skylarkblue1 commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
It's a small thing but it's been bugging me more and more - and would really help with linking to reviews to publishers and such for ARCs and similar. Would really appreciate just a little timestamp of when a post/comment/review and such was made! Would also make me more likely to comment on a post or update or similar if I knew how long ago it was posted.
Post from the Reign of the Talon (Talons, #3) forum
Not really vibing with this as much as I did the first 2 tbh. It's amazing how they find so much time to be romantic/pine for each other in this situation. And the mental health aspect has gotten.... weird.. and somehow very watered down despite it being the main(?) focus now.
Post from the Pagebound Club forum
It's a small thing but it's been bugging me more and more - and would really help with linking to reviews to publishers and such for ARCs and similar. Would really appreciate just a little timestamp of when a post/comment/review and such was made! Would also make me more likely to comment on a post or update or similar if I knew how long ago it was posted.
skylarkblue1 wrote a review...
Content Warnings:
Graphic: Miscarriage, Pregnancy, Death of a Child, Sexual Assault, Rape (Off page but with descriptions), Misogyny, Death of a Parent, Gore, Violence, Murder, Blood, Death.. It's a Celtic mythology retelling that's decently accurate, I'm not sure what you expect other than like, every content warning 😅Thank you Netgalley for an eARC in exchange for an honest review! This ran at a break-neck pace and left nothing room to breathe. So many characters, so many lives - but everything is just told to us in short snippets and barely anything is actually just shown. There's so much dialogue just of exposition and explaining constantly. The characters where a mix, quite a few of them felt very flat honestly and despite that seemingly being intentional (Little time with characters, mostly only focusing on 1 or 2 aspects of each, etc), it kinda just blurred most of them together. The main character, The Morrigan, was good though. She was strong, powerful, stubborn, but had a good range of emotions still and was a really compelling main character! I just honestly wish we had more time for her to properly go through each scene though instead of quick snippets. The pronunciation guide as well.. I'm quite heavily dyslexic, and while I've been learning Welsh that doesn't help with Irish too much haha. It's a fantastic guide, but it is *very* long. I read this in an ebook form and it was really frustrating having to keep going back to the guide and then reading through all of them again to try and find the 1 name I wanted. There's too many names to just remember, especially after the first "part" or so, and once you get closer to the end you're just not going to remember the new names' pronunciations. Imo it might have been better to keep the pronunciation note at the start, but then put the pronunciations when the names first come up in the book? Not perfect, but I'm sure there's a decent way to format that. Would be much easier to remember them and a lot easier to read! I'm not Irish, and Welsh + Scottish mythology is more my wheelhouse but this book does seem to be faithful enough and certainly respectful obviously. The author is Irish and very clearly loves the tales of old and that comes through! It's certainly something that's absolutely needed in this current era of American fantasy attempting to take over and erase Celtic mythology in the worst of ways. I just think that it was maybe trying to fit too many individual stories about her into the same book. I think there is too many duologies currently being made, but this might have benefitted from having more room to breathe.
skylarkblue1 finished a book
The Morrigan
Kim Curran
skylarkblue1 finished reading and wrote a review...
Got up to page 20. I cannot read anymore. This book is very obviously written by a man and a lot of it belongs on r/menwritingwomen. In addition to that it's painfully pro-Israel to the point of re-writing historical events just to further push Israeli propaganda and being so just heavy-handed with it. Additionally, and I'm going to make no claims here but just allow you to make your own conclusions - googling the author's name very easily brings up a CSA victims testimony accusing someone called John Myslinski as being an accomplice. Again, I am not going to make any claims, but there is a fair few details that line up pretty damn close in my opinion. I think people should know about the authors they choose to support. So thank you for sending me a copy of the book unsolicited, but I shall not be reading anymore of this book.
skylarkblue1 started reading...
The Morrigan
Kim Curran
skylarkblue1 wrote a review...
Graphic: Loss of a Parent, Grief, Car Accident, Death, Panic Attack, Disassociation, Derealisation. Moderate Murder, Blood, Injury Detail, Medical ContentThank you Netgalley for an eARC in exchange for an honest review! Representations: https://trello.com/c/AFPp8tnh/132-the-underwood-tapes-by-amanda-dewitt Read this in 2 settings, half of the book each time. I got absolutely HOOKED! It's a little hard to keep track of who's who over 3 different generations but there's not too many characters over all. Mainly just a couple different "generation lines" and the rest of the characters were easy to keep track of. Trying to work out how each character was related though.. I gave up on that fast but I think that's the point 😂 They were pretty nice to read though, not too tropey and were different enough from each other. Grace being the POV was nice, she didn't read too young and had a good amount of wits about her. The emotions, the grief, the generational trauma running through the town was really well written imo and it ties together really nicely. The cover also not having Jakes face is just perfection ngl. The story was one hell of a ride. I can't say I read the description of this - if I did I'd entirely forgotten by the time I got to reading the book lol - so I went in blind. When I got to the hook of this book, I legit just like, put down my e-reader for a second and just knew this book is gonna be fantastic. Did not disappoint at all! The pacing kept up, it does feel like things are slightly too convenient at times but I get it tbh. Things don't get explicitly explained though but personally I'd say it's a very satisfying ending anyway that works very well. I think an actual explanation of how things happened wouldn't be good as well and it's absolutely not neeeded. I did just love this though. I loved the nerdy parts, I loved that there wasn't romance in it and instead the emotions is all about processing the grief, trying to find light in darkness and human connections through barriers - time or otherwise.
skylarkblue1 finished a book
The Underwood Tapes
Amanda DeWitt
skylarkblue1 commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
Hello! Would it be possible to include the title in addition to the covers on posts that appear on the main feed? The images are pretty small so it’s hard to tell what book it is if it’s new to me without clicking into the post!
