I'm going to go ahead and DNF this book.
It took me a few listens to even get past the first couple chapters, I kept feeling like I was joining a series in the middle and must have missed previous books or something. Then I jumped into some reviews written by own-voices readers and was disappointed to see that this book contains some racism and homophobia, so I'm going to go ahead and pass.

Unfortunately, this one was. DNF due to harmful representations of POC characters. I had high hopes for this one going in but it perpetuates stereotypes that are prevalent in modern society while also taking place in an alternate USA. I would not recommend this book.

I flat out refuse to read this book based off of the early reviews. The author clearly chose to write anti-Black scenes, and did not to rectify said scenes or even acknowledge the harm of those scenes. Hard Pass.

I saw the rating on this one but wanted to go ahead a give it a try anyways because surely it can’t be that bad. Well unfortunately I DNF’ed at about 50% after one of the teen MCs does what felt like a super random dance at a strip club. The whole book felt a little all over the place and even at 50% the pieces didn’t feel like they were coming together. I didn’t click with any characters enough to push through to figure what happened. Unfortunately, I can’t recommend this one.

There was a lot of cool writing in this book and the author is local to me, but I'm afraid I have to agree with a lot of other reviewers and say that there were just too many problematic elements in this book for me to recommend it.

Thank you so much for the review copy!

Book Report for We All Fall Down by Rose Szabo

Cover Story: Sinners and Saints
BFF Charms: Yay x3, Natalie Imbruglia
Swoonworthy Scale: 7
Talky Talk: There Be Monsters
Bonus Factors: LGBTQ+ Representation, Magic?
Anti-Bonus Factor: Abuse
Relationship Status: More Than Friends

Content Warning: Although there aren’t direct examples of abuse in We All Fall Down, there are hints at past trauma that might be triggering for some readers.

Cover Story: Sinners and Saints
Having read the book, I know who these folks are and how they relate to each other and the elements in their various quadrants. If I hadn’t read the book, though, I’d be totally drawn in by wanting to know more about each of them.

The Deal:
If you need River City, it’s there for you. If you don’t, you might never know about it, as it exists completely separate from the rest of the United States and somewhat outside the realm of reality. The city used to be run by a king, whose relationship with his wife was vital to the existence of magic there. But a revolution led to the rise of the University, which is more focused on science and “helping” those people whom society calls monsters.

But there’s change on the horizon for River City, thanks to a new king experimenting with magic, a Maiden discovering themselves, a hero doing all she can to deny what she is, and a monster who is nothing of the sort—even though none of them know the part they’re destined to play.

BFF Charm: Yay x3, Natalie Imbruglia
Three of the four main characters of We All Fall Down (Jesse, Jack, the nameless girl) are delightful individuals. They’re folks figuring out who they are—and in Jack’s situation, not realizing they’re lying to themselves about who they are—and magical, all, even if they’re not literally magic. I’d be honored to be friends with any of them, although it might be harder to break through Jack’s mental walls and the nameless girl’s mistrust of regular humans.

David, on the other hand, is someone I’d struggle to be friends with. At first, he seemed like a decent dude with more than a passing interest in magic. But then he changed. He got a taste of power and leaned a little too hard into it. I have hopes that he’ll course correct in the next book, but for now I’m being wary.

Swoonworthy Scale:
The relationships in We All Fall Down are complicated. The couples all have a lot of things to figure out before they get to “secure” ‘ship territory. But I have hope that things are going to work out right, if not well, for everyone.

Talky Talk: There Be Monsters
In my review for Szabo’s debut novel, What Big Teeth, I described their writing as dream-like, “but not in the fuzzy, half-remembered sense; rather, Szabo’s writing is clear and concise, but the story itself seems to be set slightly aside from reality.” This description continues to fit the writing in We All Fall Down, which is set—literally—outside of “normal” reality while not in a separate fantasy world. It’s a fascinating idea that a city could be lurking just outside of our periphery, thanks to a conjunction of elements that makes it possible for magic to exist there, and only there. Szabo writes about the city as though they’ve been there, making it feel just that much more real than your standard fantasy city. And having read both of their novels now, I’d believe it.

