teagrl

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders was a DNF, but I did get all the way through Soji Shimada's Murder in the Crooked House. I picked it up mostly for the eponymous house, but didn't feel like it lived up to the hype - the house was weird, but I wanted it to be weirder and more of a character (as in Ayatsuji's Bizarre House Mysteries). The detective, Kyoshi Mitarai, is an interesting character, but doesn't show up until the third arc, and is filtered through his assistant because he already knows/suspects everything and the assistant is not very interesting. The solution is extremely clever, but I feel like my reaction was lacking due to the set-up and execution.

Deeplight by Francis Hardinge got hyped on tumblr, so I gave it a shot - YA set in an island chain previously haunted by eldritch cephalopods with humans harvesting their corpses for powers. Great worldbuilding, but the central relationship between the protagonist and his "friend" are so blatantly abusive that I got frustrated with how long it takes the protagonist to realize this and do something about it. At least there was no overt romance plot.

I'm increasingly coming to the realization that most recent YA is not for me - which is a little frustrating, since older works that were originally JF but got rebranded as YAF still work fine, and I can't tell if something's changed over the intervening years, it's me, or some combination of the two.