Carabearr

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To begin with actually discussing the book itself, I loved it! Similarly to the first installment, the characterization of both the main and side characters were things I was overjoyed with along with the writing style, plot events, plot speed, and the overall components of a written novel. Since they’re written as Emily’s journal entries we get a personal look at her thoughts and understandings of situations which is something I absolutely adore. I love when books are written in first person as it makes it feel more grounded (?) to me in a way. Perhaps it’s just my need to be able to include myself in any media I’m consuming, I’m not sure. Anyways, I found the progression of Emily and Wendell’s romance charming and something I actually looked forward to reading which is insane and rare for me to think about book romances now days (no slight against authors, I’m just a stingy prick when it comes to what I read). I like that we see Emily’s side of things from a human perspective because she makes the crazy yet “rational” decisions, but even those aren’t anything compared to what Wendell would suggest she could have done instead. (I’m specifically talking about when she made her way into his realm and snuck around rather than blatantly show up in something that would identify her ties to Wendell (the believed enemy of the current queen) because she (and the reader) are lead to believe that being associated with Wendell will likely cause an attack and an untimely death).

I also normally hate when most tropes are done in an obvious way in books, but for some reason I love the grumpy x sunshine trope within this series. It might just be because the typical holders of each title have been swapped (grumpy lady x sunshine guy) but I’m not even sure about that either. Somehow, Fawcett managed to write a series that I have practically no issues with (again, I am a stingy prick when it comes to media so this is almost unheard of for me). On the other hand, I have actually heard quite a few negative things about the series that I want to note here. One of them being that the writing is “tedious” or just straight up boring… I FEAR THAT’S PART OF THE POINT???? I know that doesn’t make the book sound appealing at all but dude you’re literally reading the journal entries of a CAMBRIDGE PROFESSOR whose main personality traits center around her being a NERD for her subject of study. OF COURSE SHE’S GOING TO USE “BIG” WORDS AND WRITE IN LONG HANDED SENTENCES SHE’S USED TO WRITING ACADEMIC PAPERS AND THIS IS HER JOURNAL BRO like oh my god don’t even get me started on that it makes me so mad. I’ve also heard that people couldn’t see the romance aspect at all between her and Wendell and that he seemed like a prick who was an asshole to her the entire time and like… COME ON GUYS SHE LITERALLY THOUGHT HE WAS HER ACADEMIC RIVAL AND THE BOOK IS FROM HER PERSPECTIVE! WE ARE READING HER UNDERSTANDING OF EVENTS BASED ON HER BIASES AND PREVIOUS ASSUMPTIONS OF THEIR RELATIONSHIP. SHE DIDN’T THINK HE LIKED HER SO IN HER WRITING HE WOULDN’T BE OBVIOUSLY FALLING ALL OVER HER IN HER OWN JOUNRAL ENTRIES. I feel like some people just didn’t get the point/structure of how these books were written.

Moving on, there are of course things from this series that I feel inspired by/want to incorporate in my own writing. As I’ve said, I love books written from the first point of view and Emily’s clear inability to be a totally reliable narrator is something I wish to adopt in my own book/series. I was always planning on writing my protagonist as an unreliable narrator so I guess this just really solidified it for me. I also really like the idea of journal entries as a written novel, but I don’t think I’d want my main book/s to be written this way so maybe just a spin off book? Or just something for my own entertainment.

This actually wasn’t nearly as much as I originally intended on writing so I might return to this post or just make a whole separate one for more rambling/ranting over this. Thank you Heather Fawcett for making this goated ahh series bro I actually love it so much

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