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| 1632157098
| 9781632157096
| 1632157098
| 3.96
| 64,690
| Jul 13, 2016
| Jul 19, 2019
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really liked it
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(Initially, I received this book from NetGalley for review purposes; however, the DRM-protected files expired before I got around to reading it, and I
(Initially, I received this book from NetGalley for review purposes; however, the DRM-protected files expired before I got around to reading it, and I later tracked down a copy from my local library. Either way: no external considerations went into this review.) Monstress is� opulent. The worldbuilding is rich and complex; the art is stunningly beautiful and yet easy to follow; the characters are diverse, fascinating, and clearly with a lot left to reveal. It reminded me of some of Hayao Miyazaki’s work - specifically, Princess Mononoke and the manga version of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. As do Miyazaki’s stories, Monstress presents conflicts between humans and nature on a massive scale, where the question of who is righteous and who is monstrous has no easy answer. If there’s one thing that I felt was lacking from this first volume, it’s an appendix with worldbuilding information. This is something that, as a habitual high fantasy reader, I often struggle with in second-world-fantasy comics; I’m used to getting more detail than any comic can actually provide, simply for reasons of space. Still, Monstress is so complicated that I did struggle to keep track of everything going on for about the first third of the volume. Interludes with brief infodumps helped, but I hope that future volumes will include a brief glossary, map, and cast of characters at the beginning. The plot and characters definitely have me hooked. Maika Halfwolf makes for an intriguing protagonist - she seems to have little objection to violence, but also deeply wants to see herself as a good person. The volume ends with a suggestion that there’s more to her situation - and the larger conflicts between humans and non-humans - than it initially seemed, and that what is strange and hard to understand is not necessarily evil. While I’m not a dedicated comics reader who picks up each issue as it comes out, I’ll definitely keep an eye out for future collected volumes of Monstress. Merged review: (Initially, I received this book from NetGalley for review purposes; however, the DRM-protected files expired before I got around to reading it, and I later tracked down a copy from my local library. Either way: no external considerations went into this review.) Monstress is� opulent. The worldbuilding is rich and complex; the art is stunningly beautiful and yet easy to follow; the characters are diverse, fascinating, and clearly with a lot left to reveal. It reminded me of some of Hayao Miyazaki’s work - specifically, Princess Mononoke and the manga version of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. As do Miyazaki’s stories, Monstress presents conflicts between humans and nature on a massive scale, where the question of who is righteous and who is monstrous has no easy answer. If there’s one thing that I felt was lacking from this first volume, it’s an appendix with worldbuilding information. This is something that, as a habitual high fantasy reader, I often struggle with in second-world-fantasy comics; I’m used to getting more detail than any comic can actually provide, simply for reasons of space. Still, Monstress is so complicated that I did struggle to keep track of everything going on for about the first third of the volume. Interludes with brief infodumps helped, but I hope that future volumes will include a brief glossary, map, and cast of characters at the beginning. The plot and characters definitely have me hooked. Maika Halfwolf makes for an intriguing protagonist - she seems to have little objection to violence, but also deeply wants to see herself as a good person. The volume ends with a suggestion that there’s more to her situation - and the larger conflicts between humans and non-humans - than it initially seemed, and that what is strange and hard to understand is not necessarily evil. While I’m not a dedicated comics reader who picks up each issue as it comes out, I’ll definitely keep an eye out for future collected volumes of Monstress. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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not set
not set
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not set
not set
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Jul 13, 2023
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Paperback
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| 1492635820
| 9781492635826
| 1492635820
| 3.69
| 47,736
| Mar 07, 2017
| Mar 07, 2017
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it was ok
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I wanted to love The Bone Witch. Honestly, I expected to. Heavily Asian-inspired fantasy with a female protagonist, questionable morality, and necroma
I wanted to love The Bone Witch. Honestly, I expected to. Heavily Asian-inspired fantasy with a female protagonist, questionable morality, and necromancy? