books_ergo_sum's reviews
759 reviews

If I Have to Be Haunted by Miranda Sun

adventurous

1.0

This book was about a cartoonishly insensitive teenager who can see ghosts (but we weren't supposed to think she was insensitive?) going on some wacky adventures with her highschool "enemy". Who had just become a ghost.

But themes of death and grief? Nahh. The theme was more: 'I don't care that you just DIED. If my mom finds out about this, she's going to KILL me' 🥴

It was giving Nickelodeon teen show circa early 2000s (particularly the canned laugh track).
And then I just disliked everything else about it:
• The world building was thin AF. Normally, I critique a fantasy setting by calling it "liminal" —but this book literally called its fantasy world the "liminal realm." And I hated it with every fibre of my being.
• Holy villainous monologues, Batman. There was an episodic structure to this plot that had our MCs battling bad guys every few chapters. But not before each and every bad guy pontificated about their evil plans for a few paragraphs.
• I don't think I've ever read a book with this many too-convenient and nonsensical "twists"?
• That romance plot was a jump scare.

And this book couldn't decide if ending a ghost's existence was a good thing (an almost gratuitous number of ghosts were unalived in here) or a bad thing (the whole point was to help our ghost high school "enemy" guy)? The cognitive dissonance of all the characters was getting to me.

Oh well, can't win them all. This cover is really pretty tho.

The Fiercest Pirate in Surrey by Anne Knight

emotional lighthearted

4.0

Sometimes I just need a little 100 page friends-to-lovers historical romance novella.

This was adorable. Our landlocked lady-pirate kidnapped our Starchy McStarchison and we all caught some feelings (guided along by some only one bed).

It was all really touching-if a story can make my heart pitter-patter about hand holding and longing glances, then I'm sold.

Wed By Proxy by Alice Coldbreath

adventurous emotional medium-paced

4.0

The premise of this book was deliciously moronic.
Whatever the opposite of secret identity trope is, this was that 😆

The premise: These two dumb-dumbs were wed by proxy, had never seen each other. She travelled to him, he thought it must be some elaborate plot when she said "I'm your wife," they fell in love but he was
panicking because he still thought she wasn't his wife? But she was his wife? It was a whole thing.

I love these fictional Medieval settings. Bonkers plots and all the brocade a girl could ask for, without any of that pesky 'my brain getting picky about real Medieval history. Bonus points for witches, cloistered maidens, knights, and peace treaties between kingdoms.

Our heroine's innocence did make me cringe somewhat. And there was a side plot that meandered a bit. But still, a really fun book that got me out of a big reading slump.

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

reflective

5.0

Is this nonfiction? If so, it’s a very genre-bending version of it. It read like a memoire, a political treatise on feminism and class consciousness, as well as a stream of consciousness story with a fictional narrator and a plot.

But, I wasn’t reading this for its feminism, which was radical for its time but is way too cis, het, white, and privileged to rock any boats these days.

I thought I would just enjoy this for the stream of consciousness (teenage, obsessed with Mrs. Dalloway, me saved this book for a rainy day), but what really drew me in was its interwar period setting. 

If feminism has evolved to the point that Woolf’s ideas about women are old hat, then our anti-war philosophy (what would we even call it?) has evolved so little that her ideas about the First World War still felt really fresh. And weirdly applicable to our current situation, I thought.

Take her raw thoughts on why she struggled to enjoy poetry and music at the time:

✨ “Shall we lay the blame on the war? When the guns fired in August 1914, did the faces of men and women show so plain in each other’s eyes that romance was killed? Certainly it was a shock (to women in particular with their illusions about education, and so on) to see the faces of our rulers in the light of the shell-fire. So ugly they looked—German, English, French—so stupid. But lay the blame where one will, on whom one will, the illusion which inspired Tennyson and Christina Rossetti to sing so passionately about the coming of their loves is far rarer now than then. One has only to read, to look, to listen, to remember. But why say ‘blame’? Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in its place?”

And quotes like this have really stuck with me.

Muscles & Monsters by Ashley Bennett

2.0

That two stars feels harsh because, really, this little book was fiiine. The MCs were cute, I was rooting for them.

But what really took me out of it was the whiplash it was giving me. We’d go directly from a scene that was soo cutesy, awkward, flirting, blushing, emojis—to a scene that was full-on dirty talk schmexy times, then back again. With absolutely nothing to mediate the two extremes. 

The Hegelian in me was like, dude where’s my concrete universal? Where’s the actualization of a rational self-consciousness in another self-consciousness? That mediation *is* the love story, which… wasn’t present in the book? It was strange.

The two extremes were fun on their own but flip flopping between them was too weird for me.

Through a Dark Mist by Marsha Canham

adventurous

1.0

Sooo. I didn’t have a good time with this one. My issues fell into a few categories…. Let’s get into it 😅

The romance plot:

▪️ There wasn’t much of one? These MCs hardly spent time in the same location, let alone in the same scene, let alone talking to each other, let alone falling in love on-page. I could’ve given it 1⭐️ for this alone.

This was NOT a Robin Hood retelling:

▪️ If ‘taking from the rich and giving to the (other) rich’ counts as a Robin Hood retelling then I quit.

There were some questionable writing techniques:

▪️ Holy head-hopping, Batman. We switched POVs every few paragraphs, with bizarre results. 

▪️ It leaned into the ‘ugly/deformed = evil’ trope. It was so ubiquitous that a, “Ooo, I bet you didn’t think this physically perfect person was going to be bad,” moment was supposed to… mean something? Yuck.

▪️ The girl-hate in here was getting to me.

