Fuck Showers

1) The Kiss Curse (5/5): I started this new years eve and flew through it. Very easy light read, if you're a season based reader it's perfect for fall. It avoided many of the romance tropes I hate and had me full giggling and kicking my feet at times

2) Last Night At The Telegraph Club (5/5): A queer historical romance set in the 1950s. It was genuinely very good, it explored many aspects of being a teenager in the 50s and the author included a bunch of the research they did at the very end of the book. Not necessarily a feel good book but it's not necessarily sad either.

3) Once Upon A Dream (5/5): This book is part of Disney's Twisted tales collection and is the first of the series that I read. I ended up enjoying it more than I thought I would, the twist they put on the fairytale is one I haven't yet seen and was very fun to slowly figure out what was going on. Aurora and Phillip got on my nerves occasionally but it was less of a "why don't you just do the obvious thing" and more "you're both kids and idiots and suck at communicating and going through something traumatic so while I wish you would use your words better I can't blame you".

4) Project Hail Mary (5/5): I read this one in anticipation of the movie adaptation coming soon and knowing I loved both the book and movie The Martian and it didn't disappoint. I love how Andy Weir seems to ground all of his science in reality to the point where I had moments I forgot it was a fiction book not based on any true events.

5/6) No Nest For The Wicket and Cockatiels At Seven (5/5): I'm lumping these together because they're part of the same series that are an easy enjoyable read for me. They're murder mysteries and while I wouldn't say they're groundbreaking, they're a nice read. I'm on my tenth or eleventh of the series and they don't feel too formulaic and the main detective character doesn't feel like a Sherlock rip off, she's just in the right/wrong places and curious.

The reviews are as follows:

1) Six Geese A Slaying (5/5): Like the others in this series, just very fun and silly to read. When I finish my nostalgia run I look forward to continuing the series!

2) Spring Awakening (2.5/5): I was aware of some of the general themes from having a rough idea of the musical but it is much harder to read in its original play form. For me it was a lot of heavy things with very little break.

3) The Boy In The Stripped Pajamas (1.5/5): I picked this book up some time ago because I had remembered hearing good things (although that might have been more specifically about the movie) and while I remembered hearing some controversy I decided to give it a try. It was terrible, it gets some points because I can see some merit in the story it was trying to tell, it just failed pretty terribly. It doesn't feel like the writer did any research on the Holocaust and just wanted cheap feel good points. The 10 year old raised in Berlin by a Nazi officer comes across so unbelievably stupid as he mispronounces "fuhrer" as "fury", "Auschwitz" as "out with", doesn't know who Hitler is, doesn't know the concept of Jewish people, and constantly makes everything about himself. The author consistently seems to be trying to cram the message of the book down the reader's throat rather than trust them to get it, having characters several times remark about how so and so actually isn't so different after all or how wow so and so is actually a person with a life! In retrospect I should have rated it lower.

4) Inkheart (5/5): I needed something nostalgic that I knew I would enjoy, so I've started rereading the Inkworld series for the first time in perhaps a decade. I absolutely adore the first book, the idea of characters being able to come out of their books is both terrifying and fascinating and I love the fictional story this author made that gets explored in more depth in the later books!

Once upon a time, in a dense and green forest—a good beginning to a great many lovely stories (and coincidentally to this one as well)—a man was hiking on his lonesome.

Soon enough he came upon a group of hikers. It wasn’t a particularly large group, five at the most, but what really struck him about them was that every single one of them was a deep shade of purple.

He wanted to ask about it. He really did. But one can’t simply walk up to a group of hikers and ask why they’re purple. It’s rude. So instead, he asked, “Mind if I join you?”

The purple hikers did not mind, so they all went off together as a group of six. Conversation was casual and pleasant, on the topics of an interesting piece of moss growing on a tree, or a strange birdsong audible from the path, or the beautiful waterfall allegedly at the end of this trail.

After what may have been a mile, or may have been more—time is hard to judge with good company and easy conversation—one of the purple hikers turned to the man.

“I suppose you want to know why we’re purple,” she said, cutting off his protest with a wave of her hand, “Everyone does, you’re not the first to join our group, and I can’t judge you for it. I’ll tell you the story.”

And so the man listened.

“Once, the five of us were hiking out in the desert. We’d heard rumor of a magical city, buried among the sands and inhabited by Fae, and were eager to see if they were true. But we got lost.

“We wandered the desert for days, running low on water and hope, when we saw it. A marble pillar, rising from the sand. The magical city was real, and for want of a better option, we ran to it.

“Now we had done our research before hand. Fae food is delicious, but it has strange effects, and this land was no exception, their food could recolor anyone who partook, so we’d be sure to drink nothing but water there. Being colorless, water wouldn’t do anything.

“But when we entered the city, a Fae greeted us and pointed us to several natural fountains, bursting from the ground with strawberry milkshake, grape punch, sparkling water, orange soda, and any drink you could imagine.