breezie_reads's reviews
1035 reviews

This book was like a breath of fresh air. Every page, especially after Tere traveled to Spain, was dripping with hope. I laughed, I cried, and I enjoyed every second of this. I even didn't mind when Tere got too repetitive with how many times she reminded the reader she was a rule-follower. I'm glad this was my first book of hers to read.

I never realized how absolutely ridiculous this book was.

When I was in middle school, we had a Greek Mythology section in our Language Arts class, and a SparkNotes version of The Iliad was included in that section. So I already knew what happened overall, but having finally read it 15 years after first learning about it, I feel robbed. 12-year-old me would have loved this just as much, if not more, than 27-year-old me does.

I mean, really. They were stoning each other. They were monologuing in the middle of a battlefield after every kill. There was diving jokes?? Someone ate cow shit.

I've been psyching myself out over reading this book for the last 5 years and I'm so glad I finally read it because I had a great time.

I expected this to be longer and more detailed considering it's an erotica short story, but it was fine. There wasn't much there and I read it in like 5 minutes. But considering I got the ebook for free, I don't know why I expected anything spectacular.

I did not care for this. A couple intentionally gives birth to deformed children and only loves them according to how deformed they are. Those siblings are in love with each other.  The narrator is obsessed with stalking and sexualizing her own incest daughter.

And yet, everything was still flat. I felt nothing but boredom. Not even a little hint of disgust at the Lilly and Al for what they intentionally did, not at the incest or the cult practices. Arturo, actually, was the most interesting thing about this book, and it still didn't hold my attention.

I contemplated DNFing at 16% but decided to stick with it since I was listening to the audiobook, and that's the only thing saving this from being a DNF.

I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to, considering the headache I had while trying to understand the language of teenagers in this world. Eventually it grew on me and I found myself understanding everything that was being said with no problem.

This book is disturbing, violent, and grotesque. I didn't know anything about this book before going in to it, so I was taken aback, to say the least. There's deeper meanings in everything and it definitely deserves to be discussed, especially in a classroom setting. If high schoolers are forced to read Beowulf and The Odyssey and Shakespeare, I think this should qualify as required too. Maybe a long, deep discussion of it would make a difference.

This was a good representation of the lengths a parent would go to for their children and how something this massive would affect society, but it wasn't all that horrifying or exciting for me. Maybe being a parent would have made me feel differently, but going through everything these parents did and doing everything they did for children that were obviously not their children anymore just didn't make sense.

This was a masterpiece. Haunting, beautiful prose. I didn't know what to expect going in to this and I think that amplified my enjoyment, although there wasn't much in here to not enjoy. Rivers Solomon is a literary genius.

I was wary when I first started reading this book because I judged it by the title and assumed I was going to be preached at the entire time. That's not what this is. While the author did wrote about her faith and love for God, it wasn't in a proselytizing tone and I found myself connecting with a lot more poems than I expected. Mary Oliver wrote about her love for nature more than anything else, and a lot of the poems about religion were connecting her faith to her love for nature and I thought they were all beautiful poems. You could practically taste the emotion in them.

I'm not a fan of retellings, and there's something about Great Gatsby retellings that I just hate more than every other one. But this wasn't as bad as I expected. I think the magical elements of it were what kept me from hating it entirely, but they weren't frequent enough to really make the story all that intriguing.

If I had known this was a retelling before I started reading, I never would have started it. This was popular on BookTok for a bit when it came out, but even then I was never told anything about it being a retelling. I'd like to read a story that focuses more on the demonic elements in this book because they were only mentioned a few odd times.