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This was a fun book. Not only because of the unusual point of view (an engineer in a siege), but because of the narrator's wry turn of phrase. The style was a change of pace among fantasy, and I quite enjoyed it.
From bouncing in my seat, trying not to cheer aloud, to bittersweet poignancy, a lovely read for GGK fans. A delicate tie-in to the previous book, the extent of which does not become apparent until the end.
No, this is not part of the “Wayward Children” series, but you can see the same author is weaving with some of the same threads, as she's making a new pattern. This book pulled me in and I swept through it, enjoying the ride. Some of McGuire's common bits, like alternate world fairy tales, special children, magic, etc., are present. However, she also brings in alchemy and ideas from the period when early science and magic still had a large overlap in the psyche of human civilization.
Mild spoiler: In this case, she explores what is might be like if universal forces were incarnated as children, paradoxes, etc. We might even see the birth of a new pantheon, of sorts.
Good solid fantasy writing. Switching between many character POVs for different sections is reasonably well handled. Ending seemed a bit rushed while some earlier sections seemed drawn out. Overall, a good fantasy book.
These are lovely little novellas. Easy reads with a philosophical bent. Most people should read these.
This is a fun read. The tales are told in friendly, engaging tone. This made me realize how very much Greek mythology I already knew, and was a nice revisit. The author has done his best to weave the complicated tangle of tales into a more coherent, continuous narrative, which may help them make more immediate sense to a novice. At the same time, he employs a dry wit and large array of cultural references. The footnotes are a pleasure.
Enjoyable quick read, with Pratchett's usual humor. If you like Greebo, then you'll like this!
The greatest strength here is the character writing. Different characters, starkly and distinctively portrayed. The characterization kept me reading to the end. Some weirdness with pacing/continuity, but this was the author's debut novel. I can't tell if it was an intentional tool to portray the neural atypical nature of several characters or just inexperience.
If you are widely read, you won't find anything new in this book. It is going to remind some people obviously of Snowpiercer. Warning. Snowpiercer spoiler:
This is Snowpiercer light, with everyone at the bottom of ship/back of train being people of color. Snowpiercer light, because they have many decks filled with varied crops on this generation ship. Horrid discrimination and abuse, with the lower/colored classes doing most of the manual labor (which for some reason this incredibly high tech generation ship does not automate), but lighter than Snowpiercer as the upper decks are not literally cannibalizing the lower decks, and while abuse is rampant, some lower deck people do have meaningful jobs/careers of a sort.
I suppose the primary goal of this book must have been to portray rampant violent trauma and how that locks people into a cycle where more trauma and abuse continues to occur:
It seemed utterly unrealistic that The General, so incredibly revered as the Hand of God by the entire ship, would refrain from taking power when his uncle died. He was SO dreading the new level of cruelty, but didn't make a move, despite his aristocratic upbringing. We are told he has also been horrifically abused in his past, but it seems not quite believable that a character of tremendous intellect and true religious devotion to doing good, in a position of close inheritance to the throne as it were, wouldn't make any moves to take power in order to prevent great cruelty an evil.
Also, did not enjoy the very abrupt ending.
I learned a lot a bout Jane Austen's life, and I could hear the author's voice in my head at times, as her distinctive phrasing is so familiar from all of her documentaries. However, this enjoyment was marred because I was reading the Kobo ebook edition. In this edition, the pictures section at the end are all too small to see clearly, and the captions are absolutely miniscule and unreadable. Very disappointing to realize the publisher included photos of people and places mentioned in the book, and then be unable to see them or read what they are. My advice is to not buy the Kobo ebook edition. Try print instead.
This trilogy was a fun read. Swashbuckling, magic, and wonder. I feared very briefly that this third installment might drag, but was fortunately incorrect. I liked this set enough that I shall have to investigate more of the author's work.
This was a fun read. Not quite “League of Peoples” good, but good enough that I want to read the sequel.
This is a fun read. Ursula Vernon / T. Kingfisher has a most enjoyable sardonic sense of humor, which I recommend! I think this is a great read for fans of fairy-tales, and it is worth reading for the two alt fairy-tale short stories “Toad Words” and “Boar & Apples”.
This was an interesting and fun work of anachronism in many ways. There are a lot of fun “what ifs” for fans of space exploration and NASA History. Alternate histories are good for that.
I could write about racism in the 1950s. I could write about sexism in the 1950s. I will refrain, though, because that's all to be expected. The main character's social anxiety does seem tiringly omnipresent, but I believe that is the point. It seemed a bit much at times, but if you want to portray a person suffering from social anxiety, who has PTSD several times over, and works a high pressure job that the future of the human race probably depends on (while surrounded by racism and sexism), how could you lessen it? Usually stories gloss over the nerves of the performer, soldier, or yes test pilot. I think it took some bravery on Ms. Kowal's part to attempt this. So even when it's a bit much, it's still interesting to observe as a writing exercise.
It is a fun book. If you ever wondered “what if” about the timelines of the early space race, then you might enjoy it! If you ever looked at the social and technological history of that time and wondered if anything but aliens could have spurred us forward faster and started to bring us together, then Ms. Kowal's offering of natural disaster just might be a read you enjoy as well.
