mmccombs's reviews
691 reviews

This was fine! I do think Villavicencio is a phenomenal writer, but I thought it was a bit strange that her fiction voice and nonfiction voice read so similarly. Like I almost wished I was just reading a collection of essays instead? There was not much plot, but it didn’t feel “vibey” either like some other campus novels do, so it mostly just felt like a very long essay. I really enjoy her writing but I do think I’d be more eager to read nonfiction from her in the future.

Super informative and generally readable! This felt well researched and helpfully organized, and the author’s voice was casual enough for most readers to find it accessible. I found myself a little overwhelmed by the complexity and moving parts of this period of time, I think reading via audiobook was probably not the best way to read it because I often lost track of who everyone was and zoned out from time to time. But being able to connect distant history to our moment in time today (even in the US) was really interesting and I’m glad I know a bit more about this time (though the specifics will for sure leave my brain immediately!)

Hmm… unsure how to feel about this one! There were moments where I was like “ah ha, I see what the author is doing!” but then it would go in a different direction that just didn’t feel right. I think I struggled the most with the inconsistent voice, in one sentence we’d get something so serious and wordy I assumed it leapt out of a classic poem and then the next sentence would be some kind of gimmick, I never felt like I got a handle on the vibe or our main character.

And this is just a personal opinion but I truly hate books that do the “The End” “lol just kidding I totally got you!” thing, it’s just not clever and it didn’t add to this story. Doing the choose your own adventure thing definitely sparked some interest, but also felt like a gimmick.

The writing was good and conveyed the bleak heaviness of suicidal ideation in a way that felt pretty authentic, and I really liked the concept (the elevator part was especially interesting!), but the execution was just way too all over the place.

I can’t argue with the writing, it was often beautiful and emotional and poignant, but I’m not sure how I feel about the rest of it. This book was perhaps a bit long and often repetitive, and the sisters were mostly described to me, especially in the beginning. The characters felt a bit caricature-y, like the classic elder sister who is everyone’s mom, a middle child who floats around, and the youngest wild child who does whatever they want. There’s obviously some truth to this, these kinds of characters are common for a reason, but I wanted something more than that. Their relationship felt very real but also overdone. The ending was way too sweet and neat, I just didn’t buy their resolutions and dialogue. The mediation on grief and love and unburdening yourself from unhelpful expectations was good, but I just think other books/works have done this in more nuanced and interesting ways.

This was fine! I wanted more: more Christmas, more music, just… more! I’m not usually into the second chance romance trope, and at first I was not convinced because their chance meetup felt SO unrealistic, but at the end I thought it was well done. The characters were fine and the plot was pretty flat, there were some glimmers of really great romance and fun banter, but on the whole I felt underwhelmed.

I’m also feeling a bit tired of Blake’s formula of two fairly femme white sapphics surrounded by Black and POC friends, like I’m into the queer found family Blake creates each time and would rather a white author write what they know, but it’s just like… we get it! The main gays are white and thin and pretty, and they have an incredibly diverse friend group (who never seem to have their own spinoff stories). I’d like to get a bit more variety from these romances in the future, this one felt like reading all of the others with a slight Christmas sprinkle on top. I’ve read much more compelling holiday sapphic romances, so I’d recommend those first.

I was absolutely knocked over by this book! Part book, part poem, each sentence was beautiful and painful and absolutely engrossing. I loved the vignettes, very much like “life flashing before your eyes” while also connecting Ezra’s story to that of their ancestors and family and friends. It definitely felt disjointed and sometimes odd, but in the end I thought that it totally worked. This reminded me of Martyr!, another book I read and loved this year, taking bold swings in form and style to create something stunning and complex. While this will not be everyone’s cup of tea, I thought it perfectly captured our current moment of dissociation, numbness, and coexistence with our past.

Once again, this was so cute and fun and a bonus Halloween treat! I have really enjoyed these more “low stakes” silly missions that let me enjoy Percy’s pov and little Greek myth hijinks without feeling like I need to remember anything from previous installments (or fear that Rick will make me sad again). I think I liked the first one in this college rec letters series a bit more, but this felt like the perfect read for October, full of magic and ghosts and tiny hellhounds for the perfect cozy time!

This is a book that falls in the “it either should have been longer or a short story” category. It didn’t feel long enough to fully develop any of the characters or to build up suspense, but it also felt repetitive and a bit boring. The twist at the end was very fun, so I did enjoy how it ended, but otherwise this was forgettable.

Well… I really think we should not do nuclear war.

In all seriousness, this was probably not the greatest book to read while already spiraling about the climate crisis and increased hostility around the globe, but I do feel slightly more informed and definitely more alarmed about the mere existence of nuclear weapons. I kept coming back to that scene at the end of Oppenheimer when he tells Einstein that that they likely did usher in the destruction of the world with the creation of the atomic bomb, because that felt truer than ever as I went through the book.

Seeing a step-by-step scenario play was incredibly chilling and also just terrifyingly realistic (even though all of the worst possible scenarios were the ones that played out). I did think the writing was a bit over the top, and some of her comments on North Korea seemed just kind of out of place, especially in a made up scenario (like please don’t even quote from Joe Rogan’s podcast even in passing please). After just reading Challenger by Adam Higginbotham, which set a high bar for gripping scientific nonfiction, I feel like the writing and journalism was just not as well organized or paced as I would have hoped. Ultimately, I ended this book feeling entirely upset but also more informed, though unsure exactly where to go from here with this knowledge. Just panic I guess??

In light of recent state executions of innocent men, this book came at exactly the right time. This was well researched, deftly paced and organized, and called into question every aspect of the prison industrial complex: police, prosecutors, judges, trials, journalists, and even eye witnesses. Slepian convincingly demonstrated why wrongful convictions happen and why they are so difficult to overturn even in cases where the evidence of innocence is mind boggingly obvious. I also appreciated that he made his own position (and contribution to each case) very clear, putting journalists firmly in this conversation as well. Also the audiobook experience was wonderful, having real audio from the people he interviewed was very impactful and I felt the emotion in his reading.

Would definitely recommend reading/listening to this as a single piece of the puzzle that is the giant problem of incarceration in the U.S. And as a side note, I just so happened to finish this on the day JJ Velazquez was exonerated which is just another moment of joy to conclude this story!