Kyle
Alright, I have to give this series more credit than I did after I read the last book. Willis did a masterful job tying all the threads from Blackout together. However, I still did not enjoy it as much as her other books, and I really feel that Blackout and All Clear would have been much better as one book.
I am severely disappointed by this book. I loved the previous oxford time travel books, and this one seems to have much lower quality. Rather than the focus on one or two characters, this book juggles 6 characters at 6 different events, not giving nearly enough time to any of them. It still has one of the best time travel mechanics in fiction, so I'll probably keep reading just to see where we go with that, and Willis is still a competent writer, but she used to be excellent.
EDIT: Having read All Clear, I'm willing to give this book more credit, as it's massive amount of characters actually had some meaning rather than just cluttering the narrative.
This book was really well paced (which is my normal complaint with these type of competition based plots), had interesting characters, and a solid plot. It would have gotten five stars from me except HOLY SHIT SO MANY 80'S REFERENCES! I swear, there was an average of four per page, and some pages had up to 10. I get how it fits in with the plot, but it's just way over done.
A good story, but I feel that a better author could have done a better job with it. Every backstory chapters had my eye's glazing over, and I found the ending very anticlimactic. But still an interesting story that did a very good job discussing the dangers of deep wreck diving.
This book has some good things going for it, but fails in a few major regards. First of all, Aaronovitch needs to work on his characters a bit, especially their relationships. I still cannot tell you what the relationship between Peter and Leslie is; are they dating, are they friends, but he wants it to be something more; are they friends who have sex every now and then. This particular lack of characterization kills the very interesting plot in my opinion because when (SPOILERS) Leslie is possessed and her face starts to melt, it evokes almost no emotion for me because I have no idea how she relates to the main character. On top of that, the lore is fairly ill-defined, although it feels like that might get fleshed out more in future novels.
Pretty good for a self published book. There is a chronology error, but it's really well written. The characters are cliched, but solid. The plots got a unique spin on the crime writer wrapped up with his fans thing. I don't know where the series is going to go from here, since everything is pretty neatly wrapped up, but as it's own story, it's worth a read.
This is not a book. This is a fanfiction of history. Turtledove does not develop his own characters, he pulls some ready made characters out of history and drops them in a plot of his own making. And that plot is wonderful. He clearly has put a lot of thought into his premise, making reasonable guesses about the course of history if the South maintained it's Independence. But that does not excuse the lack of character creation. This book includes Lincoln, Custer, Theodore Roosevelt, Stonewall Jackson, and many other famous characters as it's main cast, and they are all paper thin foils of their real selves; Lincoln's a revolutionary, Custer's a bloody leader, Roosevelt's a Jingoist, and Jackson's a loyal military commander. By far my favorite character was the German Military attache, Colonel Schlieffen (who would go on the be the architect of the Schlieffen Plan), just cause he wasn't shackled to a historical portrayal of his character. I could learn and explore who his character was, rather than knowing as soon as the word Custer was written on the page. He gave Lincoln an interesting spin by making him a Marxist, and if he had done that with every other character I would have shouted his praise from the rooftops. But he didn't, so I call this a fanfiction because Turtledove blatantly grabbed characters from another medium and used them for this own story.
Also, this book loses another star by having frayed fucking edges. I'll keep doing this until publishers stop.
The initial premise and writing of this book is shockingly ridiculous, but that only highlights the decent characters and plot. Fforde knows exactly how seriously to take his writing and dances around cliches, using them to his advantage. They'res a character named Red Herring, and the entire time you wonder weather or not he's a Red Herring, trying to guess what level Fforde is thinking on. That being said, it's far from perfect. After 6 books, the concepts beginning to get a little played out. Switching the main character out for her fictional copy helped with this, giving us a new character to work with, but the books all feel kinda samey and similar. Fforde could also stand to set up his ending a bit better, as the big reveal looses a bit of punch since I didn't catch all of the setup. But it's so unique, you have to ignore the flaws and read it anyways.
Excellent comedic story of accidentally ending the world to time travel, and the only way to prevent it is to run around the Victorian era trying to arrange a marriage. The romances are fleshed out and the characters feel real
Has the same fun and inventive storytelling as the first book, but much less character development.
