francois

I am beginning to tire of Brandon Sanderson.

In hindsight, this is a very successful series. Sanderson is an exceptional science fantasy/space opera author - in fact, other than this one, I'm not sure there's any sci-fi book of his I haven't liked. Starsight remains my favorite book of his for its incredible world building and plot handling. And I am glad his Cosmere series is headed in that direction, because the four fantasy books he released this year were some of his worst. The cringiest aspects of Sanderson's writing came to the fore in all of those novels.

Defiant avoids all those habits. But for all that it continues developing Sanderson's best world to date, it is just not a very well-executed novel. Every twist and plot device seems to arrive two chapters too late. I felt “oh, finally,” or “oh, that happened,” rather than “wow!” or shock or sadness or fear.

The beginning of the book was glacial. I wonder if the YA genre limits Sanderson's ability to establish a rotation between viewpoints the way he does in his adult novels (not that there's really much content difference!) When that rotation shows up at the end to facilitate the avalanche, it was confusing and inconsistent. Some of the viewpoints were from characters we haven't seen in 3 books - it felt like you had to have read the Skyward Flight spinoff novellas to really understand what was going on inside these characters' minds.

There were some really iconic moments in this one, flashes of the best of Sanderson, and the general scope of the plot was predictable but fulfilling. It actually disappoints me a little that the problem was not overindulgence, but a fundamental flaw in the way things worked out at the end.

I love this universe and I hope this is the first of Sanderson's works to be adapted. Despite Defiant's execution not really working, I think the strength of the first two makes this his best series and I'm glad he is letting some other authors play around in it. It seems perfect for that sort of thing.

A perfunctory close to a series that started with an explosive, creative, and original premise. The first book of this trilogy was a smart, interesting setting in a fantasy version of Kallipolis from Plato's Republic. The characters were various shades of grey, the book was well paced, and the seriousness of the whole thing was refreshing.

This third book is very well written and had some bright spots, but as the series went on it began to lose the smarts and more embrace YA dystopian tropes. The much-heralded Griff and Delo plot line introduced in book 2 was confusing, not really cohesive or convincing, and wasn't integrated too well with the main story, particularly in this last book. I thought Power's character, throughout the series, was a particular standout.

Overall this is definitely a very recommendable series and I think Munda has a bright future ahead as a writer. It's easier to see after reading the trilogy why this isn't more popular, despite the sheer quality of the writing. I've already commented on the relative lack of banter or humor (which I appreciate!), but I think this is also one of those series that has an explosive premise and then has trouble filling in the gaps when that premise runs out.

It's the Master and Margarita on acid. That's all I'm gonna say.

Robert Jackson Bennett is a weird author to place. He gets lumped in a lot with Brian McClellan and James Islington as sort of the successors to the hypermodern Sanderson school of fantasy. This is the type of fantasy that dispenses with elves and dwarves and dragons and instead reinvents worlds with crazy laws of physics that must be followed exactly to a T, and flawlessly executes intricate bulletproof plots in said worlds.

The thing is, this is not a really good description of Bennett, from the two novels I have now read from him. He's not interested in bloat, side quests, or epic/cosmic plot shenanigans. He basically writes thrillers and mysteries in modern fantasy worlds, very much like a Genevieve Cogman or Rachel Aaron, but since he's a man and writes hard sci-fi descriptions of his magic systems instead of pointless romance subplots, he gets taken more seriously.

I'm more bashing the public's advertising of Bennett than the man himself, because I liked this book. It's a fun and well-executed fantasy novel set in a world that's loosely based on Renaissance era Milan but which ends up feeling very weird and inhuman (and downright Islingtonian). The well-leashed cast of six main characters are all developed well, the pacing is good, the dialogue is snappy, etc. The writing and character interactions, and the sort of “art-style” of the characters, reminded me a lot of Foucault's Pendulum and Umberto Eco in general. It's a novel with impressive construction and execution.

I return to my half-joking “manliness” argument here because I think Bennett in general pays too little attention to any sort of emotional payoffs and instead wants a reader to find catharsis from solving increasingly important problems. If you're an engineering type and you enjoy when a problem is solved from a patient and distant perspective, you'll love this book. If you can't stand the people who methodically sit down, pull out a pencil and a neat sheaf of white paper, and start carefully drafting solutions when something is desperately and urgently wrong, you will be irritated like I was. There's really not enough “human interest” in this book, which is something I rarely find myself saying.

