eemilycolleen's reviews
532 reviews

wholly immersive — funny and sad and hopeful and bleak all at once. loved maria, loved james, loved their interactions together. the narration is so singularly confident and layered, spiraling deeper into itself with every word. not to be that dude but i felt as wrapped up in each of their heads as i did at age 12 reading holden caulfield for the first time; the voices are just so lightning-strike intimate and real and, like, day-in-the-life mundane. also excellent ending, i legit gasped when i looked to the next page and realized it was over. what a pleasure! what a blessing! 

happy international women’s day, storygraph reviewers! 🫶 for me this was very solidly mid, mostly bc i’m realizing i don’t care AT ALL about the actual plot. hawthorn & violet & maud arguing all night on a boat, though: excellent. excited to read the third! 

whew i cried a lot. reading this as a full-fledged adult i’m really thinking — is this the best john green????? it might be! it’s so generous and open-hearted and loving even through its despair and pain and mind-eating anxiety. 

sometimes it can be clunky or slick or overly sentimental when books’ endings catapult themselves into the future, yknow, especially the whole “write this down” shtick; but it’s perfect here, i can’t imagine it any other way, and in fact it makes me weep with gratitude to imagine that future for aza, and, of course, for me. i feel very lucky. i feel very grateful. it is a miracle to be here.

“But that's not the point of the story, Holmesy. The point of the story is they built the city anyway, you know? You work with what you have. They had this shit river, and they managed to build an okay city around it. Not a great city, maybe. But not bad. You're not the river. You're the city." 

😭 

yeah i was pretty moved by this. i like how explicitly lillian’s appreciation & willingness to love and care for these kids is tied to her desperate and long-denied desire to love and care for herself. like, it’s such an obvious metaphor, their literal fire against her wildness & weirdness; and sometimes an unsubtle metaphor works! just some weird people choosing to care for each other in a bleak world. 

also everything with lillian and madison was also so tense and weird and good and sad 

EXPANSIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! yeah i fuckin loved this. made me cry at all the right moments. love as a soft place to land!!! love as going back and getting it right this time! love as creating a safer, warmer, brighter future TOGETHER!!!!!!!!!

georgie is great of course, i loved her as soon as i saw her in those stained overalls, but my god, levi fanning — truly top-tier romantic hero. anxious vegetarian dock builder who loves his little siblings so much he didn’t speak to them for 10 years?????? i swear to god this is the bravest man i’ve ever read in a romance novel. i love my boy. also, great dog. also i thought the third-act conflict was really well calibrated — i saw it coming, but it felt very True and never forced, and i loved watching georgie and levi Do The Goddamn Work in order to come back together. it felt so earned! i am so happy for them! may we all feel our hearts as expansive and as warm and as filled with love! 

She wanted to tell him every last terrible thing and see if he flinched.

OKAY LEIGH!!!!!!!! you got me! simply a tremendous fucking time. made me yell out loud. an absolute mess in the best way possible. i had so much fun. the way that i feel about darlington and alex,,,,,,,, WHEW nobody is doing it like them. sorry but naomi novik WISHES. the whole circular dante/virgil situation where they have to take on each other’s roles in order to get through their respective hells…… wild. never been done before. loved it.

some quotes for the records because i will simply perish without my monster babies—

- Get up, Stern. Get your shit together. Get ready to fight. Was it her voice she was hearing? Darlington's? Hers, of course. Darlington would never swear.
- “I'm not going to throw it away for a rich kid who was nice enough to talk down to me a few times.” It was all true. All but the last part.
- Maybe they were just two killers, cursed to endure each other's company, two doomed spirits trying to find their way home. Maybe they were monsters who liked the feeling of another monster looking back at them. But enough people had abandoned them both. She wasn't going to be the next.
- She remembered Darlington leading her up the stairs at the Hutch, into the hall at Il Bastone, down haunted streets, and through secret passages. He'd been her guide, her Virgil. How many times had he turned to her and said, Come with me?
- Why the hell was she so nervous? This was Darlington —  scholar, snob, and pain in the ass. No mystery there. But she'd held his soul inside her. She could still taste him on her tongue.
- He wasn't sure what he expected: Laughter? Tears? A heroic demand that she take his place in hell? He had lost track of who was Dante, Virgil, Beatrice. Was he Orpheus or Eurydice?
- A little magic. A talent for taking a beating. A demon at her side. That was all she had, but maybe it was all she needed.

and of course "Galaxy Stern, I have been crying out to you from the start" — INSANE!!!!!!!!! LEIGH!!!!!!! thank you for my life 

brain too tired for the litfic horror vibes :/

warm & precious & cozy! so low stakes that i found myself kinda bored tbqh but a very tender time and a nice read :) 

ummmmm i loved this? i wept countless times. i am an enormous bitterblue guy, so it rly says something remarkable about cashore’s character work that i fell so deeply for lovisa, my bravest sneakiest upper-class asshole. the parallels between bitterblue & lovisa, WHEW! it’s about looking someone dead in the eye and knowing they know what you know: the same pain & fear & desperation & helplessness, and recognizing that you can’t fix it but trying anyway. it’s about abuse, it’s about privilege, it’s about realizing you’ve been taught wrong and making a promise to be better than the people who failed you. idk. it just really worked on me. WE CAN BUILD A BETTER WORLD!!!!!!! god i am such a sucker but i really believe it.

bitterblue the book probably made these points more effectively — but i still really enjoyed the expansion of the world here and i still cried a bunch so five stars for crying