vickycbooks's reviews
885 reviews

Very good novella, with a really creative and poignant take on some fairytales and mythology! Didn't realize it was the third in the series; can be read as a standalone, although the lore is intriguing enough that you'll want to seek out the other two installations. 

I did not like this book. There's no like, technical flaw, but it was really not for me. I would have enjoyed this a lot more if it was a sci-fi psychological horror/thriller, but it is instead literary fiction and it drove me absolutely bonkers. 

Why? Because nothing happened. The whole book. Literally everything you need to know is in the summary. Once you've read the summary, you can pack up, go home. No need to read it because nothing new is going to show up. 

I already generally don't like books that flip flop between two time periods for dramatic effect (generally I end up preferring one POV which makes the other POV a slog to read by virtue of not being the one I like), and not only was this textbook flip-flopping, the whole mundane literary flashback ruminations of the present day portions just didn't do it for me. Okay, you sliced a lemon. Okay, you're shitty to your friend. Okay, you have unresolved trauma about your mom's death. Nothing gets adressed! Literally the only closure is the bit that's talked about in the summary. I sat through the whole book waiting and waiting and waiting and nothing happened except pointed metaphorical flashbacks and mundane tasks and light pop culture references, all to create the literary atmosphere. This should have been a short story. There was not enough content to be a whole novel, especially because all of the bits touched on in the literary ruminations portions were wholly unresolved. Miri never actually makes progress with her friend, or does anything meaningful about her feelings about her mom. 

Drove me bonkers, clearly. If you like literary fiction books like what I've described, certainly go for it, but I really would have preferred the concept to be part of an emotional thriller.

Probably one of the darkest, goriest, most unsettling books I've ever read. Absolutely captivating, like a trainwreck you can't look away from. Heed the content warnings.

I understand what Alam was trying to do but it didn't really hit the mark for me. 

A decent historical vampire mystery! I'll admit I don't think it'll end up being very memorable to me, but it was a fun 4 hours of figuring out whodunnit. I was a bit frustrated that Radhika wasn't as...compentent? of a lawyer as I was hoping. I was hoping she'd be sharp and witty and pull aces out of her sleeves in a majestic moment of legal prowess, but she was quite a bit of a hot mess and unprofessional and not really a lawyer I'd want to hire. (And you know what good for her!) I was also frustrated because a lot of the plot felt like it hinged on the vampire Evelyn being exceptionally cagey about literally everything. Nonetheless, I stayed till the end to see how the story got resolved, and I'd be interested in reading more by Greyling. 

THERE, THERE is risky and emotional and an absolutely devour-able read. The ensemble cast was great, and there was a fantastic sense of convergence in the story. Waffling between a 4 and 5 -- I kind of wish Orange was able to dig into the characters even more, although I understand from a literary perspective why it ended where it did. 

ALL THIS & MORE was an interesting exploration of the "what would you do if you could change your life" premise that Shepherd set out to write! I'll admit the first half kind of dragged and could have been trimmed down a bit more -- the mystery with Chyrsalis etc. was super interesting, but it took a while for this to really start becoming important (halfway through the book...).

I also think the choose-your-own-adventure wasn't really executed well in two ways. One is that there aren't actually that many choices (not like the OG choose-y0ur-own-adventure books where sometimes you only get four lines in and you die), and the choices that are there aren't actually that important to the story. Whether you go one way or the other, it all still converges to the same general plot. But the other issue is that the little choice you do get (the one very important choice at the end) takes you to three different endings, but none of the endings really hit very well because it doesn't have the plot and story to back it up. I feel like the three different endings are philosophically quite different, and even though Shepherd worked hard to make Marsh malleable for a story like this, some of the endings don't mesh well with what you see of Marsh.

Unfortunately, I don't really see any way to have made it satisfying and consistent for the reader without severely stripping a lot of Marsh's character away, to really make Marsh you, the reader, who is experiencing this story yourself. I think fundamentally it would have been fine without the choose-your-own adventure aspect, and this honestly ended up detracting from the punchiness of the story. 

Nonetheless, I still generally enjoyed, especially with regards to the aforementioned mystery elements! I'd be interesting in reading other things from Shepherd, especially maybe something a little more fast-paced. 

I'll admit it was kind of confusing in audiobook format...(on Libro.fm at least) the chapter titles don't quite match to what the narrator describes them to be called so it's hard to choose your own adventure if you can't figure out where to go, and a lot of the second choices were moved to the almost-end-but-not quite which made the ending confusing as someone who was just listening to it straight through. (There's 3 decisions at the end, but in between the place where you make the 3 decisions and the actual decision chapters, there's all the alternate choice progressions, but I didn't realize that I could have skipped those because I couldn't figure out where the actual three endings were because they weren't titled correctly). 

If you really like the idea of the premise, I'd recommend picking it up (in a text format), but I wouldn't recommend trying ALL THIS & MORE for just the choose-your-own-adventure format, as I feel it will disappoint. 

Thanks to Libro.fm for the complimentary copy! I listened on 2x speed. Despite the confusing format, I really enjoyed Helen Laser's narration -- the voices were great!