Josh Bizeau
Urasawa takes his time in letting the reader get to know the slowly growing cast of characters by way of unfolding events rather than heavy-handed exposition drops. Rising action is only now peaking its head and shows us that storytelling restraint is an admirable quality in a creative where setting up multiple events of interest and the characters being shuffled to them is concerned.
John M. Ford was an astoundingly good writer and this collection of quixotic short stories and poetry shows off the diverse array in whit and whimsy of which Ford was capable. One of the best surprise reads I've ever purchased purely on a whim. Highly recommended to all looking for something to shake up their collection of science fiction and especially to those who love endlessly re-readable poetry and short stories which are as entertaining as they are broad and thought-provoking.
Read aloud with my daughter. Prose remains pleasant. Our young protagonist strikes out on her first bit of rising action– an early test of her cunning, resolve and limitations in protecting Avamir and Moonsilver.
Thematic, moody dust jacket design, an inviting, nebulous cover flap and an engagingly grim story premise can't aid a thin narrative and the plain prose accompanying it (a few genuinely creative phrases aside) from being discouragingly mundane.
I enjoyed the setup involving our protagonist and the strange dreams visited upon him which, on the surface, seem to be little more than a youthful coping mechanism for the stressors his family is currently experiencing surrounding his sickly newborn brother. Curious fairytale logic between the dreamworld and how it crosses over with the waking world aside, how they reveal themselves becomes less and less unsettling (or interesting, for that matter) as the underdeveloped antagonist's motives are revealed to be not much more complex than “imperfection bad,” their summary demise feeling not satisfying but perfunctory.
The themes of the story are not lost on me and I found them to be generally worthwhile: The need to accept that not everything in life will be as perfectly put together as one might wish, overcoming the unique, overlooked psychological challenges of early adolescence amidst a distracted family and finding the courage to realize that ignorance of one's careless verbal contractual agreements does not absolve you of taking responsibility for them, especially when, in the context of this story, a loved one's life might be at stake, even if it means putting your own at peril.
Furthermore, I never felt close to any of the characters outside the chief protagonist and even found the threads drawn between him and his family members to be fairly thin and not nearly developed enough, outside of a meaningful passing glance he has of his dad sitting on his bed in a state of pure psychological and physical exhaustion, giving our main character an appropriate moment to reflect on how even his father is not immune to the irregularities and difficulties of reality. Throw in a completely pointless chapter involving the main character and a behavioral therapist, a wasted character in the “knife guy,” whose sole purpose is to act as a deus ex machina for the climax, contrasted with one particularly solid line (“A feeling is not a fact.”), a pertinent correlation to beds as our personal nests along with some eye-catching, gloomy, contrasty black-and-white art by Jon Klassen throughout and you have a story which, ironically, falls far short of its more perfectible imaginative potential.
Thinly characterized, coincidentally executed narrative that ruins a chance at exploring a coming-of-age, outsider-looking-in growth tale with SJW tunnel vision, historical inconsideracy and arbitrary character decision-making which is less organic then it is pre-destined– forced, even. John Green may have had this novel on his mind half a year post-publishing but I won't recollect anything in so many days. The lack of any forced romance was quite welcome and there are some smart, insightful lines sprinkled about which, to paraphrase one of the novel's characters, shows you can still learn things from otherwise imperfect people. Still, those are hardly enough to save this tree from not bearing desirable fruit. A shame.
One of my most beloved fantasy series and, akin to C.S. Lewis's “Chronicles of Narnia”, age should be no factor in the enjoyment of Lloyd Alexander's sharply-written, expertly charactered series. This book introduced me to some of my favorite fictional characters (Fflewddur Fflam especially) and is a delightful, spirited first act for this high adventure saga. “The Book of Three” is fast-paced without losing sense of story or scope; it is fanciful without losing sight of character development; and, most importantly, the book leaves the reader's appetite completely whetted for the following four stories. When you chuckle at Hen Wen's final “hwoinch”, you'll be glad The Book of Three isn't The Book of One.
