Jessica
Overall an enjoyable enough Gothic horror tale, but a few of the characters were annoying and there are some plot holes/confusion (especially around the whole tetanus thing). Also, some of the text seemed eerily similar to parts of The Southern Reach trilogy (feeling a “resonance” and “clarity”, becoming other, etc.). It may be that both just drew on the Cthulu mythos, which I've never actually read (did I just ruin my nerd-girl cred?). Despite these quibbles, I am intrigued enough, especially by the inspector character, to read the next book in the series.
Three or four really stellar essays (especially the one by Barbara Kingsolver), but overall the collection fell kind of flat for me.
Parts of this novel were really lush and gorgeous–especially the parts with Hild noticing the natural world around her. But like many readers, I had a very hard time keeping people and places straight, even with the map and glossary and family tree. I feel like there's a lot of subplot that I totally missed, primarily, whatever Breguswith was plotting the whole time. And the ending came out of left field. Why on earth did the author feel the need to create this character in the first place, and then make him Hild's half brother on top of it if she was just going to have them wed? Is there some political or historical significance to this that I'm missing?
Not as amazing as her poetry, but still pretty good. My favorite essay was the one where she let us glimpse into her daily notebooks. Even when she's just writing stray thoughts, she's brilliant.
This book will make you never want to eat anything with unpronounceable ingredients ever again.
It was interesting enough that I read the whole thing. Indeed, I was mostly engrossed because I was waiting to see if the many mysteries would be explained. A few were, but most were not, at least with any satisfaction. A very atmospheric tale with some truly lovely parts, but overall this book suffered from trying too hard. Too many characters, all lacking depth; the town is just too quaint and perfect as a setting and too obviously fake; both people and place names are far too telling; too much time spent on describing costuming. I think this author has a lot of potential, but this was a little too unpolished for me.
Thoroughly enjoyable–I even laughed out loud at times. I think the story might have packed a bit more punch, though, if I hadn't known going into that Fern was a chimp. Still, a very fun read, especially for a story that is ultimately about loss and facing hard personal truths. I will look for more from this author.
I wanted to like this more since I really enjoyed the first book. I still loved Siobhan's voice, but the book mostly lacked plot, and the twist at the end: NO. I don't understand it in terms of the world that was built. It seems to serve no real purpose and left me with more questions than answers. It also felt manipulative. Like it was only there to elicit emotion, but since it wasn't tied to any greater purpose that I could discern, it was unearned emotion. There also seemed to be a lot of setup for potential political conspiracies and shadowy henchmen that just never really materialized. Which again left me wondering at the point of the whole tale at all.
I . . . I don't know how I feel about this one. Disappointed, mostly, I think. Was it the waiting so long for the final installment that did it? The not-quite-successful dual ending? The ending that offered closure, but still didn't feel right? I need to mull it over some more.
Dan Simmons is so hit or miss for me. This was a big, fat, overlong miss. And be forewarned that there is no real horror or even thriller in this lengthy tome. If you enjoy overly technical exposition on how to climb mountains and what gear to wear and bring, you may enjoy this more than I did. But not only could this volume have been about 3/4 slimmer (Simmons doesn't even get to the meat of the story until nearly 500 pages in!!), but it needed a much heavier-handed editor as well. Many, many, MANY sentences are repeated verbatim not just once or twice throughout the book, but half a dozen times or more. And when we finally learn of the abomination the book is so named for, it is such a ridiculous “twist” on historical events that it'd be laugh-out-loud funny if it wasn't such a tired trope. I mean, really, the bad guys are Nazis? How inventive. If I had known that's the kind of payoff I'd get for sticking with this, I would've stopped reading 100 pages in like I was sorely tempted to do.
Not sure what to make of this one. The art was certainly gorgeous, and I liked the darkness of the tale. However, it seemed to lack a cohesive plot, and I was left with too many questions.
An utterly fascinating exploration of one girl's fight against a rare autoimmune disease that almost got her locked in the nuthouse. Makes you realize just how little we still know not only about the brain, but about the brilliant machinations of our entire bodies and all the cells that make it work.