It is fun to figure out how everything works and follow the characters as things are slowly unveiled and they each find their successes. Bennett won't be making it on my all star author list anytime soon, but he's solid enough and I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the series for sure.

Rating: 7.5/10

Closest comparison: The Sunlit Man, for all the problem solving and engineering jargon.

I was hesitant to read this book, but it's a definite rebound for Sanderson after Oathbringer. There was a story, there was a plot, there were decent characters, action, literary flow–all things that Oathbringer was lacking.

Now that Sanderson can write a book and it will automatically reach the NYT bestseller list, he continues to shift his writing more towards the casual side, even satirizing flowery writing in FM's character. I don't like this, but it certainly works for YA. It seems like Sanderson has just decided to work with what prose he has, instead of struggling over every word. It works, but there's a notable drop in writing quality from his early-period works.

The ending was...meh. There is a big deus ex machina and the book ended quite a bit before I'd expected it to, to be honest. It felt vaguely like a rehash of the ending of Calamity. It was fine–I've just read at least five better Sanderson avalanches before.

The interactions between Spensa and M-bot were probably the highlight of the book. I've never thought of Brandon Sanderson as a character-driven author, but this book was indisputably character-driven. It's hard to write a flight-school book and keep the reader's attention after five similar battles, but Sanderson managed to do it.

I wouldn't recommend this book unless you're a fast reader and are looking for a binge read, but it was a fun waste of time at three in the morning.

Not quite a one-upvote recommendation, but I'd been reading constant rumblings from diverse corners of Reddit saying that this book was lowkey very good.

“Plato's Republic with dragons” is the tagline for this novel, but the book is really based on American class politics of the 21st century more than anything else. It's dealt with in a restrained way that is refreshing and somewhat sheds a lot of the dramatic images of class warfare and revolution in a lot of young adult fiction.

Reviewers suggested this book would be smart, and I was impressed by its cleverness. There are no cosmic plot twists or wheels being reinvented here, but it's one of the best executed and mature YA fantasy novels I have read. Especially for a young adult novel, it's serious, philosophical, and doesn't spell things out for the reader. I was invested in both main characters throughout. The first scene was kind of weird and maybe was meant to hook people in? I had this book stuck on page 3 for about 6 months only to find most of the writing was nothing like the first chapter.

There is a certain lack of pizzazz and wacky creativity that is missing here - the book isn't fun in the traditional YA sense, although it's gripping and attention grabbing intellectually. Munda isn't a very funny writer, and she doesn't try to be, which is ok! I love this, actually. This sort of lands the book in an odd place, marketing wise - a certain type of twelve year old can read it, but that's probably the same certain type of 20-30 year old that's going to read it and enjoy it. I'm very much that type of person, but if you're looking for more of a romp, I'd skip this.

As for the dragons, they may have helped market the book if it had been released post-Fourth Wing, but there's actually relatively little to them other than to draw the reader into a somewhat distant universe. They're fun, I guess, but don't expect the same amount of time or character development of a “traditional” dragon rider book.

I'll certainly be continuing with this series and am looking forward to books 2 and 3!

I was immensely disappointed.

I was an apologetic Sanderson superfan, to be blunt about it, until I picked up Oathbringer the day it came out and slogged through the entire thing that day, setting aside work and other, more important and more timeworthy things, to finish this paperweight that was about as profound as your average fanfic or, to be more generous, an average conversation on the street.

I wasn't surprised–ever since Shadows of Self, which I still think is Sanderson's best book to date, I'd gradually noticed a stylistic change in his writing, replacing unremarkable prose with cliches spilling off the page, and a general attitude, ever since he finished the Reckoners series, to write every character as if they were about to feature in the next MCU film. Which, I mean, isn't too far from the truth now. I clearly didn't like this shift–it took things that were neither good nor bad about Sanderson's writing, and just made them worse. His strength–worldbuilding and plot–couldn't shine through the way it had in his previous novels, when he'd managed to mitigate any negative effects of his prose and characterization.

