BulbasaurusThe7th
That... was very different.
So basically we have a huge library. One so big it contains the cumulative knowledge of multiple millennia, different cultures. Different species. The whole thing runs on magic and a select group of librarians trying to discover the endless secrets of it.
And that's pretty much about as much as I can say without spoiling it. Why? Because this thing does incredible stuff with time travel, with how we think about knowledge and history.
The central characters are Livira and Evar, a girl and a boy who are destined to meet each other. They share the library and yet they have never talked to each other and they shouldn't, because something about them sets off events that are going to break time and space and essentially, everything.
And man, did the story go in ways I didn't see. It expertly plays with the idea that you can interpret certain things in contradicting ways and so the twists are some of the best I have ever seen. They are not just shocking; they completely change how you see previous events.
You know how clever authors are needed to write clever characters? Mark Lawrence does that perfectly; his concepts are stellar and unique and his prose is fantastic. No, it's not the flowery stuff that has no meat. He carefully picked his words to support the story perfectly. It's not bullshit (I'm looking at you, Rothfuss).
A warning; I am convinced this series will end in a tragic way. The story is just too big, the ideas are not for this to have a clear, happy ending. But so far this is 100% worth a read.
Like every second woman at this point, I love true crime stuff, with the caveat that it's not emotionalised bullshit. I want facts, not a narrator talking about the victim's smile lighting up every room. Fuck off with that cheesy, ridiculous stuff.
So I looked at this and was like “okay, maybe I can try”.
And it was awful.
We have Alix and Josie, two women with polar opposite lives. Alix is a glamourous podcast host and Josie is a repressed, humble housewife. All they have in common is having been born on the very same day at the same hospital. So when Josie begs Alix to document her breaking free of her life, they start working together on a project.
You know, a book like this needs exceptional character writing. We have two people interacting, yet somehow both of them have the inner monologue of the exact same type;that overly detailed one that pretends to be deep by “noticing” ridiculous shit you never specifically think about. Or do you look at people and start thinking about random details regularly? In every bit of your thinking?
Plus, with a book that is based on the contrast of these two, at least make them sound sufficiently different.
The twists were not much either. Like there aren't many ways you can spice up a story with so few characters and so little going on between them. If you can't guess it... what's wrong with you?
After years of reading mostly fantasy, this isn't enough. It's so basic and so uninteresting.
This is my review of the whole series. This thing has no right to be this fantastic. I've read another series by this author, but that was so long ago I barely remember anything about the story. It was good, I gave it 4 stars, so I expected this to be at least somewhat enjoyable. Then I started it. 50 years before the story started, ghosts began popping up and attacking people. Humans being humans, a fight started, first with two young visionaries, Marissa Fittes and Tom Rotwell, who developed their methods of dealing with ghost and figured out ways to protect yourself. Time passed, they, then many others, started agencies that specialised in ghost extermination. But here is the catch. Only kids see them. Once you become 18-19-20, you are effective deaf and blind to them, yet they can kill you just the same. The agencies are still led by adults, but the people working there and doing the fighting are all kids and teenagers. Except at Lockwood & Co. They are all teens. At first I really wasn't sure about the era in which this story played out. The whole situation gives industrial revolution child worker vibes, yet... we get mentions of televisions and dishwashers (the machine kind, not a human servant). So it's obviously a somewhat modern world, one that has huge, glass-and-metal skyscrapers, but no social media and cell phones. To me, that was a surprise. Not sure how anyone else feels. Puts the ‘urban' into urban fantasy. We see a world that is lived-in, the ghost situation is part of everyday life in a way that makes sense. It's not just an extra thing on top, but it has been a thing long enough for generations to have grown up in a different lifestyle. It never gets overexplained, you see enough of it to make sense of how things function. Generally, I am not the biggest fan of teenage girl protagonists. They often go into the smug, better than everyone bullshit territory. She is so special, she just doesn't know. Or she knows, and she feels she can be an asshole to everyone, because she is SPECIAL. And here we have Lucy, who is incredibly relatable. Sometimes, she is not nice. She can be standoffish, judgemental. She doesn't always take direction too well. She can be a slob and bad at talking about her feelings. A person who isn't always showing her most flattering side, but is loyal to her friends, works hard and stands up for the right things. I find it hilarious how we get a million books by female authors with bitchy female characters or downright manic pixie dream girls, yet we have a man who writes the best teenage girl. Fantastic work. When it comes to characters, I always need a concrete explanation why teens do most of the heavy lifting in a story. One of the reasons why I hated [b:Six of Crows 23437156 Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1) Leigh Bardugo https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1651710803l/23437156.SY75.jpg 42077459] was because it made no sense that the most feared gang was a bunch of kids. Why? Why them? Why did criminals respect their authority? Here I could buy these children being needed. Sure, Lockwood was essentially his own boss, with a teenage group of fellow agents, but it's not like they technically needed any adults. They would have done the jobs anywhere, because they were the ones who could properly sense the ghosts. Talking about fantastic work, a middle grade/YA series that doesn't sacrifice an ounce of quality for being targeted at a younger age range. This is good writing. Doesn't speak down to the reader. The teenage characters are competent without being supernaturally so or without forming a world that pretends they are the be all, end all. Hell, by the end an adult becomes part of the main group! Which is another odd think I normally don't love about books, late additions to the main group. More often than not, we get new characters who are automatically 100% in and the authors (or showrunners) love to try and make us love them just as much as people we've been following for a long time. Here that is part of the plot! That new people bring new dynamics to a group. Someone finally actually understands! It's so good to be proven that I'm not crazy; many authors just ignore this thing. This series is a parade of those clever little things. Great characterisation. A world building that is enough and never infodump-y. Prose that works perfectly with the mood that is created. Incredibly competent, fun and just overall an A+. It's not even that I would recommend it, I have already done it. So yeah, go and pick this up, it's a blast.
DNF at 18%.
This is just not it and my reason will not be what you think it is.
You could assume I have an issue with the concept of humanising President Snow. And here I am, about to say the wild stuff; I had no issue with young Snow. He is actually the only tolerable character, plus his Nice Boy classmate. I can't stand the female characters Susan Collins writes. Lucy is a freaking Manic Pixie Dream Girl, with annoying quirky antics. Katniss was the “she doesn't know she is literally amazing” and now we get this??
