ethics have vacated the office. there are no ethics in till summer do us part. the ethics donot exist.

also too much throbbing. i donot need this much throbbing in my life.

kind of sweet on occasion but then the author launches you into weirdness in two words.

this had no business being as long as it is, but i suppose when you have a small town as unhinged as story lake is, you inevitably end up dedicating quite a few chapters to the various shenanigans and antics its residents get up to. it's a good thing lucy score did that too, because that was pretty much the only saving grace of this entire book for me (though of course it didn't last nearly long enough to save it entirely).

many of the problems i have with this book are the same as those i'd have with the average heteronormative romance novel (anglophone ones, at least): everyone thinks way too much about sex, it feels like their brains are ruled at least in part by lust, and the man always has to prove his masculinity and devotion to the woman he loves by resorting to physical violence over her. you'll have to forgive me for not finding this caveman-like display attractive, especially when said woman is often subjected to public humiliation as a direct consequence of his actions. i believe that a man should be able to defend his lover in subtler and more elegant ways, rather than simply punching it out like someone who doesn't know how to use his words. 君子动口不动手 / a gentleman uses his words and not his fists and all that. but unfortunately, lucy score believes that campbell getting into fist-fights over another man daring to flirt with hazel is him simply "prov[ing] to [him]self and to story lake that [he] wasn't going to give up without a fight." yikes.

anyway, my main problem with the romance is that it was just boring, which shouldn't have been the case with the premise of their relationship. hazel uproots her entire life and moves to a small town in the middle of nowhere just to base her latest male lead on a random contractor she's never even spoken to once before. campbell, on the other hand, slowly manipulates hazel into agreeing to an actual romantic relationship with him, culminating in him proposing to her minutes after they get back together post-third-act conflict (yes, unfortunately there is in fact one in this book. tragic, i know), via an engagement ring taped to a wedding planning notebook. both of these, on their own, would've been incredibly uncomfortable to read about. put together, they make the perfect combination for a freak4freak story, which i love. unfortunately, they're just not insane enough to pull that off, hence my opinion that their romance was boring. i would've rather read 500 pages of the town's pet bald eagle named goose slapping unsuspecting tourists in the face with fish.

p.s. i was initially going to leave this unrated, but the smut scenes made me change my mind. if i never have to read sentences like "my legs wrapped around his waist like hungry boa constrictors" again it will be too fucking soon.

no, i am not jealous that the butch who's always strapped at work decides to whisk you away to their office. not jealous at all !

anything going wrong in space is always scary. the unknown killing off crew members is scary. this was boring despite having both.

Over and over again this book highlights the necessity of community, one where it is accessible for everyone who lives in it. I think an important part of community building is learning about the people who share the space, and this book works to further that. Having these first-hand accounts from disabled people is such an excellent resource and an incredible gift from those who contributed to it. These stories brought me to tears, but also made me laugh. Disabled people are not a monolith, and therefore these stories present a wide range of emotional impact, but I feel I was able to take something away from every one of the pieces in this compilation.

this is yet another assholes-to-lovers story where lust conquers all (their antagonism) and the guy is the (much) bigger asshole as per usual. but don't worry, his assholery will be excused by way of his insomnia, his martyr-like restraint in not jumping a hot girl the second she openly expresses her interest in him, and his tortured musician/fuckboy persona. he's been having writer's block for a year, you see. naturally his temper is on a short fuse because of that.

i'm probably being a little unfair here, but no words in this language can properly express just how little i care about wyatt's moaning about how women always fall for him, but he's incapable of loving them back the way he deserves, and how he doesn't want to break blake the same way. women aren't that fragile. they are, in fact, capable of surviving without your magical cock. and anyway, he already rejected her once when he left her high and dry on a kitchen countertop after a midnight fondling session during a family reunion. she's clearly survived that just fine.

it also really pisses me off how he insulted both blake and a stranger in really petty ways due to his refusal to admit to his jealousy and, in blake's case, crossed multiple lines he shouldn't even have been near in the process. i especially hate how this jealousy mainly manifests in him thinking about blake fucking another guy. these people think about practically nothing but sex, and lust, and how much they want to see each other's genitalia. they think about it so much, in fact, that they fuck each other on every available surface, including in the family vacation house their entire extended family is coming to stay in (and also while said family is already there. yikes). maybe it's because i'm too asexual for this, but surely there's more to your attraction to each other than just physical lust. wyatt is the worse offender of this by far too, because elle kennedy believes in a type of gender essentialism that casts men as insatiable horndogs, whereas blake at least occasionally thinks about how she likes wyatt because of how contradictory and mysterious he is. whatever.

speaking of which, the misogyny in this book is practically dripping off the pages. as mentioned above, there is a shocking amount of gender essentialism in this book. wyatt's internal monologue, in particular, is horrendous to read for this reason. it's either "i'm a guy, so obviously my inner horndog is gonna perk up when a girl makes her interest known" or "we stayed up all night to have a deep conversation and that means something to girls that us guys just don't care about. she's probably designing the wedding invitations [right now]" (the last sentence is an actual quote btw). it's exhausting to have to read such gallingly heteronormative takes on gender. another example of this is when blake hears about her friend's girlfriend cheating on him and wonders "[w]hy are men so blind when it comes to toxic women?" darling, your own boyfriend cheated on you for an entire year and filmed sex tapes the entire time to commemorate it, and you didn't realise until it made national news. i think it goes both ways.

but wait! this is not even the worst this book has to offer. the absolute worst part of this book, in my humble opinion, is blake's pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage, which is in effect only there to lay the groundwork for their third-act break-up and conflict. yeah. you heard that right. i hate the pregnancy trope as much as the next person, but there's something particularly appalling about the way elle kennedy uses it here. miscarriage is a serious matter. it should not be bandied about as loosely as it is here, where the sole purpose of its depiction is simply to set up yet another tiresome romance trope. it is simply horrifying to me that no one thought to bring this up in the publishing process. this is a consistent problem, because there are plenty of other lines that should've been cut before this book hit the shelves. for instance, blake thinks to herself halfway through the novel: "For the first time in my life, the word freckles doesn’t feel like a slur." in what fucking world can the word freckles ever be likened to a slur? how did no one in the editing and publishing team notice this? i have so many questions about this book, but i doubt any of them will ever get a satisfactory answer.

anyway, my problems with this book don't stop with the set-up of their romance, but with the set-up of a future book in the series, in which another character cuckolds his best friend (again, in the family vacation house). i presume readers are eventually meant to forgive him for this drunken "mistake," because blake and wyatt sure dismiss this easily enough, and so does every other member of their extended family (except the best friend, of course, who goes right back to his fuckboy ways). unfortunately, i am of the opinion that this is unforgivable, and i'm not sure how blake managed to ignore it given her own experience with cheating assholes. on a slightly different note, i am concerned about elle kennedy's knowledge of global geography; i'm not sure she's aware that tokyo is not, in fact, in south korea. or perhaps she simply doesn't realise that the k in k-pop stands for korean. yet another question i'll never have answered.