This book is worth the hype it got over on BookTok. It's a strange combination of hope and despair, and I think the fact that we don't get any answers from the narrator, because the narrator also doesn't know, makes this even better than if we'd known what happened. It gives the ending of the book an almost stifling feeling.

I'm going to break this review down into two parts: the narration itself, and the content. Because both of these things play an insanely large role in my enjoyment and rating of this book. The narration itself was a disaster. The author narrated the book herself, which usually is something I love. When the narrator reads their own work, especially nonfiction, I feel like they're able to convey the emotions and point better than someone else narrating because they're the ones who wrote it. However. The way Brene Brown read this seemed almost condescending because she was constantly repeating herself and telling you "I'm going to read that again because its important" or "let me repeat that because it was pretty dense" even when it wasn't. She was also constantly adding "this is an aside just for the audiobook listeners" and then would tell you her feelings or make it sound like an addendum she added at the last second while narrating. Just read the words you wrote. This isn't a conversation? She should have just hired an actual audiobook narrator to do this because it would have been more tolerable. The only benefit really was her describing the illustrations that are in the book just in case you don't have access to the PDF, but even then it still seemed condescending because why are you describing what a ewe is when the painting you're talking about centers sheep to begin with? The content itself of the book was unengaging for the most part. I didn't get interested until the book focused on the difference between empathy and sympathy. But once she shifted focus to shame, she made a lot of extremely vague blanket statements instead of giving more accurate information, which now just makes her information incorrect. There were also a lot of personal anecdotes that it seemed they outweighed the actual research and work she mentioned. She also compared democrats and republicans to an active genocide and I think that was both extremely unnecessary and distasteful. You could have made your point about contempt without doing that. Especially since she went on to explain "how hate is different than contempt" which specifically mentions wanting to kill someone/people as a result of that emotion. She also kept plugging podcasts way too much. Whether it was her podcast or a podcast she was on, she took every opportunity to tell you to go an watch that podcast. That's not what I'm reading the book for ma'am.

This book hurt so much because of how real it is. I used to be Ellie and reading this had me crying so hard because damn. It's been so long since I've felt these things I almost forgot what it was like. Starfish is an amazing novel-in-verse that I think everyone should read.

I came for plant sex and ended getting so much more. The author has been promoting this book mostly by using the excerpts from the explicit scenes on her TikTok, but this is so much more than an alien plant sex novella. It's less than 200 pages but it had me a chokehold regardless, and now has me interested in her other work. A++ for marketing specifically towards the science-fiction-loving monster fuckers. I was enthralled the second I started reading.

Definitely the best of his fiction I've read. Being in Aza's head put OCD in such a different light. Like I knew what it was, but being IN someone's head who has OCD is something else entirely. The romance wasn't a main focus which was a nice change of pace, and the mystery wasn't a main factor either. This book was just Aza and her struggles while life went on in the background.