I'm probably way too old for this. No matter how bloody it gets, how brutal, this is still a teenage romance and I am so done with perfect quicky girls singing songs on television.
A bunch of people know about Josiah Bancroft. His previous series, with [b:Senlin Ascends 35271523 Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel, #1) Josiah Bancroft https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1502224161l/35271523.SX50.jpg 24467682] was a surprise hit, so weird and just out there, with strong character writing. Then... as the series progressed, it fell off to many people, me included. Something about the story just went in a way I didn't like much, so after the stellar book one and two, I quit on book three. But at the same time, this wasn't one of the cases where I gave up on the author, it was just that specific series. So when I saw this one coming, I had to give it a go. Especially because reading the blurb, it made me think of a fun version of Ed and Lorraine Warren. (Then a friend told me the husband is called WARREN, I just went duh, of course.) Now, I have to point something out. The prose in this goes hard. At first I was a bit disoriented by the language that's used, because it's archaic and very flowery. Maybe it's just me, my lack of experience with such things, but it's different, especially when I'm in an urban fantasy phase, which are typically more connected to our contemporary world. But yes, it can possibly put some people off, though it's not at all impossible to read or unpleasant. It's actually a ton of fun after a few pages of adjusting to it and never seems to be hurting the legibility and the flow of the story. That's a big thing with detective type novels; if it doesn't ease you through it all, then what's the point? Mr. Bancroft does that well, though. I wasn't sure about his oddly whimsical and almost bizarre style being able to pull off a mystery that logically builds up, yet he did it. He was never a bad writer, I would say he was always great, but in this he managed to have a much more accessible appeal in my opinion; I can totally understand why his previous series wasn't for everyone. Another thing that could have failed big time, but didn't. The main couple, Iz and Warren starts from the situation of almost like Sherlock Homes and Dr. Watson. Iz is academic, she works hard, analytical. Not always the most well-mannered, she has no patience for people and she can seem cold and uncaring to people who don't know what's going on with her. Warren is a comically buff man, caring and extremely sociable. He usually approaches iffy situations with empathy and tries to reason with people instead of cracking the case open. There was so much room for it being awful, turning Iz into a “I need no man, I am smarter than everyone” and Warren into a bumbling idiot useless husband. Many writers, both book and screen, would have and do regularly go with that, resulting in awful stories or unlikeable and downright offensively caricature-ish characters. Iz and Warren are better than that, though. They are people with evident love for each other. They are total opposites and both sides are needed for the other to function. They never treat each other as defective, they just are. Even the mostly hinted backgrounds on their relationships with other characters were brilliantly done. Iz's father, specifically, sounds like such a big one, the way he was described in relation to his wife and daughter. It has that haha random whimsical thing many books do, but then we go a little bit into what it is to be in a family with someone who is basically a cartoonish, seemingly random adventurer type character. Plot twists aren't a must to me. I mean, big ones that make you super surprised and such. Normal ones are fine, I'm not even bothered by spoilers, honestly, the “how did we get here” is more important to me, so I'm not sure how good I am at describing the mystery. To me it seemed good, it had enough buildup, enough logical steps leading to each other. I did not see it coming, though this is a first in a series (and a first detective story from an author), so it's not like we have any kind og a baseline to judge. Maybe for seasoned mystery readers it was easy to figure it out. I don't know, I usually don't even try, just let the story take me from A to B. Of course it ends with a bit of a cliffhanger, or more like a hint for the overarching story starting out. Honestly, so far this year, this was one of my biggest surprises and favourite reads. I do recommend it for anyone who is into fun mysteries with outstanding characters. Just a bit patience to get used to the writing style and you will definitely have fun with it. And I'm already waiting for book 2. :/
So. Daisy Jones and The Why The Fuck Are You Alive? In this review I will compare the book to things that will make so little sense at first, but work with me here, please.
This reminded me of Sex and The City in one specific way. They did have sex. But that's not it, that's just wooohooo rock stars.
The thing I will forever hate about Sex and The City was the fact that we had to follow people who were fundamentally just... absolute assholes. Sure, messed up things happened to them and I know the writers wanted me to feel sorry for them, but at the same time, just no. They all forged their own problems with their own hands and they never seemed to actually learn, just chased meaningless shit and acted awful, expecting some wonderful outcome still, because if you cry a little after heinous things then it's all okay, right?
This book is the absolute same thing. We are told Billy and especially Daisy are these fantastic, once in a lifetime amazing creatures. The number of times Daisy's HUGE BLUE EYES get mentioned made me want to claw my non-blue ones out of my head. She is such a manic pixie dream guuuurl, you can't tell her what to do. She doesn't wear a bra, because fuck you, that's why. She does all the drugs ever, because nobody can tell Daisy what to dooooo. There is literally nothing great about her. People keep saying she has a great heart. People who don't even know her. Based on? Well, I have no idea, because other than being told she baked a birthday cake for the mailman as a child, we never see any sign of it. Daisy never tries, with anything. She just rampages, but she has big blue eyes and she is pretty, so it's all cool.
Billy and his wife Camila are almost as asinine. The stomach-turning ideas about how your spouse can do whatever, because you “trust” them is just... are we being this stupid and this level of martyrs now? “Oh, he only cheated on me when I was pregnant and he was doing drugs, so it's cool.” I'm sorry, but these people are miserable as shit. But Camila is only a bossy bitch when it doesn't matter, but she acts like wet cardboard when it should be important to be straight with Billy. Because she DECIDED to marry a rock star, so it's all okay.
Karen's only character trait is struggling bossbabe. Eddie is pissed off. Warren likes babes. Pete... was there at some point or some shit. Graham was the only one who was kind of nice, really.
The way it ends, though... that's some gigantic bullshit. Camila is considerate enough to die, so Billy and Daisy have a chance of making up. How shitty.
And we have arrived to my other nonsensical comparison.
Tolkien invented a language because linguistics was his passion. He knew a lot about it and to him that was prime fun. Which gave the stupid idea of “every fantasy series needs some half baked bullshit fake language” to generations of fantasy authors who can't do the same. They try, bless them, but they make these clunky ass words and it just never works.
