icarusandthesun's reviews
140 reviews

this could've been nice you know. the writing was beautifully lyrical and i liked the themes of death and grief, and the talk about art and food was wonderfully comfortable. 
but the rest... not so much.

this felt like a reality show in book form. like milf manor, but make it dilf manor and also erase all the fun because that shit wants you to take it seriously. 

i hated all the characters. and i understand the situation in this book is messy and there's no real right or wrong, but the characters handled all of it so poorly, and how they acted just made me livid.

like feyi for example. so let me preface this by saying, feyi and her best friend do absolutely NOT pass the bechdel test. all they talk about is men (or love interests in general), and about fucking and their relationship problems. i swear, they do not talk about anything else, and it made it sort of hard to believe they're best friends. 

but anyways, feyi - super unlikable, and there's no real depth to her character. her whole personality orbits around her dead husband and the art she creates ABOUT said dead husband and fucking her lover's dad. there was absolutely nothing else to her character, nothing to grasp, nothing to relate to or sympathise with.

what especially pissed me off was that she acted like she was so much better than nasir after he found out about them and lashed out at her. sure, he's an asshole for that, but the way she thought she had the high-ground was so annoying to me? because she's not at all better than him - she fucks her date's DAD man.
i sympathised with none of the characters, because they were all just the same shade of shitty. 
still i feel like the author did nasir dirty. his reaction was extremely out of character, which i mean i guess makes sense, because you never know how a person truly is, but it was so INSANELY out of character, it felt like the author wrote him to be a shitty person so the reader feels bad for feyi and alim, even though nasir was nothing but a sweetheart at the beginning.

oh, and feyi and alim - don't even get me started. they bonded over grief for their lost loves, which is a nice icebreaker, right, but their entire relationship is built on that one thing they have in common. they had no chemistry whatsoever, and not any more mutual interests except maybe food and art but those conversations were pretty shallow and/or only there to build sexual tension (literally i will never get the image of them licking foam of each other's hands out of my head).
their relationship and love felt ingenuine and if this was real life, i doubt it would last.

but okay, let's end this on like a brighter note. i enjoyed the general trope of falling in love after a tragedy like that.
i also really loved feyi's art pieces and how they were described. as an artist myself, those fascinated me a lot.
and also, i fully support the idea of "older" people pursuing relationships, because we were conditioned to believe that new and fresh love is only for the young, and that you should stop trying at a certain age.
alim chose his children over love the first time and i thought it was nice to watch him coming out of his shell, because in the greater scheme of things, he's still young, and has long years of life still in front of him, and he deserves love, even if his children don't like it.
but you know... maybe not with your son's girlfriend next time.

i am utterly disappointed.
such a shattering cliffhanger in book two, and for what?

this book has 400 pages and i kid you not, around 300 were horribly uninteresting. the whole first half of the book was useless rambling - boring, uninspiring and devastatingly dry. 

the twist and reveal and all that were fun and had potential, the delivery however was super unexciting and the wow-moment shadowed by the absolute nothingness the whole rest of the book was. great concept, such poor execution.

and don't even get me started on the ending. 
the ending was the most frustrating thing ever. like yeah, we all love a happy ending, but

just how did orion survive? and i'm not saying that out of spite or malice, i liked him as a character. i just think he seriously should've died, because that would've been the most realistic and sensible outcome.

also, watching all the conflict and problems get solved in a little godlike act 20 pages before the end made me want to claw my eyes out.

there were a couple of scenes and happenings that hooked me for a few pages, a chapter at best - for example

the little liaison thing with liesel which surprised me BIG TIME, in a good way,

but the rest was absolutely not it. 

i loved book one and two, and the author's catchy and quick writing style didn't disappoint in this one either, but the story - tragic.

interesting, immersive, quick and deeply relatable. the art was a pleasure to the eye.

i want to preface this review by saying that i'm not really a fan of modern royalty - neither as a trope nor in real life - so my opinion might be the tiniest bit biased.

this book is by no means a quick read with its nearly 500 pages and of course not all of it was interesting. but overall, the drama and gossip kept me relatively hooked until the end. 
i really liked the characters interacting with each other, because conflict was nearly always conveyed through dialogue, and even when the dialogue was only used as a filler or a means to develop the characters, it was still entertaining.

whenever the characters were not interacting with each other however, i was horribly bored. the royal life and its logistics did absolutely nothing for me, and neither did the story. the twist at the end wasn't exciting and the whole thing with georgina's life was underwhelming and just sad.

we had some minor commentary on contemporary topics like mental health, war, etcetera, which were handled well, but not extraordinarily so. the authors didn't add anything of value, but the representation in itself was fine.
underlying social commentary about royal life, about the press shoving their noses into things that aren't any of their business and so forth.
i do think nick's mental illness was sort of glossed over, though. it was solved by him going to therapy a couple of times as if that could cure all you problems. boring.
so was freddie's going to war, and the trauma he supposedly brought home. glossed over, never really mentioned again. missed opportunity there.

