sarah2438's reviews
1046 reviews

I'm tentatively rating this 3.5 but I'll need to sit with it a bit longer. This was very well written but also fairly dense and not a writing style that I'm accustomed to. I had a vague concept of the storyline going in, which held up to what I expected. I did not expect the rampant misogyny, and that's harder to ignore in such a short novel. I understand this book was written in the 50s and is thus a product of its time, but that nonetheless took away from how much I can hold this book in esteem. (I wanted to say how much I enjoyed it-- but this is not a book that you enjoy.) With all of that considered, I did find a great deal of value in the prose, and I wish the story were longer to really flesh out the relationships.
I really don't know where I am with this one. But it is worth a read.

The first time I opened this I immediately closed it because I knew I'd devour it. And I was right! I basically read this entire thing in one sitting today, no pauses. It's a very sweet and frustrating novel. I think I would've liked for the anguish and emotional aspects to be pushed further, potentially a longer novel, but this was a great time and I'd recommend it.

I am bored and the Dragon is abusive.

This has been my least favorite of Hazelwood's. I usually don't mind the predictable plots (predictable because they are all identical) but I couldn't do it with this one. Bee was too cringe with all of the puns, and the "twists" weren't even fun to look forward to because they were so obvious and I just wanted to get to the point already. I didn't feel the chemistry and just wasn't into this one.

Very interesting and entertaining, although I will confess to getting a bit bored during all of the landscape and architectural details. Those portions definitely got a bit dry. But Larson's writing is a very thorough narrative style, so his books feel more like a story than a recitation of facts. I'll look into more of his works.

This one was very interesting. I went into it a little hesitant because I was worried it would get into modern politics and I wanted to focus on history. And for the most part, I think it did that. There's always going to be a bias when talking about current events, so I took off a half star for that, but overall I'm really glad I read this and would recommend. There are so many pieces of U.S. history that aren't talked about because of the reluctance to admit that we did something wrong. This book sheds light on a lot of that, and how we can reconcile the truth with what we've been taught.

Reading this after his passing is so sad. Very interesting first-hand look at substance abuse disorder but it's pretty dark.

This book sucked. The 2 MCs were boring. Everyone says Henley is so nice and giving and blah blah blah but she's actually kind of terrible to her sister. A lot of this was just straight up cringe. I started this to keep me awake while I was at work and it served that purpose, but I should've DNF'd once I left.

May come back to this but for now I do not care.

I had some mixed thoughts on this one. Overall, I think it was solidly in the middle. I don't think this will be for everyone--  if you're not familiar with his Tiktoks, Jeff has a very distinct voice and I don't think everyone will enjoy it. I love his videos and even I thought it was a bit much sometimes. But he's still an entertaining writer, and I swear I could almost hear him saying these things as I read them. That said, I think the topics and ideas covered here are pretty basic Psyc 101 type stuff. I didn't come across any deep revelations as I worked through this. (And to be clear, I committed-- I had a notebook with me and answered every question written in the book). Additionally, I read through this slowly, and went through a range of relationship statuses as I did so. I started completely single and am now hoping to cross that DTR bridge any day now. So while it was neat that I got to experience some of the different relationship stages as I read about them, I still don't know that this book was particularly helpful for the relationship. I think the prompts can be very useful but it will really depend how deep you're willing to go, and I don't know that many folks are willing to push themselves that far. I think this would be a good book to read in conjunction with therapy so that you can really dive into the answers you come up with for each chapter. But on its own, the weight it carries for its readers will vary quite a bit.

**Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the free digital Advanced Readers Copy!**