Whew, I have finally made it through this torturous book. I know so many people loved An Anonymous Girl, but I found it to be pretty awful from beginning to end, and I'll try to put into words why.

First, the story is so silly. In it, Jessica signs up for a psych study administered by Dr. Shields to make some money. But then Dr. Shields starts asking odd questions and trying to take the study a little too far. Oooh scary, right? Except if Jessica finds the study strange, she could just stop participating. And she had multiple chances to do so, but due to some toxic co-dependent relationship that she forms with Dr. Shields, instead felt compelled (by herself) to keep going. I was just baffled.

Then there is the stilted and awkward writing style. It's written as first person narration, alternating between Jessica and Dr. Shield's point of view. But Dr. Shield's voice is so odd, because she doesn't refer to herself as "I" or "me", but rather as if she is observing herself with an out-of-body experience. She's so over-the-top with hints of menace and impending doom, I expect her to start cackling.

"You will be stripped bare. You will need to summon skills and strength you may not have known you possessed in the coming weeks."

But she's just talking about a psych study that Jessica can leave at anytime. In the end, Dr. Shields gives a great impersonation as a robotic cartoon villain.

Then we have Jessica's voice. She's constantly second-guessing herself and agonizing over her actions and decisions, but she doesn't gain any insight from all that thinking. She's a people-pleaser and seems hell-bent on pleasing the strange psychologist she just met, even when any regular person's weird-dar would have gone off. Her narration includes so many irrelevant details that it reads like filler the authors included to pad out the book, such as descriptions of random people on the bus, her outfits, the minty-ness of her breath, etc.

Then as the story continues and Jessica realizes that something is off, she doesn't stop participating. Rather, she doubles-down.

"If I can't get out of this trap by pulling away, maybe I need to lean into it."

What?! And as it becomes clear what Dr. Shield's motivations are, they makes no sense too. This is not how people would act in those situations.

In the end, I couldn't find a single thing I enjoyed in this book. The over-the-top story is silly and nonsensical. I can't understand why any of the characters would act the way they do. The writing style is fussy, self-important, and awkward. And the constant foreshadowing of scary things to come with no payoff made the whole thing feel like I'm reading a farce.

Readaroo Rating: 1 star

An American Sickness is the most eye-opening book I've read so far this year. It takes the reader through how insurance, hospitals, doctors, big pharma, and medical device manufactures, among others, all prey on the system and the patients to wring every possible cent of profit from American healthcare. Though it is the ill and the poor who suffer immediately from this, really every person who pays taxes is subsidizing this greed in the end.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part, which covers the first two-thirds of the book, takes a detailed look at all that is going wrong with the American healthcare system. The second part contains suggestions for what people can do to push back and combat these wrongs. For such a dry topic, this book was surprisingly easy to read and digest, partly due to the copious amount of real-life examples.

A word of warning though: the greed detailed in this book is often hard to read and swallow. For example, medical devices are not subjected to the same rigorous FDA regulations that drugs are, so patients are the ones who suffer when devices implanted into their bodies fail because they haven't gone through adequate testing. Another example is that doctors can employ extenders, so that if you are in surgery, you can be billed at full price by both the overseeing doctor as well as his assistant. Another example shows drug companies exuberantly raising prices year after year, and paying off other drug companies to not manufacture a generic so that they can retain their monopoly.

My one complaint about this book is that it didn't go far enough in talking about how we can fix the system. Every other developed country in the world is better off in terms of healthcare than we are. I want to know more about how they are able to achieve that, but the book only touched upon some of those points instead of providing a more thorough juxtaposition of how their system works versus ours.

There is so much wrong with the American healthcare system that I'm not sure we can ever as a country pull ourselves out of the mess that we've landed in. The entire system is fundamentally broken. At times, reading this book made me feel sick. I can't believe we've come so far from patient-first healthcare to a world now where profit is king. The currently profit-driven healthcare isn't sustainable, and the country is already buckling under its tremendous cost. Though this book doesn't provide all the answers, it does help me better understand what is happening to healthcare in the U.S., and what I can do as an individual in a vast system.

Readaroo Rating: 4 stars

Wow, what an exciting end to an amazing journey!

In Winter, the last installment of the Lunar Chronicles, all our favorite characters are back, along with a new story line following Princess Winter in a retelling of the classic fairy tale "Snow White". Winter's individual story is my favorite of the series. She's sweet and also a bit crazy, and there's just something so lovable about her. I adore her romance with Jacin, her stoic guard who tries so hard to protect her and not get involved, while she tries to thaw him out.

While the individual stories in each book based on the classic fairy tales are great, my favorite thing about the series has always been the overarching story to overthrow the evil queen. In this final book, everything comes together, and we finally get the epic conclusion I've been waiting for. This book is action packed, with so many heart-stopping scenes that there is never a null moment. Even though it's quite long at 800+ pages, it didn't feel long to me while reading. The pacing is spot-on, and the book seamlessly switches between the different characters's story lines.

I'm amazed at how Marissa Meyer was able to weave four separate fairy tales into one cohesive narrative, while staying true to the spirit of each fairy tale but also adding her own take. Each story is slotted perfectly into the Lunar Chronicles universe, helping propel the overall narrative forward. I haven't read a series that comes across as so epic, cohesive, and well-plotted in a long time, possibly not since Harry Potter!

*sob* I'm so sad I've reached the end of the series. It's been a fun and thrilling ride, and I'm so glad I was a part of it.

