Daniel Vanzin
Slow paced, dispassionate writing style, full of descriptions and info-dumps.
See here for a good review
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1600037280?book_show_action=true
SUMMARY
Alec is young naive boy who is being tortured in a prison. Seregil, a well lived gentlemen, is a spy that just let himself being arrested on account of a mission. When Seregil decides to escape, he feels sorry for the young Alec and decides to take him along with him.
On the way to some city, they talk to each other and Seregil can't help but see something he likes about Alec, enough to offer to take him as an apprentice. Alec is reticent at first, because he wants nothing but to live an honorable life, and a spy is nothing but a professional liar thief in his eyes.
When arriving at the city, Seregil assumes one of his many disguises, as a bard, a famous one at that. They lodge themselves in an inn and offer their singing and storytelling services as a part of payment for they stay. All the while Seregil is busy at work, trying to find out information about an upcoming war.
Read 2:06 / 15:56 12%
Slow paced, too much name dropping. I like stories to rely on the plot for being interesting. “World building” usually gets in the way. This is such a case.
There is too much effort in naming every single “Japanese” thing, characters as well of course, that I couldn't get a taste for what the book is actually about.
If just the mention of Shigeru, Shingen, Yaegahara, Shizuka is enough to get you going, this might be a book for you. Perhaps it's the equivalent of “elves” for regular fantasy loving people.
The story was very simple. It is set in feudal Japan, it focused on ordinary events, the day to day life of lords and serfs, rivalry between clans, how to run a fief, obedience, to master one's emotions because you're the lord, etc.
Read 1:32 / 16:18 9%
I read it all, which is rare for me, but if felt too short to deserve even a 2 star. Everything is shallow. The pacing was ok, the writing subpar. The world based on pantheon of different mythologies was just name dropping, as were also the inclusion of vampires and werewolves.
I wanted to enjoy this, I like immortal characters, but nothing in the protagonist makes us think he is actually 2100 years old.
This is a typical example of the kind of book I despise. Well written, medieval fantasy BUT incredibly boring. I find Game of Thrones, which I didn't love, to be the very minimum a book of this kind must be. You want to write an “ordinary” story, talking about trivial events in day to day life, with many protagonists, an pacing so slow it seems the plot is inexistent, be good at it. Stephen King, GRRM, Anne Rice. All good examples.
The book starts with a prologue (sigh), following the same formula: the most interesting part of the book, completely unreleted to the following chapters.
The first chapter is about one of these protagonists, Marcus. He is an ex soldier, trying to avoid being enlisted in an army he didn't care for. So he is trying to convince a theater company to disguise themselves as soldiers, in order no to be attacked in the forest by bandits, and leave the city as a caravan.
The next chapters introduce the next protagonist, aaaand I've seen where this is going. All characters, no story. So I stopped.
Read 1:07/17:19 7%
REVIEW
Very close to being good, but the author got too many details wrong. There were some red flags that could have been overlooked if everything else was better written. I stopped reading because the plot was too simple and slow paced. Also, this is a book about the characters, so there was very little time dedicated to developing the plot. And the characters were not that interesting.
- poor side characters
- weak plot
+ mostly a refreshing take on werewolves stories
+ well written first person narrative
SUMMARY
Elena is a werewolf living in Toronto. She had many hardships growing up, she lost her parents when she was young and had some bad experiences with her many foster parents. At college she met and fell in love with Clayton, the man who would later bite her, turning her into a werewolf against her will.
With her new found condition, she is unable to continue living among normal humans. She has violent urges and can't yet control her transformation. So she lives a life of isolation with the other pack members, the only other humans she is allowed to interact with.
In time she becomes a vital part of the pack. She is the one with the best nose for picking up scents, and so she becomes the pack's best tracker, and gets assigned the responsibility to keep tabs on the werewolves outside the pack, known as “muts”. Her job is to keep the pack safe from outsiders, and she monitors those muts to see if they are living without bringing attention from the outside world, killing humans and other things that would endanger the pack's continuing existence.
