Liz Rapp

Fun, fairly quick read. The dialog between Zacharias, Prunella and Damerell were probably the best parts of the book, with Damerell stealing any scene he was in. Zacharias is immensely likable. But as a whole I felt like too much was left unexplained.

The use and acquisition of familiars was both vague and horrifying. Zacharias describes their hatching from eggs as having the mind of an infant, for some unexplained reason a person from fairy deciding to reincarnate themselves in the mortal realm. Are they pets? Slaves? Friends? Are the sorcerers their slaves in turn? Apparently it's ok to marry one, as in the case of Midsomer and Lorelei, but they don't have any of them same rights and privileges of a human person, considering that Prunella feeds one of hers to another with no consequence but a few shed tears. This was murky and not adequately explained, I was honestly left wondering why anyone would want a familiar at all. For a moderate boost in power?

The main plot is about England running out of magic but it doesn't seem to impair the magic users in any way- the book is full of examples of Prunella and Zacharias casting spells with no difficulty.

It is apparently verboten for ladies to practice magic because they are too delicate - except for any occasion in which a lady feels like doing a bit of magic would be convenient.

Can almost everyone do magic? It is mentioned many times how useful maids, farmers, laborer etc find doing spells to aid their everyday work, so I was left with the idea that almost everyone in England must be able to do a bit of magic.

What does the Sorcerer Royal do? Zacharias mentions attending to his duties and being very busy, but doesn't say what he is doing. He can't flee Midsomer because he can't leave his duties, but I could not figure out why since he mainly seemed to be teaching Prunella and collapsing in pain at intervals. And much is made of the Sorcerer Royal's magical staff - but what does it do? I can't remember any instance of explanation of where it came from or what it actually does.

I have mixed feelings about this book. I liked it better towards the end, so I'd recommend sticking with it. Lots of thoughts on feminism and women's diminished roles in the Victorian era. The female characters slowly revealed complexities as the book reaches it's climax is fascinating. Faith and Paul's mutually antagonistic friendship was a delight to read. Faith's interactions with her little brother Howard were also heartfelt and at times deeply sad. When she tells him that good boys write their scriptures right handed, and ghosts don't bother good boys, and then he reveals almost hysterically his pages showing his attempts - that scene was so sad.

Honestly what I dislike about the book is more to do with the Lie Tree itself, even suspending disbelief over it's general magical concept. There is no evidence that the plant is actually helpful in anyway, if anything, Faith should have read her father's journal and thought “My father ate hallucinogenic fruit that drove him mad, and ruined our family. The last thing I should do is also eat this fruit.” Her reaction to both believe the journal, and then follow through with cultivating and consuming it were bizarre to me.

Also - the row boat. I have no idea why the author's idea was to hide the plant in a sea cave only accessible by boat. This immediately threw me off, it's such a weird and random choice. For one, who owns the row boat? Why is it there? Why would someone just leave it on the beach? Has the author ever used a rowboat? They are heavy, and it takes a lot of arm strength to propel and steer it. It's not like being in a small plastic kayak. I do not believe for an instant a 14 year girl in the 1800s who is used to being bound up in corsets and not exercising much would have been able to propel that boat into the ocean against waves and current. It was easier to believe in the magic of the Lie Tree than to believe Faith would not have been washed out to sea.

I loved the start of this book. From Baru's childhood home, to the descriptions of the Masquerade's increasingly rigid and terrifying social structures, I was hooked.

Unfortunately, I found the rest of the book to be convoluted. Baru's character is assigned as the tax accountant to an unstable land called Aurdwynn, where we are very quickly introduced to dozens of dukes and duchesses who I read as being practically interchangeable with each other, and considering how most of them are slaughtered by Baru's plans or die in battle, there is little incentive to become invested in any of them. There seemed to be little to distinguish their voices from one another. Baru's take on rebellion through loans seemed weird to me - supposedly the population rises up for her, the Fairer Hand, because over a period of a few years she allowed them to take out loans of gold that had a note inscribed on them saying they were from her. I honestly don't think the common people would have noticed - when was the last time you looked at your money and thought about thanking the Treasurer of the United States, whose name and signature are on there. Since she is directly representing the Masquerade's interests, it seemed more likely that the local population would thank the Masquerade, instead of rebelling, if indeed these loans are to be believed to be some sort of driving force.