Was it bad? Not entirely. I won't complain about specific details of the plot, because there's a good story here, and plenty of complex plot fodder for the Seventeenth Shard to debate about for years on end. But it seemed that every inspirational quote that Dalinar managed to produce ex nihilo was something paraphrased from Goethe or Nietzche, and the puzzles and ciphers, even the worldbuilding in general, will never stand up to someone like Umberto Eco. (However, I will admit that reading Eco's Name of the Rose will cause anyone to view Sanderson's fairly good worldbuilding as pedestrian).

I particularly liked the plot, actually, and Sanderson's willingness to drag characters into basic moral gray areas was refreshing given his relatively black-and-white stance in the past. But the other aspects of a good story just weren't there, and I didn't give this book particularly much thought after I finished it. I didn't have any complaints about the length, but for an author who wants to write fantasy works with the profundity of literary titans, it just wasn't there.

I've written a lot of four-star reviews recently of books from my obscure Reddit comment rec list. Here's another one.

This series is a perfect example of the difference between 2010s fantasy and 2020s fantasy, if anyone wants to really put a nail on it. It's really much slower-paced than anything that would sell post-covid, but it's not particularly literary, diverse, or topical: it's a straightforward, bright epic fantasy novel that's written patiently and carefully, not with the snap and glamour you see in Sanderson, or the sort of hypermodern fantasy that's trendy on booktube these days. It reminds me most of some finalists I've seen in the SPFBO. I say that as a compliment because what it reminds me most of, The Combat Codes, was a very decent read, and was picked up by a traditional publisher around the same time this series was coming out.

The setting is a really good idea - a western European analogue, focused primarily on Spain and France, except they're floating islands in a sky with steampunk airships. I really like books with an epic feel that avoid sprawl, and this is really one of them. The main characters are Isabelle, the one-handed but intelligent and brave princess - nothing we haven't seen before, and her goofy musketeer, Jean-Claude. Isabelle is deemed powerless at birth and thus, after her best friend essentially gets her soul sucked out of her, is sent to marry the prince of fantasy Spain against her will. Politicking ensues.

And the first half of the book is neverending and extremely slow politicking. It took me about two months to get through the first half of this book, and two hours to get through the second half, which was extremely hectic. This book isn't bad, it's not fresh, but the shift in pace is so jarring that it really comes off worse than it is. And despite the well-managed cast, it feels like we don't actually get to know the characters that well - none of them stuck with me all that much. The plot is intricate and the politics are really well thought-out, and the ending feels rewarding.

This is an objectively high quality, very unglitzy book, the type which I wish were published more these days. I'm not overly attached to this world or characters and it seems the different volumes of this series are pretty independent, so I'll likely return at a later point, but not now.

Rating: 7.5/10

Michael Swanwick is a very angry man.

This is one of my favorite reads of the year. The conceit is simple: Swanwick is angry at the state of fantasy in 1994. In 1994, Swanwick's world is going to shit. Why, he asks, do we write about noble elves and chaste princesses and chivalrous knights, and especially, why do we kid ourselves that some child of humble origins will enter this world, aspire to great things, and climb the rungs of society?

Swanwick asks what would happen if a fantasy world worked exactly like ours.

Enter Jane Alderberry. We find out her story eventually, but figuratively, she's an orphan working in a factory, then she cons a mechanical dragon (from the factory) into helping her escape. From there, she lives as Appalachian trailer trash with a single-parent dad (the dragon), then a student at a state school in an unnamed city. She's a changeling who was stolen from Earth, ordinarily bred with faeries to create dragon pilots until her womb gives out. These fairies are varied, but the grotesquerie of the world is prominent. Instead of Arwen and Aragorn and Boromir, we have Ratsnickle and Monkey and Blugg, and Swanwick takes every opportunity he can to tell you how disgusting this world is and how much it makes a truly horrible person out of our protagonist.

I don't like grimdark fantasy, but this world, despite its immense cynicism, was so colorful and detailed. I couldn't help but think that JK Rowling must have read this book at some point. The sheer sliminess, weirdness, and again that word, grotesque aspects of the world just remind me so much of the genius of the Wizarding World that Rowling would create three years later.

