lindentea's reviews
559 reviews

Lunar Boy by Cin Wibowo, Jes Wibowo

fast-paced

3.5

Very cute but a lot going on, and I don't think of it got the right amount of focus... like maybe with about 100 pages more there'd be a bit more in-depth exploration. But also. Book for 12 year olds. And 12 year old me would have really appreciated this!

Flux by Jinwoo Chong
Did not finish book. Stopped at 46%.

Got bored and also lost abt what was going on…. 

Hana Khan Carries On by Uzma Jalaluddin

emotional lighthearted medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

Cute, if a bit predictable but that's not a crime in the romance genre. The You've Got Mail thing is a little less believable when one of the characters is actively podcasting about her life (is Aydin stupid? Because if I listened to a podcaster for years and met someone who sounded exactly like them, matched up with the demographic info i knew about them, and worked in radio, I think i would figure out pretty quick), but WHO CARES they were cute !!! Hana is the real star here tho (obviously, the book is named after her), she felt like a friend probably because we're so close in age and both in kind of transitional limbo periods of our life, and even though I was worried for her I was so happy things turned out well for her :D

One thing I really really like about the way Jalaluddin writes romance is that she doesn't rely on spice to develop her romantic relationships... don't get me wrong I love a good sex scene and like the sex kissing horniness etc are obvi a part of romance but I've recently been feeling like a lot of romance writers are using those things as crutches or stand-ins for relationship development. Like me personally I don't think it's compelling when the two main characters meet and whoever's pov we're in immediately wants the other person like they're a man dying of thirst running into a glass of water, and then has to fight the attraction for arbitrary reasons like "oh but I don't like him"... whereas imo the enemies to lovers dynamic Hana and Aydin had going on was a lot stronger because they DID genuinely dislike each other at one point, and then they became FRIENDS, and THEN it got romantic, but there were complications when they REACHED there.

Also, if I had a nickel for every book I read back-to-back with a

reveal that the main male character, a diasporic Muslim whose last name starts with Sha-, thought his mom was dead but she died at an age where he was too young to remember and truly mourn her, BUT his mom was alive this whole time, also she had post-partum when he was born

... i'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice, and in a row, right?

Overall had a good time with this :D

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

dark emotional reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I really really really REALLY loved this… until i didn’t, but i can overlook the stuff that didn’t work for me. Most of all i love — it makes me cry i love it so much — that we now get books from queer muslims about queer muslims and that my queer muslim self can cry over them because oh my god, someone HAS been thinking about all these things too, someone else GETS IT, this thing i always thought was incongruous and impossible to share. i adored cyrus as a character, because even though our lives don’t actually overlap much at all, reading about and from him felt kind of like getting out of the shower and looking in the mirror and seeing yourself (myself) without all the other stuff we put on around people (not just clothes i mean but how when we know we’re being perceived we act different) and then seeing the mirror-self get kinda freaked out by that. i felt that from page one and it was wonderful. which is why i think i didn’t really enjoy the big revelation all that much! I think

Orkideh being Cyrus’ mom (!!!)

actually felt a little bit cheap, because it’s obviously something that shakes Cyrus to the CORE (of course!) but then what we get feels like the author explaining how that’s possible, and we sit with Cyrus for a moment after, and the book ends. Like, here’s this guy who had one of the core pillars of his life just ripped out from under him, and it doesn’t feel like we explored it at all!!

Orkideh gets to talk about the feeling of dying twice, but I don’t think I really saw Cyrus’ thoughts about mourning twice, mourning over and over again, and only finding out what he really lost until she died for realsies. THAT I think would have been a beautiful turning point to further explore ?

But then again, a book where your biggest complaint is “i wish it didn’t end where it did but go on and on and on and on” is a special and beautiful thing. so even if the ending fell a bit flat i can safely say i adored this book. kaveh akbar i will be keeping up

The Truth According to Ember by Danica Nava

lighthearted tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I think this was just ok for me sadly! I see a lot of reviews saying they were stressed out about Ember's lies snowballing, but funnily enough that was one of the more interesting parts of the book for me, while the romance was, tbh, boring. It felt very insta-lovey, and while Ember was a really strong character, I feel like Danuwoa didn't really have anything going for me to latch onto. Like, he was TOO perfect? Which made him feel fake, not he's-trying-too-hard in-text fake but this-guy-is-not-real out-of-text fake? Like I personally prefer a romance where both parties are the main characters (even if they're not both povs!!) as opposed to following one and the other is just The Love Interest. When

she got him back after the third-act breakup, it didn't feel like "Yay Ember & Danuwoa are back together" but rather "Yay Ember got the guy and is happy"

. 

Also -- and this is not the book's fault tbh -- I just couldn't handle how capital-H Heterosexual everything felt.... yes including the queer rep... tho shout-out to my girl Natalie!

Anyway I'm still looking forward to whatever Nava writes next! 

Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky

informative slow-paced

1.5

I don't ever want to see a single salt crystal ever again!!!!!!

