I am caught in N.K. Jemisin's net and I don’t think I will be able to get free. Like the first book, I could not put this one down and was still thinking about it many days later. I think this series has the potential to be one of my favorites. While I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as the first, it was still very good. This book very much fulfills its role, setting up the reader for the final act. I am ready but also, I’m not ready for it to be over.

If you are expecting an action packed or quickly paced story, that is not what you will find here. If you are willing to sit and eavesdrop on conversations for hours, you will be rewarded with beautiful stories that will show you the depths of who these characters are, the history of their relationships and the reasoning for why they are the way they are.

Yes, it is true I am easily influenced by other Pagebound users. I would have never picked up this book without everyone's wonderful comments here. I really enjoyed this story and I think I will probably read it again in the future. I feel like there is even more I could pick up on a second time around. I do think the book lulled a little bit in the middle and was a little slow moving, but I think that's the nature of a conversation driven story.

Format: Audio + Physical

Baldwins storytelling skills are beautiful. You can tell his days of preaching and sitting through church services influenced his writing style. His prose is sermon like, pulling the reader through many different side stories to convey a message and filled with emotion.

This essay covers racism, the flaws of white Americans and the hypocrisy of religion. It feels like this could have been written today. I was left with feelings of disappointment, not in the essay but in my country. We have not changed anywhere near enough and we must.

New Achievement!

Just kidding, if you have read this book you have already been traumatized enough by that phrase.

This is my first time reading a LitRPG book and I really enjoyed how videogame elements are weaved into the story. As someone who is a gamer (that feels weird to say), it was really easy for me to pick up and understand how these elements would impact the plot. I am so interested how this story is going to span so many more books without getting boring and learning more about the later levels. I think what I am most curious about is the intergalactic politics we got a small glimpse of during this story.

I can completely understand why some folks do not like this book. It is very much filled with DudeBro humor. There were descriptions and things said in this book that felt unnecessarily offensive. There were of a handful of times I was left cringing and uncomfortable with what I just heard. I am hoping this stops in the next book, I have heard it gets better and that is why I am willing to keep going with the series.

Two comments I remember from MrMadHoney while we listened to the Audiobook for two hours on a roadtrip: “I hate the voice the narrator chose for Carl”, “Why would they choose the most abrasive videogame voice to sound like the game AI (voice sounds like Claptrap from borderlands - MrMadHoney hates Claptrap)”

Format: Audio + eBook

Warning: If you hate boobs and reading about them you will hate this book.*

*This is not why I rated this book 3 stars, I like boobs, but also holy moly I have never read so many descriptions of boobs in a book before. If there was a boob emoji I would have used it here.

I went into this book knowing it wouldn’t be my favorite, splatterpunk is not a horror sub-genre I like to read but I was so interested in the blurb and the cover is so cool that I looked past the genre and picked this book up. Well folks, it lived up to the sub-genres expectations, some of the descriptions in this story will turn your stomach while others will leave you stunned.

The scenes where our main character Sarah was faced with Transphobia were uncomfortable and anger inducing. I wanted to reach into the book and slap around multiple characters at many points through out the story. Sarah was the best part of this book in my opinion, her character is what kept me interested. I think I could read 100+ pages of her just texting with the &&&**glitch@&.

The story struggled with pacing, at times scenes moved very quickly and others dragged, it felt as though this book could have been shorter. This book also felt sooooo repetitive because it was, there were phrases, and topics overly repeated all through out this story. I think an aspect of this story that really bothered me was the authors repeated descriptions of women's weight as a element in the story, it felt gross in an offensive way. I searched my kindle and while not every time was in relation to weight, the word FAT was used 25+ times.

If you like splatterpunk, gigantic boobs and you want to feel like you are on the weirdest trip of your life, this book might be for you.

Format: Audio + eBook

As I listened to this book I kept wondering what am I supposed to be taking from this, why is it taught in high schools? After finishing, I did a little bit of research and found that this is meant to be a story of resilience but that is not what I found myself noticing in this story. Instead I took away a message about aging. This book made me think about the struggle of the loss of youth. How our past actions impact our bodies in the future and how the elderly struggle with loneliness. I may not have gotten the right message out of this book but at least I got something.

Hemingway was not taught as a part of my high school curriculum and I know some of his writing is considered classics so I figured I should give it a chance. Did I enjoy this story, no not really. I found the plot and Hemingway's writing style to be boring. Maybe I chose the wrong book to try first, but I have feeling that might not be the case.