The Twilight series is objectively trash, I know this, and despite that fact I still find watching the films extremely comforting. Yes, there was a time when I was embarrassed to admit I liked the Twilight series, but I am not afraid anymore at 27.
On the nights when I would come home from a slightly drunken night out, because I don't really do that anymore these days, I would clumsily open whatever streaming service happened to be showing the films and fight sleep until I couldn't hold out anymore. It's a nostalgic feeling for me, and one of my closest friendships has been cemented by our mutual obsession with a very mediocre story about forbidden vampire love (that friendship has lasted over 10 years). I didn't know many teenage girls at the time without at least one poster of a male actor from Twilight ripped out of J-14 magazine scotch taped to their wall. The die-hard fans really asserted their dominance by procuring cardboard cutouts of either Edward or Jacob, though personally I found that a bit creepy, especially with the lights turned out. TikTok has pointed out recently how obscenely funny the descriptions of Bella's outfits are in the Twilight books, not to mention how the themes are likely heavily influenced by Stephanie Meyer's Mormon background. My 14-year-old self must have glossed over the fact that Bella wore a long khaki skirt the first time she goes to Edward's house; that or I just didn't find it odd at all. This got me thinking about all the conversations I've had with fellow Twilight lovers about how much more interesting the story would be had small plot points been slightly altered. Remember when Edward tried to convince Bella they could stay together without her becoming a vampire? He insisted he would stay with her as she aged, and I would like to call bullshit on that. You can't tell me the second some hot piece of a vampire rolled into town he wouldn't leave middle-aged Bella to find a new man. If I could alter anything about the Twilight series to make it even more strange and ridiculous then I'd easily make Bella remain human. Can you imagine how insane it would be? Edward is walking around looking seventeen forever (like your second favorite Metro Station song) while Bella is something like 75 and they make zero sense together. This one change would make the series better in the sense that it would make it infinitely worse, and supply a dose of comic relief. Is she Edward's grandma to the general public's eye? Is she his much older sugar mama? It would be anyone's guess. I know I sound like a madwoman, but you are also reading something written by a person who made up an entire inner monologue for a minor Pride and Prejudice character, so there's that. It's Anne De Bourgh in case you were wondering, but I have jokingly called her plain Anne in the presence of some company. Bella thought she was miserable when Edward left her in New Moon, so just imagine how utterly pissed off she would be if all events in the books happened as written other than her being turned. The logistics of her remaining human would be a nightmare. After 5-10 years she would have to move with the Cullens when random people in town started questioning how they look like they haven't aged. She would have to go to family events, weddings, and all other social events alone lest she raise suspicions. At that point just let go of the obvious baggage and find another man. She would be miserable and Edward would be forced to watch her be miserable. Vampire romances will continue to be a genre for what I imagine is years to come. There were stories written about it before Twilight and we know many other books have followed in its footsteps. I will shamelessly continue to watch Vampire Academy, though it is also labeled as entertaining trash, and pine for the amazing movie it deserved to be yet never was. In the style of Carrie Bradshaw sitting at her computer reflecting on her experience with a new fling, I can't help but wonder, has the time of the teen vampire romance come and gone? I don't know, but for now I've moved onto slightly more adult stories involving faeries.
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I've probably seen Get A Life, Chloe Brown on the internet more than any other book this year. Based on the blurb, I could tell it would be a humorous read, but it in a lot of ways it wasn't the romcom I expected.