(As an aside, this book reminded me a lot of the irreverence of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels and certain modern world fantasy vibes of my very favorite Dragon Age fanfiction, Heart-Eyes Emoji. Be warned—the fic’s not a complete work, and if you dive into it, you might find yourself in the same position I am, pining for a satisfying completion (heh).)

Bonus Factor: LGBTQ+ Representation
Most, if not all, of the four main characters in We All Fall Down are queer. Jack is a lesbian, Jesse is gender queer (quite literally; they can transform their body from male to female and stop in between), the nameless daughter is a woman (although she outwardly presents as a male). I’m not entirely sure of David’s sexuality, but he doesn’t seem to mind the attention of a variety of different people. And none of them are treated differently for the way they are, at least when it comes to their gender and sexuality. (There are other reasons they’re treated differently, however, so don’t think that it’s all sunshine and rainbows for this crew.) Although it has its fair share of societal issues, River City seems like a pretty great place, at least for the “normality” of queer culture there.

Bonus Factor: Magic?
River City is host to a variety of magical creatures and magic wielders, but it’s not clear if the magic there is the “out of nowhere” kind or due to a strange element or the physical (in the sense of physics) properties of energy in that particular place. The things people can do with the magic there are certainly fantastical—shooting fire from their hands; healing all sorts of ailments including severed limbs, etc.—and it’s interesting to think that there could be pockets of “magic” out there just waiting to be tapped into.

Anti-Bonus Factor: Abuse
There’s an underlying uneasiness to We All Fall Down, in part caused by certain characters’ memories of past trauma. None of it is explained in graphic detail, but it’s clear that our heroes haven’t had the easiest of lives.

Relationship Status: More Than Friends
We had a strange first date, Book, but I’m glad we ot together. And after thinking about it for a couple of days, I think there’s some strong chemistry between us. Let’s see where this goes, OK?

I was anticipating a lot this book, but I had a few issues with this one. It had an intriguing world tho.

I’m sorry, but can I be frank? This book is a mess. It’s a melange of great ideas and quality ingredients but it’s like the chef had no idea how to cook whatever dish they set out to cook.

All sorts of LGBTQIA+ representation? Check. Knowing exactly how to add it in, how to handle it, and when to stop beating your readers over the head with the metaphors and allegories? Not so much.

Gentrification, class divide, and socioeconomic commentary? Got it! Only… we’re gonna add in a whole bunch of nebulous conspiracy theory stuff to it! Just so it doesn’t feel the same as every other book with the same beats.

Corrupt police forces and police violence targeting members of marginalized communities… but add “monsters” into the equation? Sure. Let’s drive that metaphor into the ground too.

Most of all… let’s just use this whole book to rely on coincidence and the notion of fate to keep two of the most important characters in the book from meeting until just about the very end, leaving a reader like me wondering why I even started this book and why I didn’t just stop reading at 55% when I first contemplated DNFing it. Frankly, I’m proud of me for finishing it.

I don’t recommend it, and I don’t think I’ll touch the second half of the duology. I’m sorry, but Szabo can and has done better.

Thanks to NetGalley, Macmillan Children’s, and FSG for granting me early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review, Per personal policy this review will not appear on any social media or bookseller website so as not to affect book sales in any negative manner.

I DNF'd at about 30%. While I think this book definitely has an audience - it just wasn't for me personally. I just found I wasn't really invested in the characters' stories.

I remember that many readers did not get along with the bizarre, fairytale writing style of Szabo’s debut, What Big Teeth, but I liked that novel for its lyricism and ominousness, so I figured I would be adequately prepared for We All Fall Down. But the blurry quality that made What Big Teeth feel dark and magical only made We All Fall Down flat and difficult to follow. Additionally, as many other readers have mentioned, the frequent misgendering and racial profiling of the main characters was confusing and uncomfortable.