As Jane matures and falls more into the decadence of society, we get a lot of sex, both on screen and off screen, and drug trips. I viewed these less as self-indulgent and more as Swanwick's continual digging into the underbelly of this society, which fetishizes and dehumanizes Jane as she grows older and more mature. I think some people have read this as a societal critique, but it read very much to me as a critique of the fantasy genre and, secondarily, of academia. Swanwick's view on society on this book is very clearly that it exists, and that people in certain circles ignore it.

This book is extremely well written, tight, and had a satisfying ending. Avoid if you're prudish, but it's historically fascinating, reads very modern, and you'll never read anything like this again. 9/10.

This series is quickly putting itself among my favorites ever.

Whatever pretenses of literary restraint Fallon maintained in the first book are quickly eliminated at the beginning of this one. This is wonderful suspense fantasy, addictive and gripping, not academic or dry in the slightest bit. It's the closest thing to peak Sanderson I've found, but instead of complicated worldbuilding and magic systems, Fallon manages to do the same thing in a fairly bare-bones fantasy world with some good ideas. This series is really ahead of its time in a lot of ways, primarily aesthetics and themes, and I think just reads really well even so far after its publication date.

9/10.

The first less-than-top-notch installment of this series, but who cares, this is super fun. The wetland arc (which takes up a good 60% of this) was pretty contrived, but I just love reading this world and characters. The banter in this one continues to be on point, I'm really engaged with most of the viewpoints and it continues to be pure fun. Looking forward to the last one! 7/10

For a book that is a fantasy novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, the people who have recommended this book to me are invariably neither fantasy fans nor Ishiguro fans, which always struck me as a bit of a curiosity. But I now realize that this makes perfect sense. For fantasy fans, this metaphysical, allegorical novel must seem rambling and derivative - for people who have read a lot of Ishiguro before, there's nothing new here. The Unconsoled, while confusing and long, is considerably more lighthearted, funnier, and optimistic than The Buried Giant - and one of the most impressionable books I have ever read. The Buried Giant hits hard in the moment, but that is largely the responsibility of the last few chapters.

The Buried Giant was my fifth Ishiguro, and, like Klara and the Sun, I felt he has been running out of plot and character tricks for a while. The slow reveal of the memories behind the mist, the coincidences of characters meeting each other, mysterious figures appearing on roads, and the sunny-at-first relationship of Axl and Beatrice, came straight out of his previous two novels. It was not until the ending that I found myself surprised or unable to predict a plot point - maybe I've been reading too much epic fantasy, but I wanted more.

Thematically, this might be Ishiguro's strongest and most committed novel. The book employs a wholehearted assault on fundamental Christianity, nationalism, and civil war, while raising sincere questions about the seemingly inverse relationship between objectivity and the building of community. The exceptionally creative ending was quite possibly my favorite of Ishiguro's thus far, and unlike in many of his other books, kept me sustained until the very end.

I will start recommending this as a starting point for readers looking to discover Ishiguro. Its pastoral aesthetic, accelerating plot, and committed themes are particularly convincing to readers of my Gen Z and millenial generation. This is Ishiguro at his most transparent, active, and sincere, and I anticipate this would have easily been five stars had I not encountered many of his tropes beforehand.

This was a really, really good urban fantasy. My first comment is that I don't know why it's shelved as YA, because it really has none of the hallmarks of that genre aside from the single viewpoint. I can see this fitting into NA these days, but there's probably not enough sex and murder for that label.

This book fits so perfectly into a genre hole I personally love - you can clearly see the influence of If on a winter's night, Possession, The Name of the Rose. All those novels about books are so wonderful on their own, and you just add a little bit of urban fantasy to end up with this wonderful mishmash of niche goodness.

To be clear, this is still very much an urban fantasy novel. A very highbrow one at that, probably one of the most literate and restrained ones out there, but still with predictable tropes, a fast pace, and relatively standard pathways of character development. For all that Cogman found a really creative setting in which to write this, I rate this 4/5 simply because the plot is still fairly standard MC-name-in-the-title urban fantasy stuff. I'd especially recommend this for readers who like the concept of urban fantasy but might find it too lowbrow or steamy for them.

I picked this one up because I saw it in a B&N, really liked the cover, and thought it might be up my alley. It was. It's great to see publishers offering traditional epic fantasy again. I think there's a proven market for it.

