Awesome black plague era biblical horror. I must admit I have a bit of a contentious relationship with horror, it used to be something I loved, but I can't get into a lot of it anymore, its often too gross or too schlocky for me. But this is so much of what I still love about horror. Disturbing dream sequences, cool and unique monstrous creatures, things are not as they seem. I wasn't sure what to believe or what was real at times, and several times I genuinely got goosebumps because a concept was so unsettling and awesome. The ending fully took me by surprise. Highly recommend to anyone who likes weird confusing horror and medieval books.

Morally simplistic and a bit boring. Cool to see a Muslim guy in fantasy tho!

A cozy utopian sci fi story with existential philosophical conversations and a nonbinary protagonist. Sounds awesome! But in execution, it didn't really work for me. Long story short, very entry level philosophy, unbelievable world building, a self centered main character who seems strangely individualistic culturally for a supposed solar punk style utopian world that seems like its supposed to be based in leftist theory... And no one once went on a dedicated cricket hunt.

The main character Dex annoyed me. Their impulsiveness puts others and then themselves in a bad situation. When they decide to switch vocations to being a tea monk, which involves listening and giving advice to people in need, they refuse an apprenticeship opting instead to learn on the job alone. It goes very badly. Had they had less of a fragile ego about taking an apprenticeship, this would have been avoided. Imperfect or flawed characters can be interesting, but the tone the book was trying to convey felt more like, no ones perfect and that's ok, when what was happening in my mind was someone was trying to jump into being something akin to a therapist without training, which is highly unethical. They do finally figure the whole thing out, but its done over a 2 year time jump, so all character development happens off page. It's rather unsatisfying!

They later decided to go into the woods for days without research or experience. Really stupid. That's how you die.

They leave the city they live in on a whim, driven by an overwhelming desire to get away from the overstimulating urban environment and to hear crickets. Highly relatable. However, a reasonable thing to do would be to make one search one the pocket computer they have about crickets to see where they live, and that, spoiler alert, they're very rare at this point. When they meet up with the robot character about halfway through the book, it turns out this robot is obsessed with insects! That's awesome you can talk about crickets! Nope! They never do! Instead they talk about the most entry level philosophy. Stuff like, everybody is different and that's ok! You don't need to have a purpose to enjoy life! Felt much more appropriate for a young adult or middle grade audience. Dex is 29 but acts like a teenager

I wanted to understand the hype and its safe to say I do not get it! This is utter slop! Listen I love some slop, and if this is your thing absolutely go hog wild, but this is not my trough.

I tried getting into this book like 3 different times over the past year, and past 10% or so it does improve from completely unreadable to just annoyingly bad. The main character Feyre feels like a cheap knock off katniss everdeen (only thing she can do is shoot a bow to provide for her family) with a large side of internalized misogyny.

The faeries, high fae that is, in this are the perfect representation of everything I hate about faerie books. Instead of trickster creatures, we have an epidemic of brooding magical men. They're all handsome and muscular with magic powers, and shape-shifting. Thats it. All traditional faerie lore is thrown out the window as "myths" and "we wanted to make up shit for humans". I don't think you can even call them elves, pointy ears don't make an elf. One cool thing is the lesser fae, the faeries that live in the woods. There's a couple really cool concepts there that could have used more time. Genuinely the only thing I really liked about this book.