My point? Do not include something just because you feel you have to, when you clearly don't have the skills. The lyrics in this are.... not great. You can't tell me these are genius songs, they aren't. They kind of are just absolutely meh. We are told these characters are absolute forces and we get this?
What baffled me most is that this was played straight. You were meant to buy it, Daisy being some angelic icon. Everyone wanted to be like her. Billy's 5-year-old daughter said she was her favourite. A woman who was constantly on drugs, a petty mess, who couldn't be trusted to take care of herself. And everyone was okay with this.
In 500 Days of Summer, at least the point was that Tom needed to realise that what he was doing was unrealistic and stupid. Here, you are meant to understand why everyone was all about Daisy. She was “right” and everyone else was wrong.
I will be honest, I read this because of the hype and I regret it wholeheartedly. The only thing is, it was super easy and fast. That's it. Bye.
This series has an amazing concept. A crime family and their survival in a world where certain people get superpower if they have jade on them. Cool, hm? And it was!
Though some of the choices made my the author weren't my favourite. First, about the good things.
The lore of this is insane. All the things that happen will somehow make perfect sense. There is a lot and none of it is just added for extra padding, it all connects incredibly neatly. If anything, this could have been expanded into infinity. Which is exactly why I'm surprised it's just a trilogy. Granted, especially this last one is very very long, but at the same time, urban fantasy seems to have mostly long series with many books in them.
Like the world, the characters are great. This is a story where having multiple points of view is not only well done (they all sound separate, they all have their proper motivations and world views), but it's necessary. The politics of the world are so complicated, you can't cover all of it with just one person. Especially with such strong characterisation. The people never felt like they were acting out of character, which, to me, was especially great with Hilo. To me he started out as a charismatic popular dude who was just incredibly cool. Yet he is petty, moody, not always the nicest person and often short-sighted, but so easy to like. One of the best things about this was the way he was written, honestly.
The city of Janloon is a character in itself as well, it's development through the decades of the story.
Which also brings up my biggest issue with it. So many time skips. For the politics, it was necessarily to see through many decades; it's perfectly logical that these things happen slowly. No Peak makes a decision to do something thing, like invest in business in a different country. The results aren't seen in months; they will obviously need years to play out.
But also, the actual humans doing these things don't live in a world where time doesn't pass for them. Many of the important character developments happen off screen and they are glossed over. Maybe we see a tiny sliver of them, but then we get told real quick what happened in a marriage in 5 years. Hell, he get a brief introduction of one character with one of the old timers, then skip, we get told this person is in a years long relationship with another. Excuse me?? Am I supposed to CARE?
This is why a lot of stressful scenes are only meaningful when the few main characters are involved; I got told this new character is important, but the things that make them so were skipped.
Which is sad, because some of the big scenes we saw were absolutely great, like when Niko returns to go to Ru's funeral.
All in all, I did like the series. I enjoyed the story, I enjoyed most of the characters. The action was really nicely done, just like the politics. But I wish it would have been given more space. Selling a long series is probably hard, not sure if a publisher is willing to buy it, so it was possibly a sacrifice made for marketability, to be possibly for this story to be told at all. I don't know. But there was enough substance here to let it properly breathe and run its course.
It's a great series and an imperfect one and that's fine. I just wonder if, after this, the author will write something that is given enough room for her grand concepts and complicated storytelling.
I needed a bit of time to think about my reason why I liked this book less than I did the first one.
The setting is still full of colour and atmosphere. The action is still fun and well-choreographed. There is still politics.
But the relationships are not fleshed out enough. Sure, the characters are great (mostly, I am looking at you, Anden), their voices are different and unique enough so their individual chapters feel different. Yet somehow we are being told about their connections more than we see them. This story, the history of Kekon is FULL of epic friendships, there are betrayals, there are romances and we see nothing.
Don't get me wrong, we see impactful moments between people, that are either pivotal or the climax of a long-standing thing. But they never have a proper buildup. We are told about Hilo and Wen's love. We are told about Papi having a crush on Shae. We are told about Shae and Wen being allies. And yet, it is always just certain moments. Nothing subtle in scenes where that isn't the main focus. Anden is especially guilty of that; can the boy actually have meaningful scene with someone who isn't either family or his crush?
What we don't get with the relationships, we do with the politics and world-building. I remember being like 11 and first reading Harry Potter 4 and realising the magical world is much bigger than I thought. This had the same moment, to a lesser extent.
We see people dealing with jade and the culture around jade in different countries, both Kekonese and foreign. It's well-defined from the start what we have on Kekon, how gangs work, the moral attitudes around owning jade, using it, how jade warriors handle conflicts both with each other and the jadeless. But what happens with this powerful tool in cultures where it doesn't have a cultural and religious significance?
I think Fonda Lee does this well; she handles times of change excellently.
The pacing can be just a bit jarring, there are timeskips that feel a bit too much like “yeah, I didn't feel like dealing with this”.
It brings up an interesting thought. Somehow I think I am more comfortable with longer urban fantasy series. It should on paper be easier to do build lore when it's based on more familiar things, but this is set in a fictional place. Plus, it has so many complex elements. So I am kind of assuming it would have profited from more books.
Not like I am trying to tell anyone to give themselves the responsibility of writing a gazillion books over the decades, but the pacing would have profited from a different format, maybe more, shorter books.
I still appreciate a lot of this, but this book was weaker, compared to the (surprise) excellence of the first one.
