hillarycopsey's reviews
865 reviews

This was both more and less than I expected. Very well worth the time, and the audio was excellently read by Claire Danes. 

The less: Marty Goddard already had died, as had many other key players, by the time the book was written, so the history is a bit thin. 

The more: Kennedy is wrestling with her own abuse, as well as the systemic and cultural failures to protect women and children, as well as the ways we silence and erase women and people of color, particularly black people, from history. These are important subjects and her points are well-made, though sometimes the narrative feels pieces and pulled together. 

This mystery is messier,  more sprawling than some of the others in the series. But I really appreciate Perveen as a character and Massey’s historical research and feminist themes. 

These mysteries get better as the series goes along. I enjoy the setting and history. 

Thoroughly delightful and galvanizing.

A friend called this book bonkers. It is that. It’s messy, riddled with cliches and heavy-handed metaphors, and just a bit too long. But man, there’s something really good here. Butler is so good at getting into the heads and hearts of working class men, and he’s picking at the hollow core under the surface of the American dream. 

This book reminded me a little of The Odyssey, a quest filled with monsters and epic tasks. I genuinely gasped at certain plot points and cared about characters. 

This is a good book that I think could have been better, one I think will stick with me. 

I started this before it was even out, bailed on it because it treated suicide so glibly, and then came back to it after listening to people rave about it for months. So thoughtful and funny! So touching! 

I hated it. I still think it treated suicide too glibly. It handled grief better, the sort of sleepwalking quality of deep grief is real and I think you can see it here. But the characters are all broadly drawn paper dolls being paraded through ridiculous plot points in service of the author Making You Feel, Making You See. I do not care for brazenly manipulative books like this. 

I’m glad I returned to it, so I can say for sure I do not like this and so I can think about what people did appreciate about it. Addressing grief, as I said; living authentically, maybe; how to deal with the sort of pointlessness of modern life. 

Five stars for making me feel all the feelings and for making me feel like I got a little extra time and insight into my dad and grandpa and uncles, or a literary version of them anyway. 

I’ve read so many mediocre romances over the last year, it was a delight to finally read one that hit all the romance beats but didn’t feel like I was reading through a checklist. 

The first few chapters, I struggled to connect with the FMC — and I think that’s by design. In those first few chapters, Jane isn’t connecting with herself. She’s literally constantly acting a part. Monaghan’s pacing as she unpacks Jane’s backstory worked perfectly for me. I appreciated that she had a support system but she still had to figure things out on her own. 

Dan is maybe the first MMC in a Monaghan book whose name I’ll remember. That’s not a knock. I like that the men are not really the point in her books. The point is the women learning something about themselves. But this book seems like a leveling up — Jane’s own journey is still the point, but Monaghan also created a story for Dan that made him a complete person for me. 

Thoroughly enjoyable. Would be a great summer read. 

Thanks to Netgalley for the advance copy. 

This book was not for me. Too much exposition via dialogue. Too much telling instead of showing. Too much madcap nonsense — a fall into a bathtub, a woman scared by a mouse and jumping on someone’s back, Hello Kitty boxers. Main characters who have been together since high school and married and still don’t seem to know anything about each other. What?! 
There’s a good idea here, but the execution is just awful. 

Thanks to Netgalley for the advance copy. 

I like the idea of this book -- a sprawling generational story showing America over the last 100 years. But the execution just didn't quite work for me. I couldn't quite connect with any of the stories or characters; any time I started to truly care, we switched POVs. It felt to me like the story needed pruning. 

Thanks to Netgalley for the advance copy.