ellaellaellaetc's reviews
480 reviews

Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower by Tamsyn Muir

4.5

cute! this is about floralinda who has been taken by a witch in a 40 storey tower that has a new creature you have to defeat on each level. however, the witch puts her hardest beast to defeat on the first floor so all the princes that go to save her just get killed by a dragon before they can get anywhere and slowly, people stop coming to save her. a very antagonistic garden fairy flies through her window and (against the fairies will) together, they try to free floralinda by going down each flight and fighting the beasts themselves! the audiobook for this was like 3 hours and it was such a delight! it was a really fun spin on fairytales and I loved floralinda and the fairy's dynamic! the book is also told by a narrator whose tone I really loved; I highly recommend this as a palette cleanser book if you're looking for something short and fun :) 4.5 stars

Not in Love by Ali Hazelwood

4.75

omg🤭🤭 um🤭🤭 sexy!!!!! this is um🤭🤭🙈 oh my🤭🤭🤭 I liked this🤭🤭 this about two strangers who meet on an app to fuck but things end up getting derailed on their "date" and they end up just hanging out but there is a very deep connection and she gives him her number (something she never does!! she never sees people more than once!). the next day main girl rocks up to work and her boss (who is also her really good friend) is like omg this is so annoying this firm is trying to take us over, ew here they come now and then she turns around AND IT'S FHE GUY SHE ALMOST FUCKED LAST NIGHT!!!😱😱😱 they then embark on this journey where they're sleeping together but it's secret and it's really emotional but also not and they're in love but also not and it's just all very intense. these two characters both have quite dark back stories and this is very different to your usual romcom story. however, I would also set this book apart from pure erotica though because the sex is more of a vehicle of the story/their relationship vs being the reason for the story/their relationship. does this make sense????? anyway, this was actually really stunning and the character arcs are wonderful and these people just understand each other so much in a way that doesn't make sense but also does. anyway, not sure if this makes sense but I really loved this! I would highly recommend this for people who love their romance books are a bit more intense and love some good smut cause let me tell you this had me giggling and putting the book down for a sec to say "oh my🤭🤭" before continuing. 4.75 stars

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume

3.75

omg 😭😭😭😭😭😭 another rare instance where I liked the movie more but still really really good! this is about tween margaret who moves from nyc to the new jersey suburbs and it's about her making friends, growing up and understanding the world around her🥺🥺 her mum is christian and her dad is jewish and they didn't raise her with a religion and the story is centered around her choosing religion as the topic for her semester long project. I really loved this. this book really just shows that all girls went through the same things😭😭 this really took me back and I felt all of the things I experienced 10 years ago. I think this is the perfect book for kids but also for adults who want to revisit that time of their life. while I did enjoy this though, I watched the movie beforehand and tbh I was a bit more moved by it than the book. would still recommend both though! 3.75 stars

Graveyard Shift by M.L. Rio

2.25

nobody moved..... this is one of those books where you finish it and you just go "okay cool now I'm gonna move on with my life" and then you never think about it again. this is about 5 insomniacs who always meet up at the cemetery at night to smoke and they see a fresh grave and then they all go their separate ways to work out what's happening. I was very disappointed by this as if we were villains, the authors debut book, lowkey ruined my life (in a good way) and I was so so ready to love this! but unfortunately I found my self just tuning everything out (I was listening to the audiobook) and tbh I have barely thought about this since finishing it like a month ago! not offensively terrible but just plain boring and unremarkable which is maybe worse. idk. 2.25 stars.

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

4.75

oh😳😳😳 yes it's good😳😳 this is a very well known short story about a woman who is suffering from what we would now call post-partum depression. her doctor (who is also her husband!!) forces her to stay in her room with no entertainment which was the people irl though was the cure for depressed women back in the day. the story is told in her secret diary entries as she slowly loses her mind and becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper. this is a really effective and eerie story! this actually happened to the author (locking her in her room as a depression "cure", not the wallpaper aspects, or not that I'm aware of) and she wrote this to spread awareness of the actual insane craziness of this! this is perfect if you're looking to get unsettled in short amount of time but also something that will really make you think! I'm very glad we are no longer doing this to women😅😅 sbout out to charlotte perkins gilman!!! 4.75 stars

A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa

3.0

well yes! this is about a portuguese girlie who follows her sister to angola after the sister marries a guy and then right after the country is in extreme unrest as it becomes a republic. the sister and hubby leave and someone comes into the apartment to rob/kill them and main girl freaks out and kills him and then just boards up the door and doesn't leave the apartment for DECADES. she just lives off of some plants she has on the terrace and eats birds and shit😭😭 while the book is mainly about her, it follows the stories of lots of loosely people and tbh some of these threads/connections were a bit far fetched. I get that it's a book and it's gotta come full circle but come on man. also, I found the pacing to be extremely confusing. I was never sure whether days, months or years had passed between each scene and I kept getting confused which really took away from the story. 3 stars 

