Jade wrote: ↑

Sat Jun 01, 2024 10:14 pm

This isn't MAF related but I didn't know where else to put this, someone on YouTube did a review of GW recently! I'm curious what y'all think of it, it's 25 minutes long and pretty positive so I thought you guys might like it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWqMb8dhRL8

I love this, I think she put to words some of my feelings about this book better than I could, or thoughts I hadn't even fully fleshed out yet. Namely that this book isn't exactly one thing, like where she mentions how there's an entire romance just kind of dropped in halfway through, which.. yeah, it's true lol. It's hard to describe WHAT this book is, because it's kind of a ghost story, but also an adventure book, and also a deeply character driven story centered around grief and mourning, and also a romance, and also steampunk, like for real lol. But somehow it all works really well imo, it combined a whole bunch of stuff but damn if it isn't a REALLY good book.

I liked that she kept coming back to "this is a LOT" too. That describes GW, or both books really, in every way. The size of the book, the number of words, the heaviness of the emotions, eeeeverything is a lot. That should be the subtitle of GW honestly, "it's a lot."

I saw you in the comments rofl. You only wrote two paragraphs, the self control must have been excruciating But that reminded me of another thing she said where Adelaide reads as ADHD, and specifically your kind. Which I think for Arty means she did a damn good job writing you in there but also it wasn't explicitly said in the book so it's cool she got that impression. She saw a lot of the stuff we did, like as much as we tease that this book is game of thrones we also talked about how having explicit knowledge of the afterlife (kind of) makes death easier to handle. The deaths themselves are brutal sometimes, but then we remember oh, there is an afterlife and it's been confirmed, so this is all temporary and you will meet again. And that was I think before There Are No Goodbyes came out. Really cool review. I'm surprised that someone willingly picked up a book that long but the review was really fun to wathc.

Yeah her reading Adelaide as ADHD was a high point for me and also because I have it the same way she (the reviewer) does, and I also had the same experience of wondering if it was legit because mine wasn't the same as the way I see it in the movies or like the "popular" version of ADHD. So, it's cool to see it put into the book and not stated explicitly, but other people who are the same immediately point and go "oh yeah, that's what that is, I know that." It's validating!

YEAH though. GW is a lot of story, a lot of genres, a lot of emotion, a lot of themes, a mix of a lot of different worldbuilding things (and a lot of worldbuilding) and it WORKS.