graveyardpansy's reviews
555 reviews

truly did not like this, may come back later to write a longer review. the premise is cool, but it simply... was not pulled off

listen, I didn’t WANT to like this book as much as I did, but here we are. I thought the descriptiveness was beautiful, the horror being not necessarily in the murder and blood but in the raw emotion.... yeah. It’s good. I LOVE that i felt sympathy with the vampires, I enjoyed the way the story was structured around the meta-story that’s the real bulk of the novel, and most of all I adored the way the horror is caught in questions of immortality, ethics, the pain of recognition and discovery. I guess it’s the year of me reading vamp fiction.

3.5 — not surprised at all, but still kinda disappointing personally. i think one of the largest public conversations surrounding mental health should be how oppressive systems and capitalism absolutely destroy it, and this book only brushed over that pretty lightly. i do think a lot of the advice the book offered was valuable — nothing was new to me, but a lot was stuff i’ve learned in classes or given as advice myself before. it’s not a bad book! just relatively basic and not what i personally want out of a mental health guide. i wish it’d been less individual-focused, i guess? just not for me.

also i think it needs more editing lmao there were some truly unclear sentences

3.5 — i see why Frankenstein is the better known of her works but this is still rly interesting; the pacing wasn’t my favourite, but it was enjoyable. also not a fan of the occasional casual racism.

decent for a 101! i think it falls short in a couple places — some of the definitions seem a bit too definitive for what the words actually are. i think when mentioning/defining “transsexual” you need to include that it’s contested language and many trans folks today are uncomfy with it, and Getty did not. there was a bit of outdated language imo, and also i wish we’d stop focusing on ~famous theys~ as ppl to look up to. but ig, like many trans-101-esque content, this does more or less what it needs to do, but it leans towards the assimilationist side, and i don’t feel personally connected to it.

4.5?? love a nostalgic one-day read — pleased to report this holds up pretty well. it’s a little bit of a predictable hero’s journey, and i did find one typo. however, the world building and interlacing of different lore and bat-cultures is really cool, the characters are strong (though their characterization is sometimes exceedingly obvious) and i think the pacing is pretty decent. i also deeply appreciate the attention to detail by the author in terms of descriptions — so many things are described with really wonderful vivacity, but it’s never done with colour! there’s brightness and texture and sound and echoes, but because bats don’t see in colour, there isn’t a single colour-word used in the whole book and i just think it’s executed really well.