altlovesbooks

If you had told me a few years ago that my favorite TMNT property wouldn't involve the Fab-4 at all, I wouldn't have believed you. How could you have TMNT without the TMNT?

This particular volume is a split timeline story, where we're told the story of how The Last Ronin (no spoilers from me here, nosir) got to where The Last Ronin picks up. Some small plot/backstory holes from the first story are plugged up here, and we're introduced to the new/next Fab-4 that clearly is picking up where the last left off. We get a bit more lore/history from the Ronin-verse fleshed out, and setup for where things are going in the future.

More of these, please.

This seemed like a promising take on the whole retold mythology genre. Rather than it be an actual mythological character, we have (Pan)Dora Blake in London in 1799, unwilling employee to her uncle who’s running her deceased parents antiquity shop into the ground one forgery at a time. Her deceased parents were killed during an excavation disaster a decade ago, leaving Dora orphaned and stuck at her uncle’s mercy. A strange crate arrives for her uncle one day, and Dora makes it her mission to see its contents – a giant Grecian vase, in pristine condition. Dora, now with aspirations of jewelry design, hopes to use this vase to fuel inspiration for her jewelry pieces, but gets sucked into the vase’s origin story, one that involves her parents and her uncle as well.

Unfortunately, I didn’t think the book lived up to its ultimate goal. While I appreciate the different spin on the genre, the book felt really meandering in places, and it seemed like Dora’s motivations changed depending on when you checked in on her. (Mild plot spoilers here)either she wanted to take over her parents shop, as it had once been a great thing in London, or she wanted to wash her hands of the whole thing and make jewelry. This made her character feel a little inconsistent and changeable depending on what was going on at the time.

It also felt like nothing happened, despite there being this mystery hanging over the entire book. I don’t know if it was as product of the writing or wanting more of a mystery than we got, but even though there were some standout scenes, I honestly felt kind of bored with the whole thing. (Large ending/plot spoilers)I sort of wanted the vase to be more of a thing than what it was, which was a vessel for a message from her parents to her. There were some hints and intimations that there was something supernatural about it, but I guess that amounted to nothing in the end, and it left me a bit disappointed.

It’s an adequate book, but nothing I’d probably recommend to anyone. Perfectly average, I guess.

Stream of consciousness writing ought to be its own genre so I can more easily avoid it.

Did not finish.

This book suffers from "book-2-itis", I think. I really liked the first book and thought the pacing, setting, and story were all really well done, but this book 2 seems to just not hit the same high notes with me.

Iari and Friends are exploring ruins looking for the separatists that plagued the first book. Things go sideways in the ruins, and suddenly our cast of characters is split between Iari and Corso on a Templar rescue mission and Gaer, Winter Bite, and Char in Windscar trying to make the Important People care about the fact that Iari's on a potential suicide mission in the heart of unfriendly territory.

Lots of action happens. So much action! And banter! Great, engaging banter! Basically all the reasons I loved the first book are here again in the second. But maybe it was the setting (not quite a murder mystery, not quite a thriller) or the fact that there was an incredible amount of exposition shoehorned in amongst the action that I found my attention drifting in parts. Still a great book, just not quite the same high highs as the first.

I hope there's a book three to tie up some loose threads (hello Iari x Gaer), but I saw a mention that this is only supposed to be a duology, in which case I'm left deeply unsatisfied.

"In chaos, no one won."

I was expecting something entirely different than what this book delivered. I think there's something here for someone who wants a gendered discussion of a female pirate (co-)captain's life during the age of piracy in China, but that kind of wasn't what I was looking for when I picked this one up. There's no cool pirate captain action, no high seas battles, just a woman trying to keep her fleet together after the death of her pirate captain husband and philosophizing about a woman's lot in life.

Honestly, I thought it was quite a bit dry and boring. I never really came to sympathize with Shek Yeung, and honestly found what she thought of the people around her kind of depressing. I actually found Cheung Po way more sympathetic, (early book plot spoilers) because he clearly cared for Shek Yeung, but she actively avoided sharing those feelings.

There's something here if you're looking for something introspective, but nothing here if you're just looking for a cool pirate book.

"History is littered with dead good men."