Chloe Brown wants to get a life. After having an almost near death experience when a drunk woman nearly runs her over, Chloe vows her life is painfully dull and decides to do something about it. Emboldened by her brush with disaster, she etches out a list of experiences to help spice up her life. And she finds no one better than her seemingly annoying, bad boy superintendent, Red, to help. One thing that isn't on Chloe's list is living an unremarkable life. This book wasn't the romcom read I expected it to be for a lot of reasons, with that being said it surprised me in some ways and let me down in others. The representation in this story is one facet I have no complaints about, and the inclusion of a main character with a chronic illness gets a roaring round of applause from me. Chloe has fibromyalgia, yet it isn't depicted as holding her back or defining her entire existence, and it isn't handled in a way that makes her seem undesirable. Too often illnesses are cast in a negative light, both in society and in literature, but Talia Hibbert did a wonderful job writing Chloe's experience living with chronic pain. The story doesn't only bring to light the reality of living with a chronic illness; it also deals with the aftermath of being in an abusive relationship. If you're familiar with my other reviews of books billed as romances then you know I'm pretty critical of fictional relationships. I need to feel like the connection between two characters makes sense, which brings me to Chloe's romantic interest, Red. I loved Red as a stand-alone character, but his relationship with Chloe was a slow burn that exploded into fireworks too quickly. The story spent more time in their heads than they spent having any sort of meaningful conversation. I didn't expect them to start spilling their trauma and having heart to hearts 50 pages in or anything, but it felt like they went from lightly despising each other to full blown thoughts of marriage faster than a couple of teenagers. Red and Chloe would have made great friends in my opinion. At the end of the day I didn't believe their chemistry as much as I wanted to. Hibbert's humor was absolutely spot on and I found myself chuckling often. We have all been Chloe at moments in our lives, caught off guard in very awkward situations (and probably shrinking into ourselves out of embarrassment). Some of the banter between Chloe and Red reminds me of the quips I've shared with my best friends. I wanted to see more of them together having late night talks or sharing a bit more about themselves. How can two people be convinced they're in love when at the end of the day it seems they've barely learned much about one another? Red and Chloe's individual storylines with respect to their past relationships could have been fleshed out more, and maybe that's why I'm feeling a bit underwhelmed. Don't get me wrong, they were still cute together, and I think Chloe is an absolute badass. I didn't need to see how awful their ex's were to care about their trauma, I'm just noticing a misuse of real estate when it comes to how the almost 400 pages were used. I can understand how this lives up to the hype in terms of representation, but the romance element was lacking for me, and that's supposed to be a decent chunk of the story. My opinion seems to be a fairly unpopular one from what I can tell. Get a Life, Chloe Brown gets a solid 3.5 stars from me. I enjoyed the read and would recommend it for all the positives noted above, but it's not a story I'd read a second time. I love traveling, but by far my least favorite part is the head rush hangover that washes over you as soon as you get back home and back to reality. After spending four days in Chicago last week I was on cloud nine, now I feel groggy, like when you snap out of a really lovely daydream in the middle of something you probably should have been paying attention to.
It's probably an unpopular opinion, but I absolutely love road trips. I don't even mind the moment you make your first stop to stretch your legs and it feels like every muscle in the lower half of your body has frozen in place when you touch the ground. I don't care if the view from the car window is nothing but trees and corn fields for most of the trek because nothing beats those random, weird family conversations born out of boredom and the need for entertainment. It doesn't hurt if you have a good true crime podcast queued up to get you through either. There's nothing that says family fun more than listening to a conversation about murder together. There's something about traveling somewhere new, or just somewhere away from home, that gives me this feeling of inspiration, and the kind of attitude where I know I can take on anything. I browsed through bookshelves at this charming indie bookstore in Evanston, Illinois called Bookends & Beginnings one night after we'd left the city, thinking about a book idea I've been chewing on for a while. Why have I been putting off writing all this time? I don't have a good answer and it just pisses me off to think about it. There is no single good reason why I haven't been sitting my ass down at my laptop and typing until my brain runs out of ideas and plot points. I'm quite literally the only thing holding myself back from something I so desperately want to do. The name of the little bug on my shoulder is self-doubt, I won't deny that. As we walked down the streets of Evanston on our first night, admiring the stretch of beach along Lake Michigan, everything troubling me and tossing around in my brain for months didn't seem to matter so much anymore. It was pretty clear, like a junebug to the face clear, that my troubles don't deserve as much brain power as I've been giving them. I'm so used to little things being boiled into big things by my anxiety that it almost felt foreign to be able to let go for a while. We wandered through Northwestern University's beautiful campus for a while before heading back to our hotel in town. Interestingly enough, the memory from that day that stands out the most to me was a dozen bicycles abandoned at various back racks outside campus buildings. It was an odd image with rust cracking through paint and wheels missing. I drank beer we'd stashed in our