At first, the premise strongly appealed to me. I love urban fantasy, or really any story that melds the real world with fantastical elements, so I was curious about River City, a place where disappearing traces of magic butt up against research and technological advancement and all sorts of normalized weirdness—monsters? a King and a Maiden?—that happens in between. However, the story never explored this mythology to a satisfying extent. One character, Astrid, is a former witch, but her POV remained limited, and the other POVs were too young to explain it any better.

Speaking of the other POVs—I loved that, at face value, they provided so much representation. Almost all of these young characters confront their gender identity and/or presentation at some point—Jesse, who was assigned male at birth, even has the magical ability to swap their gender. David, too, deals with his self-image as a nerdy yet physically large Black man, as does Turing, an eight-armed girl who is often dismissed as a monster due to her appearance. I wish both of them had been developed earlier on in the book, especially since other characters kept misgendering Turing and Jesse? Or the narration misgendered them? While it fits that they were discovering their identities, the mid-sentence pronoun switches made me feel like I was misidentifying them the entire time.

*warning: spoilers ahead*

As for the most troubling part of the book…Jack clearly has a complicated relationship with her sister, but it is no excuse for pinning her sister’s murder of two policemen on 100% innocent David. Jack has power within the police department, and David is already under suspicion simply for his size and skin color (even though he’s literally a high-performing professor at the local university), yet Jack is naive enough to believe that David’s reputation will clear him of the crime. Even when Astrid confronts Jack about her carelessness, Jack insists on protecting her guilty sister. Worse, Jack faces no repercussions—the hazy prophecy that rules the city even classifies her as the Hero, and somehow David’s untamed magic makes him the new Villain?

We All Fall Down would have been a lot better if it was nicer to its characters and its plot.

Maybe I was just in a book slump, but I found this book hard to follow and difficult to get into. It was very character driven and had a lot of alternating POVs, which was good, but it didn't hook me or keep me too interested.

This the best cover art of 2022 and my least favorite book of the year. I am very sad because I loved Szabo's debut, What Big Teeth, but I really cannot put up with the book's constant misgendering, character devices that essentially argue body=gender, and the perpetuation of racial prejudices/systemic oppressions by and of characters within this book. As a reader in 2022, I think it is fair to expect better from a book that was touted as a queer/inclusive fantasy. This could have been the next Six of Crows but I am deeply disappointed with the execution.

This book was really great. It was definitely a character building and character driven book. I enjoyed the writing style and the creativity with each individual characters it made me think of people in my own life, and myself, who have gone through similar experiences with discovering their truest self. I am definitely going to be reading the next book and think this is an incredible book to introduce to teens to help them see themselves or see others for who they truly are and how to accept their differences and uniqueness.
Thank you to the author and publisher for a copy of this ARC and audiobook!

A very interesting premise but difficult to get into. Either due to complicated world building or the shifting povs, the plot was very hard to follow, making the book difficult to get into. That being said, readers looking for a queer fantasy may be willing to persevere and enjoy.

Magic is real, but controlled by the king and queen - and the queen is dead, the king is missing. Their children live, but no one knows it. Magic is fading without a king and queen to channel new magic to the world, and science cannot recreate it. But even when it works, it’s regional. This is the world of We All Fall Down. Magic exists, but is limited to River City - but it’s running out.

Join a diverse group of characters as they learn about themselves, their abilities, and their relationships to each other. None of them know who they are - most especially the daughter of the king and queen, necessary for the revival of magic, but unknown even to herself. Scientists and witches abound and interact, as do commoners and royalty. Old friends cross paths unknown, then find each other - only to find they’ve changed - or have they?

If you enjoy seeing magic interact with science, science used to codify and master magic, you’ll enjoy this novel.