I…. don’t know what to make of this book. It’s a good book! Lots of people agree! Fabulous worldbuilding! Interesting characters! Great prose! I just came away from parts of the book wondering if there was maybe too much worldbuilding in the first, oh, 60% of the book, and not enough crumbs of action dropped to keep me invested.

There’s not one or two viewpoints to summarize here. Instead, we get a whole fully developed cast of characters we bounce between, with their own involvements and plot lines going on within the world the author fleshes out for us. It isn’t until near the end of the book that some of these characters start meeting up with one another and the plot starts moving though, so if slow burn epic fantasy isn’t your thing, you might have a hard time getting through it.

I will say that as soon as the plot started moving, I was all in on what the author was bringing. I also hear that book two is when things really hit their stride, so I’m looking forward to that experience as well. Getting to that point took me a while, though, and I kept putting the book down for other reads and only reading it in small chunks up until the last 20% or so.

There’s definitely something here though, and I’m going to try and make time for book two sometime soon before I forget everything from book one.

"It’s your second home, Jon. You’ll be back."

Who knew a book about owl conservation in Russia could be so engaging? Books like these are why I love dipping into obscure topics – you never know what you’ll find or how interesting small details can be.

This is a book about fish owls in Russia being studied by a guy from Minnesota. Jon Slaught picks these elusive, very rare birds as the focus of his graduate work, and we go along with him on his expeditions into Russia to find, study, catch, and release them. Along the way, we get a lot of insight into far eastern Russian culture, introspective thoughts about conservation in general, and an informative final few chapters where we learn what comes from his research and the devastating impact a typhoon from 2016 has on the region.

This is almost part memoir, in that we get a lot of Jon’s thoughts along the way about his expedition companions, the locations he frequents, the colorful cast of Russian characters he meets along the way, and all sorts of other little bits along the way. There’s plenty here about the fish owls of course, but I also loved learning new things about a country I know not enough about. The struggles he goes through in getting tracking data from the owls he identifies was especially interesting to me, about not wanting to stress the birds out unnecessarily, and wanting to make sure eggs and nest aren’t harmed while doing so. It’s very clear to me that he cares deeply about the owls and the region, and I really appreciated that while reading.

Great book about an obscure topic in a country most people probably don’t know much about.

"No fear, McGrath."

I’m not crying, you’re crying. Seriously, who’s cutting all the onions in here? I’m not one to get sentimental or teary when reading very often, but this one unexpectedly did me in. Fair warning, this is a sad book with many trigger warnings, but it’s a very good book.

Frances “Frankie” McGrath is the daughter of a well-to-do family from Coronado Island, who grows up very close to her brother. Her brother graduates, enlists in the military as men in the McGrath family do, and is sent to Vietnam. Frankie, feeling a need to do something more with her life, also enlists as a nurse to be sent to Vietnam. Her family is less than pleased (women, after all, don’t belong in the military), but she goes anyway. This book is about her experiences as a nurse during the Vietnam War, and the problems she experiences coming home again.

I’m going to reiterate here that this is not a happy book. It’s very much a gut punch all the way through, and while most of it is family/relationship drama, there’s a good bit of Vietnam and PTSD discussion as well. It’s very thought provoking about the experiences of women who served in Vietnam being even more forgotten and marginalized than men who served, while also making you want to cry and keep reading at the same time.

If I had to point out one thing I wish had been done differently, it would’ve been the very ending. Bringing Jamie back seemed gratuitously sad, like it was included just to evoke more tears in the last few pages. I have no problems with sad things, but it felt a little out of place and unnecessary with all the other sad things that had gone on. But that’s super minor and I know very personal, so I definitely don’t want to discourage anyone from giving this a read.

An easy addition to my 2024 favorites for this year.

Holy cow was this a slog to get through.

Ivy Radcliffe inherits Blackwood Abbey from a rather distant and unknown relative's death. She claims her property, moves in, and finds that the abbey itself is rather run-down, the staff is a bit standoffish, and the surrounding area bleak and uninviting. Nevertheless, she has an amazing library now, but everytime she spends any length of time within it, she comes out with headaches. Dizzy spells. Weird memory loss. She ignores warnings from, well, basically everyone, keeps mucking about in the library, and in true FAFO fashion, Finds Out that there's supernatural forces afoot amongst the books.

