Sweet Street reviews, kinda

My Sweet Street stuff arrived yesterday and completed that particular order, so I figure I might as well crack on into it because I couldn't wait. Spoiler: I love just about everything I ordered and want to go back and get the rest aside from the odd sunglasses.

See yesterday's post for the pile o' boxes. Today we deal with the contents of said boxes.

Behold!
( Pics, so many pics. )

books

I believe at some point we were supposed to chat about books, right? And then I kind of shoved that aside for literal shiny things.

I had a whole ramble ready to go in my head about the last two books I dusted off my TBR pile and actually tackled but time has kind of faded them or maybe I'm just still not quite sure how to articulate my issues with both books.

I did find this review of When We Were Magic and it pretty much nails my issues with the books in a much better way than I could possibly articulate. If you don't feel like reading it, I'll attempt to sum up my feelings here.

When We Were Magic opens with our main character Alexis and her assuring us that she did not mean to kill Josh Harper. And within the first few pages you find out that in the midst of a hookup that Josh was perfectly fine to walk away from because Alexis did not seem into it (she wasn't, she was using Josh to make her BFF Roya jealous), Alexis somehow used her magic to detonate his dick like dynamite. The resulting explosion killed the boy and got blood everrrrrrrrywhere. Annnnnnnnd here's where I think literally every review that tries to claim it's "darkly funny" gets that claim.

The opening is memorable. It definitely gets your attention. Unfortunately Josh's death is what's wrong with the book. Alexis summons her friends, who are also magic, to help her clean up the mess, and while she thinks she's asking them to help her bring him back, the leader, Iris, is more into literally cleaning up the mess. So instead of trying to bring him back, Iris tries to clean up the mess and things go haywire. The body kinda disappears except for pieces of Josh, which the girls eventually put into bags and cart out of his room with them. No one at this prom party notices six people walking out with bags? Really?

Anyway. The rest of the book wants to wax poetic about the friendships and magic and getting Alexis to realize she's absolutely more than enough, just as she is, and that her friends love her for who she is. While also setting this story against the backdrop of covering up the accidental death (manslaughter? murder?) of a boy who didn't do anything to deserve to die. I think the author wanted Josh to be innocent because sometimes accidents happen to good or even okay people and that just sucks. But in order to make Alexis and her friends not seem like kind of terrible people (Alexis most of all), the story would work better if Josh had turned out to be a jackass. Alexis might be in shock for the entirety of the book and it might explain why it's so hard to connect with her. But she also seems way more upset about her crush not seeming to realize that hey, this could be True Love than the dude whose body parts she has to deal with.

The bonds of friendship and learning that your friends see you the way you see them (and quite possibly don't see themselves the way you do) is an important thing to read about. But it just feels weirdly timed to do it against a murdery backdrop.

There's a few moments where Iris seems like perhaps she's going to the dark side (not that we're told there's a dark side) and yet that literally never pays off so... eh.

I guess ultimately it's a case of characters who deserved a better framing device for the story? The murder/death really doesn't really fit the story as is written.


And prior to that I read All Eyes On Her which is about a girl who goes hiking with her boyfriend and hours later she returns home but he does not. Eventually she's accused of murder and the story is told from the viewpoints of a few people, but only our murder suspect at the very, very end. All our narrators are at least a little unreliable, not necessarily including the press coverage included. Most also have pieces to the puzzle and it's up to you to fit them together and figure out whether Tabby is guilty of anything more than bad luck.

I've read books with changing POV before and even some that do this same trick (Big Little Lies did a similar version) and it's always a crapshoot on whether or not it gives me a headache. This one did, but it also worked due to the puzzle piece aspect.

( spoilers baby. )

In case you were commenting and didn't want to see that.