After a traumatic incident, she abandons the pack and goes out to live alone in the big city. There she meets a boyfriend and manages to get a decent life for herself. One year after her depart, her ex pack leader asks her to come back to the pack's home in a small and isolated town.
There she meets her old fiancee Clayton again. She hates him, but cannot resist their physical attraction. He betrayed her, condemning her to a life of horrors, but he is devout to her, and he has always been there for her in her whenever she needed him. He is still in love with her and a sort of relationship is rekindled by her returning home.
The reason for her return is that the pack, her former pack according to herself, is in trouble. A body has been found in their private property, a large patch of land that they pay a good amount of money to prevent outsiders from getting in. Investigations lead them to the culprit, a psychopath who was a serial killer when human. They kill him, but soon learn that he was not alone. There is a group of muts organizing order to destroy the pack, in order to gain their lands. There is some confrontations, the police gets involved, more bodies shows up, werewolves get killed on both sides.
ANALYSIS
The book starts with a prologue. I'm on the group of people who dislike prologues, but it was decent enough. Then we learn about our protagonist Elena, who lives in a constant state of victimhood: “Oh I'm a werewolf, one of only 30 in the whole world. I have superpowers that make me different from everyone else, and because of that I have no social skills, cannot get a boyfriend and live in constant pain. Poor me”.
In spite of her lack of social skills, she does get a boyfriend, nothing special about how that happened. She was there, he was there. He was insistent and that's it.
Elena behaves like an immature brat. That's fine if she is supposed to grow as a person by the end of the book and maybe overcome that, or become less “bratty”. One example, she accuses her ex fiancee, who may have many flaws, of lying to her, even though he has never lied to her about anything, as he points out. She is hostile to the pack leader, the man who took her in and treated her like a daughter. She betrays her boyfriend, and convinces herself that's alright. She delays helping out the pack and impose conditions for her help.
When she arrives at the pack headquarters, we get a major info dump in the form of a book of werewolves. The way to introduce characters is not to read them from a list of names and descriptions.
Becoming a werewolf is very cliche: you get bitten, you're it. I like the “revised” version much better, the one used by Patrica Briggs. It should be something brutal and rare. The easiness of contracting lycanthropy brings up too much inconsistencies and unneeded forced moments in the story.
Case and point, the plot was about a group of muts trying to destroy the pack. They did that by creating new werewolves. So consider, I can bite hundreds of people and enlist them into my army to destroy a 5 werewolves pack, while they take the “high road” and keep the “curse” to themselves.
On the positive notes, we can see the inception of Patrica Brigg's Marrok idea, one werewolf alpha who controls all the others, more through cunning then brute force. The sex scenes were good as well, there was no self righteous prudishness and they were neither unnecessarily explicit.
I almost made it through the end, but the story got too boring to continue, and I wasn't in love with any of the characters. All I could think about is “not Mercy Thompson” when reading it.
Read 8:50 / 12:55 68%
Good start, but it got boring really quick. The author got the first person narrative right, the protagonist loosing 14 years of her life was an interesting concept, but all we get out of this is a broken woman, one who doesn't want anything to do with her previous life. Then she is forced to investigate the murder of her friend/enemy and needs to ask for help of an abusive old boyfriend to discover the killers.
The relationship with the murder victim is barely developed, I couldn't care less for it. The abusive old boyfriend behaves like a charming prince, even though she describes him as a pimp. Her confrontations with side characters involve more emotion then reasoning, with the other part raising their voices and telling her to get out, instead of debating facts and ideas about the current situation.
October Daye seems to be a legend among the supernaturals, but nothing is provided to prove it. She confronts a youth with a dialogue like “Do you know who I am? Tell me where he is or else...”, and that seems enough to intimidate the girl.
And it doesn't help that all the while she is walling in sorrow, having barely any skill to be useful for her current assignment, other then the fact that she keeps mentioning she is the best detective in the world, something only told, never shown. We have to take her word for that, but as far as I read it didn't check out.
The author spent too much time inside the protagonist's head in every scene, making for a very slow pacing.
