Aces High

I've rated all of these at 3, but they are honestly more like 2.5 and I just round up to give the benefit of the doubt. This one, however, gets the 2 because I'm actually starting book 9, and in book 8 the translator STILL doesn't know that it is “chock full” instead of “chalk full.” This book in particular had 2 instances of it if I remember correctly, and was sort of boring, thus the 2* here. Sure, maybe that isn't the author's fault for the translations, but I'm rating the English versions so I have to reflect that experience.

Overall the books are fine, nothing really special but entertaining enough. Hardly anything permanently negative ever happens to the main character though. Short-term negatives happen all the time, but he just picks a path and miraculously everything becomes super easy, barely an inconvenience. Technically something bad happens in a later book, but I'm skeptical that it will remain bad at all. I could be wrong.

Also, the fact that the native tongue is Russian is VERY obvious even with the translations. Mindsets and demeanors are pretty different than the standard Western ones, and idioms are a little different. Like how everyone “bats their eyelashes” which to us is more of a seductive thing, but I'm pretty sure to them it is similar to being stunned or agape. Or everyone being so close together you can't “swing a cat.” First of all, I need a lot of room to swing a cat, so clearly they aren't very close together. And most of us prefer to swing dead cats per the English phrase “can't swing a dead cat without hitting” whatever it is that is plentiful. Still, nothing too jarring, but it is sometimes amusing to see the differences even with a translator that I would assume is fairly familiar with English.