Cytonic

Yes, this book is a lot of filler, but it really didn't bother me. I enjoyed the continued world-building and character development for Spensa and M-bot.

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3 - 3,5 ⭐️

I really wanted to get to Cytonic! It was one of my most anticipated releases of this season and I was dying for some young adult sci-fi and continue with the story of Spensa.

However. This book felt like a total separated story for me: new world, new characters, new plot. The most interesting parts were the interludes as we got a bit of insight into the core of the story and pretty interesting things happened!
The rest tho... felt like a filler. Not a bad story in itself- we will follow Spensa in a new world where she'll meet some pirates and then will need to train her powers as well as fight for her memories to remain. Sounds cool! But it's just not the story that I spent 2 books reading about and loving!

As usual, Brandon's last 10% of the book almost made it all worth it. Just almost this time!
I'm really hopeful that book 4 will get into the main story tho, so I will continue with the saga

P.S I'm so relieved that Spensa ceased a bit her disposition to say “scud” throughout the book. It really was killing me how often Soensa said it at the beginning

Hi! I have a BookTube channel, here's the link to have a look: https://youtube.com/c/FunFantasyBooks

3 - 3,5 ⭐️

I really wanted to get to Cytonic! It was one of my most anticipated releases of this season and I was dying for some young adult sci-fi and continue with the story of Spensa.

However. This book felt like a total separated story for me: new world, new characters, new plot. The most interesting parts were the interludes as we got a bit of insight into the core of the story and pretty interesting things happened!
The rest tho... felt like a filler. Not a bad story in itself- we will follow Spensa in a new world where she'll meet some pirates and then will need to train her powers as well as fight for her memories to remain. Sounds cool! But it's just not the story that I spent 2 books reading about and loving!

As usual, Brandon's last 10% of the book almost made it all worth it. Just almost this time!
I'm really hopeful that book 4 will get into the main story tho, so I will continue with the saga

P.S I'm so relieved that Spensa ceased a bit her disposition to say “scud” throughout the book. It really was killing me how often Soensa said it at the beginning

Executive Summary: Another decent entry in the series but far different than I expected.

Audiobook: Suzy Jackson does another good job here. She does a variety of voices to add a little extra something to the audio version.

Full Review
After Brandon's Reckoner's series, I thought I was done with his non-Cosmere books, but I picked up the first book in this series when looking for a light read and it fit the bill. So once again this year looking for a similar book before the holidays, I opted for the latest in the series.

This series has sort of gone off in a direction I didn't expect it to, but that hasn't been a bad thing per say. I do find myself missing many of the supporting characters from the first book, and then the second, but found myself enjoying the new supporting characters of this third book.

There was some interesting world building in here. I was a little skeptical for awhile, but it was well explained later on in the book.

That said, I'm hoping we get back the characters of the first book in the next one.

This is a fascinating series, each entry has a different feel, style and focus. This volume adopts an adventure style that reminds me of “Planetary Romances” by authors such as [a:Leigh Brackett 22648 Leigh Brackett https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1265899327p2/22648.jpg] or the explorer novels such as by [a:H. Rider Haggard 4633123 H. Rider Haggard https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1298296700p2/4633123.jpg]. The focus however switched very much to introspection and character development - the combination of grand adventure and deep questions was pretty thrilling and was sweetened by some pretty hilarious comic moments The samurai in the cup holder and the "we are all monsters", "No I'm pretty sure it's just me." moments were brilliant.. Good stuff!

Doing a great job of viewing simple and the sublime together to create a unique heroes journey while also making fun of the motif.

8/10

This is a bit of a weird one. While I enjoyed it, it definitely had a big slump in the middle. I know Sanderson is trying to get rid of his “Avalanche”, but in this case it hasn't really resulted in a more satisfying book overall, as you'd expect– instead, it just felt like an ending to any other book. I guess this is just because I'm used to it, I wouldn't complain about this with a different author.

In general, this was fairly different from what I was expecting. It felt more like a Skyward 2.5 (even though it's a full-length novel), with the majority of the story being about Spensa just going off on her own adventure and (eventually) learning new stuff about some of the universe. It's fun, but it felt a bit lacking compared to the previous two books. Almost like one of those classic adventure novels. I also read the Skyward Flight novellas leading up to this release, which made this more disappointing... Was hoping to see more of the other characters we're familiar with.

TL;DR it's fun but I think I went in with the wrong expectations!