Dave

A short, rather meditative novel that had a lot going for it.

This book is rich with metaphor, making it hard to put down. It's sort of about a beekeeper in Northern Africa dealing with a very topical invasion from murder hornets, but there's a lot more going on than just that.

The Ardent Swarm is about change, as scary and big of a topic as that is. Everyone is promising change to the people in his small village, but that change has little impact on them. When their dictator was overthrown they didn't even know it as their village is without electricity or many modern amenities. Both political parties come into town to promise they'll get to elect a new leader, only for the ultra-conservative, fundamentalist faction to breeze into town bearing gifts including food, water and clean clothes. Not just a little, but a lot.

The catch? Their idea for the world is hardline and wishes to halt progress.

That's where the bees come into play. A swarm of murder hornets is introduced and Sidi must cope with this new, unwelcomed and deadly intrusion. The reader gets an inside view of how the fundamentalists operate and wish to lie, cheat and steal their way into unquestionable power that fights the tides of change. Of course, the leaders aren't living the life they claim to, either, which we find out from a rather... colorful scene in the desert with honey, asses and wads of cash.

Ultimately, it's about the people in Sidi's community and his family helping him and learning about a swarm in Japan that can deal with murder hornets but forming a bubble around the hornets and superheating them to death. After all his work to rid himself of the murder hornets, he finds himself needing to embrace the chaos they sow to fend off murderous fundamentalist soldiers.

Consider me conflicted about this book. In a lot of ways, it was strong throughout, but I felt like I was back in my early creative writing workshops where there will be a story that seems to want to say something, then falls apart at the denouement.

I loved the premise and the set up. There was power in what happened and led Nora to the Midnight Library, where she's met by her childhood librarian who embraced her during one of the most stressful moments of her life. She's forced to look through her “Book of Regrets” and then navigate alternative realities throughout the library, with each book a different life an alternative her was leading, or thusly, alternative lives she could lead if she chose to.

Like I said, the set up for this is fantastic and pulled me in. Yet somehow, over the span of the mid-section of the book, it was starting to lose me. Still a somewhat breezy read that went fast, something about it felt... trite?

Seeing what Nora could have been and her self-actualizations was great, but as the book wore on there was an increasing sense of something missing from her story. There wasn't a lot the author was saying about her trauma and lived experience beyond “well what if she wasn't depressed and worked harder? She could be ANYTHING!”

I enjoyed this a lot more than I thought that I would initially. Maybe it was the ominous monolith that is the name SCALZI that permeates the world of sci-fi right now or the fact that the title and concept of a book about elderly people fighting sounded hilariously unappealing. Either of those, really.

It turned out to be a fun, quick read that sets up a pretty interesting future for humanity. There were minor grievances with the plotting but overall it was a fun book and definitely deserves the praise that it has received. I'm an idiot for not reading it sooner.

I really enjoyed Old Man's War and saw people were kind of upset that this wasn't a continuation of John's story, instead focusing on other characters including Jane.

The focus this time out is on the Special Forces, who are basically the amalgamation of recruits that died before reaching their 75th birthday to enlist in the CDF officially. They start off as a blank slate and develop alongside their Special Forces mates which helps to turn them into the ultimate soldiers. The Special Forces were perhaps the part of the first book that had the most intrigue going for them so the departure to focus on this branch of the military was a welcome one.

The story is based around a rogue scientist defecting to ally three hostile alien races together against humanity who left behind a digital version of his consciousness, which is decided should be placed in a Special Forces clone of him. Of course, nothing ever goes according to plan and instead we end up with an abnormal Special Forces agent under Jane's command and a whole lot of secrets to uncover.

It's a fun read and did a great job of expounding on one of the most interesting characters from the first book in Jane while building up this whole universe and continuing its story.

This was really a case of me picking up a book because of how highly it was spoken of and being mildly disappointed for all of the accolades it received. The pacing was deliberate and the language was very dry and felt more like a journalistic endeavor than that of fiction. It did pick up though, and was engrossing up until the end, where the finish was just confusing and felt like it should have ended 100 pages sooner.

