Patricia

I realize that the writer is depicting a world in which nuance is hard to find, but still. It read like a very gory, sick, twisted children's book or something. Two boys go on an adventure in a nightmare western world.

On top of that the continuous narrow death escapes started to grate at a certain point.

The book that saved 2024.

I very much appreciate the originality and freshness of this story, but I never /loved/ the book, never connected with any of the characters (apart from feeling some sympathy for Breq) so alas, no 5 stars.

Basically what @Mpauli said, but more positive :)

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.

The man can undoubtedly write, but his focus on his absolute misery (understandable though it was) as a boarding school child made this book a very unenjoyable read.

I liked it, but not so much that I've come to understand the cult following...

3* for the tiring never ending wisecracking, .5* added for originality

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*

Only got to about halfway but I'm still marking it as read because I felt the really spiteful need to 1-star it.

The ambiguity thing was cool, but I very much doubt I'll ever read a Henry James novel again.

The final three pages were excellent. The first 110 were somewhat disappointing.

3.5 stars

I'm sorry! The writing is very good, but the bucket of shit that turns into a truckload of shit that turns into a river of shit dumped all over that character, who at that point is already drowning in a veritable ocean of shit... it just became so surreal I started laughing out loud, and I was lost to the book - or it to me. I still think of Jude sometimes, but it's always in terms of "that poor character that had a horrible experiment done to him by that writer".

Profoundly meh

Blown away.

It's a quite okay book for children.

This is the fourth time I've tried and it's just not for me. Thoroughly unamusing.

Loved it, but it feels more like a... sketch of a book? Like it was missing some substance? I adore how Ms Chambers writes about nature though.

Four and a half stars. Once in a while it is ever so slightly hamfisted but I loved the stories, and the people, nonetheless.

Torn between 4 and 5 stars. There was so much to love, mainly the complete absence of reader-coddling, the worldbuilding, acerbic humour and, in spite of myself, the writing style. (The parentheses.) It's not often that you as a reader are thrown in at the deep end and just have to learn how to swim. Bravo!
On the other hand though, none of the relationships seemed to have any real substance, except - twistedly - the one between Syen and her guardian, and even that one was mostly tell and no show, with some poignant exceptions. But the bond between mother and child, between husband and wife, between friends, lovers? Everybody seemed weirdly untouched by human contact. I felt the writer could have done better there.

So after all, 4 it is.

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.

Wow, Rosinski is good as always but the script is awful

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.

Oh I loved this book enormously. So different. (Also a little bit in love with Sarkan, I have to admit). Happy to find a five star book after a year of mainly misses, too.

Update 7/12
————
Okay, I've read a few reviews about this book from obviously very disappointed people and so I feel that I should say more about what I liked about this. Not saying that all of those people have missed these points, but I've seen a lot of ‘Sarkan is a dick / stockholm syndrome / cardboard cutout' comments and I do not agree.

I think that all of the wizards in this book are basically traumatized into coldness by their long lifespans. One of them explicitly touches on this at some point, explaining that it's hard when everyone you love dies, but that it gets easier over time. The Dragon himself is kidnapped at the age of three, taken from everything he knew and put in this cold environment. The man is scarred. He doesn't want any ties with anyone.

Apart from that, they are also, just like everyone else, part of a human race that has lost all contact with nature, both in their actual dealings with it and in their approach of magic. The kind of magic that Agnieszka brings into the mix is actually rooted in nature, just like she herself is. This tale is not about a ‘bad guy' (the Wood and the wood queen) that you 'suddenly have to feel sorry for at the end of the book', it's about how continuous lack of communication through time results in ossified layer upon layer of first lack of understanding and eventually hatred. The bad guy was never the wood. It wasn't even man either, per se. The bad guy is not listening and not wanting to change. Agnieszka represents communication and change.

I think the reason Sarkan falls for her is that they apparently can do some seriously sexy flower magic together, which I gather is a very sensual experience he's never had before. None of these wizards have, since they've all learnt their magic in coldness. She likes him because he at least has the intelligence and intellectual curiosity to look beyond his own limits, and to entertain the possibility of a different way.

Finally, while I do agree that there are certain Mary Sue-aspects to Agnieszka, her tremendous magical power clearly comes from her deep roots in nature, so it's not that weird that the others have to study and graft for seven years: they approach their craft from the science side. It's like she's whittling a very nice and very useful plate out of wood, whereas they have spent years building factories, doing research and making just-as-useful but rather sterile plates out of plastic.

So there you have it. Plates. I'm staying firm at five stars.

(Although I do think that Agnieszka shouldn't be dismissing /all/ learning like she clearly is doing. That did rub me up the wrong way a bit. Not everyone should be satisfied with being allowed to skip through the woods all day long.)

Found this novel, while interestingly dark and nasty, also simultaneously increasingly unbelievable and predictable. It was well written and deliciously witty at times, but on the whole slightly disappointing, compared to many of Boyne's other works.

Well. Much as I love Sandi, I was really hoping for something more than what essentially boils down to ‘don't touch yourself in public' and ‘don't be a jerk'. It's obviously well-written and I liked the occasional anecdotes, but being told things you already know and do (because you're a normally functioning human being) for several hundred pages... it just becomes intolerable.