The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack

4.0

this is about all the ways the universe could end!!! but it's also about humanity!!!! I found this appropriately confusing. this was some extremely high level science and especially in the earlier chapters I found myself following (shout out to 3/4 physics!!!!!) and for the most part I got the general gist of what she was saying but if I'm being honest especially in the last few chapters I was just letting her rock and I gave up on trying to properly understand. I think she made this as accessible as possible and she used lots of helpful analogies but at some point my pea brain couldn't quite keep up. I think that it's my fault though as opposed to this book not being written well. I plan on rereading this in a few years and hopefully my mind will have expanded a bit in that time xx 4 stars

North and South by Bryan Konietzko, Michael Dante DiMartino, Gene Luen Yang

4.75

when you watched avatar the last airbender did you ever think, "what if they found oil in the southern water tribe???" well! you won't have to keep wondering because this comic answers that exact question! every time I read more of these comics I am really struck by how expansive they are. while I really loved the show, it was extremely simple in it's world politics. now it's a kids show, I never really expected it to address a lot of these really specific issues but it's interesting to see them unpacked in a format for kids! this world is just so well thought out and shows that when a 100 year war stops because you take out one monarch and replace them with another one it's not all sunshine and rainbows! this is about katara and sokka returning to the southern water tribe for the first time after the war and it's turning into a mini northern water tribe! this is lowkey about gentrification and higher powered countries "civilising" native populations and stealing their resources!!!! (also about rebel forces having good intentions but having the side effects of violence!!!) now has any of these ever happened before in the world I wonder🤔🤔🤔 this is actually crazily well done seeing as it's for kids and is actually a very unfortunate reality of what would actually happen if this was real (minus the kind of happy ending.....) cause the world is actually fucked up! 4.75 stars!

Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou

3.5

oh tea. this is a satire about a chinese girlie in her like 8th year or something of doing her PhD on a made up late chinese american poet (who in his universe is like on of the most famous poet of the 20th century). she initially does not want to do her PhD on him since he is so widely studied already and she feels like she doesn't have anything to contribute but she was persuaded into doing her PhD on him by the (white) head of east asian studies who insinuated that she could get tenure by choosing him as her subject. the book kicks off when she's a few years into her PhD and she hates her life and she doesn't know what she wants her thesis to be on. 

this sounds like the start of a sad girl lit fic novel but it ends up feeling kind of like movie?? (if you're looking for a sad lit fic novel with basically this premise I read chemistry by weike wang in jan and loved it, stay tuned for that review). I saw one review comparing this to a book version of an snl skit or onion article and I would be inclined to agree. while I did enjoy the reading experience of this, idk if I would necessarily call it good? like the commentary was extremely on the nose in ways that sometimes didn't feel intentionally funny (or at least funny in the way that I found them to be funny). to be completely honest I think that this story would have been better told in the form of a movie! 

I think what I'm getting at is that I think this book took itself a bit too seriously for what it was. anyway, if you're interested in reading a satire about white men's obsession with asian cultures (and more so, white men becoming authorities of east asian cultures), white man/asian woman couples, leftist group in fighting, right wing commentators/social media this is the book for you! 

and I will just say that my favourite moment of the whole book comes from a side plot where the main character "goes undercover" in the socialist group protesting a play at the uni. she really does not understand what's going on nor does she really understand the point of the sjw group so when she's asked to make up a slogan for her sign she goes "uh... I hate white people?" and then she's just standing outside of the theatre with a "I hate white people" sign😭😭 bro why did that make me laugh so hard😭😭 anyway. pls @studios pls turn this into a really funny campy movie😁😁 3.5 stars p.s. shout out to everyone's second favourite book recommender natasha for lending me her copy! (to be clear i'm everyon's first fav book recommender)

Vicious by V.E. Schwab

3.5

this is about two fucked up friends in uni who work out that if you almost die then you get superpowers! it flips between two timelines; one in uni where the two guys are besties and roommates and the other where one of the guys has just broken out of jail and is dead set on revenge on his former best friend. tbh I loved the concepts more than I loved the execution of this one. as always, v.e. schwab has fantastic prose and can really bring you into a scene (and really scare you!). I loved all of the different superpowers and how they manifested but there were just some certain technicalities in the story where I was just like huh??? my main issue was that there were way too many coincidences in this story where people just happened to be in the right place at the right time to the point where I was just constantly rolling my eyes. also this should have been gay.

also the fact that "supers" are theorised about but not actually proven in this world is a little silly I think. I get that saving people from the brink of death is more of a new thing in the grand scheme of the world because of medical advances and what not but I don't really buy that every single one of these people immediately went into hiding because of their power and was never found out.

despite that, I thought that both eli and victor's minds were really interesting to be in and schwab built these characters so well! 3.5 stars. also I annotated this book for my bestie ellen while I was reading and had so much fun doing it! can't wait for her to read it :) p.s. if you annotate a book I HIGHLY recommend getting emoji stickers. you will not regret it.