witzelsucht
I'd previously ripped the piss out of the The Poppy War for overusing the word “ensconced”, after the author obviously discovered it halfway through writing the book and couldn't stop showing it off. Imagine my joy at seeing it return a few pages into The Burning God, used completely incorrectly (“fire ensconcing everything she saw”), an ill omen that I should've heeded.
Anyway, I came at this with my expectations at rock bottom because The Dragon Republic was the worst book I'd read this year – badly written, badly characterised, pointless stodge – but I wanted to see how the story ends because I'm a sunk-cost fallacy girl. I didn't find it as grating to read as the previous two, as Kuang's grasp of prose has tangibly improved, but The Boring God drops the ball in almost every other way.
I'm not sure how a 600+ page book can achieve so little in terms of plot, worldbuilding, or developing a cast of characters. Kuang really must've mastered the art of bullshitting the word count on an essay. The pacing drags, too much is told through dry exposition, the magic system loses all internal logic, and Rin is still one of the most irritating protagonists ever written.
“She's actually Mao!” and “She's been through a lot!” aren't good enough justifications for how contrived and incoherent Rin's reactions and decisions are. She has no politics, no internal consistency. She'll believe something with 100% certainty one moment, then another character will tell her what to think and she'll change her mind instantly. She spends half the book having the same revelation almost every chapter (“Oh no, maybe the fantasy-Japanese are humans just like us!”), and then shrugging it off and setting people on fire. Any attempts to give her inner conflict and self-reflection just ring hollow after the umpteenth rehash.
The second half of the book is a series of anticlimaxes, each less whelming than the last. The Trifecta, like the Cike, are an utter waste of time. Rin's constant disappointments might be thematically meaningful, but they don't make for an engaging narrative. Almost every single side character and potentially interesting challenge is wasted in Rin's pursuit of the lamest tactical bungles possible. She's a character with no skills or solutions to offer other than violence, who's seen and committed untold atrocities, yet who's still somehow a vapid chump. The height of her military genius is putting up a big tarp so that she can cast fire when it's raining. Why are we following her, of all people? Why is anyone following her?
It struck me in this book, more than the others, that the world feels so sparse and empty – and not in the intended way of a devastated, war-torn land. Every single character is just a chess piece. There are no incidental people in this world to add flavour, depth, and colour. Undeveloped new characters appear only to serve plot points later, which Kuang foreshadows with all the grace of a dump truck delivering concrete. It's all just so joylessly mechanical, like nothing exists outside the demands of shunting Rin from one disjointed objective to another. It's hard to care for the stakes of a setting and characters that feel like cursory window dressing.
It doesn't help that the prose, despite being more considered than the previous books, still falls short of the deep themes and seismic conflicts the author is trying to tackle. The number of times Kuang relies on this phrasing stuck out enough to irritate me:
“This wasn't about lust, this was about power.”
“It wasn't about the violence. It was about the power.”“
This wasn't about humiliation. This was about survival.”
“This wasn't about grief, this was about paying respects.”
“This wasn't about troops, this was about pride.”“
It's not about pride. It's about sacrifice.”
“It wasn't about surrender. It was about the long game. It was about survival.”
Lady, I know. I'm reading the damn story. It's already not subtle. Every author has their tics and tropes, but this one really epitomises Kuang's lack of trust in the reader, and her inability to convey theme and subtext outside of bludgeoning truisms. Having now read all her books, I think that's it for me and Kuang. Her ideas are good, but her execution is always bafflingly lacklustre. As she'd probably put it: it isn't about the ideas, it's about the execution. Her workings and research are so transparent in the text. When she discovers a cool new word (see “ensconced”), you know it. When she discovers a cool new phrase like “power asymmetry” or “conventional warfare”, Christ, don't you just know it. I don't like seeing the wheels of the author's craft spinning so nakedly when I read.
