2026 Book Log

Oh my god, words cannot describe how dissapointed I was in this book. I had such high hopes- the plot read like an American version of "The Sadness" with some religious mania sprinkled on top, and the beautiful cover instantly sold me. Unfortunately, this book is a fucking wreck. Plot aside, the characters are the most bare-bones trope archetypes they could ever possibly be, as if they were lifted straight from a 2004 teen movie. Even the world feels stuck in 2004. I understand that our protagonist is sheltered and uber-religious and thus is more unaware of the world around her, but in the modern age there is NO way a high schooler like her could possibly be THIS sheltered and naive. Any believabilty in this world and it's story just flies right out the window when she acts like she doesn't know how to use technology. You can't go through school these days without technology! It's everywhere! AUGH!!!

If you loved the 2018 Marvel movie "Venom" but thought: "This would have been better if it was a low-stakes gay teen romance with ghosts", well, I have THE book for you. And for me, apparently, because I ate this up. I'm not the biggest fan of how this book is organized- there's like one million chapters but they're all 3 pages long (annoying), but if you can look past that, what you're gonna get is a very sweet romance between a ghost boy who has decided to help living humans better their lives through (usually gentle) force and the a losery human boy he's taken up residence in this time. This book is almost TOO sweet. I wouldn't have minded if it got a little dark, but... ah... a man can dream.

This book was so boring and forgettable that in going through my reading list of this year to organize all my thoughts onto this page, I realized that I had completely forgotten that I even read this book at all. I must have, it's in my notes. I liked that the main character has OCD and her narrative tone and style reflects that, but it also hinders the book. This would have done better in a third-person POV... maybe? I don't know. So much went wrong that I don't think I could salvage it.

Before I say anything, I'd advise anyone looking to read this book to check out the trigger warnings for this book. Usually, I don't bother saying anything like that, because I'm not someone that gets triggered by books and I'd assume anyone looking into anything from my page would do their own research, but man. This book is NOT shy about the subject matter it tackles. That being said- was it any good at the subjects it tackled? ... ehh... What I liked about this book is that it has a lot of the tropes I like (unconventional explorations of gender identity, supernatural cults led by incomprehensible unholy concepts, bodily autonomy, and a setting in a small, suffocating southern town) but at the end of the day, what the main point of the book boils down to is just... patriarchy bad, which is something I would have assumed both author and readers were already nodding their heads in agreement on. The first quarter was kind of a slog, though that's probably intentional, and the gore was well-written and stomach churning at points. I enjoyed this book, I just think it could have gone better.

This one was difficult not because of subject matter, but because when I closed the book I was just like "okay?". I had a similar opinion on Basterrica's other work Tender Is the Flesh where I thought some of the concepts and ideas raised in the book were interesting, but ended up frusterated when ideas that could have been explored more were just left to the wayside.

I only picked this up because it was an audiobook that was available at my library, and after I finished it I pretty much confirmed for myself that young adult romantasy is a genre I have firmly outgrown. There's nothing particularly wrong with this book, I guess, aside from the fact the plot ends at about the 360-page mark and it has a total page count of 483, but a run-of-the-mill Disney movie retelling just ain't it for me anymore.

One of the more interesting magic systems I've seen written in a book and an interesting setting and worldbuilding that gets a little bogged down by having very generic gender politics. I get WHY it's in here, and I get why the book focuses so much on it- the protagonist, Sciona, is the first woman to ever achieve the position that she gets, but the way the author decides to show the misogyny she experiences just... felt like they went on Reddit, searched "my mysogynist co-worker sucks" and took the top three examples from various posts.

Ah, Schwab... I have a love/hate relationship with this author's works. On the one hand, she's incredibly skilled with this craft. The worldbuilding is phenominal, the characters feel (ironically) alive, and the storytelling is usually very gripping and keeps you engaged. On... the other hand, the end of the novel feels like she had no idea where she was going. The first 75% of this book is a runaway freight train of a vampire's life, but then it's like the author remembered she actually had to end the book at some point, and frantically scrambled to do so regardless of how many plot points were going on. Another nitpit I have with this author is that despite a lot of her novels spanning several decades of human history, she only ever focuses on European history, and its like the rest of the world and all other countries don't matter. Of course, we get a little glimpse of post-civil war America, but, like... no characters that aren't of European decent? No vamperic romp through the Middle East? Asia? Africa? Am I asking for too much from this author?? LOL...
Also, Alice's portions were fucking boring as sin.