Some months ago I read the first few pages of [b:Foul Lady Fortune 57190453 Foul Lady Fortune (Foul Lady Fortune, #1) Chloe Gong https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1642713157l/57190453.SY75.jpg 89504589] and I realised that I didn't like it. THIS was what I expected it to be. Jade City has such atmosphere. Mafia stories are extremely easy to mess up. You can go way too romanticised or you can go too bleak and needlessly violent. Both makes the characters unrealistic; no perfect little cinnamon bun will also make people sleep with fishes, but also a mindless killing machine will never be the biggest force and base of a working criminal enterprise. Here we have the Kaul family, war hero granddad and his three grown grandchildren who form the leadership of the No Peak gang of superpowered people, who can use jade to give themselves abilities. (Then there is their young adopted cousin, not quite ready for a life like this. He is a cinnamon bun, but that's his point, so there is that.) Don't get me wrong, they are likeable characters; they have nice moments, they bond, they can be incredibly brave and noble. But when the middle one, Hilo, snaps... HE SNAPS. They are all capable of being cruel and calculating. You can buy them having dimension, their dilemmas feel hard. The grandfather is hardly ever around, but he is very interesting. The nation's hero from a time of foreign occupation. Now here he is, unable to connect with his grandkids. Nobody measures up, but he himself is slowly dying and losing what made him special. Is he angry with his own mortality? Is he truly dissatisfied with his family? He was made for and in a completely different world, the one he can't let go. He is insanely cruel. Is that his mind just going? Or was he always like that, because it was needed during wartime? So much of this book is about that. The perception and the reality, the characters using that distinction to work politics. The difference between the measured Lan, who is liked, but provokes no passion, as opposed to Hilo, who is passionate and dangerously hot-headed, yet incredibly charismatic. What will work in the end? Does it matter? Then there is Shae, who is trying to do something completely different, yet having to realise that maybe she doesn't even have an option, parallelled by Anden, who is coming from the outside, trying to get in. And this powerful family's story is framed by something very little. Someone little, doing something petty. In the story it's often mentioned that lanternmen (civilian supporters of the gangs) were the most important during the war and even for the working of the gangs, which makes it extra ironic that the events were started by one of those civilians. A lot of the story is based on those clever little twists. The lore is a lot. A lot of language, the way they use suffixes and the different forms of people's names. The different words they use for the internal structures of the gangs. The history, religion, culture. Now that was one of my worries. Will it make sense? And it did. I never felt like Lee added any of that just to pad things and make things feel more. It's all enough. It's all needed, it all adds up. The way the island of Kekon is described is so atmospheric. I have never even been to Asia (just you wait!), but everything felt so cinematic. The little shops and restaurants, the way they have temples next to gambling dens. So amazing, it truly feels like a city in transition. I think Shae's chapters bring out a lot of it, because she spends a good part of the book walking around like a normal person. (I don't even think Lee intentionally made it “food porn”, but mentions of food made me hungry. Weird.) A lot of the book is progress. We have a culture that is between modern and traditional. They are over a war, but not yet at peace. They have something specific to them, jade, which they have kept for themselves, but now they are staring to open up to the world. All the characters' individual stories are about transformation as well, though I wouldn't want to spoil them. That said, I don't feel there are such big plot twists. The events are on a trajectory towards... well, absolute chaos and it's exceptionally done, but I don't think this book hinges on surprising you with the absolutely unexpected. I personally don't need those, though. In my opinion just riding things out is much better than some so-so twist. I will go there and say it, I didn't need the sex scenes. I don't care about romance much and I usually just skim sex scenes, so there is that. They weren't overwhelming, I just didn't expect them. At this point, I have to read the rest. I have my doubts about a happy ending being possible, but I want to keep my hopes high. DEFINITELY recommending this to others.
I'm sorry, but I really really disliked this one, so DNF at about 50%. Normally I form my opinions and that's it, but this time I had to search online if I was just seeing things. Nope, apparently not, the main character in this one is virtually indistinguishable from the one in [b:The Hollow Places 50892288 The Hollow Places T. Kingfisher https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1600022295l/50892288.SY75.jpg 75788139]. 30s, sarcastic, works in some city, but needs to go back to her family home, boo hoo. A huge part of my problems started out with that. I don't like her. She isn't funny, she isn't interesting. This one (Sam??) is even worse with her CONSTANT mentions of how she is fat, therefore doctors would let her die because of that. At one point she even does the “I am fat, but I am healthier than anyone” thing. She also claims her mother, a known, politically active liberal is suddenly a racist white person. Even when the Latina her mother was supposedly racist to says it wasn't racism. Yet she keeps bringing it up, because of an old painting of a couple, where the man wears a confederate uniform, that is a piece of heirloom. Oh, we also have a really eyerolling paragraph about how the patriarchy is oppressing women through... leg shaving. With all the Current Year comments and lame attempts at jokes, there isn't even much buildup for the mistery. It just feels boring and annoying, really. Halfway in, I was trying to rush through the book, then I realised I didn't care about anyone in it. So then why not just stop and find something better?
DNF at 54%. Generally, I am not a big fan of the main character telling his own story. Why? Because it almost feels like we are waiting to get to the cool part. I know he is not going to rot in a prison forever. There must be something much cooler waiting for him if he was meant to have his story told, right? There has to be a point. A good 300+ pages in, the point is still not revealed. The fact that this one has a single POV doesn't help with the feeling that I am wasting my time. Being realistic here, hardly any story where every moment is super exciting. I am not going to blame an author for that, real life isn't exciting every day either. But this one... Alvyn is just waiting to escape from every situation so far. It all feels like filler content, the bridge to the cool things. But how many hundreds of pages do I have to read to get at least a little payoff? The talk about martyrs and religion and impending cosmic doom tells me there is big stuff. Big enemies, monumental conflicts. Yet we are fucking around with Alwyn doing meaningless things with a lot of descriptions. What was the use of describing some totally meaningless priest character?? Who cares? Especially because honestly, all of the characters die without any meaningful bond or a way for us to develop empathy for them. Even when they are Alwyn's friends, we never see any of that. We are told that “X character is stuck in this boring situation with Alwyn and they want to escape”. Never seen sharing a good moment. Just being told they were stuck in the same shitty place for years. Because so far, this book is “Escape: The Novel”. They do nothing, but wait around to escape a shitty situation. Just to do the same in another crappy, boring place. I have had my issues with the prison part of [b:The Ember Blade 34673711 The Ember Blade (The Darkwater Legacy, #1) Chris Wooding https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1490348335l/34673711.SY75.jpg 55844744], but at least we got the best character there. But here, we got what? Toria? Who literally never does anything, just mopes? Sometimes the characters have plot armour and that makes things weightless. But here, it's the exact opposite. I know nobody of these characters will actually last, because hey, none of them do. We will just wipe the whole thing, I will have to remember 10 new people, who will also get wiped. Without any consequences. Can anyone tell me why Alwyn needed multiple religious criminal characters in his life? Did we need them to be different people? Did it make a difference? No. Not even a little. So really, just read Draconis Memoria by the same author, that one was fun. This? Boring. Slow.
