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Once again, Rachel Caine has raised the stakes and further developed this fascinating world. This book played with multiple POVs, a change from prior books in the series necessary because of where the characters wound up. Caine handled this phenomenally, giving us further insight into every character and also into the structures of the Great Library, the Iron Tower, and even smuggler communities. Getting to see the inner workings of these places really broadened the already fantastic world building. Major events occur in this one with equally major consequences, and you truly feel not only for the people directly involved, but you worry for the citizens of Alexandria as well.
Plus, that new automata design... hot diggity damn. This is really shaping up to be a favorite series for me.
This third installment in the Great Library series really upped the ante in every possible way. I was riveted from beginning to end, and on top of a heaping dose of raised stakes, the author also spent a good amount of time ensuring that by the time you get to the cliffhanger at the end, you're invested in every last member of this group of people, even the ones who have up to this point been harder to nail down or really resonate with. In prior installments I hadn't cared as much about Dario or Thomas as the other characters around them did, but at this point I would shield every last one of them from Greek Fire myself.
Also, that cliffhanger was one hell of a doozy. I found myself scrambling to get the next installment immediately, there was no way I could sit there and let it hang like that. I can't wait to continue.
This was a quick listen. I got the audiobook for free for Indie Bookstore Day. The lessons are all pretty basic but the stories Adm. McRaven uses to explain the bits of advice he is giving are all interesting and give you insight into how he became the decorated officer that he became. His life has included incredible hardship and incredible privilege and you can see that his training and upbringing gave him an incredibly strong foundation. Well worth the short time it took to take it in.
This book is a gorgeous trip to the Scottish Hebrides justified by a boilerplate murder mystery that really wasn't the draw for me. What kept me interested was the evocative writing that transported me back to Scotland, and the narrator's lilting accent (do yourself a favor and get the audiobook, if you're going to do this).
I will say I would honestly give this a 3.5 - I found the “big reveal” to be not that big, honestly, and the author did rely a lot on twists and tropes that are common to psychological thrillers of this sort. But overall it was still enjoyable. I'm debating whether to continue the trilogy, though.
This is definitely a transition book - building off the worldbuilding and character development of book 1, but clearly leading to bigger, better things in book 3. Unfortunately it suffers a bit as a result, the overarching canon of Caine's bigger picture took priority so the insular story of this book seemed a little shallow. But this also did a lot of obvious and important setup, ensuring characters have expanded their skillsets and learned valuable information that will surely lead them on their way.
So I leapt directly into this one after finishing three, which felt like a game changer... turns out that it was, but that this one made those changed games feel like appetizers for an epic game-changing main course, which is THIS one. The things Toby did in the prior books lead directly to this one, and the stakes were never higher or more personal. One really feels like McGuire has been playing a long game and it's paying off. And even after finishing this one I feel like there is so much more ahead. I cannot wait to get there.
This was a perfectly acceptable second installment. McGuire really has me attached to her world building and characters but the plot here wasn't my favorite - this particular mystery wasn't actually entirely mysterious, so it felt a bit slow at points waiting for the characters to catch up and notice the things that were glaringly obvious to me as a reader. I'm pretty fond of these characters, though, Tybalt in particular. The things McGuire gets right are more than enough to keep me reading further into this series.
A strong introduction to a really fascinating urban fantasy world in which the fae live among humans in parallel. McGuire has developed such fascinating political and interpersonal relationships in this book and set the stage for more. The murder mystery in this one is a great way to get your foot in the door and by the time it ended I definitely had the next one cued up in my Kindle!
This was a perfectly lovely little story, but when it ended I honestly felt like this was just Act One. I thought Gailey did a great job introducing this AU America and the characters in the story. One of them is without gender and Gailey committed to the singular “they,” so that representation was really lovely to see. I really wanted more, in the end, so this ultimately wound up feeling a little unsatisfying as a completed story, but I really love the world Gailey built and the people she filled it with. Looking forward to further stories from here.
This was a totally charming tale! I loved how Goss wove together so many of the old familiar monster tales - Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Frankenstein, and more - and wrapped it all up in a Sherlock Holmes story, but all the while centering the women of the story. I'm looking forward to the next installment!
This is SO GOOD. Imagine a world where the Library of Alexandria was saved... and then became the world's bastion of intelligence and knowledge, a gilded fortress with supreme executive control of the written word. One whose iron grasp on books and writing is so carefully guarded that innovations to make print easier to disseminate is squashed as seditious rebellion, and one whose continued stranglehold on this power is rooted in the enslavement of those born with the ability to manipulate the magic that binds it all together. Book burners and smugglers of original bound copies are the rebellion and it is from this rebellion that our protagonist comes into the library system initially as a spy. But things go so, so sideways. This book has political intrigue, fascinating worldbuilding, and exceptionally well-written characters. I cannot wait to read more in this world.