Extremely engrossing read. It's easy to romanticize the not-too-distant past, longing for a simpler time. But this book illuminates better than many how much we'd truly loose if catastrophe forced society to return to pioneer-like days. Some things are better, but some are much, much worse.
This was a quick, quirky, enjoyable read. I adored the narrator. I laughed out loud several times, and even got a tad misty at the end.
Currently, about two-thirds of the Western world no longer experiences true night/darkness. It is estimated that 80 percent of children born in America today “will never know night dark enough that they can see the Milky Way.” This book explores why we should care about this, not only for aesthetic reasons, but for physiological and environmental reasons as well. Bogard visits the darkest areas left in the world and interviews astronomers, park rangers, and concerned citizens who are doing their part to take back the night. A sobering look at how far we've yet to go, but also offers some real hope that things can change.
Narrated by 15-year-old Daisy, this book looks at the brutalities and confusions of war through her eyes. I loved, loved, loved her voice. Snarky but soulful and so very compelling. My favorite line: “I don't get nearly enough credit in life for the things I manage not to say.”
Fascinating, disturbing–downright scary, even. We've all heard the wackadoodle things Scientology teaches and the rumors of abuse that go on within it, but this book magnifies all that by about a million. It appears very well-researched, though at times it could have used some better organization. If everything in here is true, I don't understand how the “religion” is not only still allowed to operate under a tax-exempt status and be constitutionally protected, but how aren't half the leaders in jail? I also fear for Wright's safety, given the great lengths the cult has gone to in the past to subvert investigative journalists.
And while I understand how some people can be drawn into Scientology by the flashy celebrities, the promise of solving all your problems, etc., I don't understand how any sane, rational person manages to stick around and think “yeah, this is definitely true for me. This makes sense.”
An excellent dark fairy tale. May be a bit too slow for some teen readers and those not familiar with the tone and pacing of older fairy tales. But if you can be patient enough to get into the rhythm of the tale, I think you will be rewarded with an enchanting read.
Some reviewers have noted that the tale seemed to lack good character development for the secondary and tertiary characters. While this is true, I think it fits in with the fact that the narrator is a 19th-century German ghost. He doesn't know the other characters and their motivations the way he knows the protagonist, Jeremy. Nor is he familiar with modern American life. He even states himself a few times that he didn't understand why a character did something. The reader can easily guess at the motivation behind some of these actions, but these would be completely foreign to someone from the ghost's time and place.
This is the laugh-out-loud funny escapism we all need right now. I couldn't stop sneaking paragraphs in between video meetings, which was a terrible and brilliant idea. Terrible because I had to try not to laugh as I recalled what I read (and I got called out more than once for this–“what's so funny?”), and brilliant because the humor somehow made work more bearable for a few days.
When I first picked up this book, I thought “Awesome! The Passage for werewolves!” So maybe I overhyped this book for myself, or maybe it just didn't live up to its own potential. The characters are very interesting. The premise has a lot of promise. But in the end, I feel like the author relied to heavily on American history for his plot–it was like he did a search and replace for any cultural upheaval and crammed it all into the story. Civil Rights movement, Vietnam War protests, War on Terror, Occupy Wall Street–all there, but replace African Americans, Muslims, hippies, occupiers with lycans.
Also, the ending was a bit of a letdown and left several main characters stranded. About 60 pages from the end, I kept thinking, there's no way he can wrap this up, there must be a sequel planned. But wrap it up he did (though there could still be room for a sequel–I mean, what happens to Miriam? Chase? Augustus? Max?), in a way that made me re-read the last chapter 3 times. The solution just didn't feel right to me. If that was what the Resistance was cooking up all along, why the previous carnage? They could have done that quietly at any time, without any need for a large resistance movement. And what was the Tall Man really after? He seemed to have a bigger agenda than just personal revenge, but we never see it fully played out. And what is the deal with Augustus, anyway?
The more I write about it, the more I'm talking myself down to a 2 or 2.5-star rating. . . .
I'm not sure I actually liked or even understood this fairy tale. However, the writing is gorgeous and the tone very evocative, so an extra star for that. More sensitive readers should note that this is a fairly brutal tale. If you are squeamish it all you might not even make it past the first 20 pages.