mochazur's reviews
130 reviews

Finale by Becca Fitzpatrick

2.25

excruciating but i liked the twist.

marcie and scott dying was so stupid i’m sorry. why even redeem her for like 20 pgs if she just flips right back and why establish scott and vee just to kill him. stupidddddd

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra

3.75

the beginning was really slow to me but i loved the way everything connected in the end. beautifully tragic.

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

4.75

beautiful and difficult. a little hard to parse in places but that takes 0 away from the experience

Close by Erika Raskin

4.75

almost perfect. idk how to feel about the randomness of the kidnapping or how the dad and his gf are like.. just accepted but it wasn’t bad at all

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

0.0

i’m surprised by how much i didn’t like this at all.

• camille: i feel literally nothing for her. she’s just so bland and unremarkable. the banter she has with dick is probably the most interesting thing about her personality. i can see how her past traumas made her into who she is today but somehow it all fell flat to me. 
• the ending especially is so boring. the plot twist is revealed and done with in like 5 pages and i’m just kind of like: uh duh?? 
• amma: to me, 13 is a little grown for how childish she acts. i understand she’s emotionally underdeveloped, but it would’ve been a more interesting read if it was done more artfully (??). take the scene with john when she’s greasing herself up in front of him and then straight up flashes him. that was insane and i couldn’t even take it seriously because it was just absurd. it was just too all over the place for me and she came across as a caricature of someone with deep seated mental health issues vs a genuine complicated young girl.
• pacing: SO SLOW. all that build up in the beginning for a whole load of nothing. the writing itself wasn’t unbearable.
• amount of characters: it’s a small town and i still felt like i had to keep track of a bajillion people that literally don’t even matter in the end

The Appeal by Janice Hallett

2.5

it’s not that it was bad, just unsatisfying for how long it took to get to the end. and so many strands that weren’t tied neatly (though i get that’s realistic in crimes irl)

The Distance Between Us by Reyna Grande

4.5

intense and beautiful

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

5.0

heartbreaking

Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder

4.5

it’s hard to articulate why i didn’t love the ending but i’ll try. it felt a little too clean (?) for me because it was like “ok yay jen gets out of debt we were introduced to like 20 pages ago and nightbitch gets her art show also” but i can see why that happy resolution would work for some. if the performance were depicted as more metaphorical i feel like i’d like it more, but as is the ending was meh. loved everything around it tho!

Silence by Becca Fitzpatrick

1.0

as always, very frustrating. nora’s lack of faith in patch gets old fast.
antagonists are laughably cheesy, i can barely take them seriously

the ending was the only interesting part