Ben Saufley

Surprisingly futuristic for something written in 1909. Its themes have been heard before, time and time again - humankind versus a machine of their own creation, I guess - but 100+ years later the details remain fascinating. I also love the constant talk of “ideas” without any real ideas in sight. “Oh stop this talk, it gives me no ideas.”

I didn't hate this. I really loved the way Collins ended the trilogy; it was so interesting and real, in a universe that wasn't very. So I was curious to see how she'd do Snow. I think the biggest issue I have is the pacing. The heel turn feels sudden and late, even if there are some smart breadcrumbs left along the whole journey. I also expected the heel turn to be in response to something but I think it was sly that it was basically always in him. He was never going to be anything else because of his basic flawed belief system. A lot of “banality of evil” stuff here. So I liked it overall but yeah I think it could've been better paced and while I thing Collin's is smarter than some of her “dystopian YA” peers about the things she writes about, I don't know that this one will stick with me too long, like the epilogue of the trilogy did.

Starts off interestingly. Then the protagonist has sex with a few beautiful women and several men tell him how much they admire him, and then the intrigue fizzles to an "I guess that's it?" and then the book is apparently over.

I liked it but I'm not sure I liked it enough to read a second (or third). I think maybe just the whatever it is, Victorian? setting doesn't grab me. The magic hovered between system-based or even scientific, and mystical, and I kind of wish it would just pick a lane. And Marbur and Marlowe are so easy for my head to mix up, and then you add in that Jacob Marbur is nearly the classic Dickens name Jacob Marley...

Yeah. I liked it but didn't love it. Maybe I'll come back to the series in a while when this book has settled into my brain a bit.

An interesting book. Definitely a distinct world among much of the YA fantasy I've read, and I appreciated that. I could've done with a bit more character development, and at times a bit more description of where we were, what was ... actually happening. The prose got pretty flowery in places—sometimes, it worked, but sometimes it took me out of it. A lot of kind of extravagant descriptions that failed to actually give me a visual picture of a person, place, or thing.

I liked it, but I didn't really finish the book feeling like I wanted to return to the world and characters, because I'd only just started getting to know them when it wrapped up.

One of my favorite genre books in a long time. Such an interesting world, magic system, political structure. It's not particularly literary, focusing more on characters, dialog, and plot than on evocation or atmosphere, and honestly a bunch of its pieces are standard fare for YA with a female protagonist (I don't know if the author considers this YA but it shares some traits regardless: outcast, “broken” girl is suddenly very important, torn between two boys, etc). Yet it still does a really great job fleshing out this world. I'm really looking forward to the next one.

Entertaining and competently written. Hugely formulaic, built on tons of familiar tropes, beginning to end, but well-enough put together. I might listen to more. Early on, the freed slave gives this small out-of-nowhere Ayn Rand rant about the value of struggling to survive that almost made me put down the book. But in the end I didn't get a ton of that—in fact I got some stuff that was at times quite contrary to it—so I'm happy to have finished it. I might read the next one.

It's certainly an intriguing premise. I found myself getting a little bored – I think the interview format can take away some of the interest and excitement from what they're actually talking about. I was pretty sure I'd leave this series after the first – not because it was bad, but just because I have a long list of books to read. But the cliffhanger-ish ending has me unsure whether I'm pissed about the cheap gimmick to get me to pick up the next one, or intrigued enough to do just that.

Didn't feel like a full story. Felt like a mini-adventure, which I'd assumed was because it was tacked onto an otherwise-complete trilogy ... but the epilogue indicates there's more coming. So this is a mini-adventure between real stories? I'm annoyed, because the tease at the end and the foreshadowing throughout is way more intriguing than this story was. That said, it was fun to pop back into this world, regardless.

Decent. Nothing I'd take as dogma but listening to it in the context of the story I've been trying to get out forever has I think helped me get over some of the problems I've had with the pace etc of what I've written and sketched out. There's some confusion - three acts overlaid on a four-quarter breakdown is a bit awkward - and the last chapter (“make sure your verb matches with your subject” etc) was hilariously useless. But the points about how to structure the major plot points etc, with a lot of flexibility in what those really are, gave me some decent food for thought. Also it's short so it wasn't a huge commitment. We'll see if the effect it's had on my thinking lasts in any noticeable way.

Not a lot to say about this book that wouldn't ruin it but I really enjoyed it. It's pulpy and a bit graphic, in sometimes maybe unnecessary ways, but it's really well put-together and unpredictable start-to-finish.

I think I might have liked this a bit more if I had read it rather than listening to the Audible audiobook, which doubled down on the author's very simple, matter-of-fact writing style with a very simple, matter-of-fact narrator. It really stripped the magic from the telling. But the story it told was interesting and generally unlike a lot of the other books I've been reading—not sure how much of that is how unique this book is and how much of it is that I just don't read a ton of magical realism.