Ok real talk: if you think the history of salt would be boring.... you'd be wrong in that there IS something interesting deep down, but right in that this was the blandest way to tell it. And also you're telling me the medieval islamic world wasn't doing shit with salt? what about the ottoman empire? india before the british raj?? africa?? but no........ this "world history" only cares about white people, and also mentions chinese people but in kind of a weird grudging way where it seems to wish it wasn't. the book just FEELS 2002 and nowhere is it more obvious than in the two chapters about gandhi and the role of salt in the indian anticolonial movement to... a chapter about israel & the dead sea that uncritically presents herzl's "turning the desert green" as like. a thing that is True and Good........ hmm all around. hmmmmmm. the guy who did the audiobook did his best to make it interesting tho, and there were some very fun facts throughout... but that does NOT mean there needed to be a long-ass boring book around them!! pop history you will answer for your crimes eventually!!

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

challenging emotional reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I have no intelligent thoughts about this tbh…… just huge respect for what it was doing as a book and the emotional freight train that belatedly hit me after i finished it. I think I’d need to reread (ON PAPER — reading this on kindle was STUPID!!!!) to tease out actual thoughts but some passages made me feel So Much and it was only amplified by the fact that this book is ALMOST 100 YEARS OLD…. Scary stuff.

As for my snarky stupid idiot review I would write if this was a 3.5 star movie on letterboxd: Rip Mrs. Dalloway… born far too early to have huge superspreader ragers in the summer of 2020 and be bisexual

The Midnight Feast by Lucy Foley

dark mysterious tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No

2.5

was super invested the whole time and it just flew by but like not gonna lie when we got to the point where every chapter was 1 page and they all had a twist i did start rolling my eyes. kind of wish we didn’t have the day-after timeline but i guess we couldn’t have

Jake, who TWIIIIIST didn’t die!

be there. enjoyed the misdirects but did NOT enjoy how on the nose and just basic some of the writing was in the individual povs. like idk man maybe we could have had good prose as well as twists and turns.

ALSO!

while the whole thing with the birds was super underwhelming — because why wouldn’t you have one of them orchestrate it, like maybe eddie’s mum, instead of or WITH jake ? — there was soo much potential. im annoyed that we didn’t get vigilante justice middle aged ladies except as a final twist and a teehee line at the end

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

adventurous dark fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Things I looved:
- writing style! This is a DEBUT?? i literally would not have guessed based on the gorgeous gorgeous writing. i will say there was the occasional metaphor that made me go “??” because it was very Evocative of a Vibe but not based on a frame of reference i had, but this is not a bad thing imo
- the first 30% - i was HOOKED the whole time Zhu was like surviving and being in the monastery, the whole micro-snapshots of her growing up
- OUYANG!!!! a foil of all time actually. and dude do i ever love a foil. but even beyond that he was such a delight to follow to the point where sometimes esp during the middle section id get more hype for an ouyang chapter than a zhu chapter #sorrynotsorry. and like imagine being such a slay foil that you then get your OWN foil
- and speaking of: queer historical fantasy that is both aware of historical circumstance and how someone within a different framework than us might think about their queer identity, AND insightful about that exploration from a modern queer identity pov too. you get what im saying? 

things that surprised me, like i didn’t hate them or particularly love them but i think they’re worthy of comment:
-

FISTING????

- TRULY a morally gray protagonist on like the darker side. like at the end of the book zhu

killed a child

to get what she wanted. i support nonbinary wrongs but whoa?
- esen, ouyang, and baoxiang ………….. lowkey welcome back robb stark theon greyjoy and jon snow

things i was not super a fan of:
- pacing was all sorts of fucked up! this is a lot of story to fit into 400 pages imo and you can very much see where the page count could have been much higher: in the military offensives and a lot of the politicking. the thing is that there’s a way to write about huge battles without actually writing a huge battle scene that also isn’t “the siege lasted two weeks, many lives were lost”, which is to write abt the battle from the pov of a character who’s not there…… which in this case is ma!! like not to be too asoiaf-pilled but ma could have easily played catelyn in that zhu would be warring, but like off-page, and ma is left to politic and react and such? Hope that also makes sense. writing this at 2am
- the pacing is such a big thing that im making it two bullet points. huge status-quo changing tide-turning events would happen every single chapter and they’d sometimes be explained with one sentence. I don’t even WANT them described i just wanted to take more time especially because i lost track of everyone’s character motivations around the middle to such a degree that i was like ok damn… i guess we’re doing this

Ten Thousand Stitches by Olivia Atwater

hopeful lighthearted fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

ANOTHER banger by olivia atwater!! dude im just so happy to have discovered her books on a whim …. At first i was worried this wouldn’t live up to half a soul esp with a seemingly unconnected cast but im so so glad i was wrong :] only complaint? 245 pages is SHORT!! i would have loved to stick around for another 100-150 but i also appreciate an author who’s like “well im done with the tale, im not gonna stretch it out”. anyway brb recommending this to all my friends 

abt the hero… im putting a spoiler warning bc going in completely blind save for the blurb was an awesome AWESOME experience

dare i say juniper jubilee might lowkey be a historical romance hero of all time for me? i texted allie 30% of the way in like “Benedict is boring i hope she gets with the faerie instead” AND SHE DID!! let me tell you i was JUMPING FOR JOY — i was juniper jubilated if you will— when i realized im not hallucinating and that really is the direction we’re going. she literally let him hit because he’s whimsical. i love that guy and his joie de vivre and i think he’s PERFECT for effie and im glad she got a happy ending without having to compromise her class identity.