วีดีโอ

I went to grad school with Sarah Rose Etter! I was in the publishing program while she was getting her MFA.

YES! You hit the nail on the head. What sucks about this book is that Vi doesn’t matter and is “just along for the ride.” And I paid for a ticket to a movie that is supposed to be about a vampire realtor only to find out that it doesn’t matter and she’s not really an important character

I agree with your assessment. I want to like it and like the idea of it. But there are too many characters and it’s to convoluted for what it is. I wanted the vampire/ghost/realtor story, which is how the story starts, which I really liked and then at like 25% of the way through the focus becomes angels and the Greek pantheon and that kind of stuff, which was not what I signed up for. And all the stuff about “the game” and “winning” and “losing” that is just not interesting enough to elicit a feeling of mystery for me.

i have NEVER seen ur hair and makeup like this u look soooooo glam. excited to listen i’m like 10 sec in atm

Highly recommend storygraph. It's absolutely wonderful. Great UI, really pretty graphs automatically made, and doesn't support Amazon. Win-win-win

Storygraph is great, 100% recommend!

hearing you talk positively about piranesi... i desperately wanted to feel the way you do about it but i was fighting for the life of my attention span reading that book 😭 also this look is a serve, earrings + makeup + hair ate

I kind of really fell off of reading in the last months - will be taking some of these as recommendations to get back into it :) My favorite book I read in 2024 was "The Spear Cuts Through Water" by Simon Jimenez - the audiobook was fantastic, and the storytelling/POV approach was really unique and interesting - if you haven't read it, I recommend you check it out! It's like... a folklore/fantasy story, but the framing device is in the real world in a historical setting (if the 20th century counts as historical haha). I feel like I can't do it justice in a comment but it really drew me in and I loved the characters and the writing!

So, I’m obviously obligated to ask you for an explanation of how to do this, and a video of how you thought of this, because this is peak literature enjoyment~

Romeo and his friends snuck into the Capulet party because his friends convinced him that Rosaline would not be the prettiest one there and that there were other girls that would catch his attention. He could not be obsessed with Juliet because he did not even know she existed so I was a bit confused when you said that he was obsessed with her. Did you mean that he was obsessed with Rosaline? And when did Romeo see Juliet wake up? Other than that, thank you for your analysis.

Around 28:00, when you were talking about the viewpoint of historical periods that these stories enforce, I immediately thought that they enforce that viewpoint about _our_ society too. They discourage modern women from pursuing happiness. They essentially say that as long as sexism exists, women cannot trust men, cannot enjoy their company, cannot relate to them. Under a form of division like patriarchy, connection and empathy are noble acts of rebellion, but according to these stories they're basically impossible. Women shouldn't try their best to carve out bright spaces in a dark world, they should just resign themselves to the knowledge that they're gonna have to be inherently separated from half the population forever.

u have a very pleasant cadence to listen to - feels like im having a chat with a friend

Kudos for mentioning the ridiculousness of the Uber scene bc it drove me CRAZY that this book had so many on-page discussions of consent between Nate and Anastasia, but their friends not consenting to what happened in the Uber just…didn’t count I guess 🥴

Romeo any Juliet was always my favorite Shakespeare play. I saw the opera last year at the Kennedy Center. Also, Romeo X Juliet is amazing.

Hi! Daughter of an OBGYN here so I am extremely knowledgeable about the workings of birth control/other contraceptives. 44:25 you question what birth control Anastasia could be on that stops her period. The fact of the matter is, everyone reacts to birth control a little differently! There are a TON of different kinds of birth control that release slightly different hormones in slightly different amounts. Because of this, some birth control pills will work better for some women than others! Anastasia could just have found a birth control that works really well for her that, as a helpful side effect, completely stops her period. That same birth control could barely change the length or heaviness of someone else's cycle. However, because birth control ultimately is all made to act as a contraceptive with stopping periods being a helpful side effect present for some people, taking that birth control would be perfectly healthy for Anastasia! It's not particularly made with extra strength or extra hormones or anything dangerous; her pill happens to work super well for her. However, birth control is absolutely not 100% effective so that is still not a good justification for unprotected sex. Anyways, just wanted to pitch in with my knowledge. Hope this was helpful!

You should definitely get half of a point for guessing New England! 😂

I want to watch you rip into any book lol

do i have any interest in this book series, or hockey romances in general? not really. will i listen to you systematically break down every single element of this book and whether you thought it was well-constructed or not? obviously!! great video as always <3

Im always shocked with how underated your videos are. You have such good energy and thoughtout critiques when discussing books!

