emmareadstoomuch's reviews
2051 reviews

holy. hell.

why did 19th century white guys love writing about india so much?

YOU'RE NOT GOOD AT IT, GUYS.

it's like me and comedy. just because i'm passionate about it doesn't mean i should try it out. (buh dum ch.)

i spent an entire class discussing this book, and i never want to talk about it again.

3.8/5

mini-review because i have to go to work in ~4 minutes: not my favorite shakespeare - weirdly, it felt as though not a lot happened - but as beautifully written as they all are. some of the themes seemed a bit iffy (not entirely sure what lesson Caliban's character portrays in terms of slavery :/) but others were spot on (i'm looking at you, negatives of colonization and nature's superiority to man!). i also loved the motifs of the sea and the heavens. & if i can force myself to forget her romance, miranda might be my favorite shakespearean lady!

bottom line: really quick read and so lovely-ly written. check it out!

Because I cannot do anything earnestly, I'll preface this review by saying that I really, really hate the title of this book. It's a blatant play on Mindy Kaling's first book, but it doesn't stick in the memory. In fact, I couldn't remember the title well enough to look it up, and had to go by the author's name.

https://emmareadstoomuch.wordpress.com/2017/04/04/who-thought-this-was-a-good-idea-and-other-questions-you-should-have-answers-to-when-you-work-in-the-white-house-review/

With some mild complaining out of the way, let's do this thing. (I say, as if I could possibly limit my tendency to complain to just one paragraph in a review of anything.)

I'm debating between three and four stars as I write this. I feel a tad lied to - I was told this was essentially Mindy Kaling's writing style + politics + fun behind the scenes Obama stories. I am obsessed with Mindy Kaling, politics, behind the scenes stuff, and Obama, so I was IN. I heard about this book through the author's very charming interview on one of my favorite podcasts, Pod Save America, and I bought it immediately after. So the expectations were high and very specific.

What I got was more...advice book. Heavy on the politics, light on the Obama. Very different from Mindy Kaling - which isn't, like, automatically a bad thing. Still. Who likes a false promise, am I right? Let alone approximately one bajillion of them.

But don't let my constant whining fool you - this book is not bad. Not by a long shot. Alyssa Mastromonaco is One Badass Bitch. (I hope she would take that as the compliment it is intended to be.) It makes sense this isn't just, like, pregaming for Obama's memoir. It's about the author herself, which of course makes more sense. Even if ex-POTUS takes up more space on the cover.

It's also wayyyy more compulsively readable than any political memoir, like, ever. I read it in two sittings. (The second sitting was the last 30 pages because I took cold medicine and fell asleep on this book. No shade to the book; all credit to Nyquil Severe.) It's not always funny, but it is pretty much always relatable.

A fun thing is that I am this book's exact target audience. I am six months out from being its epicenter (young women interested in politics ages 15-25). And another fun thing: This book made me kind of, sort of, a little bit want to apply for internships on Capitol Hill. I know. Thanks, Alyssa Ms. Mastromonaco.

It's not funny, exactly, but it's wise in this really particular and useful way. Like, it genuinely may have inspired me to try out politics once I'm outta this dump (by which I mean the American college experience). That's really crazy. I probably will chicken out, but still. Crazy.

Bottom line: Give this book a try! Especially if you're a girl or semi-interested in politics. Also, listen to Pod Save America.

3.35/5 stars

i'm too lazy to write a review for this, friends. happy thanksgiving!

3.25/5

i respect this play for how badass it was for its time, and i think everyone should read it at some point or another. (it has a lot to say about nineteenth century female oppression/gender roles/etc.) but the execution can be grating and come off as unrealistic, and ibsen's idea of men and women having separate, gendered moral compasses doesn't fully sit well with me. (he thought of western law being male, and it's unfair for women to have to live like men. sweeping generalizations about genders aren't my fave.) all the same, this play has done more good than bad.

bottom line: this is a definitely-read-in-your-lifetime book. and it's short and a play and easy to read. so in some ways i recommend!

3.35/5

definitely a fun read! i wasn't in absolute love with the characters and there was a LOT of everything-goes-wrong (a bit too much for me--made me anxious!). it was a bit slow to start, but all was cute in the end and that's what matters! thanks to all of you who recommended it!

4/5 stars


Bonkers. Certifiably bonkers. (If anyone read that in Jason Mantzoukas’s voice, I’m in love with you.)

https://emmareadstoomuch.wordpress.com/2017/02/14/the-library-at-mount-char-review/

I’ve never read anything like this book before!! And I’m also pretty certain I never will again. It didn’t drip with gaudy description, but I could picture everything. I can’t remember the last time I felt that way. Also, I loved that like, the most insanely background characters were fuller than most YA protagonists. Because y’all know I’m a sucker for a good character.


I like to think I’m a pretty smart person, but I was pretty much confused for the entirety of those 388 pages. Granted, I’m not really an expert on space or math or anything (English, you may not be surprised to learn, is my main schtick) but I did feel stupid every once in awhile (usually when I felt like my lack of understanding was making me miss a major plot point). Sometimes that was fine, and sometimes it was too much.


388 pages may not seem like a lot, but they were huge pages and a fairly small font and this book did drag a bit sometimes. (May have to do with how hard it could be to read.)


But I’m still givin’ it the big 4, because it’s so insane and imaginative and unique and really more of an Experience than a book. And you can’t undermine that.


Bottom line: if you have a lot of energy, a not-too-busy week, and confidence in your own intelligence that can withstand this, get your hands on a copy!!

P.S. How'd I forget to mention how much I love this guy's writing style?! Like:

Dear Mr. Scott Hawkins,
Do you have any grocery lists I can read? Also: thank you for your book. Also also: how in the hell did you come up with ANY of it.
Much love, respect, gratitude, etc.,
Some idiot

Review: 1.25/5


Well, as a retelling, that did a rather curious job.


