whatiskatelynreading's reviews
333 reviews

Find Me Their Bones by Sara Wolf

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo

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challenging dark emotional mysterious sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This is a dark and alluring take on the familiar Gatsby story. Told from a queer and Vietnamese Jordan Baker’s perspective, we get snippets of what Daisy would have been like before the events of West Egg and what it meant to be a part of Gatsby’s glittering world. The writing in this feels like it belongs with the original, as someone who read all of Fitzgerald’s works I find this to fit so snugly into what I expected from a Gatsby retelling, and yet there’s this simmering layer of magic and unease throughout the whole book. The fantasy element to this book feels natural, organic, like it was always meant to be a part of the story. Don’t expect there to be overt world-building or explanation of any kind of magic system, there’s simply magic underlying every interaction and hiding in the corners of the story. The queer rep in this story also makes the dynamic between the original characters much more nuanced and complex and yet still feels totally natural and true to the original. I really enjoyed this book. I will definitely be seeking out Nghi Vo’s other works.

CW: death, homophobia, racism, mild body horror

Content Warnings

Bring Me Their Hearts by Sara Wolf

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adventurous dark emotional funny hopeful mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

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emotional informative slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

Spells Trouble by Kristin Cast, P.C. Cast

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Did not finish book. Stopped at 61%.

I’m 61% of the way through this book and not sure if I’m going to finish it or not. I really wanted to like this book, sisterhood and witchcraft? Sign me up! But there are definitely a lot of elements that are keeping me from loving this book.

- the voice feels off, it’s sometimes super juvenile, using terms like “bestie” all over the place and giving way too much exposition. The best writing I’ve encountered in the book so far was the prologue and I wish the whole story was more like that.

- random clinically graphic sex scene, didn’t even feel smutty or passionate it just felt weird and out of place and way too detailed for a YA book

- the treatment of grief in this book is what really turned me off. Death of parent is a big content warning for Spells Trouble and in this book for some reason the literal day after her mother dies a character is expected to be her old self and the other characters perform a spell to “remove her grief” so she can “get back to normal”. The characters keep emphasizing how they are so different now that they’ve grieved and how much they’ve changed when it has been a matter of days. One character also believes that another’s grief is only so bad because she wasn’t bullied as a child, and while bullying is a trauma that many children experience I think this could have been a chance for the authors to show that grief is such a different experience for every person and instead they chose to have one character magically get over it while the other forges on having decided “my trauma from bullying is more valid than your grief”. I think this is a really irresponsible, immature way of framing the grieving process and while I understand the characters are 16 and that this might get addressed in the end of the book, I still really didn’t like the way that grief was presented. It felt shallow and like a plot point to overcome not a chance for real emotional development in this story. A lot of recent YA releases have treated grief and mental health in a more nuanced way, I was disappointed Spells Trouble didn’t follow suit.

Overall this story feels like a cheesy CW or ABC family show about witches in high school.

Content Warnings