Josh Cheshire
I've never been a big fan of Gaiman's work, no matter how often I try. I feel like he has some great story ideas that get lost in his writing. I once started this book nearly 20 years ago and couldn't get past the opening pages. I'm glad I stuck it out this time because it was a fun tale and Pratchett's writing helped immensely.
Fun concept and amusingly familiar “nerd” types of characters doing precisely what I would expect them to do in Medieval England. I just kept questioning how a network connection worked back then...
This was a really interesting read for me, being part of the generation that came up with these technologies and industry shifts. If you have any memory of ripping your own CDs or using the various file sharing systems, this is a good telling of all the pieces that were happening behind the scenes.
So. Good.
I've been reading this book off and on for nearly six months. No matter what, though, I never lost the thread of the narrative. I was never confused about the current situation I had left a few weeks prior, nor why the characters were acting the way they were. It's so well written, it was impossible to forget what was happening in the story.
It's beautiful and I loved it.
It was SO slow to get to the meat of the story and then the truly cool plot twist. But that plot twist saved it from being a three star review. I'll pick up the next in the series just to see what happens next, and I'm hopeful it will be worth it as the author's writing style is really good.
I enjoyed the premise of jumping between LA and the fantasy world of Galiana, but every time an interaction was described with a woman, I found myself wondering if it was written by someone who has never actually talked with a woman. They are such OBJECTS rather than people in the story.
I honestly had a moment of thinking, “Man, 13 year old me could have come up with this story. And, apparently, had a similar understanding of girls.”
“Jane sat beside me and cleaned my wound, fussing over me with a womanly care that made me yearn up into her blue-green eyes.”
“The door swung open, and out from the darkness walked a woman into the firelight, a woman like no woman I had ever seen before.”
“It was the way she kept her hands clasped beneath her breasts in a position of such modesty and self-containment. Everything about her—it was all just so incredibly...what was the word? Womanly. So incredibly womanly.”
“It occurred to me somewhere in the back of my mind that I had never seen a woman blush like that before—blush because she was speaking about romantic stuff, I mean. I had only read about women doing that in books.”
And on and on and on. That's just within the first 65 pages.
It took some effort to stop being shaken out of the story by the language, but I was finally able to. And, again, I like the premise of bouncing between realities/worlds with each helping the narrator struggle through the other. So, 3.5 stars if Goodreads would let me, but I'll round up since I'd like to read more of this tale to find out what happens next.
Eh. It was a bit confusing how it was laid out, and it lacked the charm of the previous tale.
Just Good Storytelling
It's got it all: intrigue, spy craft, laughter, heart ache, and compelling set of characters. I particularly enjoyed the fleshing out of those members of the team we really only saw on the periphery in the previous chapter.
I am eagerly awaiting the next volume!
That was a struggle. The translator did a fine job, but the linguistic style and scientific explanations were really hard to wade through at times.
This was really good. It's a tale of an adventure on a far off planet as told from two perspectives: one who sees magic and one who practices science. It is the perfect illustration of Arthur C. Clark's third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
I'm not gonna lie: I loved the hell out of this book. (Pun intended.) I wish I could have given it 6 stars, or go back and adjust my other previous 5 star reviews down to 4's because this one set a new bar for me. It was a ton of fun to read. It grabbed me immediately and did a great job of balancing character history with running plot.
Probably my favorite of the series. Perrin had his show in the previous novel, but Mat, Rand, and Nynaeve really come into their own in this one. Some of my favorite scenes are in this book.
But it's also chock full of gender stereotypes and some excessive handwringing over the propriety of character attitudes and clothing. It can be annoying as hell to read in sections.
The third in the series, and I loved it. This was a lot of fun and contained the expected nerd snark the author delivers so effortlessly.
Fun, but British English. I had never heard of several of the phrases used in the book, but the writing style was a level of snark I can truly appreciate.
I mean, these are just zany, foul-mouthed fun geared toward the RPG gamer. You're either in the mood for it, or you're not. In this case, I thought the book was less of a complete story in itself and more of a bridge between the second and (I assume) the fourth. I kept thinking I was near the end when some other madcap insanity took place that continued the plot forward.
It's fun. The whole series is fun. But it's probably for a limited audience.
I give up. The writing is just not a style I enjoy or am easily able to digest. If I hadn't watched the Hulu series first, I'm not sure I would have even understood what I was reading before I abandoned the book. :\
It was a fun start, but I found myself mentally tuning out in the middle when the discussion of time travel delves DEEPLY into various possible paradoxes and explanations of the current scenario. Once that passed, and the characters continued their jolly adventure, it became fun again.
Time travel is hard to explain in books. Especially fiction which doesn't benefit from illustrations. But I intend to take up the third book despite my misgivings in the middle of this one.
This book is fabulous. I was half a chapter in when I asked for a highlighter to mark some of the more illuminating and well written passages. I can't recommend it enough.