▪️ I was intrigued by how low-key evil all the characters were at first, wondering how they’d do as MCs. With some, it was a ‘they’re secretly good’ thing; a classic. But with others, it just involved character breaking reversals. And with our heroine, it involved changing her from someone who didn’t care that her intended husband was philanderer (because she was hungry for that Grade A: D) to this innocent miss who was ashamed she felt any desire at all. Annd yeah, character breaking but also I think we were supposed to be disgusted with her at first? But I loved the first version of her character?

Then there was a ‘not this book’s fault—maybe Prisoner of My Desire has given me unrealistic expectations for how a 1991 book with SA as the main theme is going to pull it off’ … thing 😅, because:

▪️ I’m the idiot for thinking a ‘91 pub date book was going to do an okay job of SA themes, right? Well, it didn’t. It was also vague and contradictory about it, which made me reread huge chunks of the book multiple times (which didn’t contribute to my overall enjoyment, let’s just say that).

▪️ Didn’t appreciate the casual homophobia. But again, what was I expecting? 😅

This book is much-beloved. And it nailed the campy medieval old school histrom thing, so I’d recommend it for that.

To Ravish A Rogue by C.M. Nascosta

adventurous lighthearted fast-paced

4.0

This is my favourite kind of CM Nascosta. 

How can I explain? It’s like… so bonkers, so full-on, so wtf—without crossing a line into ‘oh no that went too far’ (for me)—that it bypasses hot and goes right into hilarious. You know what I mean?

Plus—monster romance mixed with historical romance on a pirate ship?? With some ‘she’s dressed as a boy’ thrown in? Delicious.

This was in the same universe as How to Marry a Marble Marquis (there’s a few shared side characters between the two books) but I enjoyed the historical setting of this one way more. The buccaneer thing was fun, the sea monster fantasy creatures fit right in, and our heroine was such a badass. Like, genuinely scary 😆

I just wish it had been longer!

A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid

adventurous emotional mysterious tense

5.0

I loved this book! It was everything I want:

✨ dark academia

✨ faeries

✨ atmospheric setting + lyrical writing

✨ perfectly imperfect MCs

✨ feeling unsettled 

✨ a cute rivals to lovers forced proximity romance 

✨ meta references—if my dark academia romance book doesn’t have excerpts from made up literature textbooks debating ‘what is a romance book?’ then I don’t want it

The vibe of this book feels hard to explain. I think it was:

-a more successfully unsettling and lyrical story than The Last Tale of the Flower Bride (which I hated)

-a more atmospheric mixture of academia and faerie lore than Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries (which I DNFed but probably should try again)

-plus The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath?? That’s honestly the je ne sais quoi magic of this book, I think.

It was published by Harper Teen but it was definitely on the mature side of YA Fantasy, in terms of themes and tone. So keep this in mind if you want to pick it up—cozy YA Fantasy, this was not.

I also highly recommend the audiobook.

Godkiller by Hannah Kaner

adventurous medium-paced

2.0

This has the dubious honour of being one of the only fantasy books to introduce a romance plot and have me say “Ew, no. Put it back.”

This book was so thoroughgoingly ‘just okay’ (on what I look for in a fantasy) that I ended up having a bad time?
▪️ it wasn’t particularly atmospheric (the cover had me thinking it could’ve had Emily Lloyd-Jones vibes?)
▪️ it was plot heavy without being anything more than a simple ‘walking from point A to point B’ quest 
▪️ the action didn’t feel high-stakes (I admit, I wanted our godkiller merc Kissen to feel more like Gideon the Ninth)
▪️ the lore was this uncanny valley between Greek/Roman mythology and completely invented fantasy (a goddess of the hearth named Hestra instead of Hestia or god of the sea named Osidisen instead of Poseidon, for example), which is so meh to me for some reason?
▪️ it fell into that classic trap of wanting the MCs to have lead armies in a big battle that changed the world… but also wanting them to be young. And I was rolling my eyes at their Aragorn-wannabe conversations around the campfire, instead of thinking they were actually cool.
▪️ there wasn’t enough emotion in here—by a long shot. The found family storyline between Kissen, Elo, and Inara didn’t have a ton of heart to me; the romance plot felt so shoehorned in; and was that supposed to be spice?

Honestly—that spice scene was my feelings about the whole book in microcosm. Basically: “why did you even go there if you were going to do it so half-heartedly?” It was neither spicy nor fade to black-y and that neither one/nor the other feeling was how I felt about everything 🤷🏻‍♀️

But I’ll give it a star for Skedi, Inara’s pet god. I appreciated how small-scale kinda evil he was.

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam

informative reflective

5.0

We're so effed.

This book was about what Putnam calls social capital (which sounds like some sociology blah blah), but basically it’s:
✨ that list of people you’d call to help you move; the club/team you’re on; your friend who knows someone who knows someone who’s hiring or renting that apartment next month…. you get it.

And Putnam demonstrated two things:
⭐️ next to maybe air, social capital is THE MOST IMPORTANT thing ever
⭐️ social capital has declined in every generation since the Greatest Generation (people born between 1901-24)… RIP Gen Z

This book was so data-heavy and all-encompassing that it was, quite frankly, kinda overwhelming. Here’s just a taste: social capital is important for…
✨ health (joining a club has the same impact on life expectancy as quitting smoking)
✨ social programs (the number one factor in a child’s academic success is their amount of social capital. Not race, income, school district, etc)
✨ politics (social capital beats wealth when it comes to political power, which explains why the last bastion of social capital, the church, was the foundation of the Civil Rights movement and nowadays makes rightwing moral issues disproportionately powerful)

I read this book right after Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis and there was weirdly a ton of overlap? This book just had more, you know, graphs and shit.

Basically, decline in social capital is VERY VERY BAD. It lowers your happiness, makes it easier for big business to screw us over, increases intolerance, decreases social trust, and turns democracies into autocracies.

Which, considering this book was published in (august!) 2001 is…. yeahhh