The essence of this book is fine. I liked the ur-story of this book and finished in a fairly decent amount of time - as usual, I pecked through the first half for about a week and then binged the last half. Plot, characters, writing were all serviceable, engaging, and decent quality. The two romances were a bit haphazard but for the most part not cringey.

My issues with this one are in the dressings. I often find myself defending Sanderson's Elantris, because it came out in 2005, and relative to most fantasy published before 2005, it was doing something new with the short chapters, end-heavy structure, and weird cosmology and very modern-feeling approach to fantasy and magic. This book feels A LOT like Elantris, with the additional caveat that it came out twenty years later, is substantially less revolutionary, and doesn't have the explosive ending. It's entirely possible that this novel could have been a midlist offering in the late 2000s, or a high-placing SPFBO finalist these days. It's good, but it's not trying to do anything special, and that's fine. But I think modern epic fantasy these days has a mandate to try to do something with plot, and in terms of plot (and other aspects) this book falls short a bit, like many midlist books traditionally did.

Also, I personally have a slight distaste for Middle Eastern-inspired settings that include the food, culture, etc. and leave out the “bad parts” of the culture. I get why, but it feels half-baked.

Anyway, I like the dragons and I'll probably keep reading the series, but it's not going to the top of my favorites list.

A very good sequel to conclude Jen Williams's third series, the Talon duology. This series fell a little short of The Winnowing Flame, which is one of my favorite fantasy series ever. But it's still top quality stuff that asserts Jen Williams as a criminally underread author who is one of the best epic fantasy writers at the moment.

Williams's style is professional but with a cartoonish aesthetic - I always imagine her books being adapted in pastel cel-shaded graphics. Her characters are bold, loud, and distinctive, and she doesn't shy away from horror. Despite this, her books carry a very British sophistication and wit that often makes them a fun read. This series was significantly more lighthearted than the Winnowing Flame, which I didn't prefer as much, but to each their own.

I've complained a bit in the past about Williams's books feeling too well rounded off, polished, and predictable, but I think that problem was solved here. I never got that feeling reading this book, even though Williams is an author where the good guys always win.

The only storyline I had complaints with was Ynis's, throughout the series, and I only really mention it because she's supposedly the MC. Kaeto and Leven (and Epona in the second book) had much more convincing storylines throughout. I get that Ynis's perspective is likely the hardest to write from, but those were the chapters that relatively fell flat.

Great series, 8/10, highly recommended, looking forward to The Sleepless in a few months!

Onyx Storm was not bad, it was just sad. It's a sadly readable filler volume in a series built on hype and vibes. The Empyrean series had provocative debut that was a novelistic mess but had a hilariously distinctive voice, and a somewhat promising sequel. Now, it begins its decadence with a mediocre epic fantasy novel interspersed with about two moderately graphic sex scenes that wouldn't scrape 100 kudos on AO3.

The good: The book was well produced and seemed well planned, and not written on a rushed timetable. It's readable, and at a few times enjoyable. The continuity seems better. The line editing was better, although a few confusing sentences and missing dialogue tags slowed down my reading a bit. But there are far too many characters in this series, and I'm reminded of a comment where an author (Rosaria Munda, I think) said that they didn't write talking dragons because that was an automatic way to double a character count.

Onyx Storm turned into a heavy fantasy novel with all the mistakes of a fantasy debut. Instead of concrete, long plotlines that carried through character motivations, worldbuilding details, and large-scale conflicts, we got 10-15 quick stations of the plot. These were small-scale skits - in one case, literally several islands with different quests on them. While this is a easy and rudimentary way to keep a reader hooked, a Gothamesque level of scaffolding remained, and the inability to generate character tension in the first 60% of the book completely ruined any chance of payoff from the ending. The worldbuilding was better than expected for this series, but far below mainstream epic fantasy standards.

The tone of the writing was inconsistent and chaotic. I question how many cooks were in this book's kitchen, especially after the recent details about Entangled's publishing process. Sometimes, particularly in the intimate scenes we'd suddenly get Violet's brash voice from the first book, but more often a dull, repetitive generic fantasy narrative tone prevailed, especially out of place in first person narration.

The romantic stakes were unconvincing and increasingly and desperately contrived, in one case using the single worst plot point I have ever read in a novel in a desperate effort to try to create stakes between Violet and Xaden. The politics were more uninformed, dramatic, transactional, and petty than the Trump administration.