I'm not particularly sure what to say about this book.

Leckie is a fine writer and this series was rich in its world building and concepts, but man, were there pacing issues galore. The first book started off at a slow crawl, but when it picked up it was fun to read. The second book sort of slowed down with time and this third one had one of the slowest opening first acts that I've seen in a while.

I'm all for setting the tone of a book and an author taking his/her/their time to get things rolling, but in a third (and final) book in a series, the scene has already been set, the players and their plans are already in motion. To be frank, I wasn't enjoying the book very much early on, which is saying a lot for a third book in a series where I'm already hooked into the plot and the characters. I put this book aside for about two months before returning to it.

The first book set up the world and the struggle between the Lord[s] of the Radach and Breq. The second book scaled things back to just one planet and its accompanying space station, debates over tea sets, birthrights and a look at how Radach society was so broken. It sort of feels like somewhere along the way Leckie changed her mind as to the scope of this story and became enamored with this planet/station and its inhabitants.

So this giant, sprawling empire drama is scaled back to just having one system that matters and magically everything just kind of happens there and the main focus moves on to the morality of artificial intelligence and humanity. Breq is, of course, essentially an unshackled AI, so it wasn't exactly a jarring transition, but that focus led to a lot of loose strands in the story that were never resolved.

People either seem contented with the rather subdued ending or upset at how the scope was scaled back so much. I didn't mind it and thought that it was clever enough, but that it really sort of came out of nowhere. Breq is an amazingly all-seeing, all-knowing AI-ship-in-a-human-body yet the reader sees very little of what goes on inside of her mind at times. This means that for some of the plot the reader will have a clear idea of what Breq is trying to accomplish, while at other times it's obfuscated for what appears to be the reason of keeping the reader in suspend. The reader is just to understand that Breq is great at everything and will just kinda figure stuff out without much insight or foresight.

That could be why the ending felt so sudden and convenient. As a reader I wanted insight into what was being planned, for tension to be created by what was happening, instead I was left in the dark and – SURPRISE – most of it didn't really matter. Weird AI cores that seemed integral to the plot? Who cares who left them there, what they were programmed for, why they were hidden and what the Lord of Radach had in store for them? Sigh.

Once this book got going it was easy to keep reading it, but man, did it take forever to get to that point. Leckie's writing style is clean and accessible, with some of the awkwardness of the first book no longer there (although I did chuckle at the return of “gestured” near the end of this book), making it a fun read once the initial slog of tea sets and tea and tea and tea are over from the first act. Overall, this was an enjoyable read and any complaint that I have is simply because I was expecting more and truly do believe that we'll see better from Leckie in the future.

I definitely enjoyed this but felt like I was in a fog for most of it. Enjoyed the second one more.

I'll preface this with a warning: I'm not a huge comic guy. I read a handful every year and am pretty selective.

The art is, in a word, astounding. Oozing with style and flair, this book has its own unique aesthetic that helps to flesh out the world.

I've seen complaints that there isn't enough story or whatever, but honestly, the art does a lot of the heavy lifting to establish the world and characters. That's probably the way it should be. No exposition dumps or anything like that.

The story isn't going to appeal to everyone, as you'll see from the reviews. This isn't the tale of our heroes saving the world; they already did all that and this is what happens after. This is what happens when, as the title implies, there's no one left to fight. What do heroes do when they aren't needed anymore?

They start families, try to be normal, try to integrate into the world that loves them but doesn't understand them. Or brood and contemplate these questions while unsure of what comes next.

I love stories like this and always will, so I'm always more receptive to authors looking to tell different stories from the norm. The shonen jump style and influences are clear, as well. So yeah.

Man, where to even start with Dune?

Science fiction can be hit or miss, even the ones that everyone tend to love. I went into Dune with a knowledge of the plot, characters and everything else surrounding it expecting to kind of like it. I can't say enough good things about this book, though.

