Really wanted to like this, but I just found it boring, slow and confusing

I won this book from Firstreads.

Anyway

Glow takes place sometime in the future, on a spaceship. A lot of the Earth's resources have been used up and the planet is just altogether a hell-hole, or at least that's how I imagined it to be. None of this book takes place on Earth, and we aren't given much description of it, but I'm sure that the place probably sucks.

A new planet has been found, one like Earth, a gazillion light-years away (actually it's never stated in the book how far away this new planet is from Earth, but whatever) and two spaceships have been sent with people on it to settle it basically. These two ships are the New Horizon and the Empyrean, which are a year's distance away from each other. Waverly and Kieran, our 15-year-old main characters in love, live on the Empyrean, rather peacefully too, but it would be even more peaceful without that rascal Seth. Anyway, one day the Empyrean is attacked by the New Horizon and everyone's like, "OMG! WTF!? We're supposed to be allies!"

Then the New Horizon kidnaps the girls, including Waverly, and I'm sure you can guess where the story goes from there.

I liked

Glow but there were a few parts that really bored me. On the back one review compares

Glow to

The Hunger Games but they are

nothing alike. The only thing they have in common is that they're both dystopians I guess. So if you're looking for something

exactly like

The Hunger Games you may be disappointed. If you're just looking for a good story however, well that's different, because

Glow really is a good story.

One reviewer said that these kids go through a lot in the book, and they really do. First there's Waverly: I liked her...most of the time. Sometimes she kind of annoyed me, but mostly I truly did like her. She's a very strong character; there were times in the book where it seemed she was on the brink of giving up, but she never did which is admirable. Seriously.

Kieran on the other hand I felt was a little bit weaker. Or maybe I just didn't like him, I don't know. Because he went through a whole too, just as much as Waverly had to go through, and I feel like no one was really sympathetic to him either. I mean I really did feel bad for him when Seth was being an ass. I think I didn't start to dislike him until

Waverly and the rest of the girls came back. I just don't like Waverly and Kieran together

.

Then there was Seth. I liked him in the beginning and the end, but he got on my nerves in the middle. What annoyed me the most about these three characters really was the love triangle thing, plus the fact that it seemed like no one really loved each other. I didn't believe that Waverly and Kieran were really in love, and Seth's feelings for Waverly felt more stalkerish to me than anything else. But honestly I just don't like love triangles, I hate them, can't stand them!

The whole religion thing in

Glow was interesting too, it's interesting that Ms. Ryan would choose that to be the main driving force in her book. I've heard that a lot of people were upset with how religion and whatnot is protrayed in

Glow.

Personally I think it all depends on how Kieran turns out. If he becomes like Anne Mather then Ms. Ryan may have a personal vendetta on Christianity. But I don't think he will.

I do plan on reading the other books in the trilogy (it's a trilogy right?) mostly because there are a few questions I need to be answered.

Oh and also, just one last thing: I was really annoyed with the New Horizon. I felt like they were just so freakin' stupid.

Okay, so the women on your ship can't have children, what are you gonna do? Oh, attack your allies! That makes perfect sense! Steal the girls? Okay! I know Anne said that the Empyrean sabotaged them, but c'mon. That's bullshit.

So, I'm a bit disappointed with this book.

Like Never and Always started off on such a good note, and then towards the middle it just kinda...fizzled out. I've seen other reviewers say that this book doesn't know what it wants to be; the plot is all over the place -- sometimes it's a mystery, and sometimes it's a slice of life, and sometimes it's a romance -- and I have to say that I agree with that assessment for the most part. At first, it seems like this is going to be a dark, psychological thriller with a body-swapping bent thrown in, and ultimately I think that this is the type of story that Aguirre was going for. However, it falls extremely short of that.

Once it's revealed

that Morgan!Liv's "blackmailer" is really her classmate playing a strange prank on her, that's when the story began to take a bad turn for me. Like this was such an interesting concept: switching into your dead friend's body, only to find out that she's being blackmailed for something, and now you have to figure out who's blackmailing her and why. And then Aguirre just completely drops the ball. Oh, it turns out there's no blackmailer after all! Isn't this the outcome that every reader wants??

This is what sets the tone for the rest of the book.

And then there's the

love triangle. God. Now, to be completely honest, I did find the love triangle to be interesting in the beginning due to its unique nature. But then Aguirre just dragged it out...and dragged it out some more...and just would not let go of it. I think the romance could have had more potential if the brothers' characters were more interesting. Especially Nathan's character. He kind of just gets pigeonholed into the douchebag role, and I guess that's so

we don't feel too bad for him when Morgan!Liv ultimately chooses Clay.

