simonlorden's reviews
1280 reviews

A really cute story about two schoolkids who become friends through a third person sending them letters. It starts with a pretty dark scenario, where a girl stands up for another girl being bullied, and then gets excluded from the class. I love the cat and the school witch.

I liked the concept at the beginning, but I guess I expected something more exciting, or juicier secrets. There's a love triangle, then two men try to frame each other for the same crime.

 

Volt benne egy érdekes csavar, de a végén nem teljesen értettem a logikát. 

Cute, but kinda too short to make you care about the characters. I liked that Mycena made natural prosthetics for other people. Mycena and her chevalier also had a kind of Gideon-Harrow dynamic with all the colorful insults.

 

Egy rövid, creepy novella. Nincs sok mondanivalóm róla, olyan közepes volt. 

I received an ARC from the author through NetGalley, and this is my voluntary and honest review.

I was immediately drawn in by that beautiful cover. The soft colors, the visibly nonbinary character, the cat?? It's beautiful, and the title itself is very soft too. This is overall a feel-good queer romantic story with an (almost) entirely queer cast, so I think that cover suits it very much.

You might find the book a bit frustrating to read if you're older than 16, though. Sophia is SUCH a teenager, sometimes in an awkward way. Most of her personality is being trans and being a girl, which happens when you've just recently come out and still figuring out your identity. She says dumb things, she curses for no reason, she thinks sexist gender roles are okay as long as she's the girl in the equation, etc.

Moreover, the random emojis in the text and the little explanations about slurs and pronouns quite literally brought me out of the story. A lot of this book makes more sense if you're reading it as a journal Sophia is writing, but that doesn't quite fit either, because the present-time narration of daily events doesn't match the journal style. So, it's definitely unconventional.

The half dozen author notes at both the beginning and the end felt a bit excessive, too. Overall, this felt as much like an education booklet/Trans 101 than a romantic story.

I have many feelings!! This was a long journey, and took me like a month to read this one book, mostly because my brain kept rejecting the magic wordbuilding somehow and I still don't fully understand everything. But the characters were A+. They've come so far. El and Orion are two weird cursed kids who find each other and also others and they are great.

Also, congratulations Galadriel Higgins on the bisexuality.

This was a very anticipated read and it had the potential to be 5 stars. I loved the folktales, the different creatures, the magic spring, the atmosphere. I liked Sylvia and Lorelei, as long as they were on their own together. But I was not prepared for the amount of antisemitism Lorelei faces in this book, and the level of antisemitism that exists in this world.

I say antisemitism because even though the Yeva are not called Jewish, they obviously are. They have rabbis, they have the same customs, etc. They also live in a walled-off district that they can't leave whenever they want, and they have basically no human rights or protection. Also, among the several kingdoms that make up the book's united nation, there is one that is basically full on Nazis. (I'm not exaggerating - the heir to this nation who travels with the other main characters literally published a paper on "inferior races" and such.) So like, major trigger warning.

The religion itself isn't really developed in-world and feels copied over from real life. Lorelei and the non-Yeva both reference a "God". Is this the same God? Does it have a name? What are its traits? Or am I just supposed to assume it's the same as the Christian or Jewish God (which one)? Since this is apparently a fantasy world with fantasy territories, this felt kind of out of place.

In short, there were some good parts, hence the four stars, but there were also a lot of holes in the worldbuilding that the sexy queer enemies-to-lovers romance couldn't hide for me.

edit: Apparently the author is Jewish, so take my feelings with a grain of salt, since I am not. This review isn't a condemnation of the book, but I think it does deserve a content warning for Lorelei and her people being treated as subhuman, and I maintain that the religion wasn't really fleshed out in-universe.

It's really fun to see the usual characters in Japanese attire and environment. Geralt's personality is spot-on, and yet still different. And I was so happy when I found out what he's looking for.

 The pop-up images are really cool. The "birdlike" ones on the last pages are my favorite.