2 stars because I finished it. Add half a star because most of the problems are concentrated in the first half and ending, and a large chunk of the second half (ch 35-55) is actually pretty well sequenced and reads well. Minus a half star, of course for the ersatz Islingtonian ending. Do better.

4/10

Not an instant favorite, but an impressive and interesting curiosity in the world of 2000s fantasy. Beautifully written, with a wonderfully and attentively crafted, Eastern-inspired world.

The character work is the highlight of this, with some of the most tightly intertwined cast I've seen in a fantasy book from this era. There are not many fantasy books that could be staged without many props or a huge cast, but this is one of them, despite the fact that this book's soft magic system has a central place in the plot and the worldbuilding.

The writing comes across as simply high quality. The prose is intellectual, distant, calm, and neutral. While it's not a heavily immersive book, Abraham very slowly and methodically uncovers details of the world, letting the reader experience the full story only when the book has ended. While the setting and many of the scenes are reminiscent of Brandon Sanderson, this is a high-effort, far more literary read.

A left brain read, best recommended to those who enjoy epic fantasy but sometimes don't mind not being swept away by an immersion tsunami.

Rating: 8/10
Closest comparison: The Grace of Kings

There's something about a lot of Australian fantasy that's very wild and off-the-wall, and I'm starting to love it. This is a beginning to an engaging and promising series that I'm looking forward to finish. It's a very creative secondary world with a magical Tide, controllable by immortals called Tide Lords who rise and subjugate humans during periods of high tide. Our protagonist, the professor Arkady Desean, lives in an era of the Vanishing Tide where reason has reduced belief in the Tide Lords to that of myth. Arkady studies the Crasii, a part-human, part-animal race that we find out the Tide Lords created to be their all-obedient slaves and army. Arkady is brought in to interrogate Cayal, a suicidal Tide Lord who is trying desperately to kill himself after eight thousand years of living.

The whole premise of this is very similar to The Stormlight Archive, to be honest. It's written much earlier, and on a somewhat smaller scale, but we still have Tide Lords (offscreen) displacing an entire ocean and murdering millions of people, and somehow jumping to the moon (I guess we'll get the story of that one in another book). But Fallon's writing is different. It's extremely accessible and readable, but centers on characters rather than diving deep into lore. The characters are rich, although they're your classic hot fantasy heroes: there are about twenty characters worth remembering at the end of the first book, and they're all pretty differentiable in my head. The immortals are delightfully atrocious, and some are even oddly sympathetic in a Byronic sort of way.

I thought this was a really good start to an epic fantasy series that's on the creative side but not too far off the beaten path. Very enjoyable, and looking forward to reading the rest. 8.5/10.

A review of two minds here.

Wind and Truth is an impressive novel. Nobody has ever tried to write a Western epic fantasy series of this scale before: of cosmic proportions, with thousands of characters, gods, and varying degrees of reification, and most importantly, an ending. And Brandon Sanderson has successfully pulled it off without letting it develop into a web serial soap opera. He has concluded most of his threads, finished most of his arcs, and found some organization in a 2.5 million word behemoth of a story. The series is moving, epic, and an extraordinary feat of fantasy writing. We must all appreciate his effort, spirit, and hard work.

Conversely, he has somewhat finally fulfilled a pathway to becoming a caricature of himself. The oversincere moments of his early career and the granitic, heroic character arcs of the mid-2010s have yielded to a neverending sequence of distant, withdrawn sketches reminiscent of improv comedy; parables and skits that sometimes pack emotional punch but more often just are there to keep us entertained. The first half of this book read as prefatory action to a promised massive conclusion, which somehow limped towards a visible finish line with stops at a couple aid station plot twists along the way. For me, the duty of drawing the series to a midpoint eclipsed the enjoyment, surprise, and escalation that one usually anticipates from a Sanderson ending. His talent and earnestness have created an expectation that even he cannot fulfill.

Unlike Rhythm of War, the story arcs in this one did not read as separate novels, but Shallan's arc, which shifted towards an incredibly moving and sweet romance between Rlain and Renarin, was the standout here. An honorable mention goes to the main focus of the book, the journey of Kaladin and Szeth through Shinovar, which contained a much better flashback sequence than the previous book and a stodgy and heavy handed, but moving, theme of self-discovery and healing.

