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* Liar City by Allie Therin hit my DNF pile hard. It's urban fantasy m/m.
I liked the writing, the world building and the mystery plot going on. The characters were great, outside of the m/m pairing. The sort-of POV character is dumb. He has the impulse control and grasp of nuance you'd expect from a toddler. It would have been one thing if he was like that at the start, but fucking focused up with all the murder and danger going on, maybe had a bit of a arc about out, but nope.
The POV does what it wants, wandering from the main character, to secondary characters to even minor characters. Whatever it takes to tell the story. But, this makes it doubly odd that we never see things from the POV of the LI character, who we know little about, at least we didn't get his POV in the first 66% of the book.
I wanted to finish it, and the book does give us nice long breaks from the couple by having us follow other characters. I did care about the plot, but then suddenly I didn't. The main character is an empath and there is a lot of anti-empath sentiment going around. In this story, empaths are new and rare. Society hasn't adjusted to them and not a lot is known about them. The MC's powers suddenly evolve to including 'insight' and that means... literally access to knowledge. He doesn't need the person there to know things about them. He uses it to break into a computer by insighting the password. Having a mystery story when the MC has the superpower of 'magically knows shit' is just dumb.
I was excited for the books as it was a urban fantasy m/m series and the name of the series is Sugar & Vice, which sounded awesome. I could point to some other problems with the book, but like the randomly floating POV, they wouldn't have bothered me if I liked the book overall.
* Tales From The Gas Station - Horror/creepy short story series
I know I got recced this, but don't remember from where. It's very mid, but not in a bad way. It's a series of spooky stories with something of an overarching plot. The writing is very solid, but you can see where the story is going most of the time, sometimes from the set up. It feels like the writer is very in his comfort zone, writing wise. It keeps it from being really spooky, at least for me, but it's very comfy. Most of what I read feels like writers trying to push for something, hit above their weight class and the writers have very uneven writing skills. This feels like something less ambitious, but well polished. The descriptions of the place and the main character's emotional state are really well some.
I listened to it as an audiobook and the narrator was very good.
It's written as if this was originally an online blog that got mistaken for creepypasta and spread virally. I think that the book was originally a blog, became popular and then become a book. But, a lot of the fandom seems to be very into unfiction so I am not 100% sure. Some of the info on the book's origin is contradictory. It's possible that the series is so polished because the book is the second or third version of it.
* Broken by Nicola Haken - m/m romance
I really liked this. It's a tricky one to review because it's an m/m romance where one of the characters has bipolar disorder.
The set up nearly lost me because I didn't know the plot, it just felt like a lot of '00s bl manga were there is a lot of boundary breaking that I wasn't into. I read a lot of those manga because here in the US we got a huge influx of m/m content when bl was taking off. It felt like one of those premises, but then taken really seriously. I don't think that's what the author was going for, but that's how it hit me. I felt like I'd read that first chapter a lot before, but then the story went a totally different direction.
The premise is taken more seriously than some people might expect from a romance novel. There are depictions of self harm and a major chunk of the plot involves the LI recovering from a suicide attempt. His father, the only person he ever really connected with, recently died and he starts the story in a bad downward spiral.
One thing I really liked about this story is that it wasn't the usual 'person got ✨mental health care✨ and then everything was better' plot. He'd been misdiagnosed and also put on wrong medications in the past. Mental health care wasn't the magical panacea that so much media and also so much of the internet treats it as. So much messaging around it is just fucked and ignores that it's complicated and involves people, and those people can be a bad fit.
I liked the startling and sometimes bleak realism in this book, but it falls very much in the pile of books I enjoyed but wouldn't recc to people.
I liked the writing, the world building and the mystery plot going on. The characters were great, outside of the m/m pairing. The sort-of POV character is dumb. He has the impulse control and grasp of nuance you'd expect from a toddler. It would have been one thing if he was like that at the start, but fucking focused up with all the murder and danger going on, maybe had a bit of a arc about out, but nope.
The POV does what it wants, wandering from the main character, to secondary characters to even minor characters. Whatever it takes to tell the story. But, this makes it doubly odd that we never see things from the POV of the LI character, who we know little about, at least we didn't get his POV in the first 66% of the book.