Overall, it's a poor trilogy for me, and not even consistently poor within itself. The Poppy War has the most memorable plot but the most juvenile writing. The Dragon Republic has slightly better prose but the worst plot and characterisation. The Burning God has the most polished wording but precious little else. I don't even mind the ending, but the journey there isn't worth it. In terms of characters, worldbuilding, theme, tone, dialogue, and general prose – everything, basically – these books are just a sorry mess.
Though this is a more positive and well-written book than Anne Lamott's almost malevolent Bird by Bird (which I'm still annoyed I read), I came away with the same net result: learning very little and feeling like these autobiographical, write-your-feelings, self-help author-gurus are the most annoying people alive. Spare me the poetry exercises about your childhood and write about shit that rocks, like a haunted car that tries to kill you or something.
Writing Down the Bones is OK for bite-sized nuggets of insight. There are some genuinely heartwarming and thought-provoking bits that made me contemplate a third star. But there's a whole lot of motivational platitudes and navel-gazing waffle to get through to reach the material of substance - the actually interesting parts about craft and practical process. It didn't leave me with a bad taste in my mouth, but it didn't leave me with much of anything, really.
The good, almost: this book is slightly better written on a sentence level than the first. It's not prose to write home about, but it's not as jarring. The telling-instead-of-showing is less constant, though still prominent, with a heavy reliance on “Rin thought X” and “Rin felt Y”. “Lackadaisical” and “ensconced” only clock in at two or three uses each this time, though there are eleven instances of lips curling, so maybe it's not that much better written. (Yes, I counted, and yes, I'm picky.)
The bad and the ugly: Rin sucks. A dislikeable main character still needs to be interesting and show development that makes it worth spending 650+ pages in their company. In the first book, whether likeable or not, Rin had a clear arc with momentum, driven by her own wit and tenacity. The Dragon Republic sees her wallow around being a gullible, myopic, charisma-free bonehead with no drive, initiative or tactical strengths other than being a magical Chosen One. James Thayer gave good advice when he said a main character should not be a fool, because a reader won't want to follow a character they don't respect. A few mistakes are fine, often important setup for plot and growth, but the protagonist shouldn't persistently be a fool. Rin is a fool and always the last person to know it. She's also a repellent combination of hateful and wishy-washy that is no fun whatsoever to read.
Even a warlike villain should have a moral compass and guiding logic in their own mind. Instead, Rin flip-flops between gleeful cruelty and moping about the tragedy of war; between being a hot-headed renegade and a passive sadsack with no agency. She snarks at everyone in sight but crumbles as soon as a male authority figure gives her a stern look. She's hostile and suspicious yet still a credulous moron. She has no philosophy, politics, or principles; her whole personality constantly turns on a dime. While some of her erratic behaviour could be attributed to grief, PTSD or addiction, none of those subjects are explored with any weight. The other characters don't inspire confidence that all Rin's flaws are by design, because almost nobody behaves or speaks like a fleshed-out, distinct human being.
Kuang pulled a couple of audacious moves in the first book, but this sequel lacks the emotional depth needed to address the aftermath in a meaningful way. The fate of not-Nanjing seems to have made less impression on Rin than the fate of Altan, who was at worst a cardboard cutout and at best an asshole she hardly knew, which is... something. It just begs why such horrors were invoked at all, because their impact is nothing compared to this guy's! Nobody can convince me that Altan had enough substance to loom so large over this story, and the author's pushing of that retcon left me baffled and annoyed.
Worst of all, this book is boring. I hardly liked The Poppy War at all, but it had more going for it than this. Any progression in Kuang's craft is set back by tepid pacing and one of the worst-written main characters I've read. No plot or character events feel truly significant until around the two-thirds mark, and the climax doesn't feel worth the wait. I might pick up the last book to see where this flaming wreck goes, but it would be a fully fledged hate-read and I'm trying to avoid that.
Adorable poems with delightful turns of phrase (other than some racial language that sends you crashing back to the 1930s). Some of the greatest cat names ever imagined. If you're hoping for some additional context to help make sense of the musical, though, you won't find any.