Read 4:24 / 11:14 39%
A book about the life of common folk in medieval Europe. Well written and researched, excellent character development, but not interesting to me. I like stories to have, if no intellectual components, then at least something extraordinary. That's why I read fantasy and science fiction. This is historical fiction, and the pacing is too slow for my taste.
Judging by what I heard of the book, it will have a lot of really well fleshed out characters, and their stories will all connect somehow. Indeed I felt empathy for the protagonists, which is very good.
The first character if a mason worker, the father of 2 children that he must provide for. His wife is expecting another child, and if he doesn't find work soon, by winter they will starve. He is fascinated by the building of cathedrals, and will put his livelihood at risk to find the job he loves the most.
We get to experience his strive to survive, the risks he takes to get paid when his employer tries to back down, the passion for his work and the devoutness to his family. We feel the the agony of him being refused work town after town and the danger of traveling between towns in the woods, where outlaws live.
Eventually he fails to get a job, his wife dies during birth and he abandons his newborn in the forest, because he doesn't have money to feed him.
His story stops here for now, and another protagonist comes into play, a priest who lives in an isolated monastery. His life is about to change with the arrival of a newborn baby that another priest found in the woods. They decided that this was a sign of god, and must therefore take care of him.
Now the priest story is unfolded, we learn how he lost his parents to English soldiers who butchered them in their houses even after the war was over, and so on.
Read 3:59/40:55 10%
People are giving more then one star for this book. No, just no. There is no redeeming quality to be found here. The premise is interesting, and maybe if I could ignore every other aspect that makes a book worth reading, I could see it come to fruition.
This is at most a casual light reading, not something I'm after.
What? 43 hours of book??? Does this get miraculously better after a while? Are people crazy? I tried to lower my standards, this still didn't make the cut.
Read 1:38 / 43:25 4%
Another excellent entry in the chronicles. I am again mesmerized by Rice's luscious prose, even though it may seem repetitive, as all of her characters are art lovers who and cannot help but describe all of the beautiful things they see. It is a challenge to make an interesting story of someone with extraordinary powers, and the story lacks a little in that department. Yet creativity persevered, in spite of some moments that felt forced down.
It's Marius turn to have his tale told. This time instead of David Talbot approaching him, it is another blood drinker to whom Marius pours his soul, one who has been sleeping for many centuries, and is older then Marius even. He is confused in this new world and Marius takes him into his sanctuary, as himself is feeling so very lonely since the death of Akasha, even though he just got reunited with those he lost so long ago.
I rate this book above Armand's story, but bellow Lestat's. Marius has always been my favorite character in the chronicles, he is the wise one, incorruptible by the centuries, the seeker of knowledge. He is mentioned so many times in the other books and much of his life is already known to the readers. Now we get the chance to see more of him, to know how he became a vampire, to glimpse into his mortal years, to understand and experience how he endured his 1500 years of existence. Friends and enemies were made, lovers were found and lost, and through it all, he carried the the burden of taking care of Those Who Must be Kept.
WARNING : contains spoilers
Summary
First we get a little about his story with Pandora, which is told first in her book on The new Chronicles. He describes the events that lead to their union and then separation from his point of view. He loved her, but couldn't stop arguing with her, whom he saw as a sharp and witted companion.
The next character we're introduced to is Mael, the brute who kidnapped him, kept him as a prisoner for months in a distant land, under deplorable conditions compared to the life he was accustomed in Rome. Marius was an aristocratic scholar, the son of a Roman senator. Mael had groomed him to be the next God of the Grove, the one who lived under a tree and could never go out, the one who would then turn Marius into one like him, and teach him how to flee his predicament afterwards.
When Marius meets Mael again, after the centuries he lived with Pandora, he is surprised to see that he has become a vampire. Mael story is very interesting, an so is his companion and progenitor Avicus. Marius and Mael can't keep from hating each other. Marius blamed him for ruining his life and being responsible for his cursed existence. Mael does the same, because after Marius left, Mael was chosen to be the next God of the Grove. His demeanor towards Avicus however is one of uncontested friendship.
