Reviews and Comments

TL;DR — I liked the setting a lot, but the story around Galaxy left much to be desired

Galaxy and her story were average at best. I never found myself caring for her much, even after it was revealed what had actually happened at Ground Zero. I know some folks mentioned that the amount and kind of trauma she went through disrupted their suspension of disbelief, but honestly I feel like it's plausible enough. Life is a bitch and then you die, as the saying goes. I just feel like we never really saw her being herself — she was always responding to the plot's desire to wipe her and the others getting to the bottom of what happened out. I genuinely felt more attached to North, since we had some look into how he was feeling before his death and a real look into his motivations. His desire to feel alive again was charming.

I just wish we had spent more time with Belbalm and building up some curiosity about her. I know it's supposed to be a twist, but I feel like the twist should (at least to some degree) slot into place when you look back at the story.

I'm glad Darlington isn't dead, honestly. Kinda curious what kinda murder or other large sin Bardugo is going to put on him in the next book. I do think it is important that Darlington was thought dead for a bit — it gave Galaxy that push she needed to not be looking to others and being within her little cocoon of this more comfortable life.

Anyway. North ended up being kinda precious to me and I liked the interactions with him a lot. 4/5 in spirit for the new blorbo.

This was a bizarre book from start to finish. The preface was unnecessarily hard on the original novel while being way too kind to the Lloyd Webber musical adaptation of the original novel (which I am a fan of, so I'm not saying that from a place of malice). Yes, the facts don't line up because he was writing mostly fiction??? Like Leroux was just trying to drum up attention for the opera house because it was in disrepair, he was not trying to write a whole fucking mystery novel. Sure, it's a 3/5 novel overall, but don't try to nitpick it for things that it was not originally trying to do.

The entire setup for Erik making it to Coney Island and eventually becoming rich is believable enough to be hand-waived. I'll take it. However, the rest of the book after the introduction is weirdly paced and stilted. I feel like we had no real time with the phantom outside of "here is how I got rich. I will now be sad about Christine for two sentences." The reporters are fun and all but the phantom should probably have more development.

Because we spend so little time with the main characters it makes no fuckin sense that Pierre would want to go with the phantom. He literally doesn't even know the phantom, why the fuck would he want to live with him instead of the guy who raised him???

Fucking wild. At least the shooting at the end makes sense, unlike Lord Andy's Love Never Dies trash fire. Both Forsyth and Lord Andy need to face prosecution for the crimes that are everything to do with this novel.

Hey, at least Raoul being impotent via dubiously logical injury to his groin arteries after a gunshot is infinitely more funny than "this kid is musical, he must be my kid"

Erik is far more unhinged than I thought he would be, goddamn lmao.

Anyway, the book is alright! It gets a 4/5 instead of a 3/5 because I particularly like this kind of story and I'm a fan of all the spin-offs that have come from it. I started with a pretty bad translation that made the story hard to understand, but once I got my hands on a good translation I had a much better time. Take care to get a good translation if/when you read the book.

I was also sorta surprised to see how much of a whiny baby Raoul was. I also think it's significant that Erik lets Christine go out of personal desire in this rather than only after being confronted by Raoul (as is the case in many adaptations). I think it perfectly demonstrates that Erik is not solely monstrous; there are still pitiable aspects to his personality and upbringing.

Okay! So. Initially I wasn't sure about how I would feel about the first person, very casual pov, but I ended up liking it a lot! I think it works for the story being told here. I also appreciate how believable all the characters (and their growth) feel. I especially related to Mickey and his struggles with depression, coming out, and feeling disconnected from his parents. I also really loved that there was a focus on the hockey community's shortcomings. It is overwhelmingly white, male, and bro-y, so it was refreshing to see a book critique that while still keeping the absolute unabashed fun that comes with hockey fiction. The real NHL draft first pick was the friends we made along the way. :^)

TL;DR: This is great debut novel with lovable, believable characters. Lots of fun to read.

Oh my god. OH MY GOD. I need to re-read this so I'll update this review when I do in a few months, but damn, Estraven's death caused me so much pain.