I really enjoyed this. The setting Martine creates is fascinating, playful and strange, and the booksmart but beleaguered Mahit is a great main character through which to explore its intricacies. I loved the concept of passing memories down from person to person via an implant, and it's a rich vein for intrigue and skulduggery here.
It took me a while to acquire a taste for the writing, which still niggled frequently; Martine is an eloquent writer who undermines her own prose with fuckloads of italics. Once you notice it, you can't stop noticing it, until you just want to shake the author by the shoulders and shout, “Your writing's good! You don't need these!”
The pacing is languid in places, but the book builds up to a third act that impressed me. I wasn't always sure if it would, but it left me really looking forward to reading the next one.
Well-written, never boring, and sometimes moving. Simultaneously very heavy and not quite substantial. The deliberately fragmented presentation allows the nameless narrator to reflect widely on writing, books, grief, friendship, death, and dogs. Like her, the book is smart but all over the place, lacking focus and closure. My first book by Nunez and though I didn't totally love it, I was impressed by her skill.
An interesting concept, lacking in its execution. As it progressed, more and more things bugged me about it.
The telling. Swathes of time, character development, and worldbuilding opportunities are glossed over in summary and so much telling. The book often reads like a plot outline that never got fleshed out, making the actual character scenes and conversations feel unearned when we get them. A harrowing war story doesn't really work when you don't care if the main characters live or die.
Kuang's writing is functional on a sentence level, but also over-modern in a way that feels generic and lazy, and this is shown at its worst in her dialogue and character writing. People describe things as “cool” and “awesome” and say they have a “photographic memory”. So does photography exist in this setting where wars are fought with swords, bows, and magic (but there are also gas canisters)? There's an abundance of cartoonish clichés (so much sneering, shrieking, and lip-curling) and thesaurus words (take a shot for every “lackadaisical” and “ensconced” and you'll soon need divine intervention yourself). Characters that are meant to be the nation's best and brightest all act like squabbling kids. The shallow vocabulary and limited emotional palette really undermine a book that's billed as a serious, challenging work for adults.
Many issues could've been ironed out with more attention to detail. In Chapter 4, the main character's never heard of Mysterious Hot Guy; in Chapter 12, she's inexplicably mooning over him as her “childhood hero”. Someone who's been through weeks of gruelling combat training doesn't know how to make a proper fist! So many small moments like these just made me go, “Oh, come on, really?” and they add up.
When that infamous chapter comes around – a wiki list of graphic real-life atrocities that are better served by a nonfiction book than a mediocre fantasy novel – it just feels tasteless, and again, unearned. I have no problem reading about violence, and I understand the author's good intentions, but in practice it comes off like a gimmick to earn that much-vaunted grimdark label and age up an otherwise unremarkable YA book.
While I could overlook a lot of The Poppy War's flaws as the debut work of a young author aiming too high, I had many similar issues with Babel, which makes me think this is just Kuang's M.O. as a fantasy writer and won't be changing any time soon.
To its credit, it was a brisk read and kept me turning the pages, even staying up late to read it, though I don't know how much I enjoyed that time. I'd like to see what happens next, but I'm not sure if my curiosity will outweigh my dislike for the characters and writing.
This is my first Cadfael book and I already look forward to reading more in future. I really like Cadfael as our unflappable protagonist: a burly, down-to-earth, middle-aged monk, once a soldier, now a gardening enthusiast and amateur detective. He's cast as the fair, worldly, and open-minded everyman among his holy brethren of stuffed shirts and bumbling virgins – the perfect wise observer needed to solve a medieval murder.
The murder mystery itself is quite simple but satisfyingly written and paced. None of the book's brisk page count is wasted. Peters' prose has charming archaic flavour and a level of adverbial gusto that's sometimes a bit silly, like Cadfael's world of smarmy monks and plucky maidens is a bit silly – but it's page-turning fun that's elevated by a strong sense of setting. Peters strikes a pleasing balance of historicity with a warm-hearted lightness of touch that isn't totally Dung Ages. I enjoyed it a lot!