Brutal but excellent. I'd recommend it to anyone and everyone. I'm not sure I understood all of it, but I plan to keep especially those passages in mind as I continue to learn and grow.

I really enjoyed this book. I'd been looking, for a while, for the next book that would capture me, make me care about the characters and really look forward to picking it up again – which hadn't happened since I finished Lev Grossman's Magicians trilogy – and this was it.

I don't know if this book is YA. It's hard to tell at a certain point. The vocabulary is good but probably not overly challenging. The subject matter borders on adult? But in a fantasy genre that appears to mark itself as “adult” by competing to show misery and depravity (“historical accuracy”), or at least requires massive tomes with hundreds of characters, a book like this feels out of place. Like Gaiman's Stardust, it's got more of a fairy tale than a strict “fantasy” feel. In the end I'd categorize this as YA-appropriate but probably not a YA book.

Like Leigh Bardugo's Shadow and Bone series, this book opts for a Slavic backdrop rather than the obligatory Anglo-Saxon/Arthurian roots of the vast majority of fantasy, but I thought it was better executed here than in Bardugo's books (her first, at least) – it felt more authentic, for whatever reason. Even though I think largely the names and myths of the book could've been replaced with Anglo equivalents and succeeded nearly as well, the way this universe blended “real” Slavic myths like Baba Jaga into this fictional world, and built the magic and the adventure around those sensibilities (the magic wood, the creatures that inhabited it, the way the songs are sung like traditional folk melodies rather than epic castings) really worked well.

A note: with place names like Rosya, Polna, and Venizia (or something like that) I constantly found myself trying to fit this adventure into real-life Eastern Europe. At the end of the day though, my conclusion was that this world drew inspiration from ours, but was not intended to be one and the same. Maybe I missed it. But if Polna is Poland, what is its capital, Kralia (which seems closest to, say, Kraljevo in Serbia, as far as I can tell)?

Another thing I liked about the book was that while it existed in a kind of fairy-tale world, I was never fully sure what to expect. The adventure wasn't laid out before me when I started the book, and it didn't turn out to do what I did expect. Yet with that said, I rarely felt like the new developments were forced or overt maneuverings of the author – it was just a well-built narrative.

This book wasn't perfect. I felt a bit let down by the climax – by the partial explanation/history that was unveiled, and by the underlying concepts there. Not overly so, but just a little. I had been built up: I wanted to know! To know more, to understand better.

I want to give this 4.5 stars because I have read better books, certainly. But this was so fun, so well-crafted. 4 stars would be too low. So... 5 it is.

Pretty smart and entertaining. Not a ton to it – would've liked her to continue a bit more on any number of topics. A few of the essays felt like filler.

I bought this immediately when I read that Neal Stephenson said, “Autonomous is to biotech and AI what Neuromancer was to the Internet.”

That may have jacked up my expectations too high.

It felt a lot like a lot of other books I've read in the genre. The contemplations of autonomy were really pretty interesting but far from the focus of the book, which was entertaining enough and had pretty standard implications regarding capitalism and tech, but didn't really hold much emotional weight or any particularly new and compelling information. I'd have liked more examination of any one single theme the book had.

Kind of fun. Felt a lot like Snowcrash early on, but went much more toward politics than tech and action. The characters weren't very fully developed and the whole thing felt kind of light. But I appreciated that so much of the world was insinuated rather than spelled out. If there were a sequel (the plot was fully realized but I could see more here), I'd probably pick it up.

Not bad. I really like the concept of the multiple Londons and how that world was built, but none of them got particularly fleshed out or realized. The characters were alright, but I didn't feel much connection with either of the protagonists by the time the book ended. I think the narrative arc could've used a bit more restraint – some pauses, some time to get to know the setting and the characters. It felt like a pretty standard YA arc, where something propels the characters on some half-explained adventure, generally fraught with nondescript streets and halls full of faceless bad guys and some general sense of evil, building up with few twists until the final confrontation. The concepts that were introduced were fun and interesting but I think the author was afraid to let up for a minute, which left me at the end less invested or interested in the whole story. Not that it was particularly chaotic, it just felt like the story lacked ... texture?

Part of this may just be due to the audiobook format in which I experienced it. I'd recommend you read it rather than listen to the audio, either way. The guy's voices were ... weird.

I enjoyed much of this book but the middle third of it falls into this really unsettling indoctrinating justification of genocide. Fantasy often walks a fine line with its many races and the wars between them but this one gets pretty brutal and doesn't even examine that, basically at all. It's taken as a given that the actual ethnic cleansing of a race of “tainted” elves from the lands is just and necessary, and it's gross. It's even weirder in a book that is otherwise so centered on kind of hippie principles—it even features the line “there's no such thing as implied consent”, which, great! But that middle section ... oof. I'm not sure I want to pick up the final book.