I feel like the author was trying to make Ivy out to be some sort of strong, independent woman in WWI-era England, but never really nailed the execution. Lots of things happen to Ivy, but she never really seems to take charge of anything to solve things. Her plans seem to amount to "bumble around until Ralph swoops in to rescue me", or get captured because Ralph wasn't able to swoop in and (immediately) rescue her, because that comes later. Between that and the constant memory loss plot crutch, it got rather repetitive by the end.

Btw, guys don't smell like woodsmoke and leather. Not even Ralph.

"The debts of the father must be paid."

Okay, now that the first book laid the groundwork for the new story after a lot of infodumping and "as you know" character conversations, I’m extremely pleased with book two. The two points of view from the first book are back here, with Olive Paper working her way through her own identity issues and stepping out from behind her family’s legacy and Darin Bales coming to terms with his own weaknesses and working to overcome them. It was great seeing them come together as unique characters and not just existing by merit of being the children of great people.

Really no complaints about this one, it hits all the same high notes from the first series with a new cast of characters that tackles things their own way. Olive Paper was far and away my favorite viewpoint of the two here, but I also enjoyed Darin’s interactions with his friends and how he leverages the powers he struggles to control in taking care of those around him.

Can’t wait for the next book!

100 pages in of a 256 page book and we still haven't gotten to the actual shipwreck. That tells me there's very little shipwreck in my shipwreck book, and I'm kind of bored reading about sailing minutiae and personality conflicts.

DNF, this would probably be better off titled "The Book at (World) War (II)", because at least within the first 100 pages, we only really read about a sliver of historical wars, and then a large swath of World War II. I also feel like this is a series of dry factoids in search of a premise. The information presented didn't feel very cohesive, and it was difficult to figure out where things were going and how it related to the title/summary of what I thought I was getting into.

I like the cover art though. I have a reproduction of this particular image on my wall at home (sans book info, of course). The original can be found here: https://www.loc.gov/item/2002709066/

A historical fiction book about The Wizard of Oz? Sure, sign me up. Sounds delightfully offbeat. Except that it kind of wasn’t and felt a little bland.

This book uses two points in time to tell its story: First, Maud Baum in 1939 trying her best to see her late husband’s creation done justice on the big screen. But to her that seems to mean word-for-word, scene-for-scene, authentic to the book, when this movie was intended to be a technicolor wonder for the masses. She also disagrees with the casting of Dorothy, and has to work through her hangups about both the movie and the actress to see both done right. Interspersed with this tale from Hollywood is Maud’s own life story about how she met Frank, how their whirlwind (heehee) romance led her down some unexpected and rocky paths, and how their experiences, highs, and lows translated into the book that Frank Baum is known for.

I just….wish I liked this book more. I tried very hard to like it since I have friends and family that all highly recommended it, but I kind of thought it was boring. Maud doesn’t seem to have a very likeable personality, either in old Maud being a seemingly stubborn curmudgeon on set to everyone around her about what Frank would have wanted, or in young Maud finding fault with Frank’s flights of fancy and trying her hardest to step on everything he loved so that they could have a "normal" life together. I thought the bits about Judy’s time on set were interesting (in a depressing child-actress-in-the-1930s sort of way), but there wasn’t a lot of that to build a story off of. And I really felt for Frank trying to make it as a creative type in the 1880s when that sort of profession was frowned up and not considered a respectable line of work. But the rest was kind of a slog to get through, and I didn’t really feel particularly connected with either story being told. It felt like most (all?) of the not-main characters were two dimensional and existed just in name as a placeholder in the story, which made large parts of the book a little hard to get through for me.

Still, it’s fairly highly rated, so if fluffy historical fiction is your thing and you love the Oz movie, give this a go. I found it flat and boring, but I’m also not really into really fluffy books either. YMMV.

"How nice it is to be two happy people on a purple moon."

You guys.

You guys.

For the short story fans out there, for the grounded sci-fi lovers on my list, even for the “I need a short book to pad out my Goodreads goal already” people, I ask that you keep this one on your list or in your mind for March. I’m going through a rough mental patch this last week or two, and this book was everything I needed to hear in all the right ways.