The high concept is great, and sometimes the prose too, but it's all wasted on a tedious wanker of a main character. Why would the plot revolve around this guy? Why should I care about his Deep Thoughts™? Pretentious misanthropic writers are a bore in real life and in fiction. The story's two cornerstone devices of sleep and etymology don't fit together in any conclusive way. On the plus side, it's short. I'd love to see a better sleep-apocalypse book.
My first Squirrel Girl experience. The art style is endearing but hard to follow at times, and I found some of the quirky presentation irritating, e.g. the microscopic jokey footnotes that break the flow of reading but can't not be read if you want to get the punchlines at the right times. The story is sweet and upbeat. The squirrels are adorable, of course. Overall, I enjoyed it! “Teamwork beats totalitarianism, yo!”
Davidson is one of the most hateable characters ever. This book is a blunt polemic, sure, but I never felt that the character writing or worldbuilding were neglected in favour of the message. They're vivid and detailed, wonderfully so for such a short page-count. It's a book with ideas to spare. Le Guin hasn't let me down yet.
I was on board for the first two thirds, but the book plays its hand way too early, and quickly goes from gritty and intriguing to aimless. The tension and threat evaporate and the story spends the third act petering out. I liked the writing and seedy atmosphere, but the violence and monologues didn't interest me as much as the suspense.
The first book in my chronological SK readthrough that I find hard to rate. There are elements of it that I loved but others that I really wish played out differently.
I would have enjoyed a whole book about the characters dealing with good and bad “luck”, twists of fate, and troubled personal relationships. I loved the dread and sadness of the early parts of the book; the idea of an accident unlocking a frightening new power in you, its isolating effect on every interaction and relationship you have, and the loss of years of your life. But the plot ends up being fairly pedestrian “What would you do if you were psychic?” fare, i.e. solving crimes and altering world events, of course. I preferred the more personal scale and stakes before that.
I really liked the fragmented storytelling style, with short vignette-like chapters switching between different characters - it's one of my favourite aspects of the book. But I can also see how this maybe worked against it, with villains not really given enough groundwork with the protagonist for their storylines to land for me.
Great character writing, brisk pacing, dodgy plotting, and a very King ending that I'm not sure how I feel about. I enjoyed it and was gripped by it, but ultimately it frustrated me a bit.
The content about developing a character-driven story is good and interesting. The “brain science” is a barely-there gimmick. The author's quippy writing and lengthy case study of her friend's inane dognapping novel get old very quickly. A mixed bag to be taken with a pinch of salt, like all writing books.
Another Le Guin win for me. It's largely slow, dense and cerebral, but it builds up a potent emotional momentum as it goes, like all of her books I've read. The setting is at once desolate and carefully detailed, and the ambisexual alien society is fascinating. I loved the varied narration styles and the main characters' journey, both physical and psychological. And I cried.
At once skeletally sparse and ultra dense to read and follow - intentional, I know, but I really craved more clarity and detail. The more I think about it, though, the more I suppose I liked it. The ominous, feverish atmosphere is certainly unique and interesting.
From the first chapter, I was sure I wouldn't want this book to end. Some 800+ pages later, I would still happily have read a few hundred pages more. McMurtry's omniscient narration is a wonder; the warmth and skill with which he explores his huge ensemble's flaws and foibles are a joy to behold. I loved this book.
A hard one to rate. When it's good, it's really good - essential - but when it's less good, it's bone dry. The good bits, I really loved. I loved that the entirety of the Lord of the Rings is summarised in pretty much three pages right at the end. Makes me wonder what some of the other stories would be like if they were written and characterised in detail.
I haven't read Shadow and Bone, but I picked up Six of Crows as I'd seen numerous takes saying it's mature and complex for a YA book, written better, and can be enjoyed as a standalone. Not my usual bag, but I was keen to give it a try. Now I really wish I hadn't bothered. A fantasy heist pulled off by multiple POV characters is cool in theory, but its execution here is below pedestrian.
