Anonymous

I'm not sure what to think of this story.

Reviewed: 01-19-24

Until it got to chapter 20 or so, I was really enjoying this book. It's cute, clever, and generally entertaining. But the minute the story turned into the protagonist blaming himself for everything that happened, instead of delving into the true messiness of everyone's involvement in the events of the story, I started to lose interest and get angry with the narrator for his self-pity and with the author for their implication that accountability only falls on the narrator's shoulders.

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Disappointingly Anachronistic

Reviewed: 09-16-22

I really liked the first Aristotle and Dante book, so I was hoping this one would be just as good.

Alas, I don't think it is.

Doing the math, these characters are only slightly younger than I (I graduated from high school in 1986 and from college in 1990), and even taking into account that the book's set in Texas and I grew up in Illinois and went to college in Missouri, this book comes across as being set at least ten years later than it claims to be. Some examples:

- Even about a decade later, in _To Wong Foo_, Noxeema uses the terms "transvestite" and "transsexual" and not "transgender."

- While AIDS actually *was* a pandemic, as they say in the book, I never heard anyone call it that back then; it was either the "AIDS epidemic" or the "AIDS crisis."

- Classmates from Chicago and St. Luis were still using "Black" instead of "African-American."

- The boys' relationships with each other and with their friends have a storybook quality to them (and this is coming from someone who didn't run into a lot of non-acceptance when he came out around the same time in a small town in Missouri).

- These are some pretty eloquent teenagers (and I have some old college papers from the time to compare it to--and I was an English major, so I did a lot of writing).

Plot-wise, the book dragged (no pun intended) for me. A lot of words for not much happening. Ari doesn't seem to evolve much, and it feels like there isn't much Dante at all.

I really, really wanted to love this book, but I just can't.

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Decent story, so-so performance

Reviewed: 08-05-20

I would rate this title higher, but the narrator seriously needs to learn how to pronounce certain words like "cavalry" (which she invariably pronounces as "calvary" in this and other Wearing the Cape books).

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Is there an unabridged version?

Reviewed: 05-28-20

If this was available as an unabridged version (I have the book, and there's so much good stuff left out), I'd give this five stars instead of four.

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4 people found this helpful

Blech.

Reviewed: 04-03-20

Ending is unfaithful to the original book and tries too hard to be like the 2017 movie. I also cannot believe that no one in this adaptation can properly pronounce the name of the process Dragomiroff.

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Not bad, but not that great.

Reviewed: 03-04-19

The story itself isn't bad, but the narrator mispronounces a whole slew of fairly common words, which is jarring.

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It's okay.

Reviewed: 02-19-19

I really liked the first two books, but Klune spends way too much of this book on sex scenes. I know I'm going to be called a prude for writing that, but I'm just not interested in reading a sex scenes unless I'm reading porn....

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Horribly dull

Reviewed: 01-29-19

The adult Eva sounds like she's from New Jersey. The story is boring, and I feel no empathy for the characters. I enjoyed the first two. This one is terrible.

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1 person found this helpful

Enjoyable story, less than average reader

Reviewed: 01-16-18

The story is enjoyable, and overall the reader does an adequate job. However, some glaring errors creep in, errors that would be easily fixed if the reader had read the story through before recording it, which apparently the reader did not. Thorough reading and research would make it clear that Renaissance V is "Renaissance Vee" not "Renaissance Five" because the world's full name is "Renaissance Vector." More unforgivable is calling Denebs Drei and Vier "Dray" and "Veer." Drei and Vier are German for "three" and "four," and are correctly pronounced "dry" and "fear."

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