August lives in a Spire on a world of purple sand. A Spire is essentially a self-contained tower of people, like a vertical city. If you’re familiar with the term “arcology”, it’s like that. August herself is a rarity, in that she’s half human, half spyren, an alien race who are spiritually and physically connected with the world, and share memories and emotions through the sand around them. Her mother (the spyren) left the Spire when she was very little to return to her people, while her father left as soon as August was old enough to live on her own. They’ve remained out of her life since. She’s since made a living on the Spire as a sand reader, someone the residents can go to to have memories in the sand read for them (like a medium), but the job is taking a terrible toll on her mental health. She opts to take a sabbatical and find something new to do with her life. It’s through this that she meets Alix, a painter, and Lekka, a gardener who maintains the plants on the outside of the Spire (like a window washer, but…plant maintainer). As she slowly starts connecting with these two and finding where she belongs now that she feels she can’t go back to sand reading, the past intrudes on her new happiness.

It bills itself as a cozy science fantasy novella, and I agree with that assessment. It’s sci-fi in setting, fantasy in terms of sand reading, and grounded in the feelings of fear, inadequacy, and awkwardness we all feel when leaving something familiar behind and branching out into something new. The writing is stellar (badumtssss), and very quiet and deliberate in terms of setting the scene. I absolutely want to live on the Spire as described. It’s more family drama than action packed, so temper your expectations accordingly, but it really was the thing I needed to read right now.

Thank you to BookSirens and the publisher for providing me with a free eBook copy in exchange for an honest review.

"You can fall out of your own safe life that quickly, and nothing you thought you knew will ever be the same again."

I’m going to spoil this up front for everyone concerned before reading. Here’s my doestshedogdie.com report: The dog does not die.

New year, new amazing 5 star book! Teeeeechnically I started this in 2023, but the only date that counts is the date you log it as read, right? Right. If the rest of my 2024 reads could be this good, I’d be a happy camper.

The world has ended long ago, so long ago that Griz only knows it from tales passed down, and from what he finds when scavenging. His family lives on an island (maybe in the Scotland region? Being not from that side of the planet, I’m fuzzy on actual geography, but the setting/feeling sounds right), and very rarely sees other people. They’re a very close family, especially Griz and his two dogs Jess and Jip. A strange man arrives with a ready smile and a quick tale, and suddenly Griz is one dog less. What follows is Griz’s quest to get his dog back across a post-apocalyptic Britain. John Wick would approve.

First, to get out ahead of the complaints, this is a bit of a slow burn. Rather than it being a fast paced thriller of a sci-fi book, this takes place in the form of a journal Griz keeps of his journey, where we get to read his thoughts, his musings, and what he understands about the remnants of the world around him. It’s quiet in many places and doesn’t feature many characters (what with most of the population being, y’know, dead and all). But it was just so damn atmospheric and bittersweet, reading about how things have changed and how Griz approaches the world. This was all the slow parts about Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel that I liked best, wrapped up into one neat little package without all that pesky interpersonal drama getting in the way.

Major plot twist spoilers (seriously, don’t click this unless you’ve finished the book): And that 80% twist? I absolutely didn’t see it coming. I was really curious about the hints dropped by Griz all throughout the book, but I wasn’t expecting what was delivered. I guess I take book titles too literally.

I will say, what is it with the stylistic choice to not use quotation marks to indicate dialogue? This isn’t the first book I’ve read like this, and I still dislike the decision. But the book was just so damn good for me that I’m willing to overlook it just this once.

Just a really fantastic book to start my 2024. Read this if you like the idea of a quiet, introspective, post apocalyptic John Wick without killing.

"When history is the only guide, what room is there for the future?"

My Goodreads goal for the year is met, and yet I couldn’t help but pick up this novella when I saw it in my ARC recommendations. I’m kind of a sucker for speculative sci-fi concepts, and the fact that it’s in a bite-sized novella/short story format was ideal. I will say it left me wanting, but in a good way.

Rahnia is stuck on a planet, looking for a thing that may or may not exist, in order for her people that she grew up with to have a home. In a moment of despair, after she’s given up hope of finding this thing and wondering if it even matters anymore, it finds her. It being the voice box, a real Lorax-esque “I speak for the planet” type being. Without giving too much away, she’s presented with an offer that she can’t easily refuse, but ends up spending the rest of her life fulfilling the best way she can.