Everything about the book is undercooked. Bardugo can structure an inoffensive sentence, but there's little beauty or atmosphere to the writing. The worldbuilding is all vague aesthetics and no specifics – if you can call it “worldbuilding” to reskin some lazy cultural stereotypes and stick the letter “k” everywhere – not like a fully realised setting that's already three books' worth of lived-in. The ensemble cast is charmless, lacking depth beyond two or three traits each, all delivering the kind of dismal “banter” and artificial one-liners that make me want to grind my teeth to dust.
Flashbacks and POV-changes kill the pacing whenever the story threatens to get too exciting. So much of the book is long, navel-gazing flashbacks, the opposite of the urgency and suspense you'd want from a high-stakes criminal escapade. I started wishing the author had just told the damn thing in chronological order, because she was clearly more interested in backstories than she was in creating a coherent main storyline.
It's not a new observation, but I didn't buy the characters' ages and the total lack of age diversity among the main cast. One or two teen prodigies I could possibly suspend my disbelief for, but a whole squad of them? I see the issue is often glossed over with, “It's a tough world – they had to grow up fast! And it's fantasy, anyway!” but it's not the ages in themselves that are the issue. I easily believed that the teenagers in A Song of Ice and Fire were kids in a brutal world with trauma and burdens to which they had different, complicated responses. It can be done. I just didn't remotely believe it from the haphazard narration and characterisation choices in this book.
The teenagers in Six of Crows reminisce gravely about their dark pasts and long careers like people two or three times their age, to a degree that's borderline comical. Then, just as you're starting to think you could ignore their ages and imagine them as adults, there'll be some cringeworthy relationship drama that feels too childish for such hardened characters. All six of them are set up to be in perfectly contrived, chemistry-free couples, because what better time for romance than on a life-or-death stealth mission? Give me a break.
I stuck with the book to see if the central heist was pulled off in some ingenious way that justified the buildup and made clever use of the multiple POVs. It wasn't. It's just a series of annoying bungles and forced conveniences. My last bit of patience evaporated when a character was revealed, in the eleventh hour, to have secret Grisha-ex-machina powers that were never previously mentioned even in their own POV chapters. Bardugo passing up something that could've given real depth and intrigue to an underdeveloped character, in favour of springing that lousy “twist”, cemented for me that the writing wasn't just boring but bad. It somehow just got worse from there, ending in a tryhard flurry of attempted shocks and callbacks.
I really wanted to be impressed by this book, but it was a poorly crafted bore that never missed an opportunity to disappoint. I think it might even be the least enjoyable book I've ever read, and I'd have DNFed if it wasn't a buddy-read with friends (who found it equally soul-sucking). If Six of Crows is widely considered better than Shadow and Bone, the bar for the Grishaverse must be beneath the floor.
I'm not sure if Mona Awad intended Bunny to embody exactly the kind of hollow, edgy, art-school garbage that she's supposedly skewering in it – maybe she's just too meta and clever for me! – but that was what I felt, and I wasn't a fan. I was fully on board at first, enjoying the writing and setup, but the shine started coming off a quarter of the way in, and continued coming off until I had no goodwill left.
The main character, Samantha, is a real slog. She starts out a not-like-other-girls craven whinger, waxing misogynistic about how pink and air-headed she judges the women in her peer group to be; how they're creepy, borderline non-human bimbos, unlike her, a real person; and how, despite hardly knowing each other, she supposes they hate her for being so gritty and different. We get it, Samantha. You hate pink and collect vinyl. Whatever. She doesn't get any more compelling as the story goes on.
In general, I just couldn't buy into the characters' ages and environment. They're supposed to be post-graduate adults, but the melodrama and awkwardness that drive every character interaction feel acutely teenaged. Samantha, who can barely say hello without breaking into cold sweats, reads more like a 15-year-old than a 25-year-old with a degree and work experience. The limp character work didn't put me in the mood for the book's meandering flights of fancy, which make up most of it.