Paul Atreides is one of the most frustrating characters I can think of. You know what he's capable of, you know what he's walking into, you know what he wants to do, but you can feel things go off of the rails. The system is broken, there is no way for it to be fixed, yet Paul will start going on about his birthright and how he deserves to be the Duke.

You know that he's trying to work over the crowd, but something about it is eerie, like you are beginning to feel like he believes it. Even Gurney noted that Paul had seemingly lost his way and was lacking the compassion that his father was so well-known for. By the time I had finished the book I felt like I really didn't like Paul anymore and that he was headed down a dark path.

That was probably one of the most satisfied feelings that I've ever had with a book like this. The easy way would be for Paul to make all of the right choices, for Paul to cast aside the power and live his life with the Freman, leaving them in peace and harmony out of the reach of the Guild and the Imperium. Instead he chose to become a Messiah, for good or for bad.

You can feel bad for Paul, because he didn't choose that path, it was chosen for him. He was built for greatness and no one was able to contain him, but it was also what led him down this dark path. The best part is that Herbert doesn't outright say that it's a dark path. When I was reading this, I thought to myself, “is this supposed to be good? People actually want Paul to be this conquering hero?” It just made for Dune Messiah to be that much more interesting.

This was one of those books that... yeah, it took me a full month to read, not because it was long, but because there were entire parts of the book that dragged so much that I found other things to do outside of reading this.

There is a lot of this book to like and I'm glad I read it, that being said, there are some major pacing issues in here.

The basic idea here is Addie LaRue doesn't want to do her arranged marriage, nobody is listening to her, so she makes a wish in the night and a malevolent spirit hears her wish and grants it to her, in exchange for her soul. What did her wish end up being? “I want to live.”

Thus, Addie lives for hundreds of years but nobody can remember her. The author takes every opportunity to place Addie in different parts of history, which is where things get bogged down. A subplot is that Addie figured out the only ‘mark' she could make on the world, the only recordings of her, were art. So she meets tons of artists of note and becomes a subject for them.

There's parts of this book where you can't help but roll your eyes at historical figures that show up, all having a made a deal with this same spirit. All the famous people have, you see. Okay.

The actual meat of the plot comes into play when we meet Henry, a boy who works at a bookstore in NY and gasp–he can remember Addie~!

It's at this point where we get dueling POVs between Henry and Addie and we're pretty deep into the book here. Like, really far into it. We're talking almost halfway before the actual plot of the book kicks in. Seriously, almost half of the book is just doing constant legwork of “nobody remembers Addie and she's depressed, also the demon/spirit/devil is an asshole.”

So, when we eventually, finally find out dear Henry has made a deal with this same devil, which is why he can remember Addie, we find out he just wanted to be loved. Oh, and his deal was just for a year, so Henry dies soon.

But guess what? Addie and Luc (the spirit, who now has a name) go from an adversarial relationship to oh wait, they are actually ~in love~ sort of. Sort of. You see, Luc is a bad boy, bad to the bone! He is a demon and is ~the night~ who makes these deals but he's way into Addie and the timelines start to feel jumbled. This hot-and-cold relationship gets shown in flashbacks, but the problem is some of the flashbacks happen before periods we've already flashed back to and had no real reference to this Addie and Luc romance plot.

So here, with the book almost coming to a close, we have dear Henry, who's going to die, and dear Addie, who's decided she's not human anymore, anyway, and we have Luc, who just wants Addie for himself and this relationship doesn't feel very healthy... For a book that meanders and lingers, the third act does a lot of the heavy lifting. My difficulty with the book at this point is imagining this thing have massive rewrites and revisions to make this plot more focused and that's generally speaking not where I want to be with a book.

The ideas and characters mostly work, but the plot's lack of focus leading to cramming most of it into the last act means by the time it's done you're satisfied and have fond memories of it, but reflecting on the whole book it's not as easy to keep these feelings.