Post from the The Underwood Tapes forum
Read half the book in one sitting, I am SO invested in this!!!
skylarkblue1 wants to read...
Puzzleheart
Jenn Reese
skylarkblue1 started reading...
The Underwood Tapes
Amanda DeWitt
skylarkblue1 wrote a review...
Graphic: Suicide, Fire & Fire Injury, Grief, Death of a Loved One, Medical Scenes, Racism. Moderate: Missing Person, Slavery.Thank you Netgalley for an eARC in exchange for an honest review! Representations: https://trello.com/c/VCDroEhD/131-black-tag-by-simon-mayo Feels a tad generic, but with some very wild curveballs thrown in with not much research lmao. The characters largely were just a bit meh. Nothing too spectacular, nothing too bad. Famie just feels like a general "investigative journalist" with a moral compass that seems to be a generally common trope at the moment, but she wasn't an annoying point of view at least and decently solid to follow along with. It did get a little confusing who was what, even at the end I was still getting confused about how someone related to someone else. Just felt like too many characters, with not enough information on a lot of them. Plot was a bit wild. The main crime had a decently solid thread through it - if not just a bit weak - and knew where it was wanting to go. But.. then there was just a load of really weird side tangents in it. One of them was a constant mention of a specific video game, XIII - even throwing shade at the developers of the remake for the bad release for some reason - but (and this isn't a spoiler tbh) it leads to literally nothing lol. It was described weirdly and just had no use being there except for the shade towards the devs, and a bit of shade towards just, gamers in general I think?? It was weird. And on the topic of tech - if you're going to have "Base Sixtyfour" in your book, at least convert the string into B64 to see what it is - and see it's an alphanumeric string of 108 characters and not "thousands of letters, signs and symbols" 😂 Also PLEASE stop using the colour green for "hacking" scenes, it's such a tired trope that's so bad lmao. Though I'll be honest that scene was just so bad it was hilarious - all tension was stripped from the scene and I was genuinely just laughing my ass off at how dumb it was. So minus points for not doing basic research, bonus points for hilarity lol. It is pretty slow paced, but it at least keeps things going. It was an easy read, and didn't take that long (I've just been pretty busy) keeping my interest decently well tbh. I have literally no idea where in the series this book is, if it's book 2 or 3, but it's certainly not book 1 despite literally no where mentioning this is part of a series. Do better, publishers. Luckily though you can read it fully standalone I'd say, it gives background context to some things (maybe a bit too often) and feels like a contained story.
skylarkblue1 commented on a post
I’m struggling with my feelings about Molly’s character. She’s a walking stereotype of autism in a borderline offensive way. Why does she need to act like a child to get the point across that she is naive and lacks social skills? Neurodivergent representation is important but it’s not representation when the author is infantilizing the character to get their point across. I think the thing that’s bothering me most about the stereotypical portrayal is that we’re constantly being told that Molly has certain autistic traits over and over again (such as being unable to read facial expressions). Show don’t tell is something this author would probably benefit from greatly. TL;DR the portrayal of autism (whether on purpose or by accident) is lazy and lacks proper research into actual autistic experiences.
skylarkblue1 finished a book
Black Tag
Simon Mayo
skylarkblue1 commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
Would it be possible to change settings so that anywhere there is a clickable link that that would be able to right click open in new tab option? If I've just seen my friend add a book and I want to check out that book, I usually have to left click and navigate away from my home feed instead of open that book in a new tab. From an author's page, I can left click on any book cover to go to that book's page, but right click only allows to (open image, save image, copy image) etc. Or if I try to right click on the title or anywhere in the white box of blurb text, the options are (back, forward, reload, save as) etc On my home feed it feels totally random whether I can right click new tab-- -a post from the forum, dark blue background, seems to have 'open in new tab' function when clicking on that book cover, but not the white text that shows the reading update (I realized that clicking on the white text will open pop-up to show the full update text instead of opening a new page-- but the blue text within that pop-up that says 'book forum' is not able to right click new tab) -seems like user names are always okay -pink box 'earned a badge' allows to right click open the quest link -pink box 'wrote a review' allows to right click on cover to go to that book's page, but not clicking on the review text -pink box 'finished a book' or 'wants to read' does NOT allow any right click navigation -someone commented on update, pink box 'DNF'd a book' does NOT allow any right click navigation -someone commented on post, orange box containing the reading update-- both usernames and the cover are right-click fine but none of the white text box Within any Library I can left click on any tag and see that collection but can't open any tag in new tab Quest icons on someone's profile will left-click go to that quest but right click function as an image My following, my followers, my points, the participants who have joined a quest } none right click to new tab (I think actually because these open as a pop-up instead of navigating to new page 🤔)
Post from the Black Tag forum
At 60% is when what's mentioned in the description happens. Do better, publishers.
skylarkblue1 commented on a post