The prose is incredibly lyrical and moving, for one. I thought the author did a fantastic job of describing the setting, describing Rahnia’s fragile state of mind in places, and the constant conflicting emotions she feels throughout the story. I also loved the idea of Rahnia being able to (plot spoilers here) manipulate nature/the planet like she’s able to, but I do wish a bit more had been said here about how that translated to creating a better future for the planet. I get that she was able to put the planet on a better path towards peace and prosperity, but nothing was said about how Rahnia was able to do that with what she was given.

Just a really great read, a short one too. This will unexpectedly stick with me a bit, I think.

Thanks to BookSirens and the publisher for providing me with a free ecopy in exchange for an honest review.

I read RJB’s Foundryside several years ago, but left it a bit letdown and not really wanting to continue the series. I found its magic system convoluted, unnecessarily layered, and full of infodumps about why exactly something works one way and not another. Other people really dug it, but I thought the word salad it turned into was hard to follow. Having said that, I’m really glad I gave him another chance, because I think The Tainted Cup is something special.

Dinios Kol (or, Din to just about everybody in the book) is an assistant to Ana Dolabra, something of an investigator in the realm of Daretana. Rather like a certain Sherlock Holmes, Ana is very eccentric, a bit unreliable, and rather brusque and sarcastic to just about everybody around her, but is brilliant at what she does. Din is her eyes, ears, and hands into these investigations, and we follow him as he begins the investigation into the mysterious death of a rather prominent officer involving a tree mysteriously (and gruesomely) growing out of his body. The investigation quickly starts snowballing, and the two find themselves called to the very front lines of Daretana’s most dangerous battlefront against a most massive foe.

Right off the bat I like that, this time around, the magic system is much more subtle, requires less infodumping, and feels more organic (hehehe) to the plot and setting. Rather than it being the pivot point and purpose of the story like it was in Foundryside, it takes a bit of a backseat here where it’s still involved and necessary, but doesn’t feel like you’re being beaten over the head with it. I also really like the overall plot. Once upon a time I lamented to a friend that there was a distinct lack of fantasy murder mysteries. This is exactly in the realm of what I was looking for. It really does feel like a Holmes/Watson adventure, with clues and leads and a mystery that Holmes (Ana) solves early on and Watson (Din, our eyes and ears) struggles to keep up with. The last 10-20% of the book was my favorite section, where things click into place, suspects are hunted, and just enough is left teased and hanging for there to be both a satisfying ending and an anticipated sequel to look forward to.

There’s also a bit of a romance! It’s not a major plot and not a ton of time is spent fleshing it out, but it’s there, and I’m actually kind of hoping it’s continued in the next book.

Keep this one on your radar if you’re a RJB fan, if you’re like me and love the idea of a fantasy murder mystery, or if you’re looking for something fast paced and fun.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a free ecopy in exchange for an honest review.

Hey! We’re back in the Three Pines! And after a run of two books in the series that I didn’t care for, I actually enjoyed this one! Or maybe my feelings about the previous two books made this one feel not as bad. Unclear. I will say that, despite us being back in the Three Pines, on familiar ground, and working a familiar case, things managed to feel just a bit sloppy. I think if I didn’t actively dislike the previous two books, I’d probably rate this one lower.

Gamache & Co. are called on to provide security at a rally being held over the holidays. The person holding the rally is the most inconspicuous, likeable person you’re liable to meet, and yet they’re there to present some incredibly distasteful facts and figures. Someone takes a few shots at her during the rally, and the plot is off to the races! Her aide turns up dead, fingers get pointed, and it’s up to Gamache to unearth the various long buried skeletons in closets to get at the purpose and the truth.

First off, full stars for being back in the Three Pines. I missed it here.

But I had some issues with the book. Namely, it felt like it tried to do and be too many things at once. Major plot spoilers: For instance, Penny buries the lede hard on what exactly it is Abigail is presenting on for so long that I was expecting everything from anti-vax sentiments to a full-blown Nazi rally. It’s actually eugenics, but it seemed like that didn’t even matter to the larger murder reveal so I’m not sure why it was played so coyly. It also felt vaguely forced, like the other social issue books Penny’s written in the past, which took me a bit out of the story. It also felt rather repetitive in places, with Gamache & Co. rehashing the same points, the same strong feelings, the same sentiments in different locations frequently during the book. Penny is great at creating interpersonal drama over many different facets in a murder mystery, so when I was reading the same points rehashed several times throughout the book, I started to get a little bored.