But most of all, I had a problem with the way the plot is handled. You find out at the end, that the entire time Baru has early on made a deal with the Masquerade's shady under government, so that while it appears from the outside she is leading a rebellion she is in fact neatly delivering the land, sans the ruling class, into the hands of the Masquerade. But since the narrative is largely told from Baru's perspective, it seemed like a weird shift to have a sudden reveal of something our character has been aware of the entire time, thus we as the readers should also have been aware. It seemed inconsistent. It was also hardly a twist - Baru says repeatedly that her entire goal is to get to Falcrest so she can change from within the leadership, which is exactly what she ends up doing.

I thought Baru was interesting, and overall the Masquerade society was chilling, and it left with a sense of oppression similar to 1984 or the Handmaid's Tale. I would be interested in a sequel, but the oppressive set up leads to feel any outcome would be just as bleak.

I should also say that this is one where the audiobook really fell flat - I read the first half and listened to the second, and the narrator was not a good choice for handling so many characters. They all sounded the same.

Very short, finished it in a couple of days. I really enjoyed parts of it, especially the parts about the protagonist's childhood and relationship with his father. The writing is beautiful, but the I feel the subject matter would appeal to few.

I was excited to read this, based off the reviews I thought I would love it. Unfortunately, I don't think it lives up to the hype. The second half is much better than the first, where the story is bogged down by the pettiness and idiocy of the characters. Vianne's central motivation seems to be do nothing and wait until her husband comes home, while Isabelle wants to flagrantly antagonize the Nazis at every turn. I am surprised she wasn't arrested or shot in the first few days of the occupation, her attitude was maddening. Opposing the Nazis is noble, but doing it by spitting in their faces is just going to get you killed. Add in the fact that the two sisters have a history of guilt and abandonment between the two, meaning they are at odds every step of the way, and the beginning of the novel was very frustrating.

“Why do we have to give them our radio, Maman?” Sophie asked. “It belongs to Papa.”
“We don't,” Isabelle said, coming up beside them. “We will hide it.”
“We will not hide it,” Vianne said sharply. “We will do as we are told and keep quiet and soon Antoine will be home and he will know what to do.” This basically sums up the first half.

Now imagine if the author has wrote a book where the two sisters patched things up early in the story, and skipped all of this antagonism. They could have worked together. I don't think it would have lessened the ending, but it would have made a much better book.

Also, did it bother anyone else that Isabelle's her codename is literally her name? Nightingale = Rossignol. She goes to all this trouble of getting a fake name and papers, but then uses her own surname as her cover. That was maddening. When you look at conversations like this, but replace Nightingale with it's French translation, it seems very strange.
“The Germans are looking for the Rossignol, Isabelle.” “That's old news, Ian.” “They're trying to infiltrate your escape route. Nazis are out there, pretending to be downed airmen. If you pick up one of them...” “We're careful, Ian. You know that. I interrogate every man myself. And the network in Paris is tireless.” “They're looking for the Rossignol. If they find you...” “They won't.” She got to her feet. He stood, too, and faced her. “Be careful, Isabelle.”

Overall, I felt like the second half is much stronger than the first, very moving and sad. But I felt like I kept getting tripped up by weird passages. Like “I am trussed up like a chicken for roasting. I know these modern seat belts are a good thing, but they make me feel claustrophobic. I belong to a generation that didn't expect to be protected from every danger.” This is a ridiculous parallel to make, not dying in a car crash is something you should definitely make an effort to protect yourself from.

I'd recommend All the Light You Cannot See or City of Thieves over this hands down.

The characters are interesting, but could use more fleshing out. There's a lot of great stuff here, Dylan's descriptions of Babylon, Stella's thoughts on her body, but the book lacks any sort of momentum, and feels like an unfinished first draft. The moment you get the antagonist in the room with the rest of the characters the book ends. And I don't even know if I would call Stella's dad a real antagonist, except that Dylan and Stella don't like him. The extremely cold weather, which should overshadow the book with a sense of doom, feels more like a non-issue. The main characters don't seem to struggle with it any more than a normal winter. They drink gin and go sledding, with the occasional mention on the news about the Thames freezing and snow in Morocco.

Stella is the most interesting character, her feelings about her body and fears about puberty forcing her into an unfamiliar body were very moving.

Parts of this I really liked. The family dynamics were great. Lots of quippy dialog and great writing. Dante and Aristotle are incredibly likable.

