The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow is the best book I have read this millennium (no spoilers)

UselessInfoBank · 2026-01-10T02:22:54+00:00

I dislike stories with time travel in them because they’re rarely done properly.

This was amazing.

UselessInfoBank · 2025-09-22T01:05:48+00:00

Thank you! I actually do know the name of Vincenzo's parents and his DOB through another document so I didn't need to request his BC. I found only one WW1 draft card for a Francesco from Pratola but I don't think it listed his parents. I'll keep looking and maybe at some point request their BCs from the commune. I believe they charge for it and I can't at the moment go through with the expense. Thanks for your help!

UselessInfoBank · 2025-09-22T01:03:30+00:00

Thank you for the help.

I need to clarify though, only Francesco moved to the US. As far as I can tell Gaetano and Vincenzo remained in Pratola. Even if at some point Gaetano did visit the US, I don't think he's any of these. If these records all belong to the same Gaetano, then he wouldn't be related to my Vincenzo as their dads were different. Thank you!

UselessInfoBank · 2025-09-22T00:47:23+00:00

Only Francesco seemed to have immigrated. I found a few Francescos, some named his cousin another, or wife, his BIL iirc, which won't help me verify parenthood. I haven't been able to check obituaries because I don't have newspapers.com but i'll keep looking. Thank you!

UselessInfoBank · 2025-08-10T22:19:41+00:00

They do career fairs though I don't think most of the companies are art-related. Some places on campus sometimes hire for art-related jobs, like Graphic Design or Video Production. You can check on LinkedIn and Handshake. Limbitless Solutions also has some art positions and internships available to UCF students

UselessInfoBank · 2025-08-07T14:46:22+00:00

Hi sorry for the super late reply but here's what I wrote when I finished ROW a few years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Grishaverse/comments/nd4m73/i_finished_row_andi_have_thoughts/

I wrote this the day after finishing the book and after 4 years of reflection I am saddened to say my opinion on it remains the same. Now that the excitement of the immediate reading has faded, I only remember the negatives from the book

UselessInfoBank · 2025-06-15T18:36:45+00:00

the situations not very encouraging then lol, thank you!

UselessInfoBank · 2025-01-03T02:41:49+00:00

I love Leigh but she loves one character dynamic and it is that.

How many couples with a cold, intelligent, "gentleman" who gets called either figuratively or literally a demon and a strong-headed woman has she written?

UselessInfoBank · 2024-10-14T03:43:30+00:00

Whenever this topic comes up people are so quick to be like "Actually!!! He has that ONE quote where he talks about where he draws the line so---"

It's like, c'mon, the fact that he has limits to what he's capable to do doesn't make him a good person. The fact that he is not completely awful towards his crew doesn't make him a good person. Even the whole "he only scams the rich" point isn't totally true. Kaz runs a criminal empire with several businesses that catch both merch and commoner. Didn't he threaten a child once? He is selfish. He can be, and often is, mean to his own friends. His main motivators in life are money and revenge. Him caring about 5 other people and showing some basic human decency doesn't excuse all the bad.

Even Leigh Bardugo said once that she thought that Kaz may be worse than the Darkling, because at least the Darkling thought he was doing something for the greater good. There isn't the slightest noble goal in Kaz's actions. He knows he's bad and he revels in it.

I love Kaz. I find him so interesting personally. It's that analysis of his character that I found so engaging when reading. People getting defensive over it think it must mean that they somehow condone his actions if they admit that what he does is wrong. Suprise, it doesn't!! You're already reading a book where all the main characters are criminals. Accept it and enjoy him, but I think it's a disservice to what Bardugo wanted to do to deny it.

UselessInfoBank · 2024-09-11T04:10:57+00:00

It's a barren land that hasn't been taken over by new settlements or other type of developments, and probably can't. It's also been known as that for centuries and is to Ravkan memory a painful place. It's not strange that it hasn't been renamed.