I still am giving this a cautious 4 stars though, if only to keep myself in the game and happy to read the next book in the series. It’s an improvement on All the Devils are Here, but it’s definitely not the same caliber as the early books in the series.

I admit to knowing little and less about this region of the world and the problems the people of this region face. In reading this book, it really opened my eyes to the downright deplorable actions taken against Rohingya Muslims and the strangely blind eye the world has taken toward them. They’ve been stripped of nationality, of a home, of even the name of their people being spoken, subjected to imprisonment, torture, and death, and this was the first time I’d heard of it. What a world we live in.

The book follows Habiburahman, from his earliest memories growing up in the Rakhine province of Myanmar, to the caution and danger he faced as a child growing up Rohingya in a nation where to speak their name invited abuse, imprisonment, and worse. The boot at the back of the Rohingya’s neck presses ever harder throughout this book, until Habiburahman ends up fleeing first his home, then his region, and finally the country trying to find someplace where he wouldn’t eternally be on the run or enslaved by his own people.

This is a very sad story, told beautifully with the help of Sophie Ansel in the writing of it. That an entire culture of people can be effectively eliminated from a nation is a horrific thing to read about, but I’m very glad to have read it. Stories like this need to be read, heard, and spread.

Twins Mokoya and Akeha have some serious family baggage to sort through. Traded to a monastery by the ruler of the Protectorate–and their mother–to be raised, it’s not until their gifts start emerging that their mother starts taking an interest in them again. Unfortunately their mother being who she is, she’s only got selfish and power-hungry reasons for wanting to break the twins up after being raised together for so long. Frustrated and angry, Akeha begins to explore his own path away from his upbringing and his twin. A rebellion is growing within the Protectorate, and Akeha wants to be a part of it to free them all from his mother.

This book had some serious world building going on for something that’s just a novella’s length. I almost wonder what we would have gotten if the author had given themselves the space to expand on it all some more, because as it was, it felt very rushed and undeveloped in some areas. We handwave away a lot of cool sounding things, jump years in a matter of pages, and accept that anyone outside the small cast of main characters is a name and that’s it. As an example, (plot spoiler) at one point a character is sent on a quest to go to the top of a mountain and retrieve a phoenix feather to prove their willingness and worthiness to a cause. Rather than go with them on this quest, we get the resolution wrapped up in a single sentence, saying that they did the thing successfully. I get it, it’s a novella in length, but it really felt like the author was trying to do novel-length things with a novella number of pages making everything feel rather frantic.

It also kind of felt more like a family drama in a fantasy setting, as nothing really fantastical happens. Sure they have cool powers and all, but the bulk of the book was (plot spoilers here) Akeha coming to terms with being left behind by his sister, his mother being a right bitch, and feeling comfortable with his own gender and in his own body. These are all good things to explore, but everything being so down-to-earth made the rest of the fantasy book feel rather ordinary.

But that cover art though, right? I wish I liked the book more to have better things to say because of the art alone, but I don’t think I’ll be continuing the series.

"In a fight of one against many, chaos favored him."

I managed to squeeze in all four Sanderson secret project books before the end of the year, and that’s a big deal to me. Normally I don’t read authors/series back-to-back like this. I’m somewhat glad I did, because it lets me really compare the four books against each other in terms of my enjoyment and arrive at a (somewhat) legitimate review score. The tl;dr version is that it’s a decent book (particularly if you really sink your teeth into Cosmere stuff), but definitely not a stand-alone story, and be at least caught up with the Stormlight Archive through Rhythm of War before riding this ride.

Nomad, a key player in the Stormlight Archives, is on the run, and winds up on a murderous mudball of a planet. The sun is actively trying to kill everyone on its surface, forcing its residents to live in moving cities that travel just in the sun’s wake so as not to, y’know, fry. The Cinder King is the despot of this planet, trying to unify everyone under his singular rule (and thumb). The rebel faction on this planet are the ones Nomad falls in with, and the book follows his story of trying to escape this planet while also saving the people from the Cinder King’s rule.

