Reviews and Comments

3.5

I'm definitely not mad at this book and had way more fun than I expected. As someone who never ever reads these books and picked this one out from the library on a whim knowing nothing about it, I was pleasantly surprised. Am I going to recommend it? No, but mostly because I have no clue if there's better Regency romance out there or not.

A brief overview of the things that worked for me:
- it's generally humorous and never takes itself overly seriously
- the female main character is sensible and has ambitions and speaks her mind, but is rarely over the top or unbelievable for the time period
- it's dual perspective and very fluid with it. It'll even switch in the middle of a scene if it makes sense to and was never jarring
- The shapeshifter part was really fun and the author put a decent amount of effort into worldbuilding considering I wasn't expecting much from a regency romance

My biggest problem with the book was how slow it moved at times. Sometimes it worked, such as building tension up until he finally reveals his true nature, but other times such as the drama with her inheritance it felt a bit dragged out. Also the author is trying to show of her thesaurus/dictionary skills or she was straight up inventing words, but it didn't really bother me all that much just a heads up.

I don't think I'll read any more books in this series when they come out tbh, it's just a little predictable at times and the writing style and my brain don't mesh very well.

There just wasn't enough that I enjoyed about it to give it a better rating but it's not terrible, 3 is a respectable rating. It was a reasonably fun audiobook to listen to while cooking, but it's not a series that I'll be continuing either.

Unfortunately, the book suffered from focusing on too many characters and so only superficially dealt with each characters conflicts and romance. In fact, it was really difficult for the first 50% of the book to keep track of each character (who they are, who they like, their personality) because there's FOUR character perspectives that it's roughly equally split between and they're all young women who are either in the royal family or closely tied to it. Not to mention everyone is cheating on everyone (not judging but it makes it even harder to keep track) or in some other secret relationship. So why did we need four characters?

I also don't feel like this needed to be a royalty focused book? So much time is spent on relationship drama and hardly any on the royalty stuff? It's just kind of a backdrop that has only some impact on the plot so it felt more Gossip Girl than say, Red, White, and Royal Blue. I honestly think this would make a better TV show than book series just because of the way it's structured. But that's just my opinion lol

4.5

As someone who has read hardly any classics (if you exclude all the Shakespeare I was forced to study in school then none at all), I found this much easier to read than I was dreading. I really enjoyed the humour especially and struggled whenever it disappeared for long periods of time. There's plenty of words and phrases that I only inferred the meaning from context or just glossed over and that didn't really affect my enjoyment of the story on the whole.

I think the characters are the strongest part of the book. All the characters feel like very real people. I usually struggle with books that don't get into the heads of characters, because it makes me feel disconnected, but this is the rare case where it worked for me. I will say that there are still plenty of insights into Elizabeth's internal thoughts when necessary to give the reader the full picture. Btw Elizabeth is now one of my favourite book characters. She's sassy, down to earth, self-aware, and caring of those around her. She also grows from her mistakes in ways that are realistic and highly relatable.

On a note of easiness to read: I found it difficult to get through the physical book alone. There are large blocks of text with very few paragraph breaks on some pages and a lot of exposition. I ended up reading it with an audio version and then just the audio on it's own because I could get a better feel for the characters through the narrator. The emotions are rarely on the page, you kind of have to inject whatever the appropriate emotion is into the dialogue on your own , because it's rarely stated outright and sounds kind of dry on its own.

No rating because I don't rate non-fiction/instructional, but it was good!

I've never read or watched anything that explained bullet journaling as well as this book did. I've tried to start bullet journaling multiple times and always fail because I think I didn't really get it until now? This is definitely a guide for beginners, so anyone familiar with bullet journaling already probably won't get anything out of it.

Organisation is at the forefront (rather than creating pretty spreads) so most of the content is aimed at creating customisable systems for staying on top of tasks and goals in your life. There are sections dedicated to different high school subjects, which are probably great if you're a high school student who takes any of the classes, but as a uni student I found them a bit irrelevant to me. I will say there are a lot of good study and note-taking tips even if they don't apply to me though, and even a few that do.

It's very short, so it's not a very detailed guide, but I think that's a good thing. It's not overwhelming for beginners, and a busy student would have a very low barrier to reading it and getting some useful tips.

2.5 I think?

It had it's moments I guess, but it was so incredibly slow to get going and the main character was kind of annoying so it all felt like it dragged. I never skim fiction, but some sections were just boring so I did. I dunno... it's a cool idea, but I think it just needed like a bit of tweaking and could have done with a twist or two just to make things more interesting and even perhaps scary?

I'm a terrible gauge for what's scary because I find virtually no horror scary, but this one definitely was quite far off for me. It just took so long despite how short the book is to get to anything interesting and didn't use that time to effectively build the stakes. Instead it felt like 200 pages of setup and 130 pages of proper horror out of nowhere.

Also, very minor spoiler: the ending? disappointing. Considering it's 'found footage' style there could have been a great epilogue, but the opportunity was wasted imo. Also I just gotta say it, hated the newspaper articles. They were so unrealistic to me and the most poorly written aspect that it was distracting. The reddit posts were somewhat better but also really distracting how they were formatted wrong? Like nearly every comment had 0 points? It felt like they just forgot to change the default before printing lol

4.5

I think if I had this book when I was a teen trying to figure this stuff out, it would have changed my life. It's just such good rep and really covers all the bases in terms of what it means to aro and/or ace. It's always tough for these books to be inclusive and a lot of ace rep can easily get hate for 'misrepresenting' the identity, but I think the author makes it pretty clear that this is just one person figuring out their own identity.

Obviously it's not complete realistic, there's some added theatrics for fun and flavour. It's like reading a teen rom-com, but the rom never actually happens, at least not for the main character. I never fail to be impressed with how well Alice Oseman writes young people that feel real and modern and I laughed out loud several times. [Side note: the way the narrator pronounces key smashes is perfect and amazing and was just generally an amazing casting choice].

I highly, highly recommend this book. The only reason I dropped it by a .5 is only because contemporary generally isn't my thing so I didn't feel that like 'super love' that a true five star would. BUT read it please!

4.5 // note: author uses e/em/eir (spivak) pronouns so I'm using them to refer to em in my review

I think this is a really important addition to media about genderqueer/nonbinary people. Being genderqueer myself, I think not only can gq/nb (especially if they're AFAB) people find a lot to resonate with and feel seen by, but also cis and binary trans people can hopefully gain some insight into what it's like to be genderqueer. Also, while gender remains the main focus, there was also some exploration asexuality and its interplay with gender, which again, as an a-spec genderqueer person, I really appreciated.

Of course, autobiographies are deeply personal to the author and no one's experiences are universal. I still really enjoyed it and respected when my opinions or experiences differ, but still gained a lot from eir perspective.

I seriously can't stress enough how important books like these are.

It's a 4.5 from me because I felt the ending was very abrupt and didn't really wrap up nicely, though I guess life doesn't either. I was just surprised when I turned the page and that was it. I also felt that e could have explained what asexuality is a little bit (seriously just a quick little panel or something, it wouldn't have looked out of place I promise), because some readers might not really get it/might not have even heard the term before. I'm not discounting that people can do their own research, but it's just not explored as much as the genderqueer aspect so a quick little sentence or two explaining it could have done a lot.

CW/TW: blood (period blood), moderate sexual content (not graphic, but there is discussion), mild nudity, pap smear test, some mild transphobia