Ruby Knoebel

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This is one of the most AMAZING books I've ever read!!! I love Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies! Each story teaches a lesson about personhood and relationships in such a beautiful way. Lahiri expertly presents each one; she never makes the mistake of directly stating something that should be shown. I'm excited to read The Namesake after enjoying Interpreter of Maladies so much! I would highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading!!

I had to read this book for school, so perhaps I'm just not the target audience of this book and I was subjected to reading it. However, I am generally good at separating my personal opinions of the subject of a work from the quality of the work; even when I do not enjoy something, I can recognize when it is praiseworthy. This book, however, is not praiseworthy. Aside from the plot (because if I had read the plot, I wouldn't have picked this book up if I didn't have to), this book uses simple writing and a predictable storyline. Van Pelt allows the reader to know the major plot twist of the book very early into the story, yet she drags out the characters not knowing to the point that it is tedious to read. This book shows zero mastery of any literary technique: the descriptions are weak, I can't remember any figurative language (it may have existed, but it certainly didn't stand out), and there were no parts of this text that stood out as intuitive or beautiful. There are parts of this that people may consider "cute" or "heartwarming," and I can understand why some people may find enjoyment in a "cozy" read like this, but I can think of tons of cozy books that are written much better than this, so I cannot understand how this book became so popular! At the baseline, I would've forgotten this book was made for adults if it hadn't been for the "adult" language and minor sexual references. Other than that, the demographic of this book seems like sixth graders. I was not surprised to find that this was Van Pelt's first book. I support people beginning at a humble starting place and growing from there. But what made this woman's beginning work stand out among the countless more talented authors who will never create best-sellers? Congrats to Shelby Van Pelt on her resounding success. I wouldn't recommend this book (neither would anyone else I know at my school, and we were all required to read it), but perhaps there's something I'm just missing.

If I could give this a zero, I would, but zero is not an option, so I'm giving this a one. This is one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Even for a cringey Christmas movie that passes a night well, it was bad. I guess that's my fault for expecting anything different. I thought that it would be of a pretty bad quality but still enjoyable, but I was so distracted by the bad acting and script that I just could not enjoy it. Not a single character in this movie was realistic. That's fine; that can be good sometimes. It was not good in this case. Everything was so over the top. These people are extremely unrealistic. The only character that I liked was Lindsay Lohan's dad, and even he disappointed me in the end when he said that he was glad to see the love interest. I was like "no you aren't; you don't even KNOW him!!!!" These characters had no depth. Maybe the laughingstock of a boyfriend could have been given some motivation for how he was, but instead, he was left as a running joke, one which was not even funny, by the way. Plot: This movie is supposedly a rom-com, though I found it neither funny nor romantic. All of the sudden, Lindsay Lohan and her love interest like each other, and there was just no buildup. If I didn't know the genre and watch the trailer, I may have even been surprised. It is not a cute couple. Everything was extremely shallow. Costuming: I could not stop cringing at their terrible haircuts. One of the ending scenes at the Christmas event had Lindsay Lohan in this okay, kind-of-pretty red dress, and then she put on this HIDEOUS golden jacket. It was actually distracting how poorly this outfit went together and how out of place it was. I was tremendously disappointed by this movie. I would not recommend watching this. The only good scene of the entire movie was Lindsay Lohan singing "Jingle Bell Rock" as a reference to Mean Girls. I have a theory that Netflix is aiming to include only Netflix-produced movies. BEWARE, EVERYONE! If this is the goal of Netflix, we need more more like The Irishman, To All the Boys I've Loved Before, Ozark, and Miss Americana, along with many of their other documentaries and docuseries, which I have found interesting.