But honestly, after a while, I just found the romance to be so

boring. Neither of the brothers are really that interesting to me, and I just couldn't care less about the romance, and ultimately I think it subtracts from the rest of the story.

Although the rest of the story really doesn't have that much to offer either. Like the mystery of who killed Morgan's mom...who cares?? I thought it was kind of just randomly thrown in, like oh yeah and btw Morgan has a mom that died in a mysterious car accident. It wasn't compelling enough to get me invested, and then

when it's revealed that Morgan's father killed her mother, it's just so completely anti-climatic and also incredibly, incredibly predictable.

But by this part of the story, I was just so ready for the book to be over. Probably the most interesting part of the story is the how and why of

Liv entering into Morgan's body. It was

kind of explored, but ultimately I felt like this gets glossed over. And I'm not saying that a definitive explanation needed to be given, but just that the implications of this could have been explored and discussed more, and handled in a better way.

Are you noticing a theme of how all the most interesting and compelling parts of this story are also the least explored??

Anyway, I think mostly I'm frustrated with this book because it had

so much potential but the execution was pitiful. The story doesn't feel fully formed or fleshed out to me, and I think if the author spent a little more time developing the plot and the characters and what motivates them, then this could have been a 4-star book.

Also please note that I did receive an ARC copy of this book through Goodreads.

This was cute, but I felt like it could've been about 150 pages shorter

I actually found reading the Wikipedia synopsis much more interesting and compelling than the book itself.

This book had such an interesting concept, but the execution was just not there. The writing, the characters, all of it fell flat. I don't know if it was a translation issue, or if the writing is this jilted and dry in the original Chinese, but I'm really at a loss for why this book is so popular.

Well at the any rate, I'm sure the Netlfix series will be bomb, so there's that to look forward to.

4.5 out of 5 stars

I won a digital copy of this book from a Goodreads giveaway, and I'm so happy I did cuz otherwise there's no telling when I would have gotten around to reading it.

The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang was nothing short of amazing, and it deserves all of the praise that it's been getting. I was quickly hooked on this book from the very first page and had a hard time putting it down. (I'm sure I would've finished

The Poppy War much sooner had I not been reading 2 other books at the same time.)

Kuang's writing flows quickly and easily, and overall this is a pretty fast-paced book. With that said, never once did the story feel rushed or poorly formed. The pacing was perfect, and I'm honestly amazed by how much Kuang was able to fit into this story. And although this book is well over 500 pages, it didn't feel nearly that long.

As many reviewers have already pointed out, this is a dark book. Kuang pulls no punches in depicting the atrocities of war and genocide. If you are someone who is easily upset by monsterous acts of dehumanization, then this will not be an easy read. But I think it's important that Kuang included these scenes. This book is a fictionalization, but it's based heavily on facts and unfortunately we live in a world where this has happened and continues to happen. Kuang did not include these scenes as some kind of gore or torture porn, but instead to draw awareness to this reality. The reality being that civilaztions have endured this trauma before.

There were many times that I felt sick while reading this book; it's not an easy topic. But it's incredibly important.

Besides war and genocide, there is a vast array of other difficult themes that this book explores, and I love it. I'm still wrapping my head around the ending. I think something else that Kuang characterized quite well are the cycles of hatred, anger, dehumanization, and systemic trauma.

I'm eagerly looking forward to finishing this series and seeing the directions that Kuang takes the story and the protagonist, Rin.

Every now and then a book comes along that makes you think:

This is why I read.

This is why I love books.

Normal People is that kind of book.

I just need to know why would anyone write this

Android Karenina was not for me. Point, blank, period. It was insanely boring beyond belief, and if I were critiquing Tolstoy I’d give it 2 stars. But I’m not, so I decided to give it 3 instead.

Ben Winters did a very good, I guess you could say amazing, job at “remixing” this book. The robots and the groznium and all that other stuff that he added flowed so well with the original manuscript that it’s almost like it was there to begin with. Flowed so well in fact that it wasn’t even entertaining (as I'm guessing that entertaining was probably what it was going for). It was just as boring and long-winded as the original

Anna Karenina. (Now, I’ve never actually read the original book, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that it’s boring.)

I really wanted to like this book, but it was just too hard for me to get into it. I enjoyed the writing at first, but after a while it just became a slog to read through. I made it about 100 pages in, and just wasn't finding the story very compelling or interesting.