Reviews tagging 'Toxic friendship'

Celestial Monsters by Aiden Thomas

3 reviews

kays_reading_journal's review against another edition

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4.5

Content Warnings: There’s a full list at the bottom but I wanted to elaborate on something: there is a deaf character whose hands are restrained therefore he looses the ability to communicate.

Aiden Thomas is the author that got me back into reading after college and is the author that just got me out of a slump. 

He pulls the perfect amount of emotion out of a reader while balancing it with humor. 

I won’t lie tho I don’t love all the characters. I adore Teo and Aurelio so much, but Niya just gets on my nerves. 

I’m all for redemption, but I wasn’t a fan of how it ended up being handled here. Kind of tied into this, I feel like the horridness of how the characters were treated was glazed over.
I mostly mean I cannot believe that the semidioses forgave Xio so quickly, when they barely apologized (if it happened, I don’t remember it). More specifically, Dezi is treated absolutely horrendous. Taking away his ability to communicate for himself and with others. Especially when his power revolves around touch, it was unnecessarily cruel.


I watched a three hour recap of the first book on YouTube before picking up the sequal, and I think if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have enjoyed this so much.

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nikki_flowers's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional funny hopeful inspiring 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? Yes

5.0

Look, I’m a simple lad, give me childhood friends to enemies to lovers (and a queer/trans normative world!!!!!!) and I’ll eat it up EVERY time
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batbaby's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional funny sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

First of all I want to just add a note about the previous title “The sunbearer trials” my main gripe with the previous novel was a non binary character Ocelo who used they/them for the entirety of the book was he/himed on two pages. And on the last page the first diose Sol was he’d, one of the characters made a point to say how it was cool Sol was non-binary. 
In this book Ocelo only uses they/them pronouns which leads me to think it was a mistake missed by the editor. And Sol was he/himed 3 times at the end of this book so maybe make a point to clarify they use both he/they? Overall I did enjoy Celestial monsters and I think more than the previous book. This book has more of the high-risk high-stakes atmosphere that I missed in the sunbearer trials. I enjoyed the fight scenes/battles a lot more. I did find a few times that as a reader I felt a few too many steps ahead of the characters with the solution to the fight and it was almost annoying waiting for them the catch up. I would’ve liked to get to know Yucca and Paz a bit more but I understand the time restraints with that.  I really loved the deaf/disabled representation of Dezi but he wasn’t in the forefront of this book. The romance between the mc and romantic interest was a bit meh unfortunately, they were on an adventure so it didn’t need to be a priority but it felt like they’d lost all chemistry/pining from the last book. Spoiler
would’ve liked to see more anguish/remorse from Xio because the flip-flopping wasn’t super in character from what we know of them.
there were a couple of over used phrases too like the previous book but honestly a second editor would easily fix this issue. 
#ad This book was gifted to me as an arc but my opinions are entirely my own.
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