While Sanderson and his team have thankfully eliminated much of the fan service, I do worry if the book is too fundamentally esoteric for a reader who has not immersed themselves in the most recently available theories. And I wonder if Sanderson dropped too many hints in previous books for theory connoisseurs to be shocked by many of the climactic reveals.

Readers outside the immediate fandom will deem the closing arcs of the first Stormlight Archive series a slight failure, unable to meet the burden of expectation the first two books established. There are undeniably bright moments. I hope Sanderson, as he has discussed in interviews, will write the second series on a slightly smaller scale, potentially with 200-300k word books. It certainly seems time for Sanderson, like his characters in Wind and Truth, to break free of duty and start something new.

6.5/10

This was actually pretty good. Detective fiction and sci-fi are two genres where I've always wanted more from Brandon Sanderson. I loved Snapshot, and think it's one of his best books. This book from 2002 seems like a very early step in the direction of that and Legion.

I love early Sanderson because of his unabashed edginess and experimentation. And yeah, this is a totally unviable experiment, especially by today's standards. Yes, the satirical noir style of narration gets repetitive, but at least it's not milquetoast prose. It's a very short, fun story with two very nice central characters. And it's compact (what a relief!)

A weird and original fantasy novel, very much of the late 1990s and early 2000s period. This novel seems a very genuine and earnest attempt to blend slipstream postmodernism with epic fantasy, with a stunningly original portal fantasy mirror world, a bunch of islands each with their own sept of magic, and two girls from Earth who end up lost in this parallel world.

As modern as the premise might seem, it felt dated and not very well done. The prose is from an era where urgency and snap was far less important, and it luxuriates in purple without being particularly well crafted or aesthetically pleasing. For a book that has little pace, it's not very character-driven: it's got some semblance of a plot, but the main point of the book is really the worldbuilding and misty aesthetic of the whole thing, not really any sort of genre storyline. It's a patient story that could probably afford to be less patient - we spend possibly the first 60% of the book in exposition for both characters, and the travel and minimal conflict really only begin in the last quarter of the book. The interludes and epigraphs that color the narrative were confusing and unnecessary, and seemed to me an attempt to be somewhat literary (again, for the time, very cool!).

There are some very cool ideas in this book that just don't pop off the page very well because of the vibey mess that the narration creates. I might be interested in reading the second book to see if these clarify themselves with a little bit more plot setup, but it will be on a short leash.

Rating: 5.5/10.

I wish I had something more interesting to say about this book, given the author's wild backstory and the admittedly very creative title. But this about met my expectations - solidly okay. It was reminiscent of Vita Nostra or The Will of the Many, a dark mystery situation set at a magic school.

The worldbuilding of the menhir, and some of the skin-crawling details of how it operates, were the strengths of this book. Many of the characters were archetypical, differentiated but not really distinguishing themselves in the wider genre. The magic was cool, but the book took a while to set up - the last half of this book was significantly better than the first half.

It's apparent that this was Pruitt's first novel. As a published scientist, he's a technically very capable writer, and there were several very witty, on the nose, and laugh-out-loud scenes in this book. I think there's hope for the next few novels in the series to be better, but for now I'd recommend this as a curiosity for magic school aficionados or those who come to it from Pruitt's backstory.

This was a very 2024 book.

First of all, it's a lot of fun. It feels so modern, with splashy characters, a super fast pace, very neat and tidy plot twists, a fairly technologically advanced world - I loved reading this book. If you are a fantasy fan and love dragons, you will love reading this book. The “crew” felt like Mistborn, the world was vibrant and cartoonish (and much, much brighter than I expected), and I really liked the general pace of the story. It worked. The ending was good.

Rant below.

This book is advertised as romantasy. It is not romantasy. It is an epic fantasy novel.

Jenn Lyons already has a reputation for excessively horny books. So do Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros. The difference is that the popularity of Maas and Yarros comes from the shock value of their protagonists' horniness, the protagonist's and reader's feeling that what's going on is so inappropriate that we really shouldn't be reading this, but god damn, we can feel this way anyway.

