Archives for March 2025

52 IN 52, Book #9: Vicious by V.E. Schwab

Unfortunately I just think me and V.E. Schwab are not destined lovers and that is A-OK!

For me, however, this book was not interesting or compelling. I didn’t like either Victor or Eli (who I presume are the titular Villains of the series) and neither of them had motivations that particularly compelled me. In fact, both of them pretty much just seemed like white men who feel that power and influence is owed to them for no other reason than because they want it… Is that the point? Maybe that’s the point, but if so I didn’t think the commentary was delivered effectively enough for the message to land.

Mostly I just spent my time reading of this book wondering when either of these two dudes was going to do something that made me feel like I actually cared about what they were up to.

I did like the side characters though! I liked Mitch and Sydney and the dog, and honestly I did think that the idea behind this book was interesting — just that the two main characters weren’t compelling enough to carry it for me. Alas!

52 IN 52, Book #8: I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

Many of the criticisms I see of this book have to do with “nothing happens.” And honestly, in a way I agree! If you’re the type of reader who is looking for action and a climax and a resolution, this really might not be the book for you, and that’s totally fine. But I also don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that nothing happens.

This book was strangely both disquieting and oddly comforting for me. The premise is pretty straightforward, I guess: a group of women are kept in a cage guarded by men. The older women in the group remember life before the cage, but the narrator, who was either born in the cage or was a very young child upon arrival, has no such memories. Eventually, the women break free of their captivity and emerge out into a desolate, empty world, where they appear to be the only survivors.

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As someone who is not particularly science-minded myself, I sometimes find myself steering away from hard sci-fi because I’m worried about not understanding it. My godmother encouraged me to read this book ahead of the movie coming out, and although I was initially a little reluctant, I’m really glad that I did — and that my worries about not being science-y enough to understand the book were unfounded!

This was my first Andy Weir book so I’m not sure how well this conclusion carries across his other works, but at least within this book I felt that although the science was well-founded and seemed realistic enough (to my untrained eye, anyway) it was also explained in such a way that it was easy to understand. I didn’t feel like the explanations went completely over my head — I was able to follow the logic and the explanations and more or less understand why a plan would or wouldn’t work. Maybe this is in part because the narrator is a science teacher and he’s explaining things to people who aren’t scientists themselves… Whatever the reason, it super helped!

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