In some ways, this might be called "urban fantasy", but it was published before that term came into widespread use. The setting is modern, and the take on how various supernatural creatures fit into the modern world is interesting. It is also much darker and more serious in tone than most books that have the urban fantasy label. The tone and style is a bit more serious horror novel. Do notthink "Laurell K. Hamilton" (thankfully), as this books lacks a lot of the silly Mary-Sue quality (and smut) of that sort of book. The content is (darkly) adult, but for the purpose of exploring issues and characters, not for the purpose of titillation. If you like vampire novels at all, and you can handle a darker horror-novel read, then I would highly recommend this book. Just don't go into it expecting Anita Blake or Twilight. You might be traumatized.
This series was a fun read overall. An enjoyable romp for bookworms who like fantastical fiction, capers, and detective stories!
It has been years since I first read Elizabeth Moon's Deed of Paksenarrion. That lovely work firmly set the author in the “Fantasy” category in my mind. Years passed, and I never thought to look at SF by Moon until I saw a Redditor recommending a very unusual SF book with and older female protagonist: Remnant Population, which turned out to be excellent!
Now, I've finally turned my attention to Vatta's War (solely because it was written by Elizabeth Moon), and I am disappointed that I did not read this sooner! This is excellent character driven Science Fiction. There are events in plenty, but the meat of the book is still the central character and her interactions with others. This is realistic coming of age: not in a typical YA pubescent sense, but instead a more realistic “ just out of high school or college and adapting to independent responsibility” sort of way. The protagonist is problem solving, personnel managing, etc. amidst a chain of unexpected complications. We get the main character's self doubts, anxiety, and internal development without the fetish-like pathological level of whining about anxiety that plagues so many characters in the past decade. This balance takes more skill as a writer, and Moon has the skill to give us that. I fully intend to dive right into the sequel next!
Interesting. There was some interesting artwork in this comic compilation. There were also some interesting ideas. I read this after having seen the TV series on Netflix, and so found the differences in the plot and character details fascinating. Will probably now read the next in the series.
Interesting premise and an enjoyable read at first. However, the ending seemed rushed and disappointing, the way it was handled. Very anticlimactic.
The Tufa series probably isn't for everyone, but I seem to be the target audience. I know this part of Tennessee well, and like the rest of the series, this book is filled with just absolutely delightful in-joke moments and cultural references of all sorts. There aren't many books where I find myself singing an old spiritual out loud as I read a scene. While I've found the entire series to be just plain fun, I had a harder time staying absorbed in this one in a few places. These are moments when it seems like the main character is about to get carried away by his urban cultural blinders to an obnoxious extreme. However, each time, the author has the character's basic decency save him from his cultural ignorance. The important thing isn't that Alex Bledsoe has written a fish-out-of-water character. It's that he's written a fish-out-of-water character who still makes connections despite cultural difference that are extreme. Each time I had a moment where I just felt like groaning, the author would serve up a moment of sheer cultural delight to keep me hooked, much like the rest of the Tufa series. I wonder if someone dared the author to write this one (no way you can write a Broadway musical in to the Tufa series!), and if so, he's made it work, and made it fun.
There was an actual moment the author surprised me in this book. This does not happen often. On to book 3!
This is not a book for everyone. Some will not enjoy a fantasy novel with fighting, with children from terrible situations being trained as warriors. For me, this was one of those books that was hard to put down. Reading a during lunch and breaks, etc. Other reviewers said the world building was unique and being the jaded fantasy reader I am, I was very skeptical. Other reviewers were correct! The world building is unique. That's all I will say, in the interest of avoiding spoilers. I recommend going into it knowing as little as possible about the setting, if you can. It was an enjoyable aspect of this book to discover the setting.
The characters! Oh, the characters are great. Depth, variety, talents, flaws, and frailties, even among magic using super warriors. Some characters I cared about, and others I just wanted to see what they would do, but it kept me interested.
The combat! There's a lot of combat. This is not a military history buff's sort of combat, but furious individual combat (on a more superhero level, some of it). I often expect there to be a lot of boring in combat scenes, but this book surprised me. Lawrence has done some interesting things with looking at how the way an angry child warrior, who can really fight, might use different moves in a fight than an adult, against an adult. It isn't smooth sailing choreography all the time, but sometimes it is brilliant. By all rights, a lot of these fight scenes should have been the boring stuff you skim through, to get past quickly, but these I actually read!
There are some wonderfully quotable lines, as others have mentioned. There are moment and scenes where you could just hear the epic soundtrack music playing as you read. This is a rough and cruel world. It is no fairytale, but good grief, it kept me so hooked, I devoured it in a single day. This was my first read by Mark Lawrence, but I'm definitely reading more!
While some small details date it, I still really enjoyed this book. The idea of Gateway and some of the technologies was just interesting enough (along with the book's unusual format). Despite being able to see the ending a little bit before it arrived, I was still left wondering about the details. In a good way. You could have an enjoyable conversation with a friend regarding the protagonist at the end. It was also, despite the fabulous alien technology, more “real” in some ways than a lot of space sci-fi. Zero and low-g environments, for example, instead of ample artificial gravity, along with the gritty economic and social reality were a nice change of pace from many books I've read. Instead of sophisticated, smooth explorers or swashbuckling fearless heroes, Gateway gives us human struggle to “make it” combined with utter fear and awe. The Majesty of the universe, instead of the majesty of humanity. Definitely adding the sequel to my reading list!