eemilycolleen's reviews
532 reviews

one of the most classic alexis halls i’ve ever read. read it in one afternoon. loved jonathan of course, what a dick :) i do have some notes — there’s way too many side characters as always, and i don’t feel i really got to the heart of who the narrator was, which made fully getting swept up into the romance hard. maybe i would’ve felt more immersed via audio? wish i could capture the lightning in a bottle of boyfriend material again, SIGH!! still, a delightful read, great bants, laughed out loud multiple times, etc 

maybe love wasn’t an unwieldy accessory in times of peril. maybe it was the key to survival.

we are so lucky to love! we are so lucky to be loved! i cried :’) each part is so completely shaped by loss & grief and yet STILL so fully glowing with hope and gratitude and love. sue me but i couldn’t stop thinking of ellis grey lmao BE EXTRAORDINARY MEREDITH!!!! daughterhood just kills me whew

some more quotes for my heart:
- Wren met a man in a yellow shirt who made her feel that the world was a good place, and the world was a good place because she was someone living in it.
- Her mother, who could drive anything but chose to walk, even in terrible weather, so she could observe the world changing slowly with the seasons. Her mother, who made the most delicious pancakes and baked bread from scratch. Her mother, who could identify every bird by name and call. Her mother, who could grow a garden in an eggshell. Her mother, the kindest person she would ever know. Her mother, her mother, her mother, her mother, her mother. Her mother, an animal, whose eyes were filled with blood.
- “Lewis, he would have loved— Lewis would love—all of this.” 

thought this was real fun once i got past the 30% mark but mostly made me wanna rewatch my fav twilight zone & doctor who eps sorry dickheads! 

good fun, perfectly readable, absolutely mid thriller. will i ever read another riley sager hmm idk but 

love as phone call in the dead of night, love as looking at your ex best friend after a long time away, love as flowers planted and meals shared. love as showing up for each other, again, again, again. 

for me this was maybe entirely shaped by the anticipation of starting tj’s section with chapter 2 and hoping chapter 1 would eventually come and break my heart and glue it back together. it did :) loved this 

ok i cried!!!!! loved sav so much, truly everything about her narration. this is a book that knows exactly what it wants to share: where it zooms in and focuses, where it gestures vaguely, where it leaves you behind. simply everything about sav and izzie's relationship killed me. i was happy for her. i believed she was happy for me too. or that she would be one day. because i think the promises that we made to each other were never really about weddings or forevers. they were about a commitment to each other. a commitment to each other's joy. i think we both believed that joy could not exist without us being together, but we're old enough now to know otherwise. DEVASTATING! 

what could be more romantic? what’s as perfect as a girl stopped dead, midformation? girl as blank slate. girl as reflection of your own desires, unmarred by her own. girl as sacrifice to the idea of girl. girl as a series of childhood photographs, all marked with the aura of girl who will die young, as if even the third grade portrait photographer should have seen it on her face, that this was a girl who would only ever be a girl.

the whole point of the dead girl story is the persistent deadness of the girl — her silence, her absence. she is the ghost that haunts the narrative; the story is not about her, anymore, because she is not here, not really. she is gone before it ever starts.

which is all to say — so, rebecca makkai has seen promising young woman, huh! this book operates within a very familiar formula, which isn’t a bad thing; i thought it struck the necessary notes very cleanly, and she’s obviously a great writer on a sentence level. but since it’s so familiar, it’s easy to compare, and frankly, it’s not as good as True Story, which just blew me away with its ambivalence on the same themes. the moments that felt most effective for me really leaned into bodie’s complicity (“you have to understand that with the music underneath, this was quite powerful”) and i think to really hammer that home, it needed to reckon more with that complicity.

i put on my most convincing teacher voice and i said, “the back and forth on this will make it a better podcast. remember, we want questions. this raises such great questions.”

also i have to say the last chapter didn’t click for me, i would’ve swapped it with the penultimate (that last line! sometimes a last line SHOULD be heavy handed!) – but i am a cynic and that’s just a stylistic preference. still: a good story well told, perfect for book clubs imo

this wasn’t even a question of believing a survivor, as thalia had never said anything about you. well, and she hadn’t survived. 

"when does the assignment end?" i ask.
"when does anything end in this infinite world?" asks farren. i can hear her starry fingertips tapping on her desk.

