making Suze look stupid for not noticing what's really going on with Becky. The premise of the first book is so good, and continuing into a series could have been great, but instead we just got more of the same. There's so much potential in Kinsella's fun writing. If I could believe that Becky would actually develop I'd keep reading, but four books tell me otherwise. 

As for this book, I loved Jess and her confrontations with Becky (if I thought it would have real consequences I would read the next book!). I love the ways she differs from Becky, but what's even better is what they have in common. We get so much insight into both characters by comparing them - the way they both have such a head for numbers when it comes to shopping but use that skill for opposite purposes is brilliant. On the other hand, the benevolent prejudice on display during the honeymoon chapters and a little throughout the rest of the book is wild - it's in all of the books but it's especially on display here. After reading Bridget Jones' diary, I'm wondering if this is a 2000s British way of thinking. Do not like it.

I think this one is my favorite so far, but it's still 3 stars. The Danny character rubbed me the wrong way, so I was annoyed when they invited him to

come with them on the private plane to England

at the end, although thankfully he mostly faded to the background after that. Kind of a ridiculous ending, but that's pretty on brand for the character. I like that we learned more about Luke and his background in this book, I loved seeing Suze's story progress, and I thought all the new characters introduced at Becky's job were a lot of fun. 

Also, this book “handled” 9/11 by omitting the year on all the dated correspondence (unlike the previous 2 books and at the least the book that comes after this), but I think it’s supposed to take place mostly in 2002, with the earliest correspondence being from November 2001.