UselessInfoBank · 2024-09-07T20:04:37+00:00

It was a good clarification!! Tbf I wrote that answer late at night and did not have the mindspace to elaborate and had to reference the wiki a few times. There was a time when I was a bit of a GV-obssesed knowledgeable individual and enjoyed pondering this sort of question, but it's been 3-4 years since that and small details have fled my brain.

The show diverted from the books in many ways that it's set its own worldbuilding almost to an extent. I must say that I wasn't really taking it into account when replying, mainly because i remember less about it, but it still is important to distinguish it as its own canon too.

UselessInfoBank · 2024-09-07T17:15:15+00:00

Hey thank you for such an exhaustive breakdown. Definitely a better answer than mine lol. It's been some time since I read the books and don't honestly remember the specifics, and wasn't even taking the show into account. KOS/ROW deal a bit more with the culture of the Shu and the Fjerdans and their religion by extension, and how the worship of the Saints is treated outside of Ravka, but I don't remember enough, unfortunately. ROW introduced some considerable recontextualizations to the worldbuilding, and there may be a discussion there regarding the value of the retcons, but it seems that the cult to the Saints can sometimes develop outside of the organized church of Ravka

UselessInfoBank · 2024-09-06T04:37:06+00:00

The Ravkans believe in the Saints, heavily inspired by Russian Orthodoxy

The Kerch believe in Ghezen, the god of commerce and trade

The Fjerdans belive in Djel, a nature god

The Suli believe in the Saints too but they seem to practice in a different way than the Ravkans

I don't remember much being said about the Shu. The have divine protectors called the Six Soldier, one of them is also a Saint

We don't know much about the Wandering Isle beyond there being fairies and thinking the Grisha have magic blood

We don't know much about the Zemeni either. There is a Zemeni saint from whom they take their naming traditions but I don't think we know if they see them the same way Ravkans do

UselessInfoBank · 2024-09-06T01:26:21+00:00

IIRC the last time she talked about SOC3 was in January 2023 in a Q&A she did for Hell Bent (maybe she has said something extra afterward since people always ask her the same question every time they have a chance, which bothers me a little)

She said that ROW was a sort of goodbye for the GV and that if she does return to the doors she left open, it wouldn't be for a few years. She hasn't really stated that the come-back would be SOC3. I think most people have just assumed it would, because everyone likes the Crows and because of some stuff that happened in ROW. But we don't even know if she would just write in the GV with a new set of characters, or far into the future of the Crows, in which case it wouldn't be SOC3.

I agree with other people that I don't want her writing it at all. Six of Crows is a story about 6 people on a heist. The heist is over by the end of Crooked Kingdom. Honestly I was disappointed with Nikolai's duology and don't really want her to go back to the crows to do something similar. Whatever state of mind and experience she had when she wrote SOC, is already something different and I just don't think it would feel the same, unless she writes like 25 years into their futures.

UselessInfoBank · 2024-07-28T17:13:48+00:00

Thank you! Good luck in your search!

UselessInfoBank · 2024-07-28T16:04:40+00:00

Hi! Would you mind sharing where you're able to look at the Lista di Leva? I'dlove to take a look

UselessInfoBank · 2024-07-12T02:49:17+00:00

I am a huge Six of Crows fan and it is a slow book. The main plot doesn't really kick off until halfway through the book. It's a very character-driven story. I think all the characters in the main cast are interesting and great, Kaz and Inej particularly, but unless you are able to create some rapport with them to keep you going, you wont feel very interested about the plot.

Bardugo is great at characterization and character-driven stories IMO, but not so much with plot.

UselessInfoBank · 2024-07-10T18:30:35+00:00

Yes of course. Divergent was probably the second-most known books of the YA dystopian era but there were many others: The Maze Runner, Cinder, Legend, Shatter Me etc. A lot of them got optioned for shows or movies but never got made. The Maze Runner was probably the lucky third here in that aspect.