SAD and tender and brutal in the loveliest most absurdist way, just a delightful smorgasbord of imagery even in its most devastating moments. pretty masterful use of unreality to situate the reader in the emotional truth of it all -- a lot of stories like to shit on capitalism and sometimes it comes off shallow or even insincere, but not here. ugh. work :/ but also! life!!! :')

any detail that might save their lives. any detail that might explain their lives. their vacations and date nights and nightmares and bad years and boring choices. the marrow of all their mistakes. their levels of inexperience. their jobs, their jobs, their jobs, their jobs. 

read this mostly on a ferry and then a bumpy van in costa rica and it did the trick! it’s cute! needed more much ado, and i think there’s too many characters to flesh everyone out, but still, a nice time 

WHEWWWWWW. what to even say. feverish, devastating, maddening, and so beautiful. truly the best book I've read in ages. I read it in one sitting today while absolutely skiving off work, and it was worth it. it's about new york and growing up and desire and transness and fanfiction and love love love, and the fallibility of memory and those memories' continued importance regardless of their inaccuracy or incompleteness. I loved every moment.

the passages I found myself dog-earing largely (unsurprisingly) focus on fay's nebulous, dangerous relationship with queerness, which thomas lays out over and over again, sometimes in very straightforward ways; but the most affecting, I thought, was fay's description of the sublimated theo fic blowjob, and nell's heartbreaking, arms-wide-open response. these are two people who loved each other, deeply, wholly, cruelly; and sometimes love is not enough, or it is enough but things still end, anyway. "he could hardly breathe. tears began to stream down his face. and even still he wanted more of him inside him. he wanted to swallow him whole, he wanted him to fill him up entirely until nothing of himself remained. little did theo know that tears were in christopher's eyes too. christopher was going to miss theo so much."

the reveal late in the game that nell and fay remember things differently killed me because it's so obvious, right, of course these are imprecise memories, moments refracted back through the smudged lens of each person's own bias, and yet it's that imprecision that equally hurts and matters so much. "you wouldn't fit in there anyway. it's all lesbians / VS. / you're not gay, so..." brutal. you can love someone so much you want to become them entirely, and still you will never know them fully, and still you will lose them, and STILL you will miss them: still, it will be three o'clock in the morning in the future, and you will reach for them in the dark. the final paragraph in fay's point of view eviscerated me. it's a sad ending, I can see that, except that I don't FEEL that: because we are still here, reaching out in the dark, and maybe one day we will see each other again. the chance is still there. the love is still there.

quotes because my GOD! THE WRITING!
 - What we mean to say, but what Ms. Spider is not equipped to understand, is that Iago is gay in the way that all the best fictional murderers are gay—Norman Bates, Tom Ripley, the titular Third Man—and he was the original. Iago is gay like a black leather whip, like Paris in the 1920s, like calling non-food things delicious. Iago is gay like cold eyes and bony hips, like a pearl handled pistol tucked in one’s suit pocket, like delicate fingers that could play a Chopin prelude or crush a throat with equal grace. Iago is gay in the way that we the F&N unit aspire to be gay, but it’s harder for girls.

- How vividly I could visualize what I wanted my Iago to look like! How clearly I saw his wickedness externalized as telltale sissy traits that set him apart from everyone else: the effete flicks of the wrist, the lightly sibilant pronunciation, the fine dark clothing that clung suggestively to narrow hips. Eyeliner, perhaps. The image set my heart racing with joyful narcissism, a full-body epiphany that this was it—with “it” existing simultaneously as “the physical manifestation of what I like best about myself” and “that which I most wish to fuck.”

- What did he mean? I couldn’t ask directly, couldn’t puncture the soap bubble of double entendre in which we were floating. This was flirting, I suppose, in the sense that it was an escalating and erotically charged exchange of verbal teasing that served as an indirect acknowledgement of an attraction that felt otherwise unspeakable. But it was a delicate balance we had to strike. A single false move—by which I mean a heterosexual move, on either of our parts—would have broken the spell. The flirtation was asymptotic, the attraction displaced: my object of desire was not Theo himself, but the abstract idea of Theo being gay. That was what I wanted. That was what was causing my heart to flutter in my chest with a mothlike fragility that it had heretofore exhibited only in response to the image of two dudes doing it—never, until now, in response to another living person.

- Identification in the wild: He saw me. He understood me. He knew me.

- I have no memory of her face in that moment. Perhaps I couldn’t bring myself to look at her. More likely I looked at her and failed to see her.

- I believe that for a year and a half, Nell loved me more than anyone else ever has, ever will, or ever should. This is a belief I dare not subject to reality testing. I want to remain the girl Nell loved. And so I didn’t reveal myself. But now I wish I had. It’s three o’clock in the morning and I am still drinking alone in the dark and thinking of Nell. I wonder what would have happened had I called out Nell! Hey, Nell! and crossed the street to greet her. I imagine extending my hand and introducing myself, as if for the first time. I imagine saying that I’d like to get to know her. That we have something in common, though we’re not exactly the same.

- Here’s the thing: I’ve never forgotten how it felt to love Fay. For a year and a half, my brain merged into hers until I had no idea where she ended and I began. I know if I tried to explain that to anyone, it would sound scary. Like I lost myself to her. At the time, though, it felt like just the opposite. I knew exactly who I was. I was Fay’s best friend. We loved theater and gay shit and ourselves. We went to Idlewild.