There is a lot of teenage angst along the lines of “No one understands me. I don't understand anyone. My parents are weird,” that the protagonists thankfully grows past. They go through a phase of reading intense manly literature (Heart of Darkness, War and Peace, etc.) I feel like it needed either a longer ending, or an epilogue. There is a long lead up to Aristotle and Dante becoming a couple, but then they kiss, and the story ends rapidly. There's also a pretty strong characterization of Aristotle being asexual - the way he hesitates to describe his feelings toward Dante as romantic, the way he talks about kissing and masturabtion, how he feels alienated from other boys who have seemingly bizarre feelings towards girls and sex. It would have made a great addition to further explore that and how it would affect their relationship, but instead Ari's parents literally tell him that he is in love with Dante, and then there is a tidy kiss scene that closes the book. Feels like a missed opportunity.

Over all I enjoyed it, it is also an excellent audio book narration.

I heard great things about this book, and was excited to see the final book released in English so I thought I would finally read it.

Overall I found it to be a frustrating read. The dialog between characters felt very unnatural, with long paragraphs of pseudo scientific exposition. The overall premise is great, with a rogue scientist inviting an unknown alien civilization to colonize our planet, in the naive hope that they will curb humanity's destructive tendencies. But the increasingly bizarre, practically magical explanations for the alien's scientific discoveries really lost me. Near the end they describe making some sort of artificial intelligent, impossibly small supercomputer, by unfolding a photon, and then launching it to Earth to wreck havok. “Oh no, we accidentally unfolded it into 4D space, oh no, if we unfold it into nondimensional space we will create a black hole and could destroy our planet.” I was fast forwarding my audiobook at this point desperate to get to the end.

I did really the description of the Three Body VR video game that Wang briefly play, it was a wonderful way to explain the alien culture to the characters, and to the reader. I was disappointed that it played such a small role in the book. There's also a throw away comment about how Wang is surprised that a grown woman, his colleague, owns her own video game set up, which was such a weird and outdated mindset.

This was a really great, if rather depressing. If you like WWII subject matter, check it out.

This was fascinating, even though I kept having to ask for people to explain baseball basics to me. The cultural differences between how Americans and Japanese players approach the sport was really interesting. The main issue I had with the book was how dated it feels reading it in 2019. A friend mentioned that only a couple of years after this was written, Japan suffered a huge economic crash, ushering in the Lost Generation. I would love an update on how modern Japanese baseball has changed in the intervening years.

This reads like a long list of things that happen to Patricia. Patricia went to Oxford. Tricia met Mark. Pat met Bee. Tricia had four children. Pat wrote travel books about Italy. The background of her life is interesting, such as nuclear attacks on Miami and Kiev, an alternate assassination of Kennedy, but the overall style of the book becomes tedious. The parallel lives are an interesting concept, but are barely addressed, leading to a feeling of reading two plotlines simultaneously without a satisfying intersection. You might as well read two books at the same time to get a similar effect.

Meh. There's a lot I didn't like about this, aside from the issues raised by a totalitarian social network.

The sex scenes were bizarre and unnecessary, with lines like “...so deep she could feel his swollen crown somewhere near her heart,” and Mae daydreaming about how “She wanted to be back in that bathroom sitting on him, feeling the crown of him push through.” Bleh. I can't imagine a woman ever thinking about sex this way.

The dialog seemed largely interchangeable, so most characters working at the Circle could well have been the same person, Bailey seemed exactly the same as the people working at HR. Most of the plot was driven by pedantic dialog of some higher up person grilling Mae until she agrees that she was wrong, and the Circle is wonderful. Mae lacks any depth and just serves as a sponge to absorb the Circle's dogma.

Also, there's an allegory throughout the book involving a shark harvested from a deep sea exploration of the Mariana Trench, and they put it in an aquarium and watch it eat an increasingly weird selection of animals, sea horses, a tuna, an octopus, an entire sea turtle, for seemingly no reason. It's such a heavy handed metaphor for the Circle, which is annoying in it's own right, but also was so scientifically impossible that I just got frustrated every time they kept coming back to this stupid aquarium. You can't take a creature living in the conditions of the Mariana Trench, raise it to the surface, and then expect it to survive in a normal salt water coral filled fish tank.

I finished the book feeling entirely frustrated. The upside was that the audiobook narrator was excellent, and it did keep my interest well enough to want to finish it.

It was interesting, but wasn't a fan of the style. Didn't want to continue a trilogy of more of the same, especially since I didn't really see any of the mysteries being resolved.

I stayed up til 2am last night reading this. Moving, warm and heart breaking all at the same time.