Oh boy, where do I start. I suppose some context never hurt: I read The Love Hypothesis before this and gave it a 3/5 stars. I liked it mostly because it appealed to my specific interests and background. It was like junk food: fun, but not particularly engaging. I didn't find it too annoying to read at any point, and soared through it (especially since its relatively short). I expected something similar from Love on the Brain. Maybe not exactly as up my alley as The Love Hypothesis was, but something that would be relatable as a person that isn't very well represented in STEM. I got so, so much less.

To begin, this book felt like marvel movie fanfiction with all the fourth wall breaks and referential humor that went on . Given that I am not a fan of marvel movies mostly because of its "quippy" humor, this was grating. I felt myself immediately pulled out of my immersion in the story as soon as a quippy joke or modern meme was used in the book. Of course it was the same for the fourth wall breaks, but that's sort of their point, so I don't want to explicitly mention them in the context of that gripe. I think the worst occurrence of this in the book was "look it up." in reference to a relevant date. I had to push through hard to just finish the last bits of the book after that.

The characters also felt like they had little depth. Bee was the most well-developed, but I still felt like it wasn't really demonstrated how much her tragic love life and the betrayal she experienced really hurt. We were told it hurt her, but didn't see any of the effects beyond "oh I can't get into this relationship because I'm damaged from this past experience." All of that hurt and greiving is left as things that occurred before the book, and I think that is a great detriment to character development. Also, I feel like we learned literally nothing about Levi. Just bits here and there about his family and how that effects his behavior, and some parts of his life in grad school, and that's it. We never get to learn about his growth through therapy or anything like that.

Oh yes, and the villain in the end was barely believable, and how he gets discovered is not believable at all. Don't want to spoil it too much - I want to leave this untagged.

Like I mentioned earlier, I'm a non-binary person in a STEM PhD program myself. It's hard being under-represented in STEM, and I've faced a lot of quiet discrimination for it. As someone that experiences similar problems that Bee has, how Bee went about talking about this STEM discrimination throughout this book just felt like a mockery sometimes. Don't get me wrong, all people underrepresented in STEM should cope with that in whatever way feels best to them, but the way she talked about it occasionally felt like "oh boys hate girls in their little STEM playground uwu." Like it was silly. I know making light of things helps sometimes, but some care should be taken with it when written into a quite popular book (unlike when you throw a tweet out into the universe to complain about your labmate being a dick). This is entirely my opinion on this and it is not a large influence in how I'm rating this book, but I just wanted to mention it.

Anyway, all of these factors together just made this so unpleasant to read. It took me significantly longer to read for that reason. I'm probably just not the audience for this quippy/fourth wall break humor. Nor the audience for these characters.

I really sped through this one (read it in two days), but I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. It's a light read and a little too up my alley.

That aside, I will say first and foremost: this reads like fanfiction. I mean this in a pretty positive way, since I enjoy the tropes going on here. I also enjoy the perspective that the author has on academia, being an academic herself. Some jokes genuinely got a snicker out of me, and some bits about impostor syndrome and the ups and downs of a PhD program were a little bit too real.

I will say, how on the nose it was with fourth wall breaks and self-referential humor was a little annoying in some parts. The obliviousness of the main couple, while enjoyable most of the time, was also incredibly unbelievable. Even for fanfiction. I also felt like the ending really lacked gravitas because of how quickly Olive and Adam got back together. I would've liked to see more struggle there. I do also want to note that the characters are somewhat one-dimensional. This is definitely the largest drawback of the fact that it reads like fanfiction. (EDIT: this makes more sense now, see below) I feel like I barely understood Olive, and I understood even less of Adam. I would've liked more time spent with Olive and Adam overall, but honestly I'm not sure if this writing style or storyline would've been able to sustain much more plot without getting tedious.

Anyway, the tl;dr is that this book was perfectly servicable for my specific interests and I enjoyed it as a fellow academic.

