Patricia
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.
Started out quite fun but devolved into a list of reasons never to read fantasy again. I basically only finished it because I have a reading challenge going and didn't want to add another DNF.
This is us. We're in a plot.
An enemy appears.
Enemy is described as clearly invincible.
But wait! Here's something you didn't know about us.
We use this brand new information to defeat the enemy.
Wisecracking, we continue on our quest.
A new enemy appears!
Here's a sudden plot twist that wasn't clear from just about the very beginning of the book.
Etc.
It's insultingly childish, a kid's fantasy of ‘you can't hurt me because of this new thing that I just made up', made ‘edgy' and ‘grown-up' with some cut-off fingers and torture porn. Gah.
The second star is purely because of the passable dialogue.
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.
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 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 :)
My least favourite book by one of my favourite writers It took me ages to read because I never felt the urge to go back to the characters. While I liked the structure of the book and thought that the ‘Georgy and Zoya' parts were well-written and presented a touching image of two people going through life and growing old together (albeit in reverse), I found the pre-1918 Russian bits lacking in substance. Ultimately they did not provide a good foundation for the post-1918 part, causing the whole thing to come crashing down. I hate to say it, but I thought the book was a bit... pointless?
Could've accepted the awkward combination of socialism and romance if the final declaration of love hadn't come in the form of a £12K financial injection. As it is, the payoff wasn't worth the journey as far as I'm concerned.
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.
Thought this book would be right up my alley, but when you're 15% in and you realise you'd rather be doing anything than pick up the book again, it's time to stop. Hate the style, couldn't connect with any of the characters, found the naturalistic descriptions of day-to-day life interesting in a non-fiction kind of way but got too irritated by the endless monotony in the end. DNF.
Dnf at 80%; found it deeply boring, which is a shame as the writing wasn't too bad (the good writing actually kept me going for far longer than I normally would have)