I received an ARC of We All Fall Down months ago and watched with growing trepidation as the average rating on Goodreads plummeted as time went on. So I was wary when I finally got around to reading it, but not to the point that I was going to let it color my own reading experience of what from the synopsis reads as a fresh take on urban fantasy. Unfortunately, what could have been fresh was barely explored, as its instead fixates on a series of murders of police officers in a poorly constructed landscape of an urban fantasy. Which… leads to an entirely unnecessary bag of worms, and the main point of criticism for this book.

But before we get into the questionable thematic elements of the message here, the structure of We All Fall Down has enough flaws on its own. I’m not sure if I found the story to be uninteresting because the narrative was so jumbled I couldn’t follow closely enough to keep anything straight, or if just nothing meaningful happened. The characters themselves attach themselves to each other so quickly and with a bizarre intensity I had trouble believing any of the relationships - romantic or otherwise. It all feels a bit like a fever dream, and even the seemingly good-intentioned effort at inclusivity doesn’t actually ever depict a non-binary character in as many words. The nature of the rapidly switching narratives and frankly baffling decisions each character makes doesn’t help establishing a basis for the most unsympathetic characters I’ve ever seen plopped into the landscape of a vague urban fantasy world.

All that aside, the biggest issue most readers are fixating on - and justifiably so - is the actions of the character Jack, a white woman who purposefully frames an innocent man of color in order to protect her sister from the scrutiny of the police. A sister who, mind you, is an actual serial murderer. These are the kind of actions you ascribe to a villain in a story, not a POV character that gets a love interest, and is depicted as a mentor figure, and is unquestionably supposed to be a protagonist. It’s baffling really, that anyone would think to include this kind of plot point and not expect the appropriate amount of backlash.

I have a hard time reading anything in We All Fall Down as inherently malicious, but it does read as tone-deaf at times. And with the actual interesting urban fantasy elements most unexplored in favor of fixating on a cast of characters that range from uninteresting to actively hateable, I just don’t see this book as one that’s going to resonate with a lot of readers.

Thank you to the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing an ARC via NetGalley for an honest review.

We All Fall Down was the most frustrating book I’ve read recently. From the blurb to the cover, everything looked like this would be amazing, and it had me really excited before I started reading. There was so much potential! I hadn’t read urban fantasy in a while and was in the mood for it when I decided I’d pick this up. I have to say, as I started, I really loved the various aspects, from the characters to the universe and I was curious and wanted to read more and see what would happen next. The first chapters were intriguing for sure!

The amount of potential definitely made the disappointment greater, when I started seeing more flaws than things to enjoy. I am still salty about the fact that such an amazing premise lead absolutely nowhere. There was foundation for great characters, but they quickly became boring and unloveable. The world-building, which first had me curious, then led to me being confused and lost. Everything suddenly got very messy and clunky, with so many changes in the points of view, changes of location and nothing to hold on to… I didn’t understand much of what was going on, the writing didn’t provide any answers or really anything to connect with. I felt thrown in a story that was confusing and a complete mess. I wouldn’t be able to tell you much about the plot, to be honest.

There is, at the core of the book, a story about the murder of two policemen, the investigation that follows, and the alleged implication of a Black character, who we know is innocent. With that comes the theme of racism and discrimination in the justice system, but it was dealt with in a way that made absolutely no sense to me and that was, at best, cringy. I’m appalled that this went through editing, that people read this and didn’t think that something was wrong with this plot and the power imbalance between the characters. I am so confused about this whole thing and the choices made.

Another aspect that bothered me a lot was how the queer characters were written, especially Jesse, the non-binary character. Once again, the initial introduction of this character had me really interested, and I first thought that there would be some kind of growth and that this would lead to something. But no. I hated that pronouns and gender were constantly changing because of body changes, and prompted by these changes. This whole thing really enforced the idea that body equals gender, that when the body changes, the pronouns automatically change too. I get that labels can be confusing, that gender isn’t something that has to be set in stone, and that as queer people we all have different visions of what gender is and how it works, but what was bothering here was more the idea behind it and the way the queer characters didn’t own their identity. They were all dependent on others’ assumptions, and never claimed anything for themselves. They never get to be anything more than other people’s perception of them.

