Swij2
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1w
Funny Story
Emily Henry
A shimmering, joyful new novel about a pair of opposites with the wrong thing in common.
Daphne always loved the way her fiancé Peter told their story. How they met (on a blustery day), fell in love (over an errant hat), and moved back to his lakeside hometown to begin their life together. He really was good at telling it…right up until the moment he realized he was actually in love with his childhood best friend Petra.
Which is how Daphne begins her new story: Stranded in beautiful Waning Bay, Michigan, without friends or family but with a dream job as a children’s librarian (that barely pays the bills), and proposing to be roommates with the only person who could possibly understand her predicament: Petra’s ex, Miles Nowak.
Scruffy and chaotic—with a penchant for taking solace in the sounds of heart break love ballads—Miles is exactly the opposite of practical, buttoned up Daphne, whose coworkers know so little about her they have a running bet that she’s either FBI or in witness protection. The roommates mainly avoid one another, until one day, while drowning their sorrows, they form a tenuous friendship and a plan. If said plan also involves posting deliberately misleading photos of their summer adventures together, well, who could blame them?
But it’s all just for show, of course, because there’s no way Daphne would actually start her new chapter by falling in love with her ex-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex…right?
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Swij2 started reading...
2w
Funny Story
Emily Henry
A shimmering, joyful new novel about a pair of opposites with the wrong thing in common.
Daphne always loved the way her fiancé Peter told their story. How they met (on a blustery day), fell in love (over an errant hat), and moved back to his lakeside hometown to begin their life together. He really was good at telling it…right up until the moment he realized he was actually in love with his childhood best friend Petra.
Which is how Daphne begins her new story: Stranded in beautiful Waning Bay, Michigan, without friends or family but with a dream job as a children’s librarian (that barely pays the bills), and proposing to be roommates with the only person who could possibly understand her predicament: Petra’s ex, Miles Nowak.
Scruffy and chaotic—with a penchant for taking solace in the sounds of heart break love ballads—Miles is exactly the opposite of practical, buttoned up Daphne, whose coworkers know so little about her they have a running bet that she’s either FBI or in witness protection. The roommates mainly avoid one another, until one day, while drowning their sorrows, they form a tenuous friendship and a plan. If said plan also involves posting deliberately misleading photos of their summer adventures together, well, who could blame them?
But it’s all just for show, of course, because there’s no way Daphne would actually start her new chapter by falling in love with her ex-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex…right?
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Swij2 started reading...
2w
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
Stephen Graham Jones
A chilling historical horror novel set in the American west in 1912 following a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice. A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits. This is an American Indian revenge story written by one of the new masters of horror, Stephen Graham Jones.
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Swij2 paused reading...
2w
The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science (The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science, 1)
Kate McKinnon
From beloved Saturday Night Live alum Kate McKinnon comes a madcap new adventure about three sisters, a ravenous worm, and a mysterious mad scientist.
So, you want to be a young mad scientist. Congratulations! Admitting it is the first step. The second step is reading the (definitely true) tale of the Porch sisters…
Gertrude, Eugenia, and Dee-Dee Porch do not belong. They don’t belong in the snooty town of Antiquarium, where all girls have to go to etiquette school and the only dog allowed is the bichon frise. They don’t belong with their adoptive family, where all their cousins are named Lavinia and their Aunt has more brooches than books. And they certainly don’t belong at Mrs. Wintermacher’s etiquette school—they’re far more interested in science. After getting kicked out of the last etiquette school that would take them, the girls expect to be sent away for good... until they receive a mysterious invitation to a new school.
Suddenly the girls are under the tutelage of the infamous Millicent Quibb—a mad scientist with worms in her hair and oysters in her bathtub. At 231 Mysterium Way, the pizza is fatal, the bus is powered by Gerbils, and the Dean of Students is a hermit crab. Dangerous? Yes! More fun than they’ve ever had? Absolutely! But when the sisters are asked to save their town from an evil cabal of nefarious mad scientists, they must learn to embrace what has always made them stand out, and determine what side they’re on—before it’s too late!
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Swij2 DNF'd a book
2w
Alchemised
SenLinYu SenLinYu
In this riveting dark fantasy debut, a woman with missing memories fights to survive a war-torn world of necromancy and alchemy—and the man tasked with unearthing the deepest secrets of her past.
