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The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands
Sarah Brooks
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Never Ever After (Never Ever After, 1)
Sue Lynn Tan
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Never Ever After (Never Ever After, 1)
Sue Lynn Tan
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Daughter of the Moon Goddess (The Celestial Kingdom Duology, #1)
Sue Lynn Tan
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If you're going to tease multiple love interests, those love interests should be interesting, and the heroine should seem like there's at least a chance she'll love them. It's such a fun premise, but I don't think the author is good enough to pull it off. To make matters worse, too much of the world building is reliant on super basic science concepts I'm not convinced she knows (like metal conducting electricity, or how inherited traits work in families). It feels like the author wrote an outline of plot events and then marched us through all of them without ever showing us how those events impact the characters emotionally, or if they impact them at all. If she doesn't care about her own characters, how are we supposed to?
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Daughter of the Moon Goddess (The Celestial Kingdom Duology, #1)
Sue Lynn Tan
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Red Queen (Red Queen, #1)
Victoria Aveyard
Post from the Red Queen (Red Queen, #1) forum
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Red Queen (Red Queen, #1)
Victoria Aveyard
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In case this helps anyone else, I started reading a random edition of the book and (like some others here) found it difficult to read, especially Joseph’s speech.
I went to look up an original text (or something close to it) — found the one edited by Alexandra Lewis, Fifth Norton Critical Edition. It went back to the original two volumes, among other things. From the preface by the editor: “Charlotte made considerable revisions to Emily’s novel, diluting the use of dialect and (possibly in conjunction with the printers) modifying paragraphing and punctuation well beyond the scope of correction of obvious errors.”
Breaking the paragraphs back up definitely helped (my) reading flow, AND every time Joseph says something you can find it in the footnote in “plain” English. And I’m not a native speaker, so the struggle was REAL🙂↕️
Maybe there are other editions of the book that tried to follow the original text over Charlotte’s edit, I haven’t checked any others 🫣 Feel free to drop such editions in the comments
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Winter 2026 Readalong
Read at least 1 book in the Winter 2026 Readalong.
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Goddess of the River
Vaishnavi Patel
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A Master of Djinn (Dead Djinn Universe, #1)
P. Djèlí Clark