The three of them somewhat live together for many decades. Marius can't bring himself to destroy Mael, in respect for Avicus, and so a strong friendship between the three of them is formed. When Rome falls to the invasion of barbarians, they flee to Constantinople. These little connections with history are few, but the little that it has is enough to instigate the history buff in me.
Arriving at the eastern Roman Empire capital, he meets other vampires ruling the city. Their leader, Eudoxia, is one as powerful as him. He is fascinated by her beauty, and he is curious about her years as a vampire, her knowledge of the Mother and the Father. Unfortunately she sees in him only competition, and she demands he returns to her the guardianship of Akasha and Enkil. They fight, Marius destroys her, and her death crushes him as he is unable to endure the lost of one who could mean so much to him.
This experience was to much for him, and he decides he must abandon Mael and Avicus, and travel far away to an isolated place, and live alone for the rest of his immortal life. The knowledge he has of The Mother and The Father is very attractive to other vampires, and to keep others from discovering their whereabouts, either through reading his mind or the mind of others who knows him, he must hide from the world.
Many centuries passes when he finally emerges again into the world. He is tentative at first, but can't help himself when he sets his eyes on all the beauties mankind has created, even after the long years of destruction and pillaged that followed the fall of Rome.
He is in love with Botticelli's work in particular, and it is then that he decides to take residence in Venice, and present himself as a painter to the world. During this time he meets Santino, who begs him to lead him and his Satan worshipers in order to fulfill the Devil's work. Marius is distraught and shrugs him away, threatening his life if he ever comes near him again.
Soon after he meets Amadeo, who becomes the second great love of his life, after Pandora, who he is constantly searching still. There is some elaboration and extended scenes from what Armand told in his story, it is explained why Santino moved against him, how he managed to overpower him, what became of him after the battle with the Satan worshipers, and how he manages to recover after that.
Marius He recovers from his burned state by creating another vampire, from one human he loves, Bianca. She becomes his 3rd progeny. They spend many centuries together, many of them hiding from Santino's goons.
Again after some centuries, we get a much more satisfying encounter with Pandora then what she describes. it is a brief part of the book, but it is explained why after so many years apart, once they found each other again, they couldn't be together.
His encounter with Lestat is also very briefly explained, we get to see his reaction to Akasha's first time moving from her throne to drink from him and Enkil's anger towards him. Lestat is his 4th love in life, having immediately fallen in love with him. But after the reaction from TWMBK, he again realizes he cannot be near other immortals.
And then we get his reaction to Akasha's betrayal, and how he tried to convince her not to commit genocide. This was a very short and expected reaction. He loved her, he devoted his whole immortal life to her, and she doesn't pay any attention to him.
Analysis
Among the insights and major clarifications, we get to understand that Marius abhors violence, he doesn't want to destroy Santino's vampires because he cannot endure it. The same way as he could not have killed all those worshipers of the snake who came to him all those years before in Antioch, when he was living with Pandora. It was she who suggested and then convinced him to kill those 4 lost souls.
During the centuries, he was able to kill a few blood drinkers who sought to take the blood of The Mother and The Father, and thus compromising his mission to protect them. But he hides himself from the world because he doesn't want to do that anymore. He doesn't want to kill. Specially those of his kind, the vampires who are beautiful and intelligent creatures, either damned or blessed with eternal life, capable of living centuries and even thousands of years. To destroy them would be a heinous crime. As it also would be to create them, because their life is one of hardship and sorrow. A vampire must kill to live.
When he meets Pandora, it is she who abandons him now. I find the explanation very interesting, both as a fan of the VtM RPG and on the psychological side. Our minds are not made to endure more then a few decades of existence, how the longevity of the vampire affects their psyche leaves a lot of room to explore.
Granted I wanted something more, because as a student of philosophy all the intellectual aspects of these fiction books feels beneath me (hihihi), but it is so rare to find this in fiction novels that I treasure anything I can get.