I know the author of this book and do some proofreading for him. My review is still 100% honest and not biased. (TBH, I would probably not proofread books I don't enjoy, so there is that as well.)
A book about a card game. That sounds pretty light-hearted, yes? We play, it's fun times. Yes, well, no. In this, playing some monster summoning card game is one of the few ways the inhabitants of the city-sized slums have a chance of making a better life for themselves. Owning a card, even a weak one, is a giant thing. But here people need to team up to have a full deck and be able to play.
Hick dreams of doing exactly that; slowly buying cards, winning games, eventually helping his dad and his younger siblings move on from poverty.
And that is pretty much what I can say without spoiling half the book.
The thing about Benedict Patrick is that he will wreck you. When something bad happens, it actually happens. When the characters have to make hard decisions, there won't be some convenient way out. So even if you feel this book can't be THAT serious... yes, well, it is.
Don't get me wrong, the book is dynamic, it has action, it has so much suspense it's unreal, but you will be constantly reminded of the weight of the things.
The lore of this is insane too. I don't know how many books there will be, but there are so many interesting things about the world we have to learn. (Trust me, I have made a whole list of questions and theories I have. I wonder how right I will be about things.)
At this point, a lot of the story was the personal struggle of Hick, his first steps on the road he chose for himself. Or the one he was given. But there are hints, some more subtle than others, about a lot of other people with agendas that are far more sinister.
But trust me. Nothing about this is a coincidence. You know how some books have this undefined lore about them, just so the world feels deeper, but we never actually find out anything real? Just namedropping. This one will not be like that. I guarantee it.
Very specific thing I have to say; if you like the pure child sidekick character, you will love one of Hick's friends. We get some really precious children like that and that is why I am always extra nervous about his books. Because we need to protect them.
All in all, an unusual premise, impeccable mood and setting, action all the way, you just know it will get even better. I definitely recommend it to everyone, eeven if you don't play any of those monster card games. The rules are explained well and the story is chef's kiss.
This is a review of the whole series.
The premise of this is really interesting; a sociopath gets obsessed with serial killers, kind of his way of avoiding behaviours that would lead him to give in and do bad things to people. It works for some time, he is a seemingly okay, albeit introverted kid. Until murders start happening in his town, so the main character, John, decides to catch the murderer.
But... it's not even a human being, but some sort of a demonic creature that NEEDS to kill to fulfill his needs. Now John needs to use methods that were developed to understand and catch serial killers to deal with the monsters.
Amazing, right?
Yeeeeah. Forgot to tell you that John is a teenager? Now, I am not saying a book about teenagers is automatically shit. Nope. But in general, teenagers are probably my least favourite kind of protagonists. This series is a perfect example of that. Do I want to read about a 16-year-old doing the edgy “I could kill you in 75 different ways”? Eh.
Sometimes John can be interesting, especially in the first few books, but things quickly spiral and by the end, it doesn't even feel like John is anything special. He becomes completely... well, normal, as far as a person who kills demons can be. But really, he isn't so interesting.
Another thing is, basically no characters introduced after book 2 stay around. I understand that the story necessitates John (and for some time, Brooke) going around and meeting new people, but everything resents at the end of every single book.
New place, new monster of the week, new characters. I don't even start caring about anyone, because I know they will go into the void at the end of the book, never to be seen again. It takes a lot of the stakes; what if the characters die? What then? Not like they would be around later anyway.
The relationships form just as quickly. They arrive somewhere, half the town already likes them and wants to help them. Things like food are a problem only nominally; John worries, yet when they need food, it just appears in the shape of some well-meaning local person who feels the urge to feed the drifter youth.
This leads to another problem. The overarching story is not very satisfying. We know the Withered have relationships with each other. We know they have a history, some way they became what they are. There is some power helping them turn into this. But what? What is going on?
Oh, nevermind, new town, new nice church ladies and group of teenagers who just take them in right away.
And then let's just talk about this last book for a second.
Jasmyn is such a damn annoying character, JESUS. Have any of you seen The Babysitter 2: Killer Queen? Jenna Ortega's annoying special girl, unlike the others is exactly how Jasmyn is. With the tacked on trauma and all. Especially insulting after the development of Brooke (who was already getting on my nerves) through the previous books. Just an even worse replacement.
But the “best” was the end. REALLY? It basically dances back on everything. The series is supposed to be super dark and then we end with “AHHHH, you just need to want to change things and magically everything is solved”.
Honestly, I felt like this was a waste of a great idea. It could have been much more inventive, much less annoying, much cooler. But we got this. Almost smart, almost emotionally impactful.
It's an okay series to read, but it did not give what I expected from it and that makes me kind of disappointed.
This review is about the whole series, not just this one book. They all had the same strengths and the same weaknesses and I prefer looking at this one as more of a single unit. Also, some of my thoughts are about the whole narrative arch of it, so there is that.
When I give 3 star-ish ratings, it can mean two things. Either the book is fine, but has some relatively big flaw I can't ignore, or (like here) something is just missing.
Even from the get go, this series takes a huge risk with starting from the end of many typical fantasy stories. Often we have some sort of a ruler. A powerful figure who is corrupt and negative. So what do the heroes do? They fight the power and get rid of the ruler, fixing the problems of the world. Here... the first book starts with a group of politically motivated people of different walks of life (religious figure, criminal boss, patriotic war hero, academic, etc.) having the king executed. At the very beginning.
Honestly, that was a super interesting idea. That we get to see what happens AFTER the big conspiracy and plotting and such are done. Because power vacuums are an interesting concept. Sure, even real people in the real world love to talk about changing The System and getting rid of The Man. But how exactly do you do it? What kind of allies do you have? What if you need them, but you don't like them?
This was so cool. And honestly, Field Marshal Tamas was a good central character. I especially loved the fact that we see him through different lenses. For the country, he is a hero. A father figure who does what needs to be done. Always dutiful, always doing his absolute best, without hesitation. Yet, he is the actual father of Taniel. A father who can't help missing out on so much of his duties towards his own son because he needs to be bigger than a human, bigger than anyone else.
And while I say that... this is where the book misses a lot.