2.5

I'm sort of at a loss for what to say about this book.

Essentially, this book is not about the plot. There isn't much of a plot beyond our protagonist, Piranesi, lives in a strange, pocket world of a giant, sprawling, perhaps endless mansion overrun with birds and the ocean. The only other person he has contact with is a besuited man he calls ‘the Other.'

Welcome to the first half of the book, where Piranesi details the statues, rooms, wildlife, tides and meetings with the Other. The first, say, 40% of the book is pure worldbuilding. The only issue is this world is rather empty and detached. So you're essentially just getting a feel for the mood, which is one of isolation and otherness. There's very little meat on the bones of the characters to break into, and while the house itself is a character, it's sterile outside of the few parts with wildlife.

When the story finally kicks in, it's entertaining enough, but only about half of the book contains any conflict whatsoever. It reminds me of ‘The Martian' except, where in ‘The Martian' he's trapped on Mars and trying to get out, Piranesi doesn't seem to care about being trapped in this world and doesn't want to get out. So there's no tension. What, I suppose, the author wanted to use to keep you reading was the sense of mystery around the house.

The problem? Astute readers will know what the house represents. That means there's even less tension.

As I said, though, when the actual plot starts, this is enjoyable and left me wondering what this book could've been if there was a plot that stretched the entire (short) book and not just late into the second act into the third. I'm all for experimenting with form, but there wasn't much of anything early on.

Plus, look... spoilers, I suppose. It was all just in his head the whole time is the absolute worst storytelling convention. C'mon! It was so clear from the offset that what was so strange about the house was that it probably didn't exist, only exacerbated by the whole story of The Prophet getting there by putting himself in a childlike state of mind, then Ketterley hypnotizing Matthew Rose Sorensen. Or the guy discovered in the secret room of the house that led to the prison time.

C'moooon. It was so apparent.

There are a lot of books out there marketed towards authors.

In part, because being an author means wearing not just a few but a seemingly infinite amount of hats.

Writing book blurbs is an entirely different set of skills from writing a novel and for a lot of us, the worst part of the whole ordeal. Robert's book takes a different approach than a lot of the other blurb books on the market. Instead of approaching blurbs from the perspective of an author with anecdotal evidence or their own research into copywriting, Robert was a copywriter who writes novels.

His insight can be revelatory or reaffirming, depending on your level of knowledge. He urges critical thinking and doing your own research, which is good.

My only qualms is that there perhaps were not enough solid examples of what good copywriting and good blurbs look like and he rejects taking an authoritative voice throughout the book. I understand the reasoning here, but at the same time, he's teaching copywriting and doing a pretty good job at it.

Love Craig's indie author series and everything he does with 20Books. This was a useful book and helpful especially to those of us writing in series. It'll be helpful to others as well, but a lot of the information is from Craig's experience writing as a scifi author.

There's no right or wrong way to price, but getting insight from someone with his level of success helps a lot.

Hadn't read this in a while and damn, forgot how much I really liked some of these stories.

Really loved this book. Mieville's take on a detective story was definitely interesting and brought something new to the table.

My only issue was the intentionally vague talk about Breach or how the cities worked early on. It detracted from the story and the mystery quite a bit because it was difficult to visualize or understand.

It can be an effective device and I understand why he did it, I just don't think it worked that well here.

Gaiman is one of those authors that I've always been aware of, just never dove into. I picked this one up for cheap and wasn't disappointed in it.

There's something to be said for writing interesting, fantastical stories but keeping them grounded. Although this book hints at a large, expansive universe full of fantastical creatures, realms and planes of existence, it never leaves the protagonist's neighborhood.

When crafting a story like this, sometimes it's appreciated to keep it simple and contained. There are only a handful of characters and locations, helping to blur the line between childhood fantasies and the remarkable.

