Later
It was worth every minute of lost sleep last night. I couldn't put it down. Will make a great RomCom movie in the right hands.
A good ending to the cycle, but somehow not as exciting as the first two books. There seemed to be significantly less zombie on blogger action which may have contributed to that.
A very good book about the end of the world. You have to buy in that some sort of “event” made some of the laws of physics change, but once you resign yourself to that it's smooth sailing. I'm not a huge fan of poetry in my prose or trying to puzzle out how to pronounce a foreign language not even remotely related to my own, so Juniper's parts were sometimes daunting. The other “main” character, Mike, is a bit of a Gary Stu, but even he has exceptions.
This is a good story, although there are a few too many twists and turns that kind of took me out of it a bit. I wasn't in love with the ending, but since there's apparently a sequel maybe the author will fix that. Also, I found myself liking the 007 relationship much more than the 009 relationship.
Ok, there were also a few other things I didn't like. The whole CIA thing seems a bit cliched. And Director Marshall thinking that as soon as Jackson figures out he can time travel he will first confide in his father and second want to join the CIA time fighters club. That seemed unreasonably optimistic of him.
As usual, with almost any story the element of communication could have resolved a lot of problems. Jackson can tell his brainy friend Adam about what's going on, but he can't tell his girlfriend. He could have saved them both some heartache with just a few sentences and a quick test to show her he was telling the truth.
In spite of my complaints I really did enjoy the story. Once I started reading I didn't want to put it down. And I can't wait to read the next one.
When zombies in uniforms start showing up you will really have to suspend your disbelief, but they're Stephen Knight's zombies and he can make them do whatever he wants. It was still good enough that I didn't want to put it down. This was neither the best nor the worst zombie book I've read this year.
Any book that involves Harringtons, tree cats and Manticore is good. There are no exceptions to this rule.
Overall a fun read. Overaged frat boys meets the zombie apocalypse isn't something I've seen before. Charlie and Gay Mike are the only characters you feel like you can cheer on. Maybe the guy with the 5 kids. It takes a little longer to get started than I would have liked. They're pretty well established as a bunch of alcoholic, stoner, perverts by at least the third chapter; there wasn't a lot of need to go further with the lesson before getting into the action.
There's a prison storyline that is a waste of time to include. None of the events in that line make a significant or even useful contribution to the book. The author should have saved it for the sequel. I actually wouldn't mind seeing how the prison does during the uprising.
What a truly amazing story! If you ever need something that illustrates believing in a dream and being willing to persevere through everything to see your dream come true, read this book. Read this book anyway. Then go find “Raiders of the Lost Ark: the Adaptation” somewhere and watch it. Seeing the movie and knowing the story behind it will blow you away.
An excellent resource and a damn good read. It makes me aware of just how lucky I was with my older cat and all the things I need to think aboutmfor my new kitten. You can find a lotmof this information on the Internet, but it won't be collected all together and presented in an easy to read style.
A generally good Indiana Jones story although parts of it read a bit too much like Raiders and Last Crusade.
This is the book that brings me back into the fold on the Grantville series. I liked it so much more than any of the last 3 that I read, and I think most of the credit has to go to Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlett. I don't know to what extent Eric Flint was involved in the writing of this story aside from creating the whole universe to begin with, but a lot of the melodramatic flair that he has in any of the mainline novels was missing; happily missing for my part. This was just a great story of another uptimer going to somewhere that the mainline stories haven't gone and helping to pull the downtimers into the future. I was hooked immediately, so much so that I bought the book and returned my library copy, and bought 1635 The Papal Stakes at the same time. I'd been a little down on the series for a while, but I think I fell back in love.
Overall I liked this one a lot. Good story, great pace, lots of gore.
The one thing I didn't like was that it's all written in present tense. It's a stylistic choice that actually works a few times in the book, but for the most part it was just distracting. Obviously it wasn't a deal killer since I gave the book 4 stars, but I would have preferred it another way.
It's a pretty short book. I read it in just a few hours and I wasn't even trying to practice speed reading.
It's a cute and surprising book. It's pretty much a MasterChef mystery starring high school seniors. I found the female lead more annoying than most. She's pretty one-dimensional and convinced she knows what motivates people she met yesterday, but maybe that's true to life. I'm not and never have been a 17 year old girl, so what do I know about it?
What I do know is that I started this around noon, barely watched any of the football on, and finished it late the same night. I don't do that for many books. This one just sucked me in.
Giant shark makes an appearance in the first chapter, then it turns into Seal Team 6 stuff until 2/3 through the book. Basically, I wanted more shark less covert ops. However, the bit of shark I got was pretty damn good. If you think you would like Jaws meets John Ringo, you'll probably like this.
A little slow going getting into, but once I got into it I had a hard time putting it down. It's a pretty decent adventure story. Boy meets stranger. Boy gets mission. Boy meets people to help with his mission. All of it taking place in a USA that has been blasted back to the Steam Age, maybe, by invading insects (Gants) and dragons.
Put this book down, turn around, and walk away as fast as you can. The first 2/3s of this book is just an info dump of where Earth went from the last book, which, by the way, was so long ago that I forgot I read it. The last third is the “climax” that comes out of nowhere. One minute we're rebuilding on Earth and planning to wipe out the Hegemony, the next we're on some alien planet. There's no prep at all for this jump. Actually, the authors looked like they were setting up the finale to be the ravaging of the Shongair planet. That would have been connected in a real way to the main narrative (it's definitely not a story).
This has all the problems of Weber's Honor Harrington series and none of the charms. It's long-winded with descriptions of things that just don't need describing. There are a lot - A LOT - of words that don't form a cogent narrative.
Starts off hitting on all cylinders, but it fizzled out a bit for me in the last quarter. I was happy to be wrong about where the main plot was going to go, but the big boss fight seemed a little too easy. I'll probably pick up the sequel sometime.
Absolutely terrifying. With most disaster stories, like the Walking Dead or Dies the Fire, you can sit back almost like a sports commentator and think things like “oh, that's going to hurt” or “how are they going to get out of that?” But with this one, if you can believe the forward, it's all precipitated by an actual military tactic that has been researched and gamed out. And if that ever comes to pass, we're all fucked. Social order breakdown, rampant disease, starvation, cannibalism, and pretty much every other nasty things that humans can do could happen. This book has me wondering if I should find a cabin in the woods somewhere isolated and start learning how to live like it's 1818 rather that 2018.
This was a recommendation. It's not my usual type of book, but once I started it I couldn't put it down. It had me guessing the whole way through, but I never saw the end coming. There were a few other surprises along the way that I didn't expect. As far as shortcomings, there were at least two subplots left unresolved, but this seems to be a series, so I'll hope that they get covered in whatever books are left.
This was so good I was a little upset when it ended because there was no more to be had. John Sclazi writes in such an easy to read manner that the words just fly by. There were some surprising developments. I think I love Kiva Lagos. The character is hyper-sexual and incredibly foul-mouthed, but she's very true to life, I think.
The timing of this book couldn't have been better. Either from a standpoint of needing some new Scalzi to read or how well it accidentally ties into the pandemic.
Good book. Pretty decent end to the series, but I was unimpressed with the resolution of the Kronos storyline. I feel like either I missed something important or RR made the final confrontation too simple.