own cooler at the hotel that night and we ordered a pizza at almost ten o'clock. Possibly the best New York style pizza I've had came from a bar in a suburb North of Chicago. I read a few chapters of People We Meet on Vacation and dreamt that I was dating Robert Downey Jr. I'm not joking about that last bit either; the brain is a mystery. We caught a train to Wrigley Field that morning, for a tour my mom was antsy to get to (rightly so), and met a man raising his son on his own. He told us about the abortion his son's mother wanted and the three day hospital stay alone after the birth. He spoke of struggle and frustration, but mostly of the love he has for his son. I can only imagine the other stories strangers share on trains. All afternoon I imagined myself living in a city with so many people, something I was convinced I could never see myself doing until a few days ago. I knew in a couple days I would get to see Wrigleyville packed with Cubs fans, but when the team is out of town it's a quiet neighborhood right next to the L train. Everything looked different than the last time I stood in the same spot almost 11 years ago. New buildings mostly. Brand new, shiny buildings standing in stark contrast to everything else around them. Then there's Wrigley Field, the second-oldest stadium in Major League Baseball, the same old friendly confines. I pocketed some ivy trimmings on our tour and sat in the dugout where so many famous Cubs have graced the benches. What it must be like to watch a game from that spot. I can now say I've seen the world's most complete T. rex fossil at the field museum, and plenty taxidermied specimens too. Who knew there were so many different species of birds in the world? Four hours, it turns out, isn't enough time to spend in a museum that big. My inner seven-year-old was equally parts over the moon and creeped out to see real mummies inside a glass case. I probably shouldn't have know what canopic jars were before I turned ten, but my grandma let me watch The Mummy (1999) as a kid. I promptly developed an obsession with all things relating to Egypt and fell in love with Brendan Fraser in quick succession. This trip had been a long time coming, and it only seemed fitting for my mom to celebrate her birthday sitting in the crowd at Wrigley Field watching the Cubs play on home turf. I drank three beers and had my first, but definitely not my last, Chicago dog. Our entire vacation led up to the surreal moment where the whole crowd rose onto their feet, beers and beef hot dogs in hand, while the W flew high over the city of Chicago. We got to see our favorite Cubs play for what quite possibly could be the last time as soon as this week. Player trades are a bitch, and I'll leave it at that. Thank you, Chicago, for being so damn good to me. I never considered myself a big reader or lover of fantasy. Sure, I love the Harry Potter series and have watched every LOTR film, but it has never been a genre I go out of my way to browse through. It's even interesting to me that I feel this way because I'm a writer, and in some part that means I love made up shit (or to put it more nicely I like fiction).
You could say I like fantasy with elements of the realistic. Some part of it is usually grounded in the familiar and not too fantastic that I have a hard time following along or end up losing interest. I'm not usually one to fall into the seemingly over-hyped books on bookstagram that pop up every few posts. In general, I find that books everyone seems to love either really are that good or I end up taking a love or hate stance with no in-between. When it comes to the A Court of Thorns and Roses series I can genuinely say that bookstagram made me do it (even though I don't really love that phrase if I'm being honest). The first time I read someone's description of the series they called it "faerie porn", meaning I was equally grossed out by that assessment and intrigued. Sex scenes in books usually end up making me cringe because often they come across as heavy handed and unrealistic as porn on the internet. Smutty books are another thing I don't actively seek out, but I think we all like a little spicy read with substance every now and then. THIS IS YOUR "THERE MIGHT BE SOME SPOILERS" WARNING. After I finished reading the first book in the series, A Court of Thorns and Roses, I'm not sure I was entirely sold. It followed the whole "normal girl ends up being the chosen one" arc that is extremely overdone, but I will say that Feyre as the main protagonist didn't veer into the achingly annoying territory a lot of those characters tend to end up in. There isn't a lot of action in the first installment other than a few run-ins with dangerous creatures before the nail-biting conclusion in the final 1/4 of the book. Most of the story is spent establishing where Feyre fits into the larger story of what has happened to all of the faeries who have been cursed by Amarantha, a sadistic faerie determined to subjugate the entire realm. The stakes are high and it isn't clear until much later in the story exactly how this curse can be broken before time runs out. As someone who loves to read romance, I didn't love the pairing of Tamlin and Feyre. If someone more or less kidnapped me from my family and forced me to stay with them forever, I don't think I'd end up developing feelings. Even if that man was a faerie with otherworldly beauty. Tamlin attempting to make Feyre comfortable while she is stuck with him, for selfish reasons I might add, doesn't exactly scream romance. It probably isn't an unpopular opinion to say that I believe Tamlin never really loved Feyre, but it wasn't impossible for her to love the version of Tamlin that he was showing her. If we read Tamlin and Rhys as foils to one another then it redeems the lackluster romance in the first book because Feyre and Tamlin just aren't supposed to be. As soon as he gets what he wants he keeps up this appearance of wanting to keep Feyre safe only to put her in a cage of his own design, much like the cage she was in under the mountain. Which brings me to Rhys. Sweet, sweet Rhys. I think Sarah J. Maas is a genius for presenting him the way she does upon his first appearance, only to shatter everything you thought