Discovered your channel this morning and you've already uploaded a new video Lucky me

[looks at the title] [pretends to be shocked] 😅

can’t watch this until later but just popping in to say that this is SO specifically my niche, i can’t wait

I read Lady Macbeth and liked it well enough. I had read a Study in Drowning and was disappointed by it so I had lowered my expectations for this book. I think part of the problem is marketing it as a feminist book in the first place. Adding the word feminist to every book with a female protagonist reduces what feminism actually means. Unfortunately, Ava Reid’s books are consistently marketed a certain way and I find that they fail to hit the mark of what they are marketed to be.

Nice discussion haha

Two and a half minutes in and the book is already setting up heavy-handed political metaphors that don't even make sense (the elite draw their power from their control over the lower classes, and their ability to extract value from those classes - genociding them would *destroy the elite too*). This is going to be a fun ride.

Man, that's crazy! It's almost like feminism is nothing but victimhood grift, and feminists need to rewrite history to suit their shitty narrative!

Right off the bat, I'm loving the vibe!! Can't wait to see the rest (expecting a lot of roasts here lol)!!

Yesss with the Metamorphoses and Divine Comedy! Also Virgil's Aeneid is really fascinating - it was written as a Latin response to Homer's Odyssey and Iliad because the Roman emperor felt like the Greeks were outshining the Romans literature-wise lol. It's theorised that Virgil does slip in some cryptical criticism of the emperor in certain parts of it though!

W song

A few years ago I watched a hindi movie called Bulbbul. In it, a young girl of about eight is married in traditional fashion and leaves her family(at eight) to go live with her husbands family. Her husband is a fully grown adult man. This was normal. Mothers and grandmothers did this to their daughters, never to see them again. The movie depicts horrific violence against this girl. But the most horrifying thong is how everyone, including the main charecter,allows these small things to add up overtime until she is destroyed by the men around her. The boy who grew up with her, her closest friend whom she loved, leaves for school and returns and we learn he is the same. An innocent and loving boy returns with that same spark of power and sense of self importance because he is a man. He is the one who kills her. Then he breaks the cycle, because he realizes what his power allowed him to do, and what her lack of power never allowed her to express. And the movie is heart breaking, but never once unrealistic. These little things, these little beliefs could be harmless if everyone was a good person. But not everyone is good. And if those people have the power then all they can cause is harm. Bulbbul. It is amazing

Very thoughtful review. I can't help feeling that the author wanted to have their cake and eat it too with regards to the stakes of the trial or whatever it was called I already forgot. I feel like she wanted to have the stakes of hunger games but without the inevitably depressing tone and implications of the story dragging down the mood of the romance, which is understandable but it feels like she didn't just not understand what was the purpose of the killing thematically, but just in terms of basic narrative design, the fact that each character either Has to kill or be killed means that you always know what the stakes are and each character is deeply motivated by survival. She took away the need for killing and replaced it with nothing which is bonkers because all she needed to do to make it a reasonably adequate part of the story was to make the competition have some kind of reward, as, y'know, competitions are almost unanimously known to have. And then frame the whole thing as showing how far people are willing to go to get such thing, whatever it is, as many other stories of this kind are known to do. As it stands the completely unnecessary killing doesn't characterize anyone as willing to do what it takes, but as a bunch of deranged wackos who like killing for the sake of it, which also doesn't serve adequately as characterization because the writer does not seem aware of this and therefore does not lean into it or reflect on it. It's just so wild.

The author IS FROM MICHIGAN.. You're right. lol

aside from everything else you said, which is all good and valid...do people really think there's no subtext in shakespeare? have they...listened to him???

without putting sugar on it. Romeo is a PDF file grooming a minor (Juliet) nothing else. its just written by a PDF and masked as something (romantic) people forget their age difference and how young Juliet really was.

I dont understand why Ava Reid Lady Macbeth was so bad. I especially hated the anti scotish rethoric given Ava Reid past work Juniper & Throne was critical of xenobia well this book reeked of it.

I think retellings can be fine but I don’t get the point of giving a voice to characters who already very much have a voice, are these authors even familiar with the original texts or do they just assume that just because something is old it must be treating female characters badly? Also it looks like feminism = women can never do anything bad.

Wow this is amazing, I’ve always been so confused on why I have a love and hate relationship with Romeo and Juliet, this explains everything thank you !!!

im so glad i found this video! i study social anthropology and specialize in ancient civilizations and i love classic literature as well. being able to read classic and apply cultural context and understand to them really enhances my reading experience, so when i see these retellings like circe and tsoa i get SO frustrated. its not that i dont believe they cant be retold, but its not often done in a meaningful way that takes into account the context of the time period its based in. yeah madeline miller has a classics degree, but that doesnt mean she understands the anthropological aspects of classic literature. i think thats where a lot of these retellings fail. i also think the need to coddle women and make them out to be weaker then they are is a huge problem in these books as well edit: i realize what i said about studying classics can be taken incorrectly but and i understand theres a level of understanding context and history involved but i mean on more a nitty gritty in depth level like someone would have studying anthropology or history