It also during this period when he meets Pandora that it is made ever more clear his flaws. I would not exactly expect, but very much like to see that one who has so many years of wisdom, of studying the great minds of mankind throughout history, would be a little more insightful towards his own self. At last, he is only “human”. And that makes for some interesting conflicts in the story.
It becomes clears that the type of companion Marius wants is one of complete subservience, not one capable of dispute his beliefs. He is prone to outbursts of emotion, when he cast out Bianca for instance. He lacked the fortitude to destroy Santino, one who he knew could pose a threat to him and is so monstrous that no moral argument would justify him continued living.
Also, even after all these years, he still holds a grudge againts Mael, and never gave up upon seeking revenge after Santino as well. Too bad, he could have been the bigger person, the better man.
Generic detective PNR. When the protagonist meets the werewolf that is the suspect in a murder investigation, she immediately wants to hump him. In fact, the attraction between them is so great that they can't stop thinking about it.
A man was killed outside a famous werewolf club. The body was badly torn apart, and everything points out that a “lupus” had killed him.
Lili is encharged to investigate, as unbeknownst to everyone but her boss, she has some paranormal affinity. The main suspect is the werewolf prince that was having an affair with the murdered man's wife.
Read 2:38 / 7:36 35%
“Touch the Dark”. I'll pass, thank you. This was awful, and it really seems like just an excuse for a PNR. The following is a spoiler of the first 10% of the book.
I quit reading after the protagonist kept rambling on for 30min about how betrayed she felt because her 6 months roommate didn't mention he was a vampire, and that by killing 5 vampires that were trying to kill her, he just proved himself to be a psycho, a hot caramel skinned psycho who probably saved her life just to kill her himself. But first he is using some kind of power to seduce her, and she can feel he is linking because of the stretching of his pants touching her body and...
Read 01:24 / 12:05 12%
This book is bad, but it does have some redeeming features:
1) It's not JUST an excuse for an PNR romance. Yes, it does have a romance, it is a PNR Romance after all, but it's not in your face like all the other books in this category. As soon as you see the handsome jerk who keeps getting in her way you know they're gonna bang.
2) It almost manages break a barrier into an acceptable novel. It almost nails:
- the 1st person narrative, which you could say its cheating, as it is a very easy way to create attachment to the protagonist, but it doesn't quite get there
- the characters: their descriptions, backstory and mainly dialogue are lacking depth. Alex is the daughter of the Governor, who renounced her as a child because of her powers. All of a sudden her sister is calling her asking for a favor. And that's all you get about the family relationship. Her friends are also briefly mentioned, as is her sexual life; the author just wanted to make sure to point out she is not a puritan.
- the world: Alex Craft is a grave witch, someone who can raise the dead to talk to them. There are a few witches with this power, and there are some other magical people in the world, like the Fae.
- show don't tell: as much as a cliche it is to point this out, it is one of the signs of a great author when you don't feel the info dumps thrown at you. But the times she is exercising this skill it felt too generic. I didn't care for her “see beyond the grave power”
- pacing: at one point Alex is using her power in a body to raise its shade, then comes a detective and he is pissed because she doesn't have permission to do that, so she leaves, fall down the stairs, and that ends up saving her life. This was all crammed in without enough development. Many scenes like this.
- the sex scene: I skipped these, about 10 min I think. It felt like the author hold herself the whole book wanting not to be just another cheap PNR romance, and then she rewarded herself with chocolate at the end.
- the plot: broadly speaking so I don't spoil much, but the assassin collecting stuff to perform a ritual because he is evil and wants to rule the world, nothing interesting here. Oh, and death is in love with her. This may have sounded nice in the author's head, but she didn't translate it well into words.
Also, holding out on information from the other characters does not a good plot make.
Plenty more to comment, this is a good book to break down all its flaws. But as I said, it almost manages to be good. I hold Mercy Thompson as the gold standard for this type of novel. The narrator is the same, which helped me keep reading when it was clear I wouldn't like the story.