This is a thought-provoking book that can be at times inspiring, heartbreaking, and absolutely enraging. It's a page-turner, for sure, which had me reaching back for the audiobook every time I had a spare minute to see what happens next. The story of the Westover family is one that is fraught with abuse and ignorance, but also tied irrevocably with the bonds of family. This is a fascinating read, and really sheds light on just how hard it is for abused people to really untangle themselves from their abusers, particularly when those people are family, especially when the abusive member of the family is protected by others within the family unit for the sake of ‘keeping the peace.'
While Tara Westover may very well be an unreliable narrator–she speaks a lot about questioning her own judgment and memories, and acknowledges her trouble with recalling facts, particularly when she has paved over her traumas with justifications–it's valuable still to recognize how much work she has done in her life to try and get to the roots of her own life and release herself from the grasp of her own past. The work she has done to make a life for herself while preserving what she values is impressive, and ultimately I think the book is worth reading. It is a testament to just how hard someone has to work to untangle themselves from an unorthodox and harmful upbringing such as this one.
I'm going to have a hard time explaining exactly why I didn't like this without filling my review with spoilers, but I'm going to try my hardest.
There is a part of this book that is great. It's the part where Anna, the protagonist, is trying to break into a man's world as a woman and become a diver. That's the good part of the book: Anna's professional life. It's compelling enough that I wound up finishing this book instead of putting it the DNF pile.
The part I disliked was literally everything else. Everything about Anna's personal life is a mess, and not in a good way. The most egregious part of the story is chock-full of spoilers but I will just say this: if you care one whit about disabled people, you want to skip this book. It's callous in the way it handles its disabled character, and at one point even uses the memory of a hope of what the disabled character could have been had she only been able-bodied to motivate Anna to make a major choice in her own life.
Overall, the book was a massive disappointment, as there was an interesting story buried in it, surrounded by things that ranged from bad to worse to offensive. I would not recommend this to anyone.
This is a fantastic exploration of the Americas pre-European intervention, but it is extremely dry. I'm used to historical texts and academic readings but even with interest in the topic and a willingness to power through, I found myself spacing out and having to backtrack a bit. Persevering did reap reward, though, as the ideas explored in this book are worth examining. Well worth the effort, but it does take effort.
This book is an extremely thoroughly sourced and researched exposé on the entire unholy cluster that was Theranos. While it goes into the things you would expect of such a book - the way Theranos mistreated and terrorized its employees, the lack of standards in Theranos labs, the irresponsibility on the part of everyone involved in allowing Theranos to conduct testing on real people and give them totally fake and misleading test results, the constant goalpost moving and number-inflating on the part of Elizabeth Holmes and her co-conspirators... what really struck me about this was just how hard Holmes and her lawyers worked to keep the story from getting out. Spending millions on legal protection, threatening people's careers and families, attempting to smear Carreyrou... every action made was a poor one driven entirely by self-serving interest not in the company or its product but in the reputation of Elizabeth Holmes. Every single thing about this was in service to her and her ego. It's astonishing.
Equally astonishing is just how much trust and money people are willing to put in when they are approached by a young, attractive, wealthy, white woman with a dream. Theranos fleeced very powerful, very wealthy people, even after clear concerns were being raised about the business, its products, and its methods. And even yet people chose Holmes over reason. Repeatedly. It's really something else.
This is a completely riveting book about a part of WWII history that, for a long time, went undiscussed. Liza Mundy does a fantastic job in conveying the skill and the integrity in the women who held these extremely important jobs. She also does a great job in showing us the lives of these women before, during, and after the war, and how policies of the time robbed them of the recognition they deserved–and often, kept them from pursuing careers using the skills they developed in the war.
Liza Mundy also managed to do something really impressive, in that she had me on the edge of my seat, absolutely riveted, at events that I know extremely well. I am a WWII historian, so the “how this happened” stuff is old hat to me. Yet by shedding light on the behind-the-scenes efforts that went on to break ciphers and codes that were integral to the war, she has added an entirely new perspective on the war effort during events like D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, and the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan. It's thoroughly fascinating material.
Unlike the collections of short stories that precede it this is a full novel, and was a bit short on action–there was a LOT of setup, both character development-wise and worldbuilding-wise, so I'm sure it will pay off as I continue the series. But as an individual installment, this one dragged a bit.
This was a perfectly charming book with a gorgeous setting and some interesting characters, but I found that the family “mystery” wasn't all that mysterious and that some of the characters were far more interesting than others.
I also found some of the things introduced early on were not really addressed realistically- namely the twin sources for the protagonist's grief were kind of abandoned narratively and never fully “resolved,” not that grief can truly resolve, but the author didn't come to a satisfying fulfillment of that particular thread of character development.
Finally, I found that some of the secondary characters got far more fleshing out than others - Fabrisse was a fully developed person, but Jean-Paul was less so, and the hints we got about him were interesting so it was disappointing that we never got the whole story.
Ultimately this story was charming, and the historical flashbacks were really great. But overall I found that there were things left unfinished in the contemporary storyline.