We never get much dept when it comes to the characters interacting with each other. Separately a bunch of them are really interesting and cool. Like look at Bo, the last Privileged left after the eradication of the Royal Cabal. Yet we have him have extremely mediocre conversations with Nila.
The possibility of something very nuanced and difficult between Taniel and Vlora, people who thought they were meant for each other, mostly because they were special in the same way, yet they realise it's not true. Pans out to nothing. Maybe a couple pages of dialogue and it's all done and fine and whatever.
Tamas and Gavril? Tamas and Vlora? Nila and Olem? It all just ends with hints of something complex and yet nothing ever really happens.
It doesn't even just end with character interactions.
There are so many questions left. Ideas never properly developed. So many elements I would love to learn about, like the Predeii, the conflicts between the gods, how they came to be, the relationships between Privileged, Ka-Poel's magic...
Half the storylines lead to nowhere. We get mentions of Taniel being something more now, something potentially one of a kind, yet we forget about that whole thing at the end.
Same with Jakob. Nila's storyline is started by her hiding Jakob, a child of a noble family. After the executing of royalty, he is legally the next king, as the closest relative left alive. She refuses to save herself to make sure he is okay. Yet by the end he is only a passing thought. She doesn't even care anymore.
Same with Adamat. His family went through absolute hell. Yet we never see any of the fallout. Hell, his children don't even have any lines in the book! I think one daughter said like a handful of words, but it's nothing.
Adamat was another genius addition to the book, by the way. His investigations meant that the series had an element of detective fiction. Amazing to break up long military scenes. The solutions were sometimes a bit abrupt and not everything made as much sense as I wished, but I generally really liked Adamat and SouSmith.
I think one of the main things, from my point of view, was the fact I misunderstood what this book series was meant to be.
You know those romantic, often YA fantasy books, like Cassandra Clare's stuff, Sarah J Mass, that circle. Where fantasy is more a setting, a backdrop for romance. This series is the polar opposite, but similar in a way. How?
It's fundamentally military fiction. Most of it is about battles, wars, troops, battlefield moves. Some fantasy is included, gods and powers, but that is a lot less than I expected.
If you enjoy that, I would recommend this series. The human element is not incredibly nuanced, sure, but the war games part of it prominent.
All in all, it wasn't a bad choice, just not my No. 1.
DNF at 27%. What the hell is this? What went so absolutely wrong with this book? Multiple things, actually.
Have any of you seen Snow White and The Huntsman, the movie? It was pretty awful. Every damn character keeps talking about Snow White being the best thing since forever, her personality, her beauty, her aura just so flawless she inspires endless love and devotion in everyone. Even non-human characters. Yet you look at Kristen Stewart, playing Snow White, and she is just standing there, slightly confused, with her mouth a bit open, looking like a totally mundane human who doesn't even understand what is going on.
This book is that. Exact same feeling. Let me elaborate, because this review is unhinged at this point and I can't let you go home feeling that way.
Night Film is about mystery around an elusive movie director called Stanislas Cordova. His movies are visceral and disturbing, a force of nature. They are independently made, because he was just too weird for conventional cinema. His fans have secret communities with illegal screenings underground (sometimes literally). He lives on this secluded compound, where he works and he never engages with the public.
Then his 24-year-old daughter commits suicide.
A journalist, who used to be obsessed with finding out Cordova's secrets and got his career ruined for it, starts to try and unravel the mystery of what happened to Ashley Cordova.
Sounds super spooktastic. Sounds like it would be magnetic, you would get obsessed with Cordova and his family, like the people in universe got obsessed with his movies.
Yeah, no, think again. I know I am supposed to be confused and excited. To see more, to learn more, to get more of the clues. Yet this is incredibly boring and flavourless. The writing holds absolutely sub zero pressure on you. Sure, not all books like this need to be scary. But to be not only not scary, but THIS BORING? That's a crime.
The characters, McGrath, his UWU quirky sidekick Nora and hot, strung out, so indie Sidekick No. 2 Hopper go from place to place. They sneak into a mental hospital! Yet it all reads like an absolute slog. You never feel the danger. It never feels risky. Never feels like something could happen to them.
The prose is so colourless. Sure, we know what kind of stockings Nora wears, but none of the words build any form of momentum. We get the name of the store from which she got her sopping bags REPEATEDLY, but we are not getting any closer to even just opening up the central mystery.
I think one big issue with it is the fact it's never confidently anything. It's not existential enough, never scary enough, never gorey, spooky, atmospheric. It's just in this state of... nothing really. Characters all talk in this samey voice of no real emotion. They say what they saw and what they felt, but it's hollow. I am being told things without being convinced or infected by their ideas and any passion behind them.
Then again, the characters did really all sound the same, main and side ones alike. We get told about their quirks through their looks and surroundings, yet they all come off sounding like the author. I'm sure she is lovely and all, but she sure as hell doesn't know how to give her characters different vocabulary or ways of expressing themselves, from the 19-year-old manic pixie to the retired apple farmer. Indistinct, like the rest of this book.
The book contains a lot of newspaper clippings and such. Could be fun, wasn't.
So all in all, I just don't want to get myself into a reading slump with something that so fundamentally fails one of the big things about its genre.
Overall, this series is pretty fun, but I have to admit I didn't like this one nearly as much as the previous two.
Hannah leaves The Stranger Times to do some investigation on a wellness retreat/cult, meanwhile a previous contributor of the paper disappears without a trace.
The series reached an interesting point. The world of Stranger Times got expanded, we have the big bads set up, the sides in a huge magical conflict. We do have some sort of a case in every book to move the plot, but also there is an overarching thing going on. Some of the bigger rules of the universe are there.
Yet... the whole charm of the book started out as this weird mishmash of cooky characters. The humor is all based on these weirdos interacting with each other in a very immediate sort of way. Now, of course the main characters are tangled in the big thing more and more, but somehow it feels like we have small, funny moments that often felt a bit separate from the main thing.
Many of the characters were also underutilised. Why were we introduced to... John Mór when he is not doing much? Like in this book he was literally Hannah's driver to get her to where the plot was happening. Same goes with a bunch of the major people too! We have barely seen anything of BANECROFT, arguably the most fun character in this thing.
Now, every book usually has new characters introduced and that's fine. But why are we adding them when half the old ones could have been given a bigger role without swamping us with needless people. Just saying.