“...The scar doesn't bother her. If anything, it takes his face out of the category of symmetrical and ordered things to which everybody else's face belongs. It's a face like the throw of a dice. She likes that arbitrariness, instinctively. It's something she's drawn to.

What she doesn't like is the cruelties in his past, and in hers, over which she'll have to crawl to get to him. She wishes she'd never told him that she was a murderer. She wishes that she was pristine, in his mind, so that touching him might feel like booting up a different version of herself. But that's not how you get reborn, if you ever can....” Chapter 68.

Not for me, though I'll probably still see the movie version at some point. The book felt like a ridiculous list of extremely wealthy people doing what extremely wealthy people do. Very hard to like any of the characters. I skimmed entire chapters, especially the many sections that detailed how many karats were in someone's jewelry, or how much they paid for their outfit. This is where I suspect the movie would outdo the book, using an item's purchase cost or name dropping a designer is a poor substitute for actual descriptions. I felt like I was continually rolling my eyes at the level of excess and over the top characterizations. The humor/satire of it just didn't do it for me. Pros were that it made me want to travel to Singapore and eat a bunch of yummy satay.

Also thought the ending was weird and abrupt, but then I realized there are two more books that I probably won't read.

I am frankly startled to see so many good reviews of this book. I am a fan of Jasper Fforde's brand of humorous fantasy fiction, full of puns and delightful world building. I really enjoyed “Shades of Grey” and the Thursday Next novels. While it was a pleasant and easy read, with Fforde's characteristic wit, I just could not get over the plot holes in this narrative. Most of the things driving the plot felt very artificial and overly convenient.

Spoilers—–
...The central plot element of the novel is a premonition that reveals that the last dragon will die at the end of the week. Jennifer's reaction to that news is to decide quite out of the blue that she should go talk to the dragon. Never mind that there is a force field that will vaporizes anyone except for the Official Dragonslayer (and their apprentice, conveniently) surrounding that dragon land. Why does Jennifer think that she needs to go talk to the dragon? It would be like if I saw a White House press conference and then decided that the correct course of action would be to go personally and talk to the president. And then it is revealed that Jennifer is next in line to be the dragon slayer. The previous dragonslayer magically uploads all of the knowledge that she will need into her head in a minute, and then dies. Then she meets Gordon, a complete stranger, who shows up to apply to be the dragonslayer apprentice, telling Jennifer that he placed an ad in the paper for the job without her knowledge. Despite the fact that is is obviously some kind of scam, she without any thought whatsoever, in complete, blind trust, hires him. Surprise, it is later revealed that he is a bad guy, bent on claiming as much of the dragon lands as he can for a corporation. Why doesn't she pick her new friend Tiger? Why does she need anyone? After all, if she is the "last" dragonslayer, what does she need an apprentice for? One of the book's antagonists, Lady Mawgon, spends the first half of the book being a royal pain in the butt to Jennifer, and even succeeds in getting her effectively fired from Kazam. But she ends up being crucial in hiding Jennifer when she is in danger of being arrested (and possibly murdered) by the King's men. Lady Mawgon's character has shown absolutely no sympathy towards Jennifer during the entire book, that action is wildly out of character. It seemed much more likely that she would do something like that if she felt she could gain some kind of leverage over Jennifer, not out of the goodness of her heart. Also, Jennifer comes across as kind of pretentious. For example, why is she so turned off by the idea of endorsements? Do all of the athletes on Wheaties boxes and wearing Nike apparel, deserve our scorn for their endorsements as well?Finally, after saying over and over and over that no one can go into the dragon lands except the dragonslayer, and her apprentice...she brings her pet quark with her. Who then gets shot and killed. I found myself constantly rolling my eyes while reading this book. The plot just does not work.

I picked this book up based off rave reviews that I had seen for it lately. However, for me, it did not live up to the hype. I thought it kind of dragged at parts. I also found the descriptions of computer programming, using metaphors like ‘building a tower covered in jasmine,' to be an interesting idea...but one that did not make a lot of sense for me. I'm familiar with how programming works, and I just did not feel that the metaphors fit the art and science of computers. It's an interesting challenge, trying to write an exciting book where large paragraphs of the plot take place with the main character changing the world through coding, but the author's lyrical solution was off putting to me.

