Jonnarosa

✨ Finnish reader with a soft spot for fantasy and a habit of reading everything else too. 📚 Fueled by books, nature, snacks, and passionately debating fictional lives.

369 points

0% overlap

My Taste

Reading...

The Bear and the Nightingale (The Winternight Trilogy, #1)

20%

My Brilliant Friend (The Neapolitan Novels, #1)

49%

Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive, #3)

50%

Jonnarosa made progress on...

11h

The Bear and the Nightingale (The Winternight Trilogy, #1)

Katherine Arden

20%

Jonnarosa started reading...

15h

The Bear and the Nightingale (The Winternight Trilogy, #1)

Katherine Arden

At the edge of the Russian wilderness, winter lasts most of the year and the snowdrifts grow taller than houses. But Vasilisa doesn't mind—she spends the winter nights huddled around the embers of a fire with her beloved siblings, listening to her nurse's fairy tales. Above all, she loves the chilling story of Frost, the blue-eyed winter demon, who appears in the frigid night to claim unwary souls. Wise Russians fear him, her nurse says, and honor the spirits of house and yard and forest that protect their homes from evil. After Vasilisa's mother dies, her father goes to Moscow and brings home a new wife. Fiercely devout, city-bred, Vasilisa's new stepmother forbids her family from honoring the household spirits. The family acquiesces, but Vasilisa is frightened, sensing that more hinges upon their rituals than anyone knows. And indeed, crops begin to fail, evil creatures of the forest creep nearer, and misfortune stalks the village. All the while, Vasilisa's stepmother grows ever harsher in her determination to groom her rebellious stepdaughter for either marriage or confinement in a convent. As danger circles, Vasilisa must defy even the people she loves and call on dangerous gifts she has long concealed—this, in order to protect her family from a threat that seems to have stepped from her nurse's most frightening tales. The Bear and the Nightingale is a magical debut novel from a gifted and gorgeous voice. It spins an irresistible spell as it announces the arrival of a singular talent.

Jonnarosa made progress on...

My Brilliant Friend (The Neapolitan Novels, #1)

Elena Ferrante

49%

Jonnarosa wrote a review...

Jonnarosa

Feb 04, 2026

2.5

Enjoyment: 1.5Quality: 2.5Characters: 2.0Plot: 2.0

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👩‍🎓

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2.75 stars. I’ve enjoyed all of R.F. Kuang’s books, but unfortunately this one was a disappointment. It starts off strong, and the premise is interesting and innovative, but that’s almost where it ends aside from a few intriguing reflections or amusing moments.

The pacing is really strange. The plot is constantly interrupted by odd info-dumps about chalk or something similar, or suddenly the book shifts into name-dropping philosophers and logic concepts that ultimately don’t affect much of anything. In practice, even if you didn’t understand any of the academic jargon, you’d still know exactly what’s happening.

You’d also think the different levels of hell would be fascinating, but after the first two, everything just turns into the same kind of desert that the characters simply… walk through. And aside from the protagonist, all the characters are extremely one-dimensional if we even learn anything about them at all. The protagonist herself is also completely unbearable in an unproductive way (unlike in Yellowface, where that worked much better and was tightly woven into the main themes).

In the end, I’m not even sure what this book was trying to say or what its core themes were, because it felt like it was jumping everywhere without a clear direction, and the ending came across as very cliché.

The vibes might be the only thing you can really take away from this, and even for that purpose, I’d recommend Babel instead.

Jonnarosa finished a book

Katabasis

R.F. Kuang

Two graduate students must set aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul, perhaps at the cost of their own. Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality—her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world—that is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault. Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands, and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams. Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the same conclusion.

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Plants, fungi, and trees - oh my! 🌿🍄🌳

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Welcome to the wonderful world of Plants! Celebrate the leafy, fungal, flowering world with these non-fiction titles. Through science writing, memoirs, and essays (and more!), learn about the inner workings of plants, explore the interconnected nature of nature, and discover just how vast the mycelium network really is.

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Tragic Love: Queer Edition 🖤🏳️‍🌈🫂

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Books that focus on the unique complexity of queer & trans lives & relationships. Tragic stories that center queer & trans realities.

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Non-Fiction Starter Pack Vol II 🧑‍🏫📓🎓

💎 // 242 joined

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