Bunny is littered with pop-culture references that I found cheap and grating. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland gets repeatedly referenced in a lazy attempt to make something intertextual happen. Characters are described as having Game of Thrones hair, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind smiles, and David Bowie eyes. (David Bowie didn't have different-coloured eyes, and it is so, so easy to Google this!)
The writing's otherwise mostly fine, but it's in service of a nonsense, nothing plot, and I don't know how rookie stinkers like “bearing” instead of “baring”, “break” instead of “brake”, and “unphased” instead of “unfazed” (twice) made it through the editorial net. The cumulative effect is of a book that isn't nearly as smart, cool or incisive as it thinks it is. It's got that Yellowface energy of a rich academic author trying to write something scathing but accidentally committing self-parody. It also reminded me of Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch, another monstrous-feminine horror-thriller that falls over itself trying to be clever, but I found Nightbitch much more credible and accomplished than this. Almost two stars, but I'm not feeling generous.
Where to begin? This book offers so much to complain about before the story's even started. In Forsyth's preface, he's labouring under the delusion that Gaston Leroux was an incompetent, forgotten hack who didn't know how to write his own story. He asserts that “the way poor Gaston tells it is a mess” and that the storyline should basically have been something else altogether. He talks like he's doing the sorry bastard a favour by taking a break from writing airport thrillers to make this sequel.
So, right from the outset, this “fanfic” isn't even the work of a fan, but a writer with total disdain for the original work. His criticisms are, to me, trifling and pedantic, like Leroux not giving the story an exact date and getting the technicalities of gas lamps wrong. Some of these are undoubted flubs by Leroux, but they're also beside the point of the story. I don't really care if The Phantom of the fucking Opera functions as a watertight forensic crime thriller because it isn't meant to be one. Who's reading that book and throwing it down in disgust when Leroux gets the weight of a chandelier wrong? This guy, it seems.
I also disliked his scorn for the Persian and his dismissal of everything that happens in the Persian-centric sections of the original book. So, between the physics pedantry and the Daroga slander, Forsyth's preface didn't warm me to his take on the story, and I came at it with distrust.
But after all that, there's not enough substance in The Phantom of Manhattan to warrant the author's grandstanding. The writing and presentation of the story are decent and quite intriguing. I liked the idea of switching narrator for each chapter, telling the story through the monologues, dialogues and reports of major and minor characters. However, there's very little depth on offer here. The original book's characters barely get a look in, for all Forsyth's insistence that he could write them better than Leroux. Christine's viewpoint is conspicuous by its absence, which says it all really.
The pacing is brisk, which I did enjoy, but just when the story seems to be building up to something, it's rushing to be over. It's as if the book is missing a third of its plot. The half-baked, hasty conclusion feels like the author, too, wanted this nonsense over and done with. I was left wondering what the point was, and how Forsyth, after all his righteous complaining, had managed to do so little with the source material.
Still, it's better than the truly dogshit Love Never Dies, and I assume the physics and measurements are unimpeachable, as we all want from a romance novel.
A beautiful ending to Earthsea. The series is a five-star experience overall, somehow more than the sum of its parts. Each book feels quite modest in scale, short and carefully slow-burning, but their cumulative effect is powerful and sort of inexpressible to me. Being able to observe the growth of the characters – and author – through decades of their lives has felt like such a privilege.
An immersive non-linear study of a woman from troubled girlhood to middle-aged breakdown. Hard work to get into, initially - I found the prose off-putting until it just clicked for me. I love JCO's ability to capture the interiority, gnawing insecurities and painful dysfunctions of her characters. A slow burn but worth it.
Ahh, I wish this was longer! Plenty of great, gruesome imagery. Not enough femme Pinhead. I really enjoy the film and it's very faithful to the book, but it does some heavy lifting to expand on this.