I also had trouble liking the protagonist, Alif, at all. He is terribly sexist. He point blank says to his companion, Dina, after she outsmarts him, “I almost forgot you were a girl for a moment!” I get that the author is trying to show that he grows up as the story progresses. However I just could not get over that he keeps a blood stained sheet, from taking the virginity of the girl he is infatuated with, and then when she breaks it off with him, he send her the sheet with a note saying “You might need this.” That was an unredeemable introduction to his character, and that poisoned the rest of his story. I don't really feel like he changes or becomes a better person, despite meeting djinn, being imprisoned, and accidentally becoming the figurehead for a revolution. He just wants to go home so he can date and marry his neighbor, and continue their conservative lifestyle.

His neighbor, Dina, however, is an amazing, intelligent, passionate and steadfast character. I only wish she had found a better partner than Alif. In fact, all of the peripheral characters are much more interesting and engaging than Alif.

Clearly a lot of people like this book, so give it a try. It definitely covers some interesting ideas, and I think that computers, programming, and technology in general should be woven through narratives in interesting ways more often. I just wasn't crazy about the way the author did it here.

I picked this book mainly because it was available to download as an audio book from my library. I didn't know much about it except that it took place mainly in the 20's in New York City. I was pleasantly surprised to enjoy it so much.

AMAZING

Got about halfway through this and then gave up. I was very bored and thought the characters were very unsympathetic. I cannot stand whiny protagonists, especially not for 400+ pages.

Very informative, but made me incredibly paranoid about the hidden chemicals around us.

I am a huge fan of The Partly Cloudy Patriot and Assassination Vacation (as well as The Incredibles), but I found Vowell's latest book to be plodding and bland. While listening to the audio book I just kept wondering why she chose this subject. As an atheist, a history of 19th century missionaries traveling to and living in Hawaii seems a wildly bizarre choice of topic for Vowell. I don't know much about Hawaii, and I did find parts of her book interesting, such as learning that it was once forbidden for Hawaiian women to eat bananas. I was also somewhat fascinated to learn that Vowell was able to unearth so many facts from historical archives and museums about obscure figures long dead, it is a shame that the objects of her study will probably be of interest to a very narrow population of Hawaiian natives or those interested in American Protestant history.

It was ok, I'd recommend if you are very interested in North Korea and enjoy travel books. It is very short and contains a lot of pictures, so should be a fast read. Lots of interesting tidbits about North Korean life, like people aren't allowed to own cars, that they have to bow at every statues of the great Kims.

I wish she had gone into why she wanted to vacation there, and the details of how she went about setting up the trip. I'm assuming you can't just get on Expedia and book a tour, but who knows, maybe it's that easy. She does go into why she enjoys traveling in general, and her comparisons to other trips and North Korea were heartfelt, she writes about how hard it was to connect with anyone when both parties are so carefully watching their words. I wish she had written more about herself personally too. I know she lives in New York, is a vegetarian, likes to travel, that's about it.

It also reads like she assumes the reader knows a whole bunch about North Korea, she could have added a lot more to the books by providing more historical context, similar to how Bill Bryson covers the history of the Appalachian Trail in A Walk in the Woods, instead of just writing about his long walk.

One of the main problems is that it seems like the author was bored a lot during her trip, which bleeds into her narrative. Mentions of lack of toilet paper, and the eternal search for bathrooms, reads as filler in a trip where not much happened. There were also some inconsistencies that were strange - she's a vegetarian, and has a section about how she doesn't want to hurt living things to the point that she rescues a fly from an enclosed vehicle, where in a previous chapter she describes eating a bunch of clams at a clambake? She mentions electricity rationing and how rarely lights were turned on, but also how most places she went were air conditioned ice boxes?

Also, reading this not long after Otto Warmbier's was return to the US in a fatal coma, the sort of sarcastic tone of the book can be a bit off putting. At one point the author mentions another tourist who was imprisoned for leaving a bible behind, and jokes about Bill Clinton having to rescue her for doing something similar, but the actual threat of terror the North Koreans live with doesn't really come through.

Also, the overused quotes from Lewis Carroll drove me crazy. I read the first one and then skipped the many that followed. I do like that the book included her photographs, but captioning a lot of them with whimsical quotes from Alice in Wonderland was annoying, I would have appreciated a description of what was actually in the photo.

This one kind of fizzled out for me. I was really into it until just past halfway, then I had to force myself to keep reading. I love the characters, the setting, the differing philosophies between those who love the naturals sciences and those who love faith. There is so much to like in this story - Francis is so weird yet charming, Stella in her blue bower, Cora and Will meeting over freeing a sheep from the bog. But past a certain point it just seemed like repetitions of things already talked about, with no strong finish.