this book was…now normally if idk what to describe the book as, i would say interesting, but really, this book was just boring and plain. what am i even supposed to say beyond that?

1 star, hated the experience, mildly disliked the book, lost most of my brain cells. was this worth it? ABSOLUTELY NOT.

it immediately ticked me off from the beginning (i didn’t think so at the time but since i need to vent i’ll just point out every little detail i disliked), with the whole “love at first sight” angle. i absolutely hate it when books do that because isn’t that just liking someone based on their looks? vivaldi saw her and heard her voice and that was all it took for him to fall in love. smh might as well fall in love with some random person on the street, what was so special about her that other women didn’t have, huh? and the fact that he pursued her so vehemently, despite not knowing what she was like in person. i would’ve liked for them to atleast interact first, and then for him to realise he’s falling in love with her instead of going to her house and singing. the thing is, when he did get to know her, she wasn’t even that interesting of a character LOL. i hate how in classics the women are always so scared all the time, they always cower and think about the protection of their lover. it’s like they don’t have their own lives besides in what they exist for men.

im going to stop thinking about their ridiculous romance for the sake of my mental health. i didn’t realise this while reading but there was one friend of vivaldi’s who showed up in the first few chapters but we never saw him again. maybe i missed something that happened to him but he just vanished and then he got replaced with paulo.

paulo, paulo, paulo. he kinda reminded me of sancho from don quixote but that feels like an insult to sancho. he literally had no life outside of his master. i hated how he was just there existing for the sake of the plot, because first it was vivaldi’s friend and then out of nowhere, paulo just steps in and revolves around vivaldi.

the writing in itself was pretty boring too. everything is so dragged out (looking at you kidnapping scene) so that even the actually decent scenes feel a bore. i did think this was fast-paced because stuff happened pretty quickly, but not quickly enough because do you know how many times i zoned out or fell asleep during this book?? 7 times, that’s how many. for something that is considered to be gothic fiction, i felt no gothness in it besides when finished and that’s when i became a goth myself. damn it i’ll kill ellena myself just for something to happen in this book.

im gonna be honest, the whole captivity, then running away, then getting taken again, then running away again, then blah blah blah was so ANNOYING, like die if you must! the whole time ellena was in danger, she just kept thinking about vivaldi, and that infuriated me, you cannot even imagine. MISS GURL, if i was held hostage or on the verge of death, i would not be thinking about the creep who followed me around and sang outside my house at 3 am. i would be screaming for my life, like hello, where the drama? the fear? the tension? ann radcliffe locked all these in the room with ellena but never let them get out.

the twists were twisty. nothing more to add on the plot twist because i could not make myself care about any of those characters or whatever happened to them. i was hoping ellena would die because then atleast it would all mount to some grief in the end, but instead they all end up with their happy ever after. where is my happy ending? what about the time that i lost, the itch of boredom that built up inside me, the hatred that slowly boiled to intensity. yk if i was vivaldi i would just stop looking for ellena and save us both the misery. they’re all so dramatic but nobody really asked them to do anything so grand, did they?

i wanted to talk about the romantic tension between vivaldi and ellena BUT DUDE THEY BARELY HAD A NORMAL CONVERSATION. how do you fall in love with each other like literally what do guys see that we don’t???

Batman: Contagion by Chuck Dixon

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challenging dark emotional sad tense medium-paced