“What is it you think you’re protecting in that brain of yours? The war is over. Holdfast is dead. The Eternal Flame extinguished. There’s no one left for you to save.”
Once a promising alchemist, Helena Marino is now a prisoner—of war and of her own mind. Her Resistance friends and allies have been brutally murdered, her abilities suppressed, and the world she knew destroyed.
In the aftermath of a long war, Paladia’s new ruling class of corrupt guild families and depraved necromancers, whose vile, undead creatures helped bring about their victory, holds Helena captive.
According to Resistance records, she was a healer of little importance within their ranks. But Helena has inexplicable memory loss of the months leading up to her capture, making her enemies wonder: Is she truly as insignificant as she appears, or are her lost memories hiding some vital piece of the Resistance’s final gambit?
To uncover the memories buried deep within her mind, Helena is sent to the High Reeve, one of the most powerful and ruthless necromancers in this new world. Trapped on his crumbling estate, Helena’s fight—to protect her lost history and to preserve the last remaining shreds of her former self—is just beginning. For her prison and captor have secrets of their own . . . secrets Helena must unearth, whatever the cost.
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2w
Season of Fear
Emily Cooper
Night of the Witch meets The Handmaid's Tale in this queer Gothic horror debut set against the monstrous Bavarian forest of Hexenwald. ★“Hauntingly poetic and monstrously romantic.”—Ava Reid, #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Study in Drowning ★"A dark and dreadful tour de force of a debut! Exquisitely beautiful and horrific."—Erin A. Craig, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Thirteenth Child In the Bavarian village of Heulensee, women feed their terror to an ancient Saint of Fear. In return, it protects them from the monsters of the Hexenwald, the haunted forest on their doorstep. Born unfearing, Ilse Odenwald has felt like an outsider all her life. When the Saint discovers Ilse’s divergence, it levels a she must find her fear, or the Saint will devour her sister, Dorothea—the only person who loves Ilse unconditionally. Unwilling to lose Thea, Ilse enters the Hexenwald. She hopes that its horrors will finally unleash her fear and, in turn, save her sister. But during her quest Ilse inadvertently uncovers something more sinister than the monsters that hunt a darkness within herself. As the forest closes in, Ilse’s hopes for a normal future begin to slip away, as well as the chance to save not just Thea, but all women in Heulensee. Bewitching and timely, this gripping debut novel is a dark fairy tale about the fate of girls and women in a world grown accustomed to sacrificing them.
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2w
Inner Space
Jakub Szamalek
“A wonderfully crafted space thriller. It has everything we loved about The Martian or Gravity, but more psychological depth. It’s also a chilling picture of the Russian mentality and its workings, written by someone who truly understands it. With the resurgent conflict between the East and the West and the return of the threat of totalitarianism, this blockbuster book couldn’t be more timely.”—Zygmunt Miloszewski, bestselling author of Rage and Priceless
American and Russian astronauts are trapped together in the International Space Station as war breaks out in Ukraine and life support functions begin to fail in this action-packed debut technothriller that ripples with the tension and danger of Solaris and Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary.
When an ammonia leak threatens the astronauts on the International Space Station, NASA directs Lucy Poplasky, one of the ISS’s first female commanders, to investigate the cause. Russia has just invaded Ukraine and tensions are running high—could the leak be a brazen act of sabotage?
The Russian cosmonauts aboard deny tampering with the ship’s systems and insist on the issue stems from the American side. As levels of the poisonous gas rise, Lucy’s investigation shatters trust between the Russian and Western crews, exposing deep fissures in the partnership thousands of miles below.
Intense and unrelenting, Inner Space questions what truly draws us to the the urge to explore the unknown, selfish ambition, or an instinct to run away from the entrenched troubles on Earth?
Translated from the Polish by Kasia Beresford
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Swij2 made progress on...
3w
The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science (The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science, 1)
Kate McKinnon
7%
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Swij2 started reading...
3w
The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science (The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science, 1)
Kate McKinnon
From beloved Saturday Night Live alum Kate McKinnon comes a madcap new adventure about three sisters, a ravenous worm, and a mysterious mad scientist.
