Reviews and Comments

There are so many things to love about this book, where do I start?

The easy first is that this book can be read in one sitting or two of my bus commutes. I love books of all sizes, but right now, that length is perfect! Thank you, Seanan, for writing both behemoth and small books we can enjoy.

I love how this book explores how a person is who they are and also how they can change, and how they are still the same person. I love how this book shows the harm parents can cause to children by forcing them into boxes rather than let them be who they are. I love how this book explains how we got two amazing characters in the previous book.

I loved the descriptions and the art!

I will be diving into Beneath a Sugar Sky next, and continuing through to her latest Wayward children release. I highly recommend for everybody!

Have you ever read a book and thought "I'm glad I read this"? That's how I feel about this book.

I would have given this book 5 stars but there are a few places that it goes astray.

Overall, I highly recommend this book.

At 10% read, I thought I might DNF this one. The first 10% is trash and unnecessary. Even though all the same characters come back later, we didn't need them in the beginning. Or a lot less of them would have been sufficient.

I feel like this author read too much Virginia Woolf and embodies all the writing style of both Woolf and Atwood that I cannot stand. I really hate the writing style. I hate all the characters. The main storyteller for Part 1 only shoed some actual character after took 10% of the book. The language drive me up a wall and while I get that the language is trying to be accurate to the time, though I'm not sure what specific time this is, just in the past long enough for maids to be needed. But the language is too much of a stretch. Maybe it's because it was written in 2002 and did not in any way consider its own language. Maybe this author just wanted to use words with the meanings of whatever time it was supposed to be and not the current day meanings. Maybe she is using both. It's way too much for me.

I read this book as it came highly recommended. I think they recommended it without giving an accurate idea of the book.

It took me nine days to get through 50% of this book. It also took me a whole day to get through the last 10% that should have taken about an hour to read. At my recent read rate, that is terrible and speaks to how slow this book is. I got through the first twist and thought it interesting. I hoped the story would pick up. The character view change didn't bother me as it seems to bother others. However, partially into that view I realized the reading of it seemed like the author couldn't decide whether she wanted to tell Sue's story or Maud's story, so did both. At that point, the repeated portions of the story begin to feel like filler. I'd rather wished she'd just told Maud's story because Sue was so one-dimensional through most of her own story in part 1.

I found the amount of not-eating Maud does to be unbelievable. Every meal she refuses, I wondered how she didn't starve to death already. This may seem like nit-picking but it kept kicking me out of what little I could get into the story.

In addition, this book was recommended for its lack of male gaze, when in fact, the entire first half of the story is all about the male gaze and the jokes cracked are down by men and seem exactly to be full of the male gaze. Even throughout until part 3 the male gaze is heavily focused.

I could barely stand any of Maud's story set in London. And then the second and third twists came, which were honestly not as interesting or surprising as the first twist. In fact, the third twist was pretty much obvious from the early chapters of the book before we even knew Maud.

I was almost relieved to return to Sue in part 3, except again the story dragged and dragged. Sue is just not a good narrative focus. I appreciate seeing her where she was, but it felt like much of that was an emphasis on how poorly women were treated as a bit of a history lesson. I don't read my fiction for that. I can read historical books or even current events news for that.

Certain parts of this book remind me of Lord of the Flies, which is a book I absolutely despise. I felt like the setting was also used as a way to write terrible dialogue. It seems like they never say anything but "Oh! Oh!" and what little else they do say really makes no sense. The best part of this book is that I finished it.

I'd heard quite a bit about this book and had been hoping to read it for a long time. A fellow bookcrosser invited me to participate in a bookring for it, and it came my way this month.

This book deserves all the accolades it has received. It's a great read! My only concern is that it is already a little dated only two years after publication. I don't know how you tell this story without it becoming dated. I strongly recommend that this book go on your reading list now and you read it now.

I read this right after reading Sula by Toni Morrison, which is an interesting and difficult convergence of stories.

Starr is a believable 16-year-old girl, with all the concerns of one with the added burden of living two lives, one at home and one at school. Add in the events in the second chapter of the book, and this story becomes an emotional roller coaster.

Thank you to Spatial at Bookcrossing for loaning this book to me.

I had two copies of this book I was reading simultaneously. I had the audiobook checked out from the library and I followed a long at some points with the print book. My print book had annotations, which I found distracting. I prefer not to read others notes in a book.

I enjoyed Morrison's reading of her own work. It feels like the story is being told exactly how she intended rather than through my own filtered voice.

I loved this story. There was a thing that bothered me quite a bit in the first chapter of the first book, but the themes in these books and the story told well overshadow that one thing.

Taylor's execution of demons and seraphim is amazing and believable. I highly recommend these books.

I wish I'd read this book on the heels of Red Queen. It picks up pretty much right where Red Queen left off. Because of the lag between reading the books, it took me a bit to pick back up into the characters. This made enjoying the book tough because I had enjoyed Red Queen so much.

I'm looking forward to reading King's Cage.