Having returned home for a funeral, the narrator recounts the house down the lane, the pond that was an ocean and the girl, Lettie, who held his hand to help ward off the evil that sought to upset his small world. It's a pleasant read that flows smoothly and paints a vivid picture.

This book is a lot of things, none of which are easy.

The first thing I noticed was there were no paragraph breaks. Just... none. The only reprieve the reader gets is when a new chapter starts and there are only a handful of them. Even the sentences snake on for pages at a time, refusing to let the reader take a breath.

It's all intentional and while grating at first, pushing through it unlocks something a lot deeper in this book. Just like Cormac McCarthy writes with sparse punctuation and refuses to use quotation marks for his dialogue, this book trudges forward using punctuation, or the lack thereof, as a bludgeon.

Because this book is brutal. If I had to guess, I'd say that Fernanda Melchor wrote this book angry, and I don't blame her at all. It's a book about poverty. Not about the kind of poverty a lot of books released in the US are about, but agonizing, inescapable poverty punctuated by constant violence. The publishing industry is so filled with books written by those of privilege and wealth that it's refreshing to not read a book about a well-off New Yorker sometimes.

The central premise of the book is that there's a witch in town. She provides a variety of services for the local women, most of which we learn about later on in the book. In a world where the only way to make money and support their family for most of these women is for prostitution, there aren't exactly women's health clinics around, if you catch my drift. This ‘witch' can help, along with other ailments as well.

The story unfolds from the perspective of a few characters, each in their own chapter, all based on the brutal murder of the witch by a few local boys. The reason for the murder unfolds when the reader is taken closer to the act itself by inhabiting the POV of the men responsible, each with a different understanding and reason for being in that van that pulled up to her house that evening.

Let's just say that extreme poverty, exploration of sexuality and the relationship between cycles of abuse, poverty, corruption, and homosexuality all end up tangled in the same web, eventually.

The conscious decision to write the book in this manner gives it a sense of movement, like a makeshift go cart wheeled up to the top of the hill, allowing you to jump in while it's in free fall, forcing you to be along for the ride with no real sense of control. You're just along for the ride, unable to look away from the horror of those rocks at the bottom of the hill.

Just beautiful.

Really wanted to love this book but it didn't click. Smooth read and reasonably crafted, there was just this cold indifference from any of the characters, making it harder to latch onto any of them.

If I were forced to dig for thematic elements, it's ghosts of the past and our own mistakes haunting us and how the fates of all the characters were interwoven by a ponzi scheme a la Madoff.

Vincent was as close as we got to a relatable protagonist, but even then parts of her story and personality were omitted to build to what was, I'll admit, a very well-written ending.

There's a strong undercurrent of isolation and feeling adrift in here that helps keep everything together.

I do indeed hate math.

I'm not good at it. In fact, Algebra II was my biggest (and only) hurdle in high school. So running ads wasn't exactly something I was excited about, considering you've gotta keep on top of data, do analysis, A-B testing, the works.

Chris is able to easily explain ways to handle ads, analyze them and make it all work without getting too much into data analsys.

BookBub ads are sort of the new frontier.

Thankfully, David's book gives some explanation of how to approach them and get the best results.

There's a lot about this book to love, but it feels like it's not quite there yet.

The character of Kev feels fleshed out and realized, while on the other hand Ella does not. The opening of the book, which follows Ella, is incredible, before switching to Kev. The idea behind it is to highlight Ella's powers before jumping into Kev, who is in the wrong place at the wrong time while the wrong skin color.

While the book jumps around a lot to work within the framework of seeing trauma of other characters through the eyes of both Ella and Kevin, I've seen others state it made the book difficult to read, but I didn't think that was much of an issue. After it happens a few times it becomes clear what's happening.

The biggest, glaring issue here is a real lack of defined characters beyond Kev. Ella feels so strong early on and crumples under the weight of Kevin, his incarceration and his experiences.