Another thing was how the “MHHHH, MANSPLAINING” type overused, unimaginative, unoriginal comments are getting more frequent. Not subversive. Not original. Just annoyingly virtue signalling. Don't get me wrong, the first two had some of those, but at this point everyone has to say those things and it's a bit tiresome.
It wasn't an awful read at all, it was pretty easy and fast, but not as fun as I'm used to with this series, sadly.
Hopefully, the next one corrects some of that and finds its way back.
This book is a brilliant choice if you want to pick up non-fiction that still feels fun. It's accessible, full on interesting facts and written in a pleasant way by a person who sounds cool.
Some people are incredibly odd in a great way. You know, like the people you randomly meet and then, you don't even know how, end up listening to blabbering about some totally unexpected topic AND they make you interested, even though you have no idea you could be.
This is what it feels like reading the writing of Merlin Sheldrake.
This book isn't dry at all, he has a lot of weird charisma about him.
I expected this book to be mainly about mushrooms that humans consume, and a bunch of it was. From truffle hunting to magic mushrooms, yeast that makes bread and alcohol.
But also a bunch of ways in which fungi communicate, breed, exist with other plants and animals. Ways in which they can be used to make compostable packaging and cure bees.
In that way, it felt almost short. I wanted to know more, I wanted to hear more from this person and his odd obsession with running around in a jungle. Making cider in a dorm room.
So while it was a lot of scientific information, it never felt too much or suffocating. It kept me interested and a lot of it was unexpected. This is the enjoyable way to learn. I have already recommended it to multiple people in my life and I will continue to do so.
Here is the thing about autobiographies; they contain the things the subject wants you to know about them. Not everything about them, not even necessarily the 100% honest truth about them. But the stuff they think you should know about them to get the picture they want to project.
And this is exactly why I have no idea what the actual fuck Prince Harry was thinking while writing this.
Some moments, I could really understand him. Seriously. Nobody likes to have their privacy ruined. Being a public figure from birth sounds like a shit deal. It must be awful.
Hell, he even had moments when he sounded mature, like when he talked about accepting that his father was happy with Camilla. I applauded him for that.
Then he just had these moments when he managed to ruin all my empathy and positive feelings with one astonishingly stupid statement. Don't get me wrong, we are all products of our upbringing and experiences in life, therefore his baseline for what life should be is way different than mine or yours. That's a fact. But there were moments when he genuinely sounded like he had never met a human being before. I'm not even saying average human, as he didn't spend too much time in genuine relationships with average little people, but just... any human, really. What do I mean?
His weirdness culminates when it comes to talking about Meghan, his wife. Sure, he loves her, that's wonderful. But at one point he is amazed by her not being bitchy about having to wait 3 hours at an airport to get to the Botswana vacation he got for the two of them.
Harry. Friend. If anyone paid for my Botswana vacation.... I could accept some minor inconvenience. Hell, a bunch of us get that when we pay for our own vacation with the money we actually had to earn with hard work. And it's still a privilege that we are able to travel at all.
Privilege. That is a bit of a keyword here.
I'm not the type to claim everyone I dislike is privileged and claim that's an evil horrible thing that needs to be taken away.
Yet Harry here has a really weird relationship with his own privilege. He calls himself privileged when he is talking about the video where he calls his friend a Paki. Yet he talks about just popping off to Botswana to hang out with his nature documentary maker friends when he feels stressed. You know what I mean?
He has this attitude of everything bad in his life being this gigantic unjust crime, but at the same time he takes so much of the amazing experiences and possibilities as just normal. Again, I get it, he grew up with this. But he is writing a book kind of thinking about his own life. WHERE IS YOUR PERSPECTIVE? He even mentions that the military pilot education he got costing millions of pounds. But hey. No biggie, it's his and it makes him feel good. So it's normal.
Sometimes he mentions how these things are great, but he never faces the fact that the only reason he can do all this is because of who and what he is. Harry the Prince only gets the awful stuff, none of the perks are because of the same thing.
He's incredibly unrealistic in many other ways as well. The way he talks about his wife is supremely weird. Some people are more mushy when they are in love, but this. THIS. He is just unable to understand that there are people who can dislike Meghan. He claims the British people not liking her is his own country betraying him. He calls her magic.
Every single time she is not automatically adored, he claims she is being abused. Meghan acts in a way that is actually rude (like asking for the lipgloss of Kate, whom she barely even knows, YUCK) and he can't help freaking the fuck out about people not tolerating it.
Talking about freaking out. There is this one moment while they are dating. They have a misunderstanding. He gets pissed and apparently he says some mean things. In this 500 page book filled with details about his frostbitten penis (yes, really), we don't get explained what this argument was. Okay. But the way he reacts to his own anger is pathetic. He totally crumbles, says it's unacceptable for him to be angry with her and suddenly feels the need to go to therapy. Not when he believed Diana was just hiding until his TWENTIES. Not when he obviously had drinking problems. But when he snapped at perfect MEEEEEG.
Not sure how I feel about his conversations with his therapist. He needs help. That's true. But he seems to surround himself with people and things that make him try and get the exact wrong kind of “help”. Like a man who has a so obviously distorted version of reality... should probably not do psychedelics and listen to “spirit mediums” who tell him his dead mother is actually still hanging out with him. Just a thought.
Now about one of the main ideas; Harry wants privacy. Again, understandable.
Then he goes and tells us he used up all the laughing gas when Meeeeeg was in labor with their first child. That he is circumcised. Where and how he lost his virginity. Mate, what are you doing?
What is even worse, he does the same with other people. Often people he tries to make appear in a bad light. Like fuck off with talking about his dad having been severly bullied as a kid and still having this toy rabbit to comfort him. Fuck off with assuming the complicated and long relationship between Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret (and assuming Elizabeth started every conflict).
He shows absolutely ZERO respect for anyone else's right to privacy. What was the goal here? Because it's such a spineless thing to do, acting so petty.
Talking about petty, he is incredibly jealous of his brother. As opposed to him just having so many hardships, the life of Prince William is just enviable in Harry's eyes. His brother has no hardships! Those are reserved for him and him alone.