Patterson's atrociously elementary prose aside, ‘When the Wind Blows' is an afront to good storytelling sensibilites the world over and is another example of literature of the lowest possible common denominator. Whilst the likes of Dan Brown have been the most recent perpetrators of this populism, Patterson has certainly been the more consistent of the two and quite arguably the worst offender of all modern hacks. I must surmise that even the combined powers of Dickens, Poe, Kafka or the most literate modern storytellers could not bend Patterson into writing a competent tale should they slap him a thousand times in the face with their own manuscripts.
The plot is an absolute mess having to do with the secretive genetic manipulation of a little girl and the two protagonists who find themselves tangled up in the whole scheme and whose mission becomes to free the girl from her experimental captivity. How that happens, one can only hope to care a little less about as the “story” unfolds with all the grace and weight of a weekday television drama. Pathetic romance between the tale's heroes degenerates into being laughably absurd at its worst moments (and soap opera-esque at best), the action throughout is completely lacking in suspense or thrills; but perhaps the worst offense of them all can be summed up in the cartoonishness of the narrative, chock-full of plot turns so contrived as to make M. Night Shyamalan at his worst blush. The characters are developed with as much interest as one might put into stapling together a cardboard box and much of the inanity takes place over the modern mass market fiction phenomena of brisk three-seven word dialogue sessions, which can go on for seeming pages at a time with little to no cognitive progress made, narratively-speaking. One would assume even a writer of Patterson's lowly capabilities could at least muster up some sort of detail when describing his characters, settings or set pieces... yet we get about as much an impression of such vitals as one might make of the Taj Mahal through the bottom end of a foggy glass.
An Amazon.com reviewer summed this novel up perfectly with the headline of his review: “When the Wind Sucks.” To say a Berenstain Bears book is written with decidedly more wit, charm and readability would be uttering the very least of truths in regards to Patteron's immeasurably awful writing. Spare yourselves this waste of paper and introduce yourselves to literature worthy of your time and mental faculties. Mass market drivel like this undoubtedly contributes greatly to the sharply declining literacy of our society, even if its pedestrian characters, Bruckheimer plot and by-the-books action do at least make for the most pathetically lazy of easy, diet reads.
For those who actually enjoy great, well-written literature, I can't warn you away from this book or its brand of modern “mass market appeal” writing strongly enough. Avoid at all costs and your IQ will certainly show no end of gratitude.
One and a Half Stars. Between the surface-level characterizations (outside Tornik, whose backstory I found meaningful though pitifully little was done with him and a couple other interesting characters once their expositions were dumped), rushed narrative structure, boilerplate action, peculiar interpolation of modern American behavioral methods, verbiage and euphemisms amidst period-accurate linguistics, oral storytelling and cultural norms, efficient, learned yet hollow prose and the thoroughly unnecessary, forced, “current day,” DeviantArt fan fic-esque, laughably anachronistic gay shipping involving a bisexual relic hunter seeking the bones of a long-dead saint alongside a devoutly religious monk seeking the boner of that very relic hunter in 12th century Europe, obviously well-known for its sexually liberative, hippie-like tolerance of such atypical, queer dalliances, this modern reframing of a peculiar historical anecdote is left wanting nothing less than a raison d'etre.
None of the above is helped by the “romance” involved being as steamy and arousing as an Arctic swim, its development consisting of meaningless glances and grey touches before bursting into full physical bloom by the end of the third act in a manner so hokey and contrived in narrative context it must necessarily speak far more to the kinks of the author than any reasonable attempt at adherence to “real events” relative to his opening claim. There are certainly examples of how to write a believable gay romance with characters whose relationship feels natural or even charming in its development (see the game Undertale or the fantasy work of Mercedes Lackey)– what we have on display in Nicked, however, is unbaked at best, comical at worst, the story intrinsically benefiting from its absence. Those passages where their relationship was of one growing from distrustful acerbity to strife-tested, platonic companionship carried far more versimilitude than the ultimate attempt at shipping them, a cancerous trend reborn once more in the long march of literary history– one which will ultimately age this novel into total obscurity.