There's a lot of parts of this book that are intentional and done incredibly well, which only highlights the parts that feel unfinished. This book has a lot to say about being black in America, the school-to-prison-pipeline, policing, criminal justice and much more. The ending was good but could have been much more effective if there was more to cling onto or more of a feeling for Kev or Ella. The characters spend so much time jumping around into the memories of others that we, the readers, can't ever get grounded enough or invested beyond parts of Kevin's journey.

So I've just heard enough about it that I wanted to check it out, somewhat enamored by the idea of “lofty Stephen King.” The book even stays with him apologizing for it being so difficult to read!

It was definitely above your standard fare King horror book, for sure and conceptually deeper, but difficult? Nah. I find myself writing with a lot of Western motifs and had a few people mention this book to me. Glad I read it, but not sure I'll move forward considering people claim the rest are “easier reads.”

I want to read King doing more of this, flexing his literary muscle and challenging people.

In a way I'm conflicted about this book.

PKD is one of my all-time favorites and I've always enjoyed his work, but I feel like there is a wide range of PKD books that can at times feel very different. But at their core, most PKD books share the same basic truths; the first portion of the book is where he establishes an interesting world, characters and sets rules. The third and final portion is where all of those rules are broken, sometimes incrementally until they've been shattered.

Sure, that doesn't account for 100% of his books, but for a large portion of them it works. For Ubik it is dead on. The problem with Ubik is that the entire second act is just kind of there. It makes sense that it is like that because there is a mystery unraveling in Ubik and the characters need to exist within the confined set of rules that have been established for this world. The problem is that the stuff that happens in there isn't that interesting.

There are definitely moments that are captivating, but by-and-large I found myself putting this book down a lot, which considering it being a rather quick read, is kind of a bummer. The beginning established such an interesting world and characters, as PKD is prone to doing, but then watching some of them lament around it wasn't nearly as fun as it seemed it would be.

That being said, the four stars is because that beginning was just so strong and the last third was enough to wash the dull middle section away almost completely. Dick likes to play with perception and concepts of isolation, alienation and existence in general. Ubik is no different in this regard and wraps itself up in the exact fashion that you'd want from Philip K. Dick.

When a novelist has a breakthrough success, expectations are that the second book will either be a sequel or a book with nearly identical themes and style.

Morgenstern's style and prose are still here. The sense of wonder is as strong as it was in The Night Circus, but this book took a much different turn.

You'll see a lot of reviews frustrated this book wasn't Night Circus redux, or that the narrative style is nontraditional. You'll see accusations of “there's no plot!” But there clearly is.

Starless Sea is labyrinthian in a lot of ways, with Zachary Ezra Rawlins discovering a strange, secret book society based on the symbols of bees, keys and swords. There are meta narratives spun throughout, aside chapters that are a part of the books within this world that Zachary reads.

You're left to interpret much of what happens, but it was clear Zach fell into the narrative worlds he adored and lost himself along the way, unable to determine real from hyperreal. Much like Dante's trip through the underworld was punctuated by a writer he revered, Zach's trip through the Starless Sea is dominated by his strong feelings for Dorian, the writer of many of these tales.

He falls hard and fast for the mysterious Dorian, like in a fairy tale, then chases him through interwoven stories.

We're given a few glimpses into what could be seen as the “real,” which Zachary has to fight through and cast aside to find his own definition of real, or at least what he was comfortable with. There were multiple outcomes, still. Was he dead in a ditch? Had a breakdown and fell into a romance with Dorian? Or did he actually disappear into the Starless Sea to become one of these characters?

His friend Kat served as an anchor to reality, only for her herself to potentially get lost in the meta narrative, although it's not entirely clear.

There's a lot to digest here and I eagerly await Morgenstern's next work. Be prepared for this to be “not for you,” though.

3.5 stars.

I enjoyed this for the most part. It was well written and engaging but took a while to get going, then struggled to stick the landing.

That's always tough, but the book faltered near the end. There were simply too many loose threads in play that needed to be tugged in and it detracted from any emotional payoff the ending had.