EDIT: I was informed after writing this review that this was reylo fanfic. That connects a lot of dots. I'm not a fan of reylo, but it doesn't influence my opinion in any way in regards to this review.

Sorta hard to follow - the two streamed structure really had me confused about what was going on until I had some hindsight at the end. Most of the important bits of the story were not lost, but I wish I had a stronger idea of what was going on. The whole thing felt very dream-like. The Elethiomel reveal doesn't really fully justify it. I love all the drones and minds in the culture, regardless of how unhinged they are.

This book really does hit home on how immoral and sorta imperialistic special circumstances is. There is a fine line to be walked between imperialism and benevolent interference, and I feel like special circumstances always ends up on the side of spreading their ideology to everyone regardless of the means it takes to get there. I think beychae's notes on that near the middle are pertinent to that.

I likely will revisit this and read again - I feel like I took too long to read this so the beginning wasn't too fresh in my mind while I was finishing it.

Oh my god do I have thoughts about this book. But first, background about my rating: I try to abide by goodread's usage of the five star rating to avoid my reviews getting skewed toward more stars. So, this five star rating holds a little extra weight this time.

Alright, so. I love the culture. I was introduced through a reading I did for a Philosophy class nearly 3 years ago now, but only got around to reading the series of books now (this is the first culture book I've read). I love the absolute scale of it - it is difficult to get fully acquainted with it, and some parts of this book were confusing to me as a new initiate, but otherwise I think this book was a great introduction. There is so much to be explored, and I'm already a little disappointed that some of the parts I was most interested in from this book are not explored in future books (I skimmed some summaries). However, I am nearly unreasonably excited to learn more about the Minds.

Speaking of the minds, I love how drones are treated in this universe. As fully sentient with their own complex composition and depth of emotion - makes for far more interesting stories. I really enjoyed the twist of Mahwrin Skel being Flere-Imasaho. I caught on around the beginning of the third chapter, but the end reveal was still satisfactory.

The twists in this book were really enjoyable - I feel like its perfectly on brand for a large society to mostly keep its pawn in intersocietal chess in the dark so it was sorta awe inspiring to see just how much they kept in the dark. I really didn't expect for the final game to be played for the Empire of Azad's existence itself - I simply thought Nicosar had gone off the rails because he was a sore loser and could not stand to not win (despite his throne being assured, more or less).

Some additional notes: I really appreciated seeing Gurgeh sorta detach from reality after being shown the state media deciphered by Flere-Imasaho. I love how the way the story was told mirrored Gurgeh's detachment by referring to Gurgeh as a nondescript man that we no longer have a window into the thoughts of, especially. Of course this was, in the end, just Flere-Imasaho not making up what Gurgeh was thinking, but it really drives home that Gurgeh was having a mental breakdown of sorts trying to parse the absolute violence of the culture around him.

I'm just. Enamored. By the scale of the Culture and its society, how Gurgeh became consumed by the game and gave all of his focus to it, the drones, by Special Circumstances... It's all beautiful and fascinating and I'm excited to read the other books.

This took me a little longer to read than I'd like since I moved right in the middle of reading it. So, I think my review is going to be a little less detailed than I'd like it to be. Regardless, here we go:

I thought this was generally pretty good. I came to like having the background story of Pax and Rahara, I just wish we got more insight into how their relationship changed after Pax rescued Rahara. Of course we're given the breif mention that they're more physically close to each other suggesting a relationship, but I would've liked to get a heart to heart scene to make this developent more impactful to us as readers.

I liked how Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon were characterized, too. Especially Qui-Gon — I feel like him being more on the chaotic end was a great to show the contrast and strain between him and Obi-Wan. The strain was also quite relatable. Never feeling like enough is a common feeling among many of us, so it's not hard to feel Obi-Wan's pain. Especially when he finds out from a senator that Qui-Gon has been invited to the council. I've had to deal with some lingering hurt feelings from a falling out with a previous mentor figure, so reading about how their relationship improved and healed gave me a little solace.

