#booktok hype

[reading-writing-rebellion]

Did We Read the Same Book: Fourth Wing and Plot Holes

I was woken off by the text message alert going off on my phone at 9:30 in the morning. Reasonable enough time, but it was also long before I wanted to be awake. It was one of my friends from university asking me if I had read Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros, and if I had, what did I think of it? Did it live up to the BookTok hype? The book was sitting on my bookshelf still unread. When I…

[desdasiwrites]

Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn't know if she would ever find out where it was or become part of it.

–Sally Rooney, Normal People

[fortunatefires]

[dawnstarranger]

I honestly believe that with a slight shift in PR, Drizzt would pick up so many new fans

[area51-escapee]

YOU hate booktok books because you can’t conceptualize what a fantasy is and think these readers need therapy and professional help for enjoying dark topics in explicit material even though it takes exactly .2 seconds to understand the difference between something that is interesting and exciting in fiction and something that would be deeply unpleasant in real life. I hate booktok books because they all feel like overhyped copy and pastes of one another, the amount of bigotry that goes unchecked in these stories is astounding, and I also get tired of this attitude that if something isn’t 🔥spicy🔥 it’s boring and not worth reading. We are not the same.

[didyousaykfc]

fourth wing is like divergent but typical ya fantasy with dragons 🫤 (derogatory)

[thebraxiatelcollection]

Any time I see 'Booktok' category collection in a bookstore or as a category section online, it makes me shrivel inside.

[loving-ricciardo]

y’all need to read the Fourth Wing

[kittensandforeheadkisses]

I remember hating caraval years ago why is rated 4 stars on my goodreads??????????????????????

[annafromuni]

Revisiting Fourth Wing - How Has My Opinion Changed

So I read and wrote up a review for Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros rather soon after its release in hopes to beat the hype and get a genuine reaction out of it. While I certainly enjoyed it, I have since seen a lot of responses and reviews of it and I can’t help but question my review and understanding of the novel. I figured, nearly two months after my initial read-though, now would be a good…

[rhisardthewizard]

In exchange for reading Fourth Wing, my buddy who recommended it is gonna read the first two books of the Cal Leandros series.

And whooooo boy, my love for Cal might be the ONLY thing stronger than my irritation with this book so far.

[fortunatefires]

why tf would I read modern straight smut when I can read historical fiction gay smut? Truly there is no contest

[bellamuertes]

i waited weeks to borrow the inheritance games audiobook from the library and now i'm a half hour in and already over it lmao

[lesamis]

have you watched the second season of shadow and bone? what are your thoughts?

oof, anon, i hope (and honestly kind of expect) that my opinion on this isn't given any weight at all. i'm genuinely not invested enough in the books or the show or the fandom to really have the right to voice much of an Opinion, but i did watch season 2! it made me feel a million different ways, but mostly it didn't make me feel anything, which still bothers me.

there's a special kind of frustration to watching something that you're convinced has the necessary ingredients for a good show, but simply doesn't land with you. i talked my long-suffering friend's ear off trying to figure out what that was as we were watching. what i ended up understanding is that if a studio wants to target as broad an audience as possible with an adaptation, they have literally no incentive to prioritize depth over breadth. combining two fundamentally different book series - both of which come with very large character casts and a ton of plot baggage! - was always going to be a bad choice from a storytelling perspective. the second season kind of drove home to me just how far they were taking the commitment to trying to preserve every storybeat despite having a cast far too large to do heavier plotlines justice, and having a timeline that doesn't accommodate some of the slower developments that made emotional beats land in the books.

what you end up with is a very well-designed (oh the embroidery!) and well-cast (daisy head emmy when!) show that dips into complex and worthwhile characters in the most shallow way possible. inej has one of the most horrific backstories in canon, and the lynchpin of her trauma is taken off the playing field in the blink of an eye to advance a different storyline. a character arc like hers, or genya's, deserves space and resonance. if you got up to get a drink twice throughout the show at the wrong moment, you could have literally missed the resolution of both, that's how little space they take up. given how good these actors' performances are, and how much affection there clearly is among the cast and crew for the project, the lack of substance in the storylines you can actually see in the show makes me feel a bit jaded and cynical.

very sorry to go off on a tangent there, anon! i'm not sure i gave you a very uplifting answer. the blowing-out-of-proportion of adaptations for the sake of hedging every possible bet was a sore point for me in the rings of power last year as well, so consider all of the above as a personal shortcoming much more than like, an Intelligent Critical Assessment :')

[tea-ink-pages]

b&n deciding not to stock author’s who aren’t proven bestsellers is a literal slap to the face for authors of color and other marginalized writers, debuts starting out, especially midlist poc authors who oftentimes don’t get major support from their publishers anyways...(major side eyeing to all the *white booktok faves right now)

this new strategy is so confusing, non-sensical and i can already see it happening when i’m browsing in store or ask if new release books are available. but the company has enough resources to keep stocking coll*en hoover, taylor jenkins reid, etc..this is majorly impacts what makes bookstore browsing fun...the discoverability of different or emerging writers you’d never heard of before

[softly-and-suddenly]

We need to start bullying people who organize their bookshelves by color actually