but i get it, this book is not supposed to be a social commentary. it's a book probably best read on vacation or when you've got absolutely nothing else to do. it's relaxing, funny at times with its very ordinary and safe humour, and uncomplicated, while still keeping you on your mental toes.

a nice read to de-stress while sipping a glass of wine, but not much more than that.

a great sequel with the most brutal cliffhanger one could imagine. thrilling.
quite a curious read, especially regarding the characters and their development. the whole book centers around graduation, and a very important and substantial twist in el's thinking. the ideas behind the book were brilliant, if perhaps a little "out of character" with a lot of new concepts that make the reader basically scrap everything they know about the dark school of magic (and partly the characters as well) from the first book. it wasn't at all unpleasant or anything, quite the opposite - it filled the sequel with fresh and interest-evoking ideas, but just know that this one is swerving in the 'everything is going to be alright' and positive-thinking direction. i seriously missed the 'fuck we're all gonna die' mood from the first book and also just some death in general, but alright.
the romance sort of peaks in this one as well, and i'm really in love with the dynamic. the cliffhanger made me want to haul the book against the wall because it was just so so ... screaming crying throwing up yk, in a good way.
the one awkward sex scene made me a little uncomfortable because it was simply so uncalled for and just an unnecessary like, three-page-filler, so nope, didn't like that at all.

i didn't expect a lot going into this book. i thought it was just gonna be another ordinary young adult fantasy that's a little silly and a little over the top.
now, that wasn't quite the case, but i wasn't a hundred percent wrong either.
the main character, el, struck me as a little bit of a deus ex machina with insane killing powers only she has that could get her out of every dangerous situation if only she wanted.
she's also the tiniest bit unlikable, but given her circumstances, i get it. plus, the character development made up for it.

i was fairly disappointed in orion's character though. we had some chunks of interesting back story thrown at us, but the actual reasons for his behavior, singling out el, were simply boring.
i just thought the author could've given orion some more depth and more profound motives because i thought he was quite a unique and relatable person. but perhaps we'll find out more about him in the next book, which the cliffhanger hints at anyway.

the writing was catchy, some descriptions a tad too long, but that's alright. the romance was very curious and i'm totally here for the dynamic.

a short and fun sci-fi novella that offered great concepts, quick writing and a hilarious, socially awkward and sarcastic bot as main character.
also found family!
can't wait to continue the murderbot diaries and get my hands on more martha wells books, because the writing and humour were just *chef's kiss*.


re-read: feb 19, 24
still my favorite sci-fi book, i love it so much. it's funny, entertaining, heart-warming, easy to get through, suspenseful. murderbot and all the others have grown on me. whenever i don't know what to read, i pick up this book and it results in me wanting to tear through the whole rest series again. 
a book i will ALWAYS always recommend.

this book was brilliant - for a couple of reasons.

but i want to get into what i didn't enjoy first, to get it out of the way.
the book was really slow, bordering on boring, especially around the middle part. it felt like i was stuck at fifty percent for an eternity. i never once thought about dnf'ing it, because it was still interesting to read, but the longevity of it just put me off.
i also think you could just really feel that this was a young adult book. the romance was quite romantic, but somtimes so cheesy with the characters always calling each other by their names and saying 'romantic' lines that one could as well find on a teenager's instagram page.

now don't get me wrong, the romance wasn't bad, not at all! quite the opposite, actually. the ghibli references (esp. sheeta and pazu) were really adorable, but you know. cheesy.
i generally enjoyed the characters though and thought they were rather relatable. their dreams felt very real and i liked the diversity of them. i've never read anything about someone wanting to become an animator until now. their might life also left me feel very giddy and it made me root for them a lot, since they're both just such good (not flawless though, which was nice) people.
another thing i really enjoyed was the occasional banter, and khawf, whose sarcastic and sometimes 'funny' personality i liked.

but the romance and all that wasn't the point of the book.
the point was to educate people on what's happening in syria, because as the author states in the author's note, she noticed that very little people actually know what's going on. i think she did a great job combining awareness and information with great storytelling and a sweet romance.

the things that happened in this book were horrible, frightening, traumatic, because they are. this is not a product of the author's imagination. all the characters in the book are real. this is happening. it's not fiction, and katouh tries to convey exactly that.

i learned a lot through this book - about syria, and syrian culture specifically - and this review cannot capture how much impact this book had on me.

i recommend as long as the lemon trees grow to everyone, but especially to those who
... like me, didn't know a lot about syria,
... and to all of those in any situation who need something, a shimmer of hope, to cling to right now.

i hate to start the year this way, but it can't be helped.

the book was kinda tiresome? now, some short stories were quite alright and i had high hopes after the first one, shoko's smile. but the stories got worse and worse and by the end i could barely finish the book. 
the concepts are good, so i don't really know what put me off so much. perhaps it was the writing, or the pace, i'm not sure.

man, i am so disappointed. the book started strong and i was able to make it through the whole first book (with a little bit of effort), but the second one was sooo boring i couldn't finish it. interesting, yes - like the whole concept - but slow and tedious and unexciting. i loved mieko kawakami's 'heaven' but breasts and eggs just wasn't it.