After a slow start, where I picked it up and then switched to other books, this turned out to be one of the books I enjoyed most this year – in the genre, if not overall. Fun characters, interesting magical system, pretty well-paced plot. I'll definitely pick up the next one.

I picked this book up a while back and put it down pretty quickly because I just couldn't get past the constant and verbose references to God and God's will. That's not to say I was offended or upset in any way, I just found it really distracting. I'm not a religious person, so that may be part of it, and though English has its own set of curses and invocations – “oh my God,” “God willing,” etc, these were long sentences, sometimes paragraphs, with very little to do with the actual conversation. I wondered if they were translations of common Muslim utterances? This is of course a fictional world, but it appears to be built around something like Islam the same way much Anglo/Western fantasy is built around Arthurian and therefore Christian myth.Anyway. I picked it up on Audible more recently, and that made it easier for me to elide these distracting tangents. It became more of a seasoning to the book rather than a heavy-handed and constant thing. At that point, I shot through the rest of the book.It's fun to read fantasy that's not based on the same Anglo tropes – already this year, I read [b: An Ember in the Ashes 20560137 An Ember in the Ashes (An Ember in the Ashes, #1) Sabaa Tahir https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1417957944s/20560137.jpg 39113604] (Roman/Middle Eastern), [b: Shadow and Bone 10194157 Shadow and Bone (The Grisha, #1) Leigh Bardugo https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1339533695s/10194157.jpg 15093325] (Slavic), and [b: Uprooted 22544764 Uprooted Naomi Novik https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1420795060s/22544764.jpg 41876730] (a different vein of Slavic), and this was a great addition.In animation, they teach you to create unique and identifiable silhouettes for every character, and I felt like this book had the literary version of that: each character was unique, built on archetypes but a bit deeper, and each contributed something unique to the adventure and to the story. In my head, they also had literally unique silhouettes – the large, bearded ghul hunter, the stiff and skilled swordsman, the small feral (literally and figuratively) girl, etc.I found myself wondering how it would all wrap up, which you don't always do in genre books like this, and at the same time I definitely enjoyed the ride – the spells, the settings, the characters. I'll definitely end up picking up the next one.

Doesn't feel like a full book – feels like the first book of a book. Not so much of a climax, denouement in this one. Just setting the groundwork for future books. Lots of questions that were set up, I hoped, to be answered, are still unanswered. I think of multi-book plots as still having individual subplots in each book, which this one didn't really. It was just Day One of the story, as I suppose was promised. Which has me a little annoyed and impatient. That said, I enjoyed it cover-to-cover, and I've started the second (which is even longer, at 1000 pages) already. I think, though, if he doesn't give me something to hold onto in this one, I'm not going to get the third (when it comes out? is it out?).

3.5 stars maybe. I think it was well-told. The arc of the story, in the end, wasn't that exceptional, and Spoilerthe gist of the incident in question was pretty clear well before the end, so the big reveal wasn't that big but it was interesting and kept me curious from start to finish.

An attempt to combine Harry Potter with Holden Caulfield that's interesting but not as compelling. It suffers a lot from “adult-trying-to-think-and-talk-like-a-kid” syndrome.

I'm going to finish the series, though, because I hear it gets better and I love adventure and mythology.

I have very mixed feelings about this book. I think it handles a lot of issues with delicacy and appropriate gravitas – understanding consent, with no hint of “boys will be boys” or anything – but the very premise is really concerning to me. As a YA book, especially, its premise of a girl who's killed herself and left tapes to point the blame at other people is worrying. Having had my own struggles with depression in adolescence, I think that the idea of weaponized suicide is dangerous and could be easily seductive to a kid who has those same struggles. The line between recognizing the consequences of our actions and saying “You are to blame for this person's suicide” is a tough one to find, but I think it has to be drawn.

SpoilerWeak spoiler, I guess: in the end, I think the focus on listening, reaching out, not just watching things happen to people is a good one. I think the lesson Clay learned, shown as he tries to reach out to someone else he thought might be troubled, is alright. But it feels secondary to the overarching narrative of punitive suicide.

I also think that Hannah was portrayed as far too lucid and balanced. Her decision is presented as a rational one, when in reality the mindset needed to actually do something like this is the opposite of rational, and while it's good to express sympathy, it's dangerous to treat such actions that way.

I'm not the kind of person who says “let's not let our kids read things like this,” because ... well, that's stupid. But I did have concerns about how the core premise was presented, and I think it's the sort of thing that, if I had a kid reading it, I'd probably want to discuss with him or her.

I also thought there were some minor issues with two-dimensional characters, and the kind of strange connection between Clay and Hannah (which felt forced).

I think it's probably worth reading (it's pretty short, if nothing else), but with a lot of caveats.