Sean

I was first gifted The Blade Itself about five years ago, but hadn’t picked it up until last week. Boy was I missing out. I can’t remember the last book that grabbed hold of me this quickly. This book has the most eclectic cast of characters. Each of them is extremely flawed, with colorful backgrounds that are revealed piece by piece through the book, and yet by the end of the book I couldn’t help but root for(or vehemently against) every one of them.

I only gave it 4.5⭐️ because this book, ultimately, felt like a long prologue without a true payoff. A lot of my favorite series also start that way, and the groundwork laid in The Blade Itself was spectacular, so I can’t wait to say Abercrombies second act.

Tress is a whimsical and lighthearted, joy of a read. There was nothing groundbreaking in here, and that’s ok. Sometimes it’s nice to read a story about (mostly) good people going on a quest and learning more about who they are.

Bonus: I love a good cosmere connection and this one had plenty of fun ones.

Blood Over Bright Haven was an enjoyable read, with fast-pacing, an interesting magic system, and some important themes, but lacked some of the nuance and character work that could have really elevated it. The ending of this book carried it by making some early moral debates tangible through Sciona’s actions.

Sciona is one of the most frustrating main characters I’ve read. Despite being a brilliant mage, she doesn’t have any sense of logic or emotional intelligence. At times she had me wanting to rip my hair out. I know her naïveté was necessary to enable her journey and it pays off in the end, I just didn’t enjoy the experience of reading about it. Thomil on the other hand, was a very solid side character, mostly because of the way he would argue with Sciona. I even found myself rooting for them to have a romance in a way I rarely do.

This may not be ML Wangs best work (it’s hard to live up to sword of kaigen), but it solidified her as an author I’ll be eagerly awaiting more from, and is a book I would definitely recommend.

Boys in the Boat had a huge impact on me when I first read it almost ten years ago. It was a big part of the reason I started rowing and taught me a lot when I was in a very impressionable stage of life. Coming back to it now, at the same stage of life as the guys in the book, I look at the stories in a new light and hope that they can have a similarly positive influence on me now. That may not mean picking rowing back up, but at its core The Boys in the Boat is a story of being a young man finding his way through tough times and whether I go to the Olympics or not (probably not lol), I can still apply lessons from Joe and the gang to my current situation.

Disquiet Gods is quintessential Suneater at its best. It is the first book in the series that retraces the events of earlier books, but does it in a way that makes those events all the more impactful in reflection. The politics brought back memories of Demon in White, and are an aspect of the series I wish was more prominent. The second act of the book, on Sabratha, gave me all the supernatural worldbuilding I’ve come to love about this series, combined with a bit of horror through contact with The Watchers and the Cielcin. It felt like a combination of Demon in White and Kingdoms of Death. And the ending was a direct callback to the last third of Howling Dark, when this series really started to have an impact on me. I’d been waiting for that to happen and worried that the foreshadowing of it might reduce the impact. Boy was I wrong. While I’d say this is my third favorite book in the series, the ending of it was probably the best. We’re so close now to the fateful events on Gododdin that are revealed on page 1 and have been built up to for six books. November can’t come soon enough…