Enno Rehling
I definitely got a Stranger Things vibe. Intrigued, and want to know how this develops.
I really liked the Tiffany Aching series of YA books, and this is a very fine final book for both the series, and Terry's work as a whole.
I have a thing for journalism comics like this. I watched Katrina on TV, and it just wasn't comprehensible, but through the eyes of these seven people, it's become a lot more vivid and personal. Makes you feel closer to what happened there.
Continues the story of the first book, with the same major characters. I'm excited to hear how it all ends in the final book.
The first chapter almost lost me, but I'm glad I stuck it out. This book takes Clarke's third law to extremes like few other books, which can be off-putting or exciting, depending on your tastes. The world-building is reminiscent of Ancillary Justice, which remains one of my favorite books of all time. I'll definitely read the next books, and I'm tempted to give this one five stars, but it's on the edge, and probably closer to 4 than 5.
The extraterrestrials make this feel less like a normal Tackleford story. Onion Lem is a right good laugh once you get to know him.
This is the first part in a series, and it feels somewhat incomplete. There's a conclusion still waiting to happen in the next two books. Nevertheless, the book tells a story with a beginning and an end, of international intrigue, alien artifacts, and personal relationships that's absolutely been worth reading. I saw someone make the comparison with Carl Sagan's Contact, and I think that's appropriate - if you liked Contact, you're probably going to like this book.
First surprise: Our heroine was a personality disorder and physical disability. Talk about under-represented groups in fantasy. The story fine urban fantasy with fey and magic, but I think the portrayal of an unusual heroine is what impressed me the most.
This fusion of magic and science didn't really work for me. Some of the characters' motivations aren't well explained, like what is the deal with Mr. Rose, really? The end sort of just fizzled out, and I found the last chapters to be a slog, which is the opposite of what a great book feels like, where you just don't want the story to end yet. Probably not going to recommend this book to anyone I know.
While it employs the same time travel mechanism and backstory as To Say Nothing Of The Dog, this book is still very different in almost every other way. Much less light-hearted, for one, and with a solid B plot in the present time. Thoroughly enjoyed it, again.
I didn't love this book the way I loved some of Atwood's other works. There are some interesting ideas here, but the characters aren't sympathetic.
This book wasn't very good, and I would have quit about 30 minutes into it if I had had the foresight to bring more than one audio book on my Christmas vacation.As it was, I actually hate-listened all the way to the end.
It appears that the author tried to approximate the style of Douglas Adams, but forgot that there as more to the Hitchhiker's Guide than the endless footnotes of unnecessary exposition, and that the exposition needs to be there for a reason, and picked up on at a later point. And you can't have an entire book with characters modeled after Zaphod - you need an Arthur Dent as your straight man. What little story there is, is wilfully absurd, without ever reaching genuinely funny, there's not a single quotable paragraph, and in the end, everything resolves in a puff of deus ex machina.
If only I remembered who recommended this to me, so I could stop listening to them in the future.
I blew through this book in just under a week, it was so good. The characters are coming into their own, there's humor, and Breq's manipulation of everyone is fun to read. The Presger translator may be my favorite supporting character in the book, but I also have lots of love for Kale Five and her tea sets.
I was initially skeptical, because I knew Tchaikovsky for his Science Fiction work, and this book was clearly not that. I'm not a big reader of Jane Austen novels either, which the start of this book resembles more. But the story eventually won me over, if not the heroine. Emily takes much too long to realize that her basic assumptions of the world are wrong, and several times I found myself shouting at her to wake up already. She gets there in the end, but it takes an entire epilogue chapter for that to happen.
These short stories are little masterpieces. I was particularly taken in by the story about the witch in the graveyard, and the Instructions at the end had special meaning to me in my current situation.
“When you come back, return the way you came. Favors will be returned, debts be repaid. [...] And then go home. Or make a home. Or rest.”
A decent sequel. All the exciting world building already happened in the first book, so this one had little left to do. Overall, a typical “second in a trilogy” book.
I admit that I was sceptical at first, because this book seemed to deviate from the formula by immediately breaking up the crew, but each individual story thread that came out of that was gripping, and made the book impossible to put down. Nice meeting some of my favorite side characters from earlier books again, too.
this could have easily been two books, and the first one of them would have gotten a five star rating from me. The initial story is gripping and well-paced, with characters we grow to like, but the “epilogue” tells a completely different story, with new and weaker characters that goes on for two thirds of the book.
With this, I think I've read every book Lucy Knisley has writyen. All of her books are little masterpieces, and they make me so very happy, I can't wait for the next one to come out. I hear it's about Linney?