Readaroo Rating: 4 stars

I'll be honest, this was a little disappointing for me. Fairest is a companion book to the Lunar Chronicles that tells the backstory of the evil Queen Levana. I thought it would explain why Levana became so evil and help me understand her motivations, but instead, it just shows that she was selfish, mean, and manipulative since she was young.

Levana in this story is pretty much the textbook definition of a psycho--unable to feel empathy for others or consider things from anyone else's perspective. She seems to think the world revolves around her and her feelings of pity and importance. Yes, bad things happened to her as a child, but bad things also happen to other people and they don't turn into evil rulers, so I don't buy it.

While this book was a quick read and there's nothing wrong with the writing, I feel it just didn't add anything to the series for me. I was looking for insight, and this didn't deliver it. I would say read this if you are curious about Levana's background. Otherwise, you can safely skip this book and not miss anything in the Lunar Chronicles.

Readaroo Rating: 2 stars

Cress is the third book in the Lunar Chronicles, this time giving us a retelling of the classic fairy tale "Rapunzel". Our heroine, Cress, has been locked up alone in a satellite for seven years doing the evil queen's bidding with her genius hacking skills. This book also picks up right where the previous one left off, so we see all the story lines merge together when the crew from the first two books attempt a daring rescue of Cress, only to have things go horribly awry.

This book is so fun and entertaining! The action starts immediately, and doesn't stop for the whole book. Even though we are going back and forth between many different people's perspectives (hence the ever-growing length of each subsequent book in the series), it doesn't slow down the momentum at all. I pretty much just inhaled this book without pause.

And everything that happens in this book has a purpose, with all the action building towards a coherent narrative, which is one of my favorite things about this series. There's no meandering around while the author tries to figure out where they are going plot-wise; there's no padding the book with filler to fluff out the pages. The plot comes across as clear, concise, and well-thought-out, so there's never a dull moment.

Cress is my favorite heroine so far. Even though she hasn't had interactions with people her entire life, and she's a little shy and fearful, she still comes across as likable and believable, which is a huge improvement over Cinder and Scarlet in their respective books. Unfortunately, we still get a little bit of Scarlet acting crazy and lashing out in this book, when it would be more prudent to just keep silent. And Cinder and Kai still have communication issues, dancing around each other hemming and hawing for pages on end when a straightforward sentence or two could have cleared up any misunderstandings. They try my patience, but thankfully there are only a few such scenes.

For me, this book has finally reached the potential that I feel it has been building towards all this time with the previous books. At this point, the story has gotten so good that it's just riveting! I can't wait to continue reading and find out how they ultimately lay the smack down on the evil queen, save the world, and get their happy endings (since these are fairy tales, after all).

Readaroo Rating 4 stars

In Buzz, biologist Thor Hanson takes us on a journey of bees, starting with their evolutionary beginning from wasps, to their diet and social structure, to their symbiotic relationship with flowers and vegetables that has exploded our world in color, fragrance, and taste. He talks about the bond between humans and bees, reminding us that we have relied on bees since the dawn of human evolution.

There are so many interesting tidbits and facts in this book. For example, there is evidence showing that humans evolved our large brains partly due to the consumption of nutrient and calorie rich honey. Another interesting fact is that there is a bird that will guide humans to beehives, resulting in the bird being given the most fitting scientific name of indicator indicator.

This book also talks about Colony Collapse Disorder, the possible reasons that might have contributed to it, and what people can do to help lessen the impact and save the bees. When we rely on bees for so much of our food (the list of foods requiring bee pollination is truly eye-opening), it's important that we take bee conservation seriously, and this book is a good starting point for that journey.

I went into this book knowing almost nothing about bees, and came away with so much interesting and relevant information. I highly recommend this book if you are curious about bees and want to learn more. For me, I will surely look at bees in a new light, seeking them out so that I can observe them with my own eyes as the wondrous and fascinating creatures that they are.

Readaroo Rating: 4 stars

Scarlet is the second book in the Lunar Chronicles, this time giving us a retelling of the classic fairy tale "Little Red Riding Hood". Our new heroine, Scarlet, is looking for her grandmother after she disappears one day. She is intrigued by a mysterious fighter named Wolf, who may be able to help her find where her grandmother is, but only if she can trust him. This book also picks up right where the first one left off with Cinder's story, and and we get to see how the two story lines eventually tie together.

A lot of what I loved about the first book is back. The story continues to be fascinating, with multiple separate plot lines moving forward at a brisk pace and weaving together cohesively. The action never stops, and I felt pulled along with it, immersed in a wondrous journey.

And yet, what I didn't like about the first book is here in this one too. Scarlet is written as overly emotional, paranoid, and accusatory. Her way of finding her grandmother is to go up to random strangers and yell at them to give her grandmother back. I'm not sure this is the best course of action when it comes to getting a loved one back from kidnappers, but Scarlet seems to think it is. She's also stubborn and rather stupid, so she charges into situations without thinking first and inevitably ends up in trouble.

Thankfully, Cinder is better. She is able to talk in this book, no longer stuttering and hemming and hawing through her day, but rather making calm decisions and taking charge. It's so refreshing to see, and is a nice break from the first book version of herself, and the current version of Scarlet. So far, this series has real trouble coming up with good strong female characters; instead, they have been weak, confused, paranoid, and emotional. I hope this gets better, because it really takes away from what otherwise would have been a stellar story.

I'm going to continue with this series. I hold out hope that the main characters will get less annoying as the series goes on. And I'm still really enjoying the universe and the story line. We are gearing up for what must surely be an epic showdown between good and evil, and I can't wait.

Readaroo Rating: 3 stars