A gritty historical fantasy tale, more concerned with describing the geopolitical scene then with story or characters.
After having read The Skystone, the beginning of this book gave me a breath of fresh air. Its is much better written, there is more characterization and the elements of the Arthurian Fantasy were actually present here. Arthur, Merlin, Morgan, Uther and many others. The characters introduced were very different from what you would expect. Merlin is a vicious old men, who enjoys raping and torturing children for his experiments. There is no real magic in the world, but the magical wielders are able to fake it, so that most people believe in them. All of this contribute to an air of realism to the story.
However, the book pacing is atrociously slow, the author spends most of the time naming and and describing all of Britain's kingdoms and rulers, and how they relate to each other.
Read 3:21 / 19:55 41%
It started out ok. A Roman legionary military story, with intrigue between senators, fighting enemies in foreign lands, defending the borders of the empire against a horde of barbarians.
Then it proceeded to be a bit more mundane, with the the story a Roman soldier who wanted to build his life after having being discharged from the legions after being injured. He becomes a smith, found out about his marvelous sword and smithing techniques inherited from his grandfather. He tries to find love in the arms of a childhood friend, build up his business with a loyal servant that he still remembered from his childhood as well. His trade prospers after he sets up a supplying contract with the Roman troops, while avoiding taxes because government is evil (sigh!).
The next part it all falls apart. It's the story about a man fleeing from the law, hiding in a rich old friend's villa. There he finds that man's sister, who happens to be the most beautiful women in the world and it's love at first sight, for both of them (sigh!).
The pacing is very slow. The sex scenes are unnecessary and laughable. The book is a mixture of three different stories, at least until where I stopped reading. There was a promise of a fourth more interesting story, the founding of a new city, one free of all of the vices that corrupted Rome, vices which are about to bring down the empire.
Oh, and there are about 4-6 mentions about Arthurian mythology. If you want that, this isn't the book for it.
Read 11:25 / 21:05 54%
People are comparing this to Robert Jordan (Wheel of Time) and Brandon Sanderson (Mistborn) and this might as well be the case. I didn't like those books, and this one follows the very same format.
For me this style of writing is a thorn in the side of fantasy. It starts with an exciting prologue completely unrelated to the plot, some obscure dialogue and a lithany of weird sounding names. Then it dials down from 100 to 0 and the real book begins, and the plot is very slowly presented, because the author is busy explaining the many characters, places, magic system, etc.
These aspects are even that strong in this book, but the book itself isn't that good to begin with. The story really starts, ignoring that useless prologue, depicting the very boring life of the protagonist, who is of course a student in a school of magic, and hist best friend Sam Wyr, and they journey to Mount Doom a rebel camp for special wizards.
In the way they are hunted by the Black Riders cleverly named Hunters because magic is forbidden and being a magic user is punishable by death in some places of the kingdom.
The book is not overtly bad, just uninteresting. There is a small twist which might be cool latter, the Shadow, magic users stripped of their magic powers. Magic users are bellow regular humans in the food chain, and Shadows are even lower. They have no right and absolutely no power whatsoever.
This begs to the dramatic side too much for me, but again, the book isn't even that good for me to complain about that.
Read 4:05 / 25:29 16%
Rice's prose is still strong, like the previous books in the series. The story is focused on a witch named Merrick, and her relationship with David Talbot. The only Vampire Chronicles element in the book is within a few pages in the beginning and the end.
It does add a bit to the series, because of the ending, which I didn't like very much. Lestat gives his blood to Louis who just tried to kill himself, going against Louis's wishes and making him nearly indestructible. I found Louis suicide befitting with his character, and he has long stopped adding to the series. Armand's resurrection was far more deserving and interesting.
It also introduces what i expect will be an important new character in future stories.
This author writes the kind of books I want to read, like Calculating God, but without any literary quality. It feels like a stereotypical scientist, one who seats in a lab all day and has no knowledge of human interactions, decided to learn what that is like from a 50 page book he picked up in a Walmart, and he kind of understood.