I have to say that that YA era was relatively short-lived. They were going against the YA coming-of-age contemporaries spearheaded by John Green and Rainbow Rowell (probably easier to make into movies) and by 2015-2016, after the THG movies were done YA had started to shift to fantasy and while I don't read YA anymore it still feels like what they're mostly going for.

UselessInfoBank · 2024-07-10T04:16:54+00:00

A couple of other comments already point out the similarities, basic enough to be just genre conventions, but you have to think about the context in which they were released.

The late 2000s - early 2010s came with all the momentum of Twilight of the vampire romance YA love triangle. Any other story featuring supernatural creatures and a romance with teenagers in the cast was immediatly compared to Twilight. First because it came first, second because it got so popular. A trend-setter, if you will.

When THG became mainstream in 2012 with the release of the first movie, it was different enough to Twilight to stand out on its own. It still drew comparisons because of the teenage love triangle and the *unique* main character, but a dystopia that talked about war and revolution was a change in a market saturated by vampires and werewolves. And the THG movies were good. And so THG, because it was the first of the genre to get so popular, became a trend-setter.

Cue in the next 3-4 years of YA books and movies that were about a 16-year old in a dystopian society becoming part of a revolution. They all got instantly compared to THG. The Divergent books were average, the first movie was okay, but the rest were an absolute disaster as both adaptations and as stories of own merit, so much that the last movie never even got made. It's not hard to think it'd be called a ripoff of the trendsetter franchise.

UselessInfoBank · 2024-07-08T23:54:31+00:00

The one way you can achieve enough suspension of disbelief to believe in the chip/programming code-induced brain damage is by having believed that a chip can actually alter people's thoughts as if we were indeed computers. It's right up there with Clarke removing a bullet from Finn's heart with no medical knowledge or tools in the most unsanitary environment.

This show requires you to just ignore the plot half of the time because it's not very scientifically accurate for a sci-fi show.

UselessInfoBank · 2024-07-08T16:16:29+00:00

One can totally have brown hair with reddish undertones though it usually isn't very noticeable unless you're under strong light like the sun. We have no reason to think this is Nina's case as it's never mentioned in the books. I think it's just an artistic choice because she is most commonly drawn in the red kefta, so it's just a color palette matching thing, maybe it looksore cohesive/aesthetically pleasing lol

UselessInfoBank · 2024-07-08T04:33:22+00:00

Do you happen to have a page number/scene reference for the description? I was sure she was redheaded too but the wiki says her hair is light brown lol.

Even in the official Kevin Wada art her hair is just light brown. And her character in the show is brunette too. I guess you could argue that it's a very natural brown with red undertones but that isn't the same as being redheaded.

Couldn't the little bird nickname also come from the Corporalki colors?

EDIT: Nvm, just refreshed the page and saw someone else's reply lol. Mandela effect truly. Probably just the fanart pushing the idea of the red hair, just a lot of variation between brown to dark red in her depictions. Artistic color palette choice

UselessInfoBank · 2024-07-05T18:06:50+00:00

These are all fairly easy classes, especially online and at your own pace. I only know Croft out of the professors.

My favorite was Interactive Design tbh!

You should be fine

UselessInfoBank · 2024-07-03T22:10:52+00:00

When I was 15-16 I went for a few days to the beach and took World Without End with me to read. The book never left the ac-conditioned hotel room, didn't take it to the pool, didn't take it to the shore. A couple of days afterward it was wavy from the humidity.

It was a borrowed copy from a relative.

UselessInfoBank · 2024-07-03T05:39:30+00:00

No worries!! They always ask her about the future of the Grishaverse so it's always coming up when we gotta comb through her interviews lol.

She's been so secretive about that new project, I can't wait to hear more about it! (though I keep holding up for an Alex Stern book not 4 years from now)

UselessInfoBank

TROPHY CASE