And that happens way too much in this book. Because mostly what I hated was that the characters—who had terrible things happen to them and who ended up being targets of terrible discrimination—just… let things happen to themselves. And everyone else around let it happen as well. The whole cast of characters completely fell apart after the first few chapters and their “development” was a mess. Never once does the writing condemn the terrible things that happen, the characters who are guilty don’t get punished, it’s like the author didn’t understand the implications of their own story.

Sadly, this book just fell flat in so many ways, and by that I mean pretty much all of them. And that’s really too bad because the premise and ideas were exciting, but I wish we’d gotten something less offensive and better developed. Truly, this was such a betrayal after the cover and the blurb. I expected a lot better.

Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan for this eARC!

Content warnings: racism, homophobia, transphobia, violence, kidnapping, abuse.

2.5 Stars

Thank you to Netgalley, BookishFirst, and the publisher for an arc of this book.

This is a dark fantasy split between four pov's of people in a previously magical city. The magic has run out, and the new cycle needs to be reborn with a new king and a new maiden to have magic back. Meanwhile, cops and scientists discriminate against "monsters" throughout the city.

I was so excited for this book. I loved Rose Szabo's debut horror, What Big Teeth, and love the cover of this one. Unfortunately, this book fell really short for me.

While the world-building was decent and the plot was interesting, if a little predictable, the main problem for me was the police profiling, racism, and constant misgendering of characters.

One of the MC's is definitely nonbinary, possibly genderfluid. They can change their body to be more masculine or feminine with magic. They are definitely discovering themselves, so I understand the switching pronouns in their pov...but other characters were constantly calling them a boy and other terms even after it was clear they were not.

Another character is a trans-femme. The whole book she is referred to as a boy and a man and he he he and I flinched every time. I know this character didn't come out to some people until near the end...but it was so much, so in your face. Combined with the treatment of the other character, I just couldn't take this part.

Then we get to Jack. Jack is the supposed "Hero" of this story, but she is absolutely horrible. She is one of the major culprits of the misgendering, experiences no character growth, and the worst offense: She turns a mixed-race Black character into the already racist police for a crime she knows he didn't commit so she could save her white sister. This was awful. I know many other reviewers wrote about this same issue.

All in all, this could have been a good story if certain things hadn't been included. Unfortunately, those things were too big of issues for me to give this anymore than 2.5 stars.

Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, Body shaming, and Racism, misgendering
Moderate: Fatphobia

This one has been flagged for having some racist concerns. I didn't enjoy it enough to get through the whole book and with that kind of red flag added to it I will not purchase it as I don't want to take a chance of having something harmful in the library.

First of all I absolutely loved the premise of this book and the amount of queer characters in it. It was really nice to see a full cast of queer characters in an urban fantasy book as complex as this one and the storyline was definitely unique. I think this book had a lot of potential not just because of the amazing plot but also because I think it really good have just been a book with amazing rep however, I think a lot of things in this book just fell flat. The four main characters, Jesse, Jack, David, and Turing are all queer and one of the main plots of Jesse and Turing's characters are them dealing with their gender identity. However, I really didn't like how gender was discussed in this book. I felt that with both characters, but especially Jesse, gender identity was equated to physical traits which was something that made me uncomfortable because I believe that while gender identity can be expressed through outward experience it is really just about how a person feels and perceives themself. This brings me to my next problem with this book, Turing. I was honestly just really confused with her character since she referred to herself using she/her pronouns and was called a girl when first introduced so I was extremely confused at why every one else called her a boy. Jack was another character I didn't like. I just felt that she wasn't very likeable but what was really problematic to me was the situation with her and David towards the end and I hated that it wasn't developed more. In a book like this I would have expected that issues such as gender, sexuality, and race were explored more in depth but unfortunately it wasn't which was really disappointing to me.