eemilycolleen's reviews
532 reviews

“at some point you and i are going to have to start trusting each other, sorrengail. the rest of our lives depend on it.”

girls just wanna have fun, amirite ladies!!!!!! takes a minute to really gain momentum and i don’t feel the emotional stakes were fully fleshed out or earned, but eh, whatever: very fucking fun! rounding up for pure enjoyment, i had a great time. needed more andarna tho 

didn’t feel like this had much narrative cohesion or really enough introspection for a memoir but still pretty competently written and obviously we love elliot so four stars 

loved this :) strikes a really fun balance between classic queer YA + excellent hs au fanfiction. there are some obvious broad strokes, but that’s the fic way! also shockingly horny in the most delightful way. sometimes teens fuck!! i loved the audio performance from both narrators. best moments were 1) when margo pauses by the knife block when abbie’s dad sucks and 2) the excellent pet names (the british peerage! best friend black horse!) 

mmmm... serviceable Women's Fiction, i thought? ripe for moms everywhere? largely i was kinda bored and i didn't find the writing very impressive but the audio was fun!

ali hazelwood knows what she’s about, and fuck it, i’ll be honest: she got me with this one. maybe it’s because i read it on audio?? idk but i Just Had Fun. extra star for the debut sex scene headliner as fingering while leaning against a windowsill with twilight playing in the background. twilight is my CATNIP. also jack saying so seriously, “planned parenthood’s good people” had me BARKING 

oh man oh man, this is something else. i cried :) i was equally riveted and moved by both narrators (and julia whelan does such a beautiful job with the audio, OBVIOUSLY) -- they were both so achingly sad and tentative and hopeful in such specific but interlocking ways that i absolutely wept for them both. their separate journeys and their arcs toward and away from each other, whew. THAT'S LIFE, ISN'T IT. arcing toward and away from the people you decide to love. the future unreal conditional tense in the last chapter sent me spiraling in the best way. LIFE IS JUST REACHING OUT YOUR HAND AND OPENING THE DOOR!!!!!!

because i am a sap, i was especially moved by the image of the yerba buena itself, and how much it meant to each of them individually, and the whole concept of how these physical objects carry different meanings for different people, and what a blessing it is to uncover those meanings and merge that knowledge with your own. what a joy to understand someone else's metaphorical resonance, however incompletely. WHEW!
 
also i CRIED when we saw grant at the very end. "tell us something about him," emilie said. "no," spencer said. "tell us a few things." kill me!!!

"but it didn't turn out that way. it turned out with them surviving." ok i'm done but i'm still unwell 

made me DESPERATELY want to rewatch the world’s best story about news, bbc’s the hour. i love this book & i love how much these people love each other & i love cat. she really has a way of stating things so simply, so baldly, that they just slash you across the chest and let your heart spill out. “he can feed the goddamn ducks and he can kiss his boyfriend. he can believe that the future they have is worth more than his fear, and he can do what it takes to make that future as safe and happy as possible.” it’s about the journey toward bravery!!!!!! it’s about how we shape and reshape our lives to grow toward love. yes: i was moved!!!

details of note:
- obsessed with my number one Mess of a boy, andy fleming, who against all odds managed to find the 1950s version of an “are you gay?” buzzfeed quiz and still come out the other side unscathed. heroic!
- making nick italian was a stroke of genius. the minestrone soup! cat knows her readers appreciate a glossy head of curls and a strong jaw.
- honestly, my favorite thing about this (other than the news, whew!) was how much it felt like the canon text to Daniel Cabot Puts Down Roots’s fanfiction, which is in a lot of ways quite similar but a little looser and messier. i looooved daniel cabot lol but i really did appreciate this story’s grounding in the 50s; the police corruption, the reverberation of the war, the through line of the charioteer and the whole idea of who deserves a happy ending,,,, it all just worked for me :) sometimes, in this world, we roll up our sleeves and we make a home with each other in the big city!!!! we make soup and we buy flowers and we throw parties. we are so lucky to live this life together. cat and i both know it.

also: “Andy comes up with a strategy. He hasn’t come up with a lot of strategies in his life, so it’s a new feeling. He probably should have known better.” just. god bless cat sebastian! 

THIS ONE'S FOR THE GIRLS!!!!!! how to even explain! the girls who get it, get it: this book is my platonic ideal of fantasy romance. acosf is all of the painful trauma and halting recovery and tentative grace of acomaf, only instead of darling feyre as our protag, we get someone far more suited to my particular tastes. someone sharp, and mean, and barbed, and brimming with self-hatred and cruelty and desperation and bitterness; someone who falls further than anyone should fall and then reaches down into the dark pit of herself, smiles through the blood, and heaves herself out of the dark, inch by inch. we get nesta archeron. "she was going in," sjm writes in the prologue, "but she would not go gently." and she does not.

