Reviews and Comments

I don't care if Monday's blue Tuesday's gray and Wednesday too Thursday I don't care about you It's Friday, I'm in love

A light read, full of classic rom-com tropes and matchmaking schemes. Not deep, but definitely entertaining. Also, it's bi of course.

This book actually consists of many little stories, and all of them are so trans, i feel seen. One of the stories is in the foreground, stretched over the entire book, while the others are told as anecdotes from the characters' past. I liked many things in the book. But it is a slow read, nothing to consume in one weekend.

Darcy really is just my kind of disaster bisexual, and she has a transfem sister who is just precious <3 When reading the promo summaries, I immediately assumed she'd get the girl in the end, but this ending is just as glorious. All thumbs up!

Every time I had plausible ideas about who the murderer might be, i had to stop myself because there were still so many pages left. There was no lack of tension.

One point deduction because a girl went back to the guy who literally hunted her, and who is suddenly portrayed as a hero and saviour. The straights really aren't okay.

This book is full of puns, full of delicious baking goods, and full of wonderful people with character development during the story. And there isn't a single person-walks-into-wrong-situation-and-jumps-into-conclusions plot antipattern, the queen of YA WLW romance doesn't need that.

What I liked: All the Armenian culture references, and the proverbs at the beginning of each chapter! That's so cool!

What I found boring: The tension curve is missing. The romance story is pretty straightforward, step by step without fallbacks, and at about 50% they're a couple and I asked myself "the story is already over, why are there so many more pages, oh no, please don't do a person-jumps-into-wrong-situation-and-jumps-to-conclusions" and well, what followed was a person-jumps-into-wrong-situation-and-jumps-to-conclusions.

... and it's the best thing about the book. There's not really a classic tension arc. The book consists of three smaller stories, in different years, slightly interwoven. But the cool thing is not really the three major stories. It's how every single side character has some kind of backstory, smaller or larger, and Colson Whitehead tells you about all of them, sometimes leading to several nested layers of time in the narration. Those little ones are the stories that really make this book a great read.

Very entertaining romcom story where two absolutely gorgeous women get to dump their constantly lying douchebag ex on public television, while head-over-heals falling for each other. The book kept me up all night and didn't let me sleep. Another plus: The author invented a conlang for this (Chalonian). Minus: It's not used very much, and probably it's not designed out that well.

Queer black girl with two moms can do plant magic and poisons, falls in love with a beautiful 300-years old immortal while navigating her own insecurities about friendship and about her ancestors, while solving the riddle of her millenia-old family history tied deeply with Greek mythology and poison botanics? Yeah how to not love this.

One minus point for the scene where Alec can suddenly translate ancient greek from 400 BC on-the-fly but needs an "ancient phoneme table" for it. Honestly, if you have the skill to pull this off, you don't need a phoneme table. And if you need a phoneme table, you definitely don't have the skill to translate texts on-the-fly. (I'm just being pedantic here, it's a great read).

Very bisexual. Very amusing. Very cliché. I feel seen in my disastrosity.

What's disturbing though, is all the coercive mononormativity in the book. Not only is dating them all not seen as an option, but the protagonist is punished for having had feelings for three people in the first place, and agrees with it, talks herself into believing she didn't actually have the feelings, when it's clear she did. This is disappointing, specifically because other aspects of amatonormativity are deconstructed very well.

The book tells the life stories of a hand full of people in Eastern Africa (mostly what is now Tansania), stretched over more than 100 years. Their lives intertwine, it's written from different perspectives, and they're affected by world events in different ways. There's not really much tension in the story - but it's not boring either, it's a nice read. Though I found it a bit hard to imagine how old all the people were at any given time, because the book stretches over many decades. People are born, they age, have a life and eventually they die.