Tyler Sparr

What isn’t there to love about Jurassic Park? There’s some interactions that feel a little dated these days, maybe Malcolm is a little too preachy, and Lex could probably talk about baseball a little bit less, but there’s dinosaurs! Just such a fun, easy read that anyone should be able to pick up and enjoy.

This was so, so close to being a 5-star read and has the feel of a book that might end up being 5-stars after further reflection. The ending felt just slightly rushed to me and some of the plot was a little more predictable than I’d like, but I was just so engaged with every second of it. I think everyone should read this book if even just to broader your own horizons.

This was an easy, fun read, but what really threw me off were my own expectations going in. This book was sold to me with the tagline of "female John Wick story with dragon magic set in contemporary San Francisco’s Chinatown." (emphasis mine), and that set me up into thinking this would be just a continual action, revenge whirlwind. What I got was a retired assassin having to re-enter the world they thought they'd escaped. Definitely John Wick-esque, but skewed differently than I was expecting. The world-building is solid and there's a lot of interesting and unique ideas thrown at you, but again like John Wick, expect to have to pick up the majority of things by context clues. I'll be reading the sequel.

If this weren’t a book club book, I would have DNF’ed so fast. I’m thoroughly convinced the author wrote this book solely to flex his knowledge of 14th century Catholicism. Many of the chapters added not a single meaningful thing to the plot and were tortuous to read. Finding enjoyable parts of this book was like panning for gold and just about as successful. That being said, it’s clearly very highly regarded so maybe it’s just not for me.