April Reads + Reviews
I’m a Virgo so I’m too practical for romance and too grounded for fantasy.
I’m an overall harsh critic.
Buckle up.
First of all, I know this is late. Posting about books I read in April ON MAY 22nd?! SUZY!!!!
Second, this will be underwhelming. I had a slow book month.
But May? Buckle up for May. The reviews will CERTAINLY make up for the lack thereof for April.
Dandelion is Dead by Rosie Storey
2/5
2.5… maybe a 3. It gets points for originality, but not enough to make me look forward to reading each night. It felt like a big swing and a… foul? Not a total miss but enough to leave you feeling the potential without he satisfaction.
I’m still not sure how I feel about Dandelion Is Dead. It feels like a big swing that turns into a foul ball. There was real potential, and for a while I was hooked. Jake’s relationship with Dandelion, ambiguous and deeply personal, pulled me in. I kept waiting for the story to fully commit. Is this grief, love, psychosis?
The book follows Jake after Dandelion’s death as he tries to piece together who she was while dealing with his own inner turmoil. Ideas like projection, unresolved childhood wounds, and distorted memory are there, and Jake channeling his mother issues into Dandelion is compelling. But the emotional depth never feels earned. The buildup is too surface level, so the bigger revelations feel randomly thrown it.
Dandelion herself is hard to connect with. We are told who she is (fearless, reckless, deeply protective, loyal, highly intelligent), but never shown in a way that sticks. I understood her importance, but never felt it.
Poppy, on the other hand, felt real. Messy, inconsistent, and believable in her grief. She is what kept me reading.
This book had everything it needed to be powerful, an exploration of mental health, loss, and complicated relationships. It just never fully comes together.
Not a total miss, but not a hit either.
Evenings and Weekends by Oisín McKenna
3/5
I’m still trying to land on how I feel about this one. It’s one of those books where I can clearly see what it’s doing well, and I did appreciate a lot of it, but my actual reading experience felt more conflicted.
I really loved the structure. The short time span paired with multiple POVs worked so well. It added this layered, intimate understanding of each character and their relationships, and it did a beautiful job showing how quickly things can unravel just from small miscommunications. The dynamics felt very human. The insecurities, the second-guessing, the effort people put into making something work even when it clearly isn’t going to, that all felt very real and very honest.
But that same realism is also what made the book feel heavy and, at times, a little exhausting. I’m usually someone who wants more emotional depth in fiction, more humanity, more nuance. Here, though, it felt almost too close to real life. There wasn’t enough distance for me to escape into the story. Instead of being immersed, I found myself slightly stressed and, surprisingly, a bit bored by the constant cycle of miscommunication and tension.
And I can’t not mention the whale. That thread just felt relentlessly sad and, if I’m being honest, kind of unnecessary. It didn’t add enough for me to justify how emotionally draining it was, and I kept waiting for it to tie in more meaningfully than it did.
Something else that didn’t quite land for me was the way sexuality was portrayed across the characters. I’m very much someone who values and actively seeks out representation, and I’ve loved plenty of books with diverse, queer casts. In this case, though, it started to feel a bit contrived in a way that pulled me out of the story. It felt less like a natural reflection of people and more like the author was trying to make a point, which made it come across as slightly forced rather than organic.
All of that said, I did enjoy the writing itself. There’s a skill in how the author captures internal conflict and the nuances of a variety of relationships, and I can absolutely see why this book resonates with people. For me, though, it wasn’t something I looked forward to picking up at the end of the day. It left me feeling a little heavy, a little stuck, even with the small moments of hope woven throughout.
Overall, I’d say I admired this book more than I loved it.
2.5/5
I feel so indifferent about this book that I can’t even muster the passion to write about the things I enjoyed or the things I hated. It just… was
It gave the energy of The House in the Cerulean Sea in terms of endearing characters, but it seemed much more superficial and childlike in its main plot intent.
The romance was cheesy and I wanted to stick needles in my eyeballs.
It did its job: gave me a vanilla palate cleanser after a few denser books.