Overall, good book. Wish there was a little more time spent on characterization in some bits, but there was enough to still thoroughly enjoy the story. Definitely going to peruse around for more master and padawan books...

Like all my other reviews, I'm writing this just as I finished the book (at 2am, since I don't know how to keep normal hours).

So, to begin, this book is not at all what I expected. I saw it mentioned several times on the dark academia side of tumblr and vaguely heard there was an important mentor figure in it, so I figured that it was worth a shot. If not for the content, then to know what all the hubbub was about. I'm sure you can imagine my surprise when there was two murders, substance abuse, and a suicide in it. This is not to say I didn't enjoy the book, it definitely earned its four stars, but I was not at all expecting what I got.

To begin, this book has a nice balance between discussing classics and getting on with the actual plot. The scenes focusing on an author or passage of classical literature are relevant to characterization of whichever character is the focal point of the scene and aren't too dense. I am nowhere close to a classics nerd and I was able to understand and appreciate many of the references and passages. The scenes, especially before Bunny's murder, were rich with detail in all the right ways. I found myself thinking about the universe of the book outside of the time I was reading, which isn't something that happens often anymore.

After Bunny's murder, things dragged a bit more for me. The chapters were quite long and often felt like they were repeating themselves, so things could occasionally get boring. This would change near the end, especially around the times Charles started to spiral and Julian found out about Bunny's murder. It was nearly impossible to put down the book after that point. As a small note, I'm glad Richard didn't get with Camilla. I've read enough fiction where the main character gets the object of their affection.

To close this review, I just want to share a passage from the book that left an impression on me:

"Henry," I said. I wanted to say something profound, that Julian was only human, that he was old, that flesh and blood are frail and weak and that there comes a time when we have to transcend our teachers. But I found myself unable to say anything at all. He turned his blind, unseeing eye upon me. "I loved him more than my own father," he said. "I loved him more than anyone in the world."

There are few people more important in a budding academic's life than a particularly great mentor, so this particularly pulled my heart strings.

Oh boy, I have finally finished this series. I had a complicated relationship with the two books prior to this one, so it was entirely expected when I had complicated feelings about this one. As per usual, I'm writing this right as I finished reading.

For the positives, I can say that this book had a far more interesting start. I really enjoyed following Quentin after he was kicked out of Fillory. I actually found myself enjoying his character, which I was thoroughly surprised by. Plum was an interesting addition, too; I didn't necessarily love her, but she did add some interesting aspects to the plot. The whole bit with breaking the incorporate bond was my favorite part of the book, specifically. I really loved learning more about Mayakovsky and I honestly wish we had learned more about him throughout the book series. I wanted to know more about his background and upbringing as a magician and what he learned while bound to Breakbills south. It's understandable we couldn't go into that level of detail though.

For negatives, I really didn't like the Fillory bits in the beginning. Elliot was not what I expected character-wise, but that one's on me since I created my own ideas of what he was like from prior brief interactions. I feel like we never got to really experience Elliot, which is a shame. I feel like he could've been a really interesting addition to the plot. The bit at the end where Quentin finally understands the spell for turning magic back into matter felt rushed, and so did Quentin becoming god. I logically understand why those events needed to take place and how they make logical sense in-universe, I just wished we spent more time with Quentin where he slowly started piecing things together. I do like, however, that some growth was shown in Quentin's character when he relinquished control. For my last remark, there was just so much "I am 14 and this is deep" in these books. It never really calmed down as the series continued, and a lot of the time it was only worthy of an eye-roll.

Overall, I liked it better than the other books, but I didn't like it enough to give it a 4/5. I still have a lot of complicated feelings about the series, and honestly I felt like I was in a toxic relationship with it at times, but I made it far enough to read all of them. That's a feat within itself. So bravo, Lev Grossman, for making me read all 3. Glad to be able to ruminate on this series with the plot resolved.

Ok, so, I'm writing this review right after I finished the book because man, did I not expect that ending. Let me not get ahead of myself though.