I was so excited to read this book! It's even on my "can't wait to read" shelf. There is something about the idea of a retelling in which Alice has escaped from an asylum that so fits the wondrous aura of the original book. Yet this did not stick to any of the plot-points, truly. Which was very disappointing. I imagine it would be extremely difficult to manufacture a narrative from the nearly unrelated curiosities of the original Alice in Wonderland—Tim Burton certainly struggled—but it seemed like the only thing this attempt did was take some names.


It seems that this is not the only shared factor between Tim Burton’s adaptation and Christina Henry’s. Both focus upon the plotline of Alice defeating the Jabberwocky (which is somewhat ridiculous if you think about it). Both require a certain blade to kill it. Both have weird sexualizations of the plot points, which is so odd because the original Alice is a CHILD. (Especially Henry’s—the entirety of the book was centered upon human trafficking for prostitution and sexual assault.) Both have significantly aged Alices, perhaps to fit this. Maybe Henry was adapting Burton’s take on the book rather than the book itself. It all came off as very plagiarized.


Things, specifically, that bugged me about Henry’s take: Alice travels with her middle aged mental-institution-next-door-neighbor, whom she is in love with for some reason? He, to the best of my detection, is not modeled upon a character. The Rabbit is a villain, the main one, and does not share any attributes with the original White Rabbit. In fact, it seems that Henry may have intended the Rabbit to mean the March Hare? Everyone in the book is a villain and there is a strange incorporation of characters from Through the Looking Glass, but not the important ones (Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum and the chess pieces, for example, go undiscussed. Maybe in the next books). In general it was so frustrating to try to compare this book to the original, because it didn’t add up. And that is all the fun of retellings!


After 291 pages of unspeakable violence, the ending of this book was unbelievably anticlimactic. We follow Alice and Hatcher, her extremely old, my-only-character-trait-is-I’m-a-crazy-murderer love interest, as they battle their way to the two “boss” characters: the Rabbit and the Jabberwocky. I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll just say we encounter these guys for a total of the last dozen pages. Very frustrating.


God, I’m so upset by how much I hated this. What a cool concept, entirely dashed.


Bottom line: if you like very violent books, you may like this. If you like retellings, you will not. I sure didn’t.

I WAS SUPPOSED TO LOVE THIS BOOK. It hurt my heart how much I didn’t like it. (Or that pain might have been caused by this GROSS ROMANCE.)



https://emmareadstoomuch.wordpress.com/2016/12/01/blood-for-blood-review

The whole book dripped with that trope of emotionless/very strong characters (who always call themselves monsters) becoming, like, empathetic to human life. (Sidenote: what does it say about me that I can’t stand that plotline? It’s really synonymous with “these characters will be presented as badasses but will actually be full-on dumb.”) Yet through this attempt at a handful of characters becoming teeth-achingly sweet and caring all at once (their dumbass yucky relationships almost gave me a cavity), there’s very little concrete character development. Yael and Luka’s romance is stupid—and based on nothing of substance. And both of them are stupid alone, making dumb decisions like going against four gun-and-knife-wielding soldiers or yelling at an unseen figure. I was worried about the saccharine romance by page 45, and I was right to be.





I don’t mind romance subplots in a lot of books. Maybe even in most books. But I do NOT want to read 500 pages of formerly badass characters becoming stupid piles of blubbering lovesickness because they got cooties from the hot enemy. No, thank you.




Despite the fact that the stakes legitimately could not be higher, everything feels pretty chill all the time. At one point—this is a teeny spoiler, sorry—two Jewish (albeit shapeshifted) characters walk into a concentration camp, into the most high-security area of the prison, into the office of the director who ruined their lives, take a ton of said dude’s files, generally F up his office, answer the phone as him and talk to one of the highest-ranking members of the Third Reich, leave the office, see the guy who ruined their lives, get a teensy bit triggered and leave the camp—all without ever being stopped or so much as looked at. Like, what? That’s not action! Not everything can go right all the time in an adventure book! (That goes for you, too, first 95% of Crooked Kingdom.)





Motivations were silly and a lot of things just...didn’t add up. Here’s a list of stupid decisions made by characters we were supposed to see as smart within the first fifty pages: walked straight into a soldier’s trap, yelled out at an unseen figure while in hiding, tried to rescue an irrelevant from four armed men, left a person who could ID a tattoo (literally the only identifiable part of her) in the actual house of the SS.





The way this was written was also driving me bonkers. Now introducing: bullet points! As in, there are so many little things I have to talk about in this section that I can’t be bothered to write in full sentences! And that says a lot because I’m an English major!
1. Teeming with unnecessary, interjected, nonsensical German words (if I never see the word Scheisse again it’ll be too soon)
2. Talked about how bad Luka’s jacket smelled all. The. Time?
3. In one chapter, started translating normal, basic sentences out of “Luka-speak”?
4. In general tried so hard to make Luka a funny, sassy, hot character (potential motive: trying to get on Bookstagram’s myriad “book boyfriend” tags)
5. “If her flesh had been schnitzel, it would’ve been long finished, ready for the skillet”
6. “He had...feelings...when he was with her”
7. Book has interludes (which wouldn’t be so bad if I hadn’t just read The Library at Mount Char, which actually used this tactic in a way that added to the book instead of feeling goddamn pointless)





This was my most anticipated book of 2016. I’m crushed at how little enjoyment I got out of it, and my strong dislike of this combined with how I had to DNF The Walled City makes me scared I’m misremembering Wolf by Wolf. I want to believe that book was good, genuinely. And I liked the last page. So—


Bottom line: this book was difficult to get through, but I’m giving it two stars—for the sake of its predecessor and on the merit of its final words.