The horniness, among other things in this book, is so natural and normative that it provides no shock value or excitement, even in a very descriptive scene near the end of the book. Instead of the incredibly effective, unshameless frustration of Maas and Yarros that comes across so easily in their writing, Lyons's horniness has always just seemed her natural style, no different from her previous series, A Chorus of Dragons. I would think a new reader would pick up on this as well, that this is an author who has no issue writing this way and is doing so completely shamelessly.

The same applies to the queernormativity, which is really well thought out, but again, so natural that it doesn't really make a difference to the story at all. I thought it was interesting, but I didn't feel it had any relation to real-world queer issues at all, and I'd be very hesitant to recommend this book as “queer rep” despite it featuring a very queer central relationship.

The most obvious example of this is the portrayal of transgender people. Everyone in this society wears rings to signify their gender and sexuality in public. if you're trans, you get a magical inscription to instantly undergo gender reassignment, and you can wear a ring to signify that you have done so. Some trans people probably envision this world as their dream, and some may be insulted by the ease of it all. Is writing an incredibly queernormative world really good queer representation? I'm not sure anyone really has a conclusive answer to that. This book is maybe at least a good place to start the discussion.

Regardless, I have to assume that the link is just either a very loose take on Fourth Wing (it's better than Fourth Wing), or Tor/MacMillan trying somewhat desperately to get this book to go viral, which it won't. But it's good, and interesting, and addictive. Read it! 8/10 from me.

The best book I have read in the past few years.

It is so light, warm, and utterly hilarious. The character of Marcovaldo is one we all aspire to be, a modern-day court jester who finds beauty in everything, is constantly beaten down but gets back up, and appreciates every minute of life regardless of how it goes.

As usual for Calvino - impeccably paced. The way the realist humor progresses slowly to fantasy and absurdism is so well done.

Highly recommended for everyone.

I'd have trouble finding something that's blown me away as much as Worm has.
Does it transcend art, offer profound observations on the world, come to some conclusion nobody's reached before? No.
Is it a tremendously well-crafted, emotional, soft and touching yet brutal and visceral exercise in escalation, atonement, and balance? 100%.

I began Worm once eight years ago, and got through one chapter before quitting. I hesitated beginning Worm this time because I'd heard some horror stories about how dark and depressing it was. Vicious, complex, and gray, yes, but not dark or nihilistic. Wildbow's tone reminds me most of Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time - a supportive narrative style that can elevate and attempt to convince you of even the most horrible actions and people, even without abject justification. There's an almost heartbreaking interlude about three-quarters of the way through when he tells the story of one of the book's most horrific villains. The chances he gives his characters as people is almost too generous, their interpretations open. This suspension of morality in a fantasy world, yet a self-aware search for objective morality being the axial focus of the book, is the true genius of Worm.

Taylor Hebert - not my favorite character, but oh boy, does she work as a narrator. There are so many possible reviews you could write just about Taylor, from the way she grows her power to her progression from a bullied past to a confident cape. With one notable exception, the other characters operate on a plane of suspended moral belief, the reader's perception of them altered more by their subtle actions toward others than toward the world at large.

Worm is a remarkable feat of plotting considering the author rarely planned his story. There's foreshadowing built from the beginning, and a surprising lack of deus ex machina for a Web serial. One of my few criticisms of the work (enough to lower it to four stars) is that many of the action scenes are drawn-out, extended, and intense to a degree, and don't interrupt for some of the touching, tender, gut-wrenching “quiet” scenes that Wildbow's so good at pulling. I read this book relatively slowly (over three and a half weeks), but still, I wonder if processing this as a serial would reverse my opinion on the sometimes dogged and drawn-out battle scenes. The end is a masterpiece, and delivers appropriate closure, for those who might be skeptical of fighting through something this long only to face a controversial ending.

And maybe Worm's flaws are what makes it so special. It's an uncut gem of a superhero novel, and it really shouldn't be any other way. The dialogue is sometimes awkward for its own sake, the characters overdramatized, the fighting brutal, the personalities larger-than-life, the plot gritty but of course unrealistic.

I'm two arcs into Ward, and it's already very different. The characters are better, more subtle; the writing is more refined and pointillistic. But there's a certain vigour you miss from Worm, a sense of discovery and wonder, a sense of optimism despite a clearly tragic inevitability about the whole work. It's really a unique debut, and possibly the best I've ever read.