I really want to like this book. It's got a great core concept. Magic has disappeared from the world, and the last to English magicians work to bring it back. Magic with a backdrop of Napoleonic era British aristocracy is a great place to start, but it really doesn't do much beyond that basic concept. The characters are okay, but nothing to write home about. The writing style, which feels like an old Dickens novel, but this make the characters feel stiff and unlikable. The plot is incredibly non-descript and runs WAY too long. The last third is quite good, with the personalities of the two magicians colliding and dark forces working behind them, but it takes so long to get to that point that I really have difficulty giving this book a wholehearted recommendation.
In addition, this book has intentionally frayed edges, which docs it one star.
This book is great in the same way a bad B-movie is great; It's terrible, but its terribleness is inherently enjoyable. Anthony's choices are sometimes so bizarre, the real mystery in the book is what kind of drugs she's on. Why is there this weird love subplot between the General and the doctor who is removed from the main plot almost immediately after she is introduced? Why is Dee introduced as a character at all if she's just going to be killed immediately? Why is there a Zen master talking with a weponized video game nerd? I really enjoyed reading this book, but I can also completely understand the low scores some other people have given it.
A fun and energetic tale of adventure and friendship. The characters feel real enough that, even across the intense cultural differences, they still feel like a modern group of friends
A fun read, but fairly bland. The game is a good concept, but the author could have managed to do more with it.
About halfway through, the book about dragons introduces time travel. McCaffrey is clearly trying to blend sci-fi and fantasy, a noble effort, but in this case it just falls flat on it's face. It has some great pieces, but the time travel plot is so distracting that I can't enjoy the rest of the book.
Also, the plot relies on a bit of orbital physics (another attempt to mix the sci-fi into this book), but it gets it wrong. A planet with an extremely eccentric orbit would travel at about the same speed when close to a planet with a much more circular orbit, which would mean that a close pass of the two planets might last a couple orbits of the planet with a circular orbit, but not fifty. Maybe a personal niggle, but if you're going to base a major part of the plot around this, check to make sure it's right.
Some good characters and interesting plot devices, but I feel like this idea is running out of steam (budum chhhhh). The first books great, focusing on Hester and Tom, the two strongest characters, in an interesting dystonian future. Each subsequent book has drifted farther away from this strong core concept and has become less enjoyable.
A really good political dystopia book. The world Orwell creates is very detailed and well thought out. My only complaint is that it's a little over the top, which is kinda it's job as satire, but it's still somewhat jarring. I can understand camera's in everyone's house, but they're monitoring your facial expressions?
Vonnegut deal with his themes of inevitability and a soldiers choice in battle fantastically. However, Slaughter House 5 deals with the same themes, if a little less effectively, and also has much more engaging characters. So, if you want a good character novel, go for Slaughter House 5. If you're more interested in the themes, read this.
I haven't liked Stephen King books. They always seem like they came up with a couple good ideas, but then does the minimum amount of work to thread those ideas in the story. So maybe it was a mistake to pick up The Gunslinger, but everyone kept raving about how great of a fantasy series it was. Maybe this one's good, maybe this is where King comes into his own. But once again, I was disappointed. Kings done an okay job world building, even if it's a bit cryptic, but there's nothing else. Very little character development, a plot I can summarize in a few sentences. I didn't hate it, but I was bored pretty much the entire time.
A good story, but the author provides WAY too much detail. Not all of the characters in the book need to be fully fleshed out, you can have some background.
The main character made me furious at a few points in this novel and I don't think that he was supposed to. You're made to empathize with him and the book treats him like a basic protagonist, but he does a few things for the convenience of the narrative that are infuriating.
I feel like I would have liked this book a lot more if I hadn't been comparing it to the Martian. It's got the same realism through the details, but the characters are a bit more of letdown. I found them much more annoying than the protagonist of the Martian. It also fails because of the further distance from now. The Martian felt like something that could happen in the next couple years, but this feels farther away, and therefore, less realistic.
Also, I'm probably one of the only people who read both of these books, but did anyone else notice how similar the plot is to that of Luna: New Moon?