The result is a very “square” prose, with lots of telling/not showing. Everything feels very artificial. “... and she lost her child. It felt bad, and she cried, because that's what humans do when they are sad.”
The premise of the book is that an amazingly interesting phenomenon hapended, where the humanity's mind collectively jumped 20 or so years ahead in the future, and then went back after a few minutes.
34% into the book and NOTHING interesting to show for. He tries to describes the humane aspect of the event, how it affected peoples lives. I wanted a mystery and/or a thriller, maybe some time travel fantasy mixed in. There is none. Just a plain day-by-day description of the lives of some of the people affected by the event. Who to blame, a guy who finds out he is going to be murdered, and tries to prevent it, people getting divorced, life insurances bankrupting, etc.
A fairy tale. I don't like the genre. It feels like a children's book written for adults. It tells a story from the point of view of a imaginative teenage girl, who sees the world throw her sisters getting married while she is left behind, and every husband is actually a bird who turned into a man in before her eyes. But she is the only one that knows that. The book is full of things like that, in a very child like prose.
Read 0:47 / 11:21 7%
Just a boring book. Nothing exceptional happens, no interesting characters, magic or anything else. Some of my minor annoyances:
- this book feels like it was written by/for a millennial. The protagonist and people around her consider minor acts of rudeness to be the ultimate insult
- every character is described by levels of handsomeness
- feels like the story is an excuse for a romance
Read 2:57 / 7:14 41%
A scoundrel with good hearth protagonist, lives in a remote planet working as a harvester of precious minerals for a big company. He is lazy, lucky and a smart ass, the kind of guy who loves to do things his own way instead of by the books. There is basically one woman in the whole planet, an intelligent and beautiful Biologist, who happens to have fallen in love with him at one point but then they got separated, because the bad boy is not capable of maintaining a good adult relationship.
He accidentally finds out the motherload of precious minerals, and by “virtue” of his deviousness, he manages to obtain a big cut of the profits. By coincidence, the only sentient beings on the planet happens to reveal themselves to him. He contacts his old girlfriend, who is dating someone else, and asks her to help to investigate this new life form.
I stopped here, as this is already a very simple and predictable plot. He will find out that the sentient beings, who looks like big cats and looks oh so adorable, are somewhat being damaged by the planet exploration. he will have to choose between being rich or being moral, and because he will choose the latter, he will get his girl back as well.
This is very straightforward and too boring for me.
Read 1:42 / 7:18 23%
- evil leader who kills insubordinate goons who disagrees with him (implies idiot goons)
- evil for the sake of evil: I want to dominate the world because the powerful should rule
- torture porn: say he was tortured and be done with it, don't dedicate a whole chapter for it
- aaaannd the next chapter continues the torture scene... good bye
Read 2:02 / 25:05 8%
Good writing, the author nailed empathic link the the first person narrative can bring. I almost finished the book, but it was just too much for me. Way too blend, nothing interesting ever happens, cartoonish villain. I hoped the story would eventually pick up, it didn't.
Also, very lackluster in a lot of aspects. The protagonist, Yeine, was simple, the world the author tried to build wasn't very elaborated, the supporting characters were just there.
There were no remarking features about Yeine. She is a not very good looking girl, who once was the leader of her people. She is a warrior from a “barbaric” society, thrown in the midst of a political aristocratic war, which she has no way to win. So she just accepts her imminent death, meanwhile investigating her mother's murder.
She makes an alliance with the gods of that world, who are enslaved by the humans who rule the whole hundred thousand kingdoms. About 3 of which are mentioned.
This reviews somewhat reflects my thoughts
Read 8:13 / 11:47 70%
In modern times, Addie is a woman who loves books, drinking coffee, and doesn't want any man to tell her what to do. But when she was born centuries ago, she as supposed to be married and be a breeder as it was the costume of the time. To escape that fate she made a pact with the devil to live forever, but he also made her to be forgotten by everyone who meets her as soon as they loose sight of her.
Good premise, but cliched heroin and I didn't connect to the characters, places or prose.
Read 2:11 / 17:10 13%