I really appreciate your commentary on this! Your video got the point I think some others missed, even in critical reviews of Lady Macbeth. What people need to understand is that Shakespeare's portrayals of women were already progressive For The Time. He consistently put female characters into important roles that had agency in the plot, which was not at all a given. Lady Macbeth is already one of the best examples, but I also love Volumnia, Coriolanus's mother, who is explicitly the real heroine of Coriolanus. That's not to say that there's nothing to criticize or analyze from a feminist lens, of course. When I went to see Much Ado About Nothing without reading it beforehand I was shocked and upset by Leonato telling his own daughter Hero that she should die for adultery (it was a really good performance 😅 and when I say 'upset', I mean emotionally affected, not that I thought this plot point shouldn't have been included in the play). There is sort of a criticism against that in the play in that of course Hero is innocent, but it never says that if Hero actually had been adulterous that Leonato shouldn't have denounced her. It's just so strange to me that this feminist retelling thing tends to target where it's not needed? As you said, they add violence where it isn't as if that's all that's needed to give female characters depth. I wish more retelling authors would take a Margaret Atwood approach and limit themself to including acts of violence and misogyny where there is a historical basis for it. It would be a much more effective story if authors didn't act like all women are or must be victims and 100% justified all the time, or that men always act as villains and abusive monsters 100% of the time (except the one Good One who might be the love interest). I would like this story a lot more if they acknowledged that men and women could have good individual relationships under patriarchy, and that patriarchy *would still be a problem.* For example if it showed Macbeth and Lady Macbeth having a good or even decent relationship, even if they don't romantically love each other, and had Macbeth as a generally well-intentioned character who still might hurt her by reinforcing her limited role as a woman in society. And in arranged marriages it's ridiculous to act like every single one of them must have been horribly abusive. Some were and I'll never deny that many women in history have been systemically hurt by men, but it's not useful to act like men were never nice or supportive to women either, or that women never found their own power within their situations. Hundreds or thousands of years ago, people were still people, just like they are today.

I get app your critiques; however, I have two counter opinions. I despise Brandt with my entire heart and soul. And I think I disagree with you for most of the things you criticized for being unintentional. For me, they served the purpose of making the book fun as well as meaningful. Great review, though!

I had similar opinions about A Dowry of Blood. I feel like you would like House of Hunger if you're feeling like more vampire lady books. I read it recently and really had a spooky good time. Also Natural Beauty is on my list for this fall!

I am so excited to hear what you think of all of the TBR books! I love T Kingfisher so so much. I did have an ARC of A Dark and Drowning Tide and I have.....opinions. Super interested to see if we pick up on the same things with that one!

was not ready for this intro

Ahh hope you enjoy reading Dracula! Read it for the first time about 3 years ago and it almost immediately became my favourite book. Became absolutely obsessed with it, learning about Bram Stoker, Read all the catalogue drafts/WIPS he made of it, researched the Decade of Victorian culture when it was written. It’s a great gothic horror in its own right it’s a Fantastic Time capsule of the “modern” victorian Science and healthcare even though most of it has become outdated(Really outdated for the one insane asylum Dr lol). The characters were also a surprisingly delight for me because there is absolutely no mellow drama and it’s so refreshing Three Men propose to a women and they are genuinely Happy for the guy who gets the Yes! They remain friends! Literally nothing happens to break the friendship! They go drink together to celebrate! It’s great! Movie adaptations always does the relationship between the cast dirty lol they were all ride or die for each other immediately.

I’m enthusiastic for your dark academia adventure. They at least look like interesting titles

I too found Babel to be heavy handed. I felt talked down to in several parts. It was still interesting but i was disappointed.

Cutting my own hair without even thinking about it: a memoir of girlhood 😂

You have no idea how on point your intro was - this fall is shaping up to be filled of a lot of painful growth for me, so I'm excited to check out these books and embrace the vibe. We're out here changing with the seasons, or something. Also by all means cut your bangs - and if you hate the result, they'll grow back relatively quickly anyway. (I am notoriously unsentimental about my hair so idk if I am the best person to give advice in this respect though haha) Editing because oh my god, I thought I was alone in my disappointment with Babel. I'm a translator and I was SO hyped for a book where the magic is about translation! But I was really let down by the specifics of it (I have a lot of detailed thoughts about individual choices that were made), I really disliked the heavy-handedness as well, and as was the case for me with the Poppy War, I hated the ending 🙃 it's such a shame, but it seems for me this author's books always veer SO CLOSE to being all-time favorites and then take a hard turn in a different direction. So unfortunate for me, because I totally get why everyone seems to love her so much.