you knew about him. He is an utter ass, and a pompous one at that, the first time we meet him. He seems to be caught up in Amarantha's cruel games, while by all appearances Tamlin seems to be fighting against them. Little did any of us know at that point Rhys would become one of the most complicated and well-liked characters in the series. Talk about a plot twist because I really didn't see that one coming after the events of ACOTAR. The first book may have left me feeling a bit lukewarm, but the way it sets up A Court of Mist and Fury is fantastic. The second installment is when all of the puzzle pieces shift and begin to slot together as Feyre begins to realize how serious the threat in the faerie realm of Prythian is. Not only does she have a part to play in saving the fae, she now has to find a way to save the humans on the other side of the wall separating their worlds. Like the title suggests, these are just my mad ramblings about a series that I've quickly become obsessed with. And my mad ramblings about yet another male character that unfortunately isn't real, and that would be Rhys. Another seemingly rough and tough guy who has been through an emotional and physical ringer that could have broken him, yet he found a way to become better because of it. I may have said out loud "you sly son of a bitch" when I realized Rhys is the bad boy, the good kind of bad boy I'm supposed to like. Once again, another fictional man has raised the bar for all of the men in the real world. He definitely gives off the "man written by a woman" vibes that everyone is freaking out about lately (because he was written by a woman and that makes all the difference). Rhys and Feyre are enemies to lovers, even though in Rhys's mind he was never Feyre's enemy, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't love a good slow burn with plenty of tension. Maybe I haven't read enough of the series yet to confirm whether or not it is faerie porn, but I think it's appropriately spicy for my taste. The sex scenes aren't vulgar or described in a way that makes you want to laugh and vomit simultaneously. What we have here is a well-written fantasy series with characters you can't help but root for, and I just got a text from the library that I can pick up the third book as I type this. Talk about perfect timing. After a ballsy plan to attend NYU goes awry, Pablo ends up working at his local 24 hour bodega serving New York's finest yuppie customers. With student loan bills piling up at an apartment he can barely afford, and with no idea where to go next, Pablo is barely skating by. The one thing he has going for him is the mildly successful Instagram account where he pairs shoes with obscure snack foods. Every day for Pab is more of the same, until wildly successful pop star Leanna Smart stumbles into his bodega in the middle of a snow storm. Her life is a tornado of private planes, crazy fans, and lonely hotel rooms. When Pab and Lee are thrown together by complete chance they know it would be crazy to let their brief encounter go beyond just one night, but you know how it goes when you're young and dumb.
I hit a roadblock a few chapters into this book, and because I started it so long ago I can't remember exactly why. The story got off to a bit of a slow start in order to set the tone and dig into the many problems facing Pablo when we meet him; without sugarcoating it, he's a bit of a mess. I've yet to see a story handle what it's like to be 20 with immense debt looming over your head and dealing with crippling self-doubt the way Permanent Record does. There's an important conversation happening about the "prestige" of attending college and what it truly means to fail. Sure, this is a YA romance of sorts, but not in the traditional sense. Mary H.K. Choi presents two flawed and imperfect characters with their own needs and desires that will frustrate the hell out of you (mostly because they're human). In a lot of ways, Leanna and Pablo fit into the stereotypes they represent perfectly, but Choi creates moments to challenge those preconceived notions. As a reader you get to see them at their highest highs and lowest lows. The biggest disappointment of this book was the romance. Maybe it was my mistake for assuming the connection between Leanna and Pablo would be the most important part of the story, so if you're looking for a feel good love story then this isn't going to fit the bill. There's no way to make it not sound cheesy, but Permanent Record is more of a story about learning to love yourself, flaws and all. We get an unobstructed view into the chaos of Pablo and Leanna's lives as they try to figure out what is going to make them happy at the end of the day. Their story may have played out more believably as a friendship instead of a romance considering how little time they actually spend together throughout the book. I appreciated the narrative turn this book took in the direction of Pablo finally figuring out what he wanted to do and taking responsibility for his reckless decisions, but it was too little too late for me. I couldn't bring myself to care much about Pablo and Leanna unfortunately. Both of them were living in their own fantasy worlds which contributed a lot to their existing problems. There were more than a few times when I wanted to pull my hair out due to the forced romance and ridiculous decisions between the two of them. If Pablo would have started to come around closer to the halfway mark this would have been a stronger story about turning setbacks into opportunities. It took over 3/4 of the book for me to feel sympathy for Pablo and my feelings toward Leanna are still very up in the air. The secondary characters are definitely a redeeming factor in this story though. Pablo's roommates are the kind of friends you'd love to have and his family was lovably absurd during the moments they shared. Overall, I give this a 3/5 stars. The story was fine and it was a quick read you could take to the beach (I just happened to shelve it for many months before I wanted to pick it back up again). I didn't hate it and I didn't love it, but there were aspects of the story I really enjoyed even if it was only briefly. |
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