I was genuinely interested in reading Anderson's The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge, which, as a story conceit, sounds rather to my taste, but having experienced his mischievous, deliberate, drip method poisoning of historical realities (a method far more insidious than simply remaking events out of whole cloth seeing as its efforts are to persuade the reader of a falsehood as true given the myriad facts surrounding it) and his equally noxious, Stage IV ideological carcinoma-laced Twitter feed, I will quite happily be giving this man's work a pass henceforth. Shame.
A fine piece of sprawling space opera by Mr. Cook. Sharp character development, deviously plotted politics, classic gunfights between unspeakably large space armadas, and sturdy, overarching thoughts regarding the history of seemingly invincible empires and the complex revolutions that seek to overthrow them as seen through the lens of an unfathomably immense space-time context. The struggle between the righteous species warrior Turtle, the underhanded, self-assured Lupo Provik, and duty-driven WarAvocat Hanaver Strate make for page-turning reading across the story's one hundred and fifty chapters; a large host of well-attuned subsidiary characters lend the tale a broader “human” depth and Cook has a keen eye for developing each one just enough to find a unique attachment for each. Glen keeps the pacing brisk whilst never losing sight of the dense (perhaps too much so in parts) plot threads. The ending seems just the slightest bit too inconclusive (though almost necessarily so) and some of the characters' motivations could have been outlined more clearly in the broader context of what is a tectonically shifting, galaxy spanning narrative. Still, this is a must-read for Cook fans; hardcore science fiction fans will also find plenty to love in this mammoth saga.
This bloated, plodding, overstuffed-yet-thinly characterized Dickensian wannabe lacking any venture or stakes or archetypal theme mounted on a clever yet conclusively gimmicky astrological/lunar cycle structure actually won the Booker Prize in 2013.
Good lord.
This novella will undoubtedly never procure a sequel, something which this short action-packed fantasy adventure cries out for when the final paragraph has been digested. The ideas here in the book feel half-baked at best and practically scream to be explored in further context. Cook's prose is snappy and thrilling and while his usual care for detailed, fleshed-out characters is put by the wayside, the team of quirky protagonists on display here are fun none-the-less and a couple can certainly be rendered as particularly memorable (Rider, Su-Cha, Shai-Khe). The most noteworthy comment regarding “Sung in Blood” would be to mentioned its obvious tribute to the Doc Savage and Fu Manchu series, both in tone and color. The action hardly lets up yet, like any thrill-a-second roller coaster, yet the book's charm really only lasts while you're in the midst of it. There's little left to ponder or explore once you're done spinning, tossing and tumbling through the ride. Certainly the most unimpressive work the masterful Glen Cook has written but I can still recommend it to fans of the author as an enjoyable, short-lived thrill ride– nothing more.
An excellent read from the renowned Glen Cook. “Passage at Arms” is a convincingly written narrative about the true strains of heroes under the most oppressive ship-bearing conditions (in this case a space ship rather resembling a submarine in its claustrophic space and madness-inducing solitude amongst the vastness of the star sea) and hopeless war circumstances against an enemy few understand but are willing to fight in the wake of determined high command leadership. What becomes of a particular crew's mental devotion to said cause and in particular their leaders during such strenuous days amongst the cold elements of space is the focus of Cook's gripping tale. Strong characters, great tension, and a moving first-person journalistic narrative make this a definite must-read for not just Cook fans but science fiction readers across the board. A well-told tale full of grimy detail, genuine suspense, convincing depth and inarguable humanity; and all of that in the span of just a couple hundred pages.
One of the all-time great science fiction novels ever put to paper, this work is always worth the investment to read time and time again. I really can't recommend this book enough to science fiction fans. Zelazny was truly an exceptional talent and left an undying legacy with this interstellar action-adventure novel filled to overflowing with color, drama, comedy, heroism, tragedy, and a timeless mythos.