I wanted to finish it, and the book does give us nice long breaks from the couple by having us follow other characters. I did care about the plot, but then suddenly I didn't. The main character is an empath and there is a lot of anti-empath sentiment going around. In this story, empaths are new and rare. Society hasn't adjusted to them and not a lot is known about them. The MC's powers suddenly evolve to including 'insight' and that means... literally access to knowledge. He doesn't need the person there to know things about them. He uses it to break into a computer by insighting the password. Having a mystery story when the MC has the superpower of 'magically knows shit' is just dumb.
I was excited for the books as it was a urban fantasy m/m series and the name of the series is Sugar & Vice, which sounded awesome. I could point to some other problems with the book, but like the randomly floating POV, they wouldn't have bothered me if I liked the book overall.
* Tales From The Gas Station - Horror/creepy short story series
I know I got recced this, but don't remember from where. It's very mid, but not in a bad way. It's a series of spooky stories with something of an overarching plot. The writing is very solid, but you can see where the story is going most of the time, sometimes from the set up. It feels like the writer is very in his comfort zone, writing wise. It keeps it from being really spooky, at least for me, but it's very comfy. Most of what I read feels like writers trying to push for something, hit above their weight class and the writers have very uneven writing skills. This feels like something less ambitious, but well polished. The descriptions of the place and the main character's emotional state are really well some.
I listened to it as an audiobook and the narrator was very good.
It's written as if this was originally an online blog that got mistaken for creepypasta and spread virally. I think that the book was originally a blog, became popular and then become a book. But, a lot of the fandom seems to be very into unfiction so I am not 100% sure. Some of the info on the book's origin is contradictory. It's possible that the series is so polished because the book is the second or third version of it.
* Broken by Nicola Haken - m/m romance
I really liked this. It's a tricky one to review because it's an m/m romance where one of the characters has bipolar disorder.
The set up nearly lost me because I didn't know the plot, it just felt like a lot of '00s bl manga were there is a lot of boundary breaking that I wasn't into. I read a lot of those manga because here in the US we got a huge influx of m/m content when bl was taking off. It felt like one of those premises, but then taken really seriously. I don't think that's what the author was going for, but that's how it hit me. I felt like I'd read that first chapter a lot before, but then the story went a totally different direction.
The premise is taken more seriously than some people might expect from a romance novel. There are depictions of self harm and a major chunk of the plot involves the LI recovering from a suicide attempt. His father, the only person he ever really connected with, recently died and he starts the story in a bad downward spiral.
One thing I really liked about this story is that it wasn't the usual 'person got ✨mental health care✨ and then everything was better' plot. He'd been misdiagnosed and also put on wrong medications in the past. Mental health care wasn't the magical panacea that so much media and also so much of the internet treats it as. So much messaging around it is just fucked and ignores that it's complicated and involves people, and those people can be a bad fit.
I liked the startling and sometimes bleak realism in this book, but it falls very much in the pile of books I enjoyed but wouldn't recc to people.
no subject
Date: 2024-08-23 06:39 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2024-08-25 07:15 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2024-08-27 03:49 am (UTC)From:(Like... arguably that's the setup for a visual novel/game series that I pretty well enjoyed, though it's sci-fi reasons rather than magic, but much of the games are built around the limitations of that scenario.)
Tales from the Gas Station isn't one I've heard of, but sounds like I might like. Though I know what you mean about works that feel like they're within the author's comfort zone. Not a bad thing, but a feeling you can certainly come away with.
That feeling of "I liked this, but can't really tell other people to read it" is a weird one. I'm glad you liked it, and yeah, been real sick of the "getting mental health care is an immediate fix" plotline. I'm a little afraid my current ebook read is heading that way.
no subject
Date: 2024-08-27 08:23 pm (UTC)From:Discourse on mental health care is so weird, and it act like the struggle is in accepting you need it and not like getting it is maybe the start of a long journey.
no subject
Date: 2024-08-28 05:36 am (UTC)From:Yeah. Having dealt with both pretty good and helpful mental health care and some holy shit terrible mental health care, there's a lot more to it than just "accept that you need care and then ~everything is fixed~." Like you said, it's a decent start to getting things dealt with, but there is a lot more to it. I hate when things are wildly anti-treatment, but acting like "treatment" of whatever kind is an easy fix the instant someone ~accepts help~ is just as frustrating.