oosij's reviews
82 reviews

A Song to Drown Rivers by Ann Liang

4.5

absolutely heartbreaking and maddening and beautiful all at once. this played out exactly like a sageuk k-drama in my head as i read this (i know it's chinese, but my korean ass brain just automatically inserted sageuk material and kept jumping back and forth between korean and chinese visuals lol), and it was so incredibly to eat it up. 

ann liang paints a rich world of a broken kingdom torn apart by war, and one of the lines (i'll paraphrase badly: they weren't killed by [one side], they were killed by the war- by two kings at play) will stick with me for a long time to come. this is my second liang read, and it's made me so excited to pick up her other books. she's so incredibly gifted in writing romance, in my opinion, and it's honestly refreshing to read a beautifully crafted non-spicy romance... though i will say romance isn't this book's main genre, so don't get into this if you're wishing for a feel-good HPE type of love story. 

docked off half a star for the ending, as i'm not really into the whole

beyond-the-grave

thing, but i will say liang wrote it so... prettily??? that a tiny part of me doesn't care at all lol. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death, Blood, Grief, War, and Injury/Injury detail

Moderate: Emotional abuse, Panic attacks/disorders, Physical abuse, Violence, and Murder

Minor: Child death

Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion

4.0

more of a 3.75, but i'm not gonna start quartering my ratings so a 4 is suffice! i can see why people love joan didion- prose is just a big chef kiss, and it has me hooked from introduction to the last page. as for the story, it's depressing as hell in a similar vein to the bell jar, but for reasons unknown to me in this moment, i just didn't like it as much as plath's. 

City of Segregation: 100 Years of Struggle for Housing in Los Angeles by Andrea Gibbons

4.5

this should be required reading in schools (and for transplants lmao)

Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin

3.5

slice-of-life style book. unsure how much i liked it, so 3.5 seemed fair on my personal scale. 

Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung

3.5

i finished this during my one hour walk at the gym, which is absolutely buckwild to me lmao. the entire book - short stories that give me a horror film version of folklore type of vibe - is just a collective "what the fuck am i reading?" moment, and i can't say i hated it. only rated it 3.5 because at least a third of the stories were rather blah personally, but overall i recommend. tw for body horror. 

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

3.5

feel-good emotional read. love how japanese books can be read in one sitting and still hold weight in its meaning. 

Happy Place by Emily Henry

2.0

not my favorite emily henry read. i'm so sorry if you loved this book, but i personally... did not. a lot of it felt very surface-level: the friendship between the three women, the location/setting, the characters in general. everyone is horrible with communication despite the main couple being together for years and the friend group supposedly being airtight since college; i absolutely despise the miscommunication/lack of communication trope in stories, so this was just not it for me lmao. 

also for a solid chunk in the beginning, i couldn't tell the characters apart because they all seemed so similar to each other... which is probably why i was so confused at the "big" conflict near the end - i get the miscommunication should have ended up bubbling over like it did, but it still felt so out of left field for it to be dramatic. maybe i read too quickly and missed the too-subtle hints? (eg, "you set the date" and sab's Look™️)

Love, Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood

3.5

god i love reading romance books so i can feel good about myself (i finish them in a couple of hours, at most lol). i had fun reading this, and the smut was actually pretty good - at least SO much better than it was in LOVE HYPOTHESIS. i read this because i heard it was dramione-coded, but it's just kinda loosely that. it's dramione if you squint, and draco doesn't have constant snark, and hermione is the stupidest smart girl to exist. like... elsie... girl. you're supposed to be smart!!!

i will say, i really do not care for ali hazelwood's... obsession? with the smol fmc and fucking ginormous mmc trope. it's a kinda disturbing concept i loved in my Youth™️, but now that i'm older (and thoroughly icked out by the ao3 manacled illustrations), i personally just can't get behind the constant "he's soooooo big, and i'm sooooo smol next to him" thing. 

A Good Girl's Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson

4.0

despite figuring out the ending the second time around meeting the character (it's a curse to be on the spectrum sometimes, i swear), i had such a fun time reading this. i tore through this murder mystery within a couple of hours! some questions were left unanswered for me, but isn't that what YA kinda is all about lol? 

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein

4.0

nonfiction always takes me longer to read, phew. a solid read that i think every american should read, as it goes into how our government at every level further perpetuated segregation and racism against black people.