From, basically, page 1 Sanderson throws you into the deep end of Nomad’s predicament, and from there it’s wall-to-wall action until the end. It’s a very fast paced book, which is somewhat uncharacteristic of Sanderson. It’s also rife with Cosmere spoilers for the unwary, so it’s important that you’re well-versed in your lore before tackling this one. I appreciate that the Cosmere exists, but I don’t do extensive Cosmere study, leaving me having to do some emergency cramming to understand some of the more intricate details. It’s definitely not a stand-alone read, which Sanderson owns in the afterword. This book is Sanderson’s gift to the fans, and it shows.

I ended up with a 4 star rating on this one, just because I definitely didn’t enjoy it as much as Tress or Yumi, but I did like it more than Frugal Wizard. It’s just really fast paced (have I said that enough?), and there’s a lot going on. It’s a must-read for anyone invested (hahahaha) in the Cosmere, though.

DNF at 10%. Maybe this was an audiobook thing, but it was hard for me to get into what was going on. It took about this long to even get a mention of 419 scams (even in an offhand manner), and at this point I was already losing interest in the flat characters. Putting it down for something else.

”We are all chasing ghosts, Kovacs-san. Living as long as we do now, how could we not be.”

Man…. I wanted so bad for this series to be more than it ended up being. I found the first book amazing, the second book still good (but way different), and had hopes that it’d find its stride again in the third book to bring it all home again. It does not. In fact, it’s a super mediocre ending to a series that started out so great.

Kovacs gets spit out again, this time back home on Harlan’s World, resleeved and living out a personal grudge against—well, that’s the question for half of the book, isn’t it? As the reader, we’re not clued in on what Kovacs is up to personally until after things have already kicked off. Sure we’re along on his cyberpunk adventure as he hunts people down, but we don’t know why he’s hunting them down. Somewhere along the way, he gets wrapped up in Quellist politics, and we get entire segments of the book devoted to Harlan’s World political science and we’re treated to lengthy political debates amongst two groups of people that will never see eye to eye.

Also, that ending. Extensive ending spoilers here: I was all geared up for a Kovacs v. Kovacs showdown, but even that conclusion was taken away from me by a trigger-happy Jad. Talk about anticlimactic.

The cast of characters is extensive, way more than needed to exist for this book’s story to be told. The story itself felt really disjointed after Kovacs gets in good with the Quellists, and I hope you like copious amounts of sex, because there’s copious amounts of sex. There’s bits and pieces in here of what I liked so much from the other books, but you have to dig for them amongst the Quellisms and sexytimes.

I don’t know, disappointing ending to something that started out so great. Not a terrible book if you know what you’re getting into and like that sort of thing, but it definitely was a bad note to end the series on.

I'm slowly working my way through all the polar expeditions that have gone awry. Turns out there's a lot of them, and they always seem to go poorly. Can't imagine why that is... it's a bit cold, sure, and there's not a lot of food to be had, but surely this one will turn out differently!

It doesn't.

Shackleton puts together a crew to reach the South Pole, but doesn't make it. They get stranded in ice long before they reach their goal, and end up drifting with it for quite some time until they send out a party to go for help. In the meantime, we get to know (some of) the crew of 27, and what it took to survive on the pack ice they were stuck on for so long.

I've read quite a few arctic expedition books at this point, and while this one was a great read, it lacked some of the flair and panache of some of the other books. Part of it is because this was originally written in 1959 from diaries and first hand accounts from the survivors, which is great, but some of the writing is a bit stale. I like that Shackleton actually seemed capable of leading his crew (unlike some others... *coughcough*Stefansson*coughcough*), and the crew actually seemed fairly capable and steady when compared to some of the other disasters I've read about.

This was really an interesting read, a bit stale in the writing, but otherwise kept my attention.

Well, I can finally check this one off my “I really should read this” list. There’s a handful of books I feel obligated to read as a librarian and just never get around to, because there’s only so many minutes in a day, and new books are shiny. I was mostly pleased with this, and I think my only real hangups center around it being a novella and not a full novel. Things felt rushed in places, but when you only have under 200 pages to tell a story, things get streamlined.

The “shy murderbot” shtick is mostly funny and relatable, but I will say that towards the end it felt layered on a little heavy. Like the joke had been told just one too many times, and you’re left thinking “yeah I get it” rather than being amused. The ending was especially on-point with the MurderBot character, and I liked that the author played it the way she did.

So, only a very minor complaint to a short, enjoyable read. Definitely will read more in this series, especially to pad out a Goodreads Reading Challenge at the end of the year.