All in all, I did not develop the fondest feelings for Prince Harry. Yet, I see King Charles as more of a human being now. Which wasn't the goal, but hey. I take what I can get.
Hannah used to be a wealthy wife, until her marriage fell apart and she kinda... went batshit on her cheating husband. Probably felt really nice at the moment, though right now she needs to start a new life, which involves getting a job.
Where? Well, at The Stranger Times, a newspaper that focuses on the paranormal and weird. They are eccentric people serving an even more eccentric reader base.
And that is really the selling point of this. The characters are just so crazy and all over the place that you end up having fun, often based on the fact that these people should not exist in the same place. They are all completely different in manners, how they deal with their issues, their work ethic. How they would normally probably murder each other...
And really, their boss is incredibly murderable in a total-asshole-why-do-you-exist, Bernard Black sort of way. Yeah, the guy is absolutely the character from Black Books, played by Dylan Moran. That show should speak to readers anyway, so it all connects there.
Talking about murder. That happens here. It focuses on the characters trying to investigate said series of murders, but it's not too depressing. Don't expect some grimdark type of a thing. This is not going to do that, the tone is overwhelmingly sarcastic, random-ish humour.
It all connects into the very real magical world in this universe. It's not extensive, I mean we are in book 1 of an urban fantasy series. On that front, this one is fairly standard. What's with humourous urban fantasy, by the way? What is with the rule that straight up fantasy needs to be serious, dark and political, meanwhile urban fantasy is goofy? Not like I minded here, it was competently done humour.
The whole thing was competent. You know, sometimes urban fantasy starts out a bit awkward, yet here it all worked just fine. I don't know how long this is going to go, though. We have seen a bit of some shadowy organization when it comes to the magical people and creatures, so there is potential to go that way, though I don't know how long you can keep that up with the characters being “just” normie human journalists who got drawn into this. Is it going to be a murder-of-the-week thing? We will see.
Some personal things connect some of them to the supernatural, but again, how long is the newspaper angle going to go? Because if things get serious with the characters embracing the weird, at some point the “type in articles, have a meeting” things are going to become frustrating. Not yet, though. I have zero idea how a newspaper works, so even that was fine.
Perfect if you want to have a fun time, relax and see the headless chickens run around and the weird shit to transpire.
Everyone heard about this case; Elizabeth Holmes started this insanely innovative health start up, to bring us a technology that would make healthcare faster, more effective, more convenient and cheaper.
She had investors throwing money at her left and right.
Then it turned out she lied. Her revolutionary blood testing system never even worked and SHE KNEW IT ALL ALONG.
As of now, she got a sentence of 11 years in prison.
The amount of fucked up things this company called Theranos did is off the charts. They lied to investors and users (doctors and patients) of the product alike. Holmes and her boyfriend, Sunny Balwani abused workers so much one man, Ian Gibbons actually killed himself. Other people, like Tyler Schultz had their families fall apart. They terrorised their critics with threatening to sue them, having them follower, possibly for years, by private investigators.
Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani are both insane, dangerous criminals who did things that are inexcusable.
Once shit hit the fan, they tried everything to stop it, from falsifying tests that ensure the quality of lab work, to terrorising people, to then Elizabeth Holmes claiming she only did her crazy shit because she was raped in college. Because that excuses faking medical tests that are crucial for people to not die of preventable illnesses. That excuses having a previous employee followed and threatened with “we know where you live” messages until she wanted to move to China.
They diagnosed people with illnesses they didn't have (surprise! you are not dying after all, sorry for you being in total panic) and most probably said people were clear when they weren't. By the way, they claimed they could run hundreds of tests, from testicular cancer to AIDS.
Now about this as a book.
It took me a long time to get into it, because especially at the beginning, it has a lot of names. Now of course it's a thing because of the insane turnover rates of this hellhole of a company. But really, it wasn't always super easy to follow who did what.
In the later part, it became much better, I felt like it all got more focused.
I'm not sure how good of an idea it was to publish this book when the court case wasn't done yet. That's another part of the story I would have liked to hear more about.
DNF at 25%.
This just feels so indistinct. We are running the same circles (Vivian hates Eric and “never wants to see him again” even though she said that a million times and they still see each other again, Eric's Nazi gun just feeeeels so wrooooong, the same not friends thing with Gabriela), almost like no development is happening, and we are on book 4.
Of course, new mysteries are happening, but they are all buried under the same old, same old. Besides, even the mysteries feel kind of samey. No emotional involvement, just same murders that all feel the same.
We get a new character, called Letitia, whom Eric is supposed to already know, but we never met her before and she was never mentioned, just feels tacked on. Also, she doesn't sound in any way distinguished from the other characters.
I don't know why, but it all feels like a lot of the information about the world building is an afterthought that we get told about. Even the South American flare is mostly just the characters listing the names of the different gods. I can't help rolling my eyes when in this book Eric outright states “we are very diverse here!!!”, like this is even more of an intentional thing. (Using Che Guevara as a way to say a character has a cool and badass persona is also a... choice.)
I think I gave this series a chance to draw me in. It never really happened.
When I first started reading this series, I expected it to focus much more on Rachel and Nick's relationship with each other, but it was a lot wider than that.
What I realised as I went on is, you will not be able to remember every single person mentioned here and I think that's intentional. It's overwhelming and confusing in so many ways. At the same time... the moment you let go of that, you are going to have much more fun.
Some of the characters getting more of a role here were a lot of fun. I especially loved Kitty, the chapter with her adviser trying to help her become classy was amazing. The guidelines, they made me laugh so hard. Don't get me wrong, Kitty is an awful person, she really is, but she was so entertaining in her dumb and greedy ways.
I still didn't buy Kevin Kwan as an emotional writer. He is amazing at being funny, being over the top entertaining. The deep and emotional moments... well. Yeah, no, they didn't work for me, they often felt melodramatic in the not so brilliant way. Often I didn't feel like I cared that much about them.
Which is funny, because I get super invested in the dumb drama. The big speech Rachel throws at Colette? AMAZING.
On a side note, I watched the movie version of Crazy Rich Asians with my mother during Christmas. While is was different from the book, it was pretty great, we both enjoyed it, though sometimes I had to explain things to her, mostly about the connections between people.
Apparently, the movie of this one is on the way, we will be watching it for sure.