To begin, I had a really complicated relationship with this book. I had a complicated relationship with the first one, too, but for different reasons. If you look at my profile you can read my review of the first one for more depth, but it boiled down to "too much going on for one book, it felt rushed." This one, however, felt like it dragged. At least in the beginning. It took me roughly four months to finish this book due to my lack of interest around a quarter of the way through. The whole part where they went back to earth felt incredibly tedious at the time. I realize now, with information about the end, that it was important to introduce Poppy and bring Josh back, but I still think it could've been paced better. It especially felt slow because I wasn't the biggest fan of Julia. Things picked up as soon as they got back to Fillory.

Addressing Julia: I began this book with a strong dislike for her. The earlier parts of her story with the safehouses wasn't interesting to me, but it really picked up and became interesting around the Free Trader Beowulf section. By the end of the book I was fully invested in Pouncy, Asmodeus, and the rest of the Murs magicians. The main group of Murs magicians were interesting and I actually cared about them and their well being. The last bit with them accidentally summoning Reynard the Fox instead of O.L.U. was terrifying. I mourned the magicians lost and sympathized with Julia. Its quite impactful when someone can begin a book disliking a character and end up with a neutral leaning positive view on them by the end.

The end was interesting. I don't know yet how exactly I feel about it, but I liked the touch of Benedict and Martin Chatwin making reappearances. I genuinely mourned the loss of Benedict. I also found it interesting that the beginning of the book tied in so well with the end. I thought that the outer island would never be mentioned again by the end of the book, but I was sorely mistaken. I'm kinda glad that Quentin doesn't get to carry on as a Fillorian king. Quentin is kinda a miserable character, and I think him not getting a happy ending will be great for his development. He's had the best stuff dropped on him, and while he paid quite a lot for it by the end of the first book, it feels like he could do with a bit more paying for the jackpot he hit in life. I'm glad Julia gets to be with her tree in the far side, even though she started the whole mess by summoning the elder gods. She's suffered enough, she can get one good thing.

In essence, like my three star rating says, I liked this. The beginning dragged, and I just felt really apathetic about the whole thing, but I'm glad things picked up in the end. I'm still conflicted about how the ending made me feel, but I think its leaning positive. I just wish things were better paced - better pacing would land this book into four range. I wasn't quite sure if I'd be reading the next one when I started this book, but I can say I will definitely be doing so with that twist ending.

Reviewing at like 3am because I want to speak about it while the ending is still fresh.

I was in search for an adult book with a complex magical system, and I landed with a reccomendation for the magicians. So here I am.

My first thought while reading was that Quentin is deeply unlikable. It was genuinely hard for me to get through the opening section before Brakebills. It lessened a bit with reading onward, but I'm not sure if that's because Quentin became more likable or I was distracted with everything else going on in the book. I'm still not overly fond of Quentin.

To begin with criticism, I honestly wish there were more details on the mechanics of the magic. I also wish that more time was spent on the universe in general, as I feel like there were a billion sub-plots that could've lead to some better character development for the physical kids or any of the other characters. I find myself wanting for more Elliot character development, which it seems will be present in the next book. Brakebills could've used some expounding upon too. The comments about how getting your dreams can result in unintended and unforseen consequences felt a little overdone and very "I'm 14 and this is deep" sometimes. It's fine though, didn't get mentioned that often. Fillory felt rushed. Overall, I think there was two books of plot in this one book, and more time could've been spent developing characters and the universe.

For positives, though, all of the major loose threads were tied up. At least from what I remember (I read the book over a longer period than usual, I might be missing some details from earlier). The magical universe was interesting, at least from what we saw. The punishments and their severity for mishandling magic are clearly demonstrated and absolutely horrifying. Reading Alice becoming a niffin and the devastation of the fight personally hurt my soul. Also the breakbills south story was harrowing.

Overall, I think this is a likable entry in adult fantasy. I feel like there was roughly two books worth of plot stuffed into one, and characters could've been developed better if it was slowed down in some places, but overall it's a strong entry with interesting magic, (some) likable characters, and an interesting universe. I will be reading the next book, and hope to get a better picture of fillory's universe.