Renato R.
Absolutely earnest in its passion for metal music as a way to let your hope and energy flow, even in the face of sadness, despair and adversities... do you want a story where the power of Metal and magical warrior creatures battle what are basically “Despair Kaiju”? This is the book.
But, bear in mind... all the zany adventure is actually built on a foundation that strongly resonates on emotion, on fighting against real-world despair and illness.
You will cry. It will be a good cry. But yeah, your eyes will be wet.
La mia copia e' autografata con dedica dal buon Champion Joe in persona!
(simpatico e disponibile, tra l'altro)
The art starts strong and gets better and better. The author loves to fill giant tables with tons of tiny details... that often aren't random at all: sometimes you need to zoom and pan and just take it all in and marvel. And he knows how to surprise you with shifts in perspective and scale. It's 100% available for free online, but I find reading it on the web awkward: better a comic reader like Comixology (though the “guided reading” struggles a lot with the informal division of the page and reading flow the author uses in many tables.
Honestly, the writing is overly dense and at times baroque... but this is Herbert, after all.
The book is chock full of ideas that another author might have milked for whole books.
The story is super complicated and full of duble and triple turns... but it has a charm: something being “very dosadi” has become a household way of saying.
The authors change pace by splitting the party and finally reveal a lot of the various baggage the crew was carrying. But all within a fast paced story with lots of action and, again, some momentous changes in the fictional universe.
I can still distinctly remember the very first scene.
This book (and its sequels) really tend to graft to the back of your imagination.
The series continues to be good fun. This specific installation has a middle that's a bit slow, possibly on purpose, but if you reach past the bump, the pace picks back up.
The authors are relentlessly exploring the consequences of the world-changing events that happen basically in every book of the series, without shying from big, sweeping changes. Quite the contrary, they lean in and really go for it: suddenly there's a new Frontier? Guess what, Land Rush happens!
In more than a way, this book plays on the isolation and the lawlessness of the life in the newly colonized Frontier: what do the laws of civilized society really mean, when that civlilized society is something like 3 years away?
The authors continue to relentlessly pursue the evolution of the setting and the characters.
The long time jump was a bold move, and it was very useful to avoid a slump where the new status quo would either stay as it is (boring) or change too fast (unrealistic).
Knowing only a couple of books remain in the saga, I'm curious to see where it all will go.
I liked it a lot. It's a strange beast though: definitely a scifi story, with an intriguing handful of “science inventions”, it is nonetheless not a story about those. Maybe that's what makes it a really good scifi story; it's really about the people, not the science.
You can read the rest of this review on my blog at
https://renatoram.ch/p/the-sparrow-by-mary-doria-russell/