So, you want to be a young mad scientist. Congratulations! Admitting it is the first step. The second step is reading the (definitely true) tale of the Porch sisters…
Gertrude, Eugenia, and Dee-Dee Porch do not belong. They don’t belong in the snooty town of Antiquarium, where all girls have to go to etiquette school and the only dog allowed is the bichon frise. They don’t belong with their adoptive family, where all their cousins are named Lavinia and their Aunt has more brooches than books. And they certainly don’t belong at Mrs. Wintermacher’s etiquette school—they’re far more interested in science. After getting kicked out of the last etiquette school that would take them, the girls expect to be sent away for good... until they receive a mysterious invitation to a new school.
Suddenly the girls are under the tutelage of the infamous Millicent Quibb—a mad scientist with worms in her hair and oysters in her bathtub. At 231 Mysterium Way, the pizza is fatal, the bus is powered by Gerbils, and the Dean of Students is a hermit crab. Dangerous? Yes! More fun than they’ve ever had? Absolutely! But when the sisters are asked to save their town from an evil cabal of nefarious mad scientists, they must learn to embrace what has always made them stand out, and determine what side they’re on—before it’s too late!
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Swij2 started reading...
3w
Alchemised
SenLinYu SenLinYu
In this riveting dark fantasy debut, a woman with missing memories fights to survive a war-torn world of necromancy and alchemy—and the man tasked with unearthing the deepest secrets of her past.
“What is it you think you’re protecting in that brain of yours? The war is over. Holdfast is dead. The Eternal Flame extinguished. There’s no one left for you to save.”
Once a promising alchemist, Helena Marino is now a prisoner—of war and of her own mind. Her Resistance friends and allies have been brutally murdered, her abilities suppressed, and the world she knew destroyed.
In the aftermath of a long war, Paladia’s new ruling class of corrupt guild families and depraved necromancers, whose vile, undead creatures helped bring about their victory, holds Helena captive.
According to Resistance records, she was a healer of little importance within their ranks. But Helena has inexplicable memory loss of the months leading up to her capture, making her enemies wonder: Is she truly as insignificant as she appears, or are her lost memories hiding some vital piece of the Resistance’s final gambit?
To uncover the memories buried deep within her mind, Helena is sent to the High Reeve, one of the most powerful and ruthless necromancers in this new world. Trapped on his crumbling estate, Helena’s fight—to protect her lost history and to preserve the last remaining shreds of her former self—is just beginning. For her prison and captor have secrets of their own . . . secrets Helena must unearth, whatever the cost.
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Swij2 finished reading and wrote a review...
3w
This one took me forever to get through but I wouldn't necessarily call it a bad book. I loved "Such a Young Age" and was very excited to get into Reid again.
Here's what worked for me:
- I think Reid is a very engaging writer. Overall I think the writing is strong and I appreciate the way she builds a character through more than dialogue.
- The characters felt well rounded and fleshed out, even if I didn't like them all that much.
Here's what didn't work as well:
- I really didn't feel attached to the characters, their motivation, or their relationships. All the storylines converge in the climax near the end, but getting there was very slow going.
- The pacing was way too slow for me. I did not fell pulled through the story, I felt like I was wading through it looking for the point.
- I believe this story was trying to say too much. There were a lot of different social issues layered into this story and while I think the layering was fine, none of it felt jarring or out of place, I don't feel like i walked away with a conclusion or true understanding of what Reid was trying to convey.
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Swij2 finished reading and wrote a review...
3w
I love this book! Space travel has long fascinated me, and I'm a sucker for a lovely queer romance, so this hits a particular intersection of my reading interests.
Here's what worked for me:
- The longing between Joan and Vanessa before they give into their feelings is so beautiful. Getting the insiders view of Joan discovering her sexuality was so special because I really relate to her revelations, and I love her mind.
- Switching between perspectives and timelines kept me more engaged and I felt was done well. I was never confused about what was happening (outside of intentional mystery for the plot) or whose perspective it was.
- This was not a queer story that primarily stemmed from pain, discrimination, or death. Soooooooo many queer stories are just misery, but this one contained so much queer joy!
- The characters - both main and side - had depth, humor, ambition, complexity, and humanity. None of them felt like caricatures or cardboard cutouts. 4a. Parallel to that, the relationships between all the characters felt interesting and nuanced.
What didn't work as well:
- The ending. I understand why the author chose such an abrupt ending, but I did feel cheated.
- I wanted more gays in space.
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Swij2 commented on Swij2's update
4w
