Patricia
Raoul heeft het hart op de juiste plek en ik deel zijn interesses en verwondering, maar dit boek gaat alle kanten op. Jammer.
Sorry to say I don't know how this book got its high score. The setting was promising, but the writing is wooden. A pity; I really wanted this to be great.
Pretty cool & interesting book, although it's not really structured to teaching, it's more like a giant info dump.
Only got to about halfway but I'm still marking it as read because I felt the really spiteful need to 1-star it.
This was a very uncomfortable read. I did not particularly enjoy reading the book, but I cannot deny that it was a very well written, very loving and very unflinching way of looking back at a younger self (whether fictional or not). At times, I have to admit, it hit a bit too close to home, which is probably why I didn't always enjoy the experience.
Ham-fisted humour and mostly cardboard characters, but very well-written fights. I enjoyed the last two chapters more than the rest of the book put together. Props to the author for trying to give the protagonists distinctive voices. Didn't turn out so well, but I appreciated the effort. (This sounds terribly patronising, I know...)
Picked this book up on a whim because I'd seen it in a window display of “adventure stories” (next to Treasure Island and the like) at the American Book Center in Amsterdam. I knew nothing about it, but I'm always on the lookout for new adventure stories and swashbucklers and I like a surprise.
Because I am apparently a very innocent person, it took me about a third of the book to realize I was actually reading gay bdsm fantasy (to make clear how much of an innocent I am, this was far beyond the point in the story where there is a naked wrestling match that ends in the victor penetrating the other guy while the onlookers in the stadium are being pleasured by slaves - at which point I was like “gosh, I don't think that's really necessary”. But you know, after that there was a fight, so I took a swig of my morning coffee and on I went...) And really, I don't have anything against this kind of literature (you do you!), and I guess all of this is more the fault of the American Book Center than of this book, and technically I did get my surprise, but I can't get over the fact that there are no pirates, not even naked ones, there is no adventure except, I guess, naked adventures in unexpected pentration, and swashes were only being bucklered in a way I was not really looking for. Also the writing was quite bad.
So that's the story. dnf and this book gets one star.
This book was so thoroughly weird. Beautiful language, though. I feel like it's hanging between 3 and 4 stars for me, but it's mainly my own lack of understanding holding it back. So a preliminary 4 stars + a reread it is.
Very tempted to give this book one star for making me feel so sad but I won't, because, of course, it is superbly written and heartbreaking and beautiful. This is a reread so I knew what I was getting myself into. Not looking forward to the experience of reading the next two books in this trilogy. Robin Hobb really puts her characters through hell...
Reasonably interesting characters, pretty good world building, engaging plot, although there are some major plot holes, and the author just seems to conveniently forget about them whenever he wants to concentrate on other things (e.g. the crew just casually strolling around the city when the inquisitors are apparently raiding every lair they can find and having lookouts everywhere). Didn't mind though - I like Sanderson's writing style and I love that he just drops whatever concept he wants in the book and gives you time to figure things out for yourself instead of explaining everything. I was also rather charmed by the omniscient narrator - haven't read a book with an omniscient narrator in a long time. :)
Rather more dry than I expected, although to be fair to the writers I probably came in expecting the wrong thing.
This was solidly in 3* territory for me until the final quarter, where it turned from a nerdish infodump into something with some heart. So for that: 3.5*
Four and a half stars. Once in a while it is ever so slightly hamfisted but I loved the stories, and the people, nonetheless.
It's marvellously written, the characters are fantastic, but I really can't cope with the rambling between friends. I get why it's there and it served its purpose, don't get me wrong, but it took a lot of wading through.
DNF. 2019, the year of terrible books, continues. I really wanted to like it and for a while I thought I might but then I realised I just didn't think it was funny.
Can't decide between ‘annoyingly puerile' and ‘hilariously, brilliantly puerile', so halfway between 3 and 5 then. Thoroughly enjoyed not having an idea of what was going on or being talked about most of the time. Not many writers have the guts to do this.