i lost my mind over and over again for nesta archeron. there's nothing on this planet i love more than a horrible girl. i'd die for her, i'd kill for her, i'd train to become a military general for her. i loved everything here: the burning tension behind her offscreen fight with amren reverberating through the whole book; the core premise of the court sending her to the house of wind to train with cassian and work at the library; the hard work of relearning your relationship with your body as you recover from trauma and grief; the careful, pure friendship that grows between nesta, gwyn, and emerie; the dancing and the music and the BALL SCENE!!!; the entire valkyrie plot; the hiking interlude (which made me weep. I'LL ADMIT IT!); the swordplay (nothing sexier); the EXPERTLY played trope of sex as competition and challenge masking emotional connection. and maybe most of all, nesta's relationship with the house, and with those 10,000 stairs she tortures herself with and finally masters, realizing that the real reward is back at the beginning — uncovering the home she has made for herself, the long way around. 

but mostly i just loved nesta. the image of the "beautiful, fractured darkness" as the heart of the house, as nesta's heart? the sharp broken jagged edges as not only necessary but also the burning, best parts of you? cool!!! crying!! it absolutely ended me that the final key to the climax was not just nesta's love but nesta's voicing of her love: her owning it, claiming it, sharing it with the people lucky enough to call her family. may we all be so lucky — to love and be loved, openly, without restraint, through the dark. i feel lucky to know nesta's love, and her pain, and her darkness, and her hope. i feel grateful, goddamn it, for sarah j maas. YOU GOT ME, SARAH!! 

quotes because i literally could not create a more perfect woman For Me:
- "we're going to have a wonderful time together." they'd likely kill each other.
- they had thrown them all to the wolves. so nesta had become a wolf, armed herself with invisible teeth and claws, and learned to strike faster, deeper, more lethally. had relished it. but when the time came to put away the wolf, she'd found it had devoured her, too.
- "i look forward to your silence." / "glad to see you woke up ready to play, nesta."
- "for you, i have no strategies."
- keep reaching out your hand, cassian had told her. but what would it matter, she began to wonder, if no one bothered to reach back?
- "whatever you need to throw at me, i can take it. i won't break."
- "you'd train me into a weapon and i'd be just that: someone else's weapon."
- "she made ballrooms into battlefields and plotted like any general."
- "nesta is a wolf who has been locked in a cage her entire life."
- the fighting was only part of it. the training would sustain her, funnel that rage, but there had to be more. there had to be joy. there had to be music.
- "how's the training?" / "good. we're learning how to disembowel a male."
- this person she was becoming, emerging into day by day? she might even like her.
- the world was beautiful, and she was so grateful to be in it. to be alive, to be here, to see this. she stuck out a hand over the railing, grazing a star as it shot past, and her fingers came away glowing with blue and green dust. she laughed, a sound of pure joy, and she cried more, because that joy was a miracle.
- she wanted to live, and live well, and live happily.

AND FINALLY, EVERY TIME NESTA SMILES THROUGH BLOOD, including but not limited to:
- nesta grinned through the blood she knew was splattered on her face.
- she bared her teeth in a feral grin at the mountain. "we win the whole damn thing."
- blood flowed from her mouth, her nose, but nesta smiled anyway, its tang coating her tongue.

i swear to god. sexiest woman alive. also one last thing: the repeated image of their calluses rasping against each other as they hold hands. SARAH J MAAS, i am in your walls. thank you for seeing me

three cheers for becky albertalli, long may she reign 🫡 i love this book!!!!!! absolutely precious. wish it were longer. the gretchen character was especially brutal and true to life :/ 

okay sarah!!!! too long & sort of all over the place in terms of pacing, but/and, MY GOD, what a serve, i had a great time. the woman knows how to make you care! 

i think this one suffers a bit for the strength of its side characters; the bulk of feyre’s development is obviously in acomaf, so she is somewhat less dynamic here as a POV narrator. like her time in the spring court could have been MUCH more complex and sarah chose instead to sort of speed-run through it to get back to the night, which i get bc she Knows her readers love the night, but found a little too Easy. the whole book is too easy, really. the sacrifices don’t last; nothing is truly lost; and therefore the pain doesn’t mean as much as it did in acomaf, where everything was SO in flux from under the mountain. there’s less at stake emotionally, so feyre stalls out a bit, and rhysand isn’t given nearly as much to do.

but no matter, bc the parts that work WORK. by which i mean!!!!! NESTA ARCHERON!!!! my GOD, character of ALL TIME. i ate up every nesta line with the most rapt attention. “nothing about nesta could frighten me.” “she was a freshly forged sword, waiting to draw blood.” “unyielding and without one ounce of fear.” when she raises hybern’s head and just stares at it???? that’s my bitch. that’s my number one cunt. every bizarre, intense, charged moment with her and cassian? my ABSOLUTE shit. literally frothing at the mouth for acosf.

will also note lucien & amren are great here, and that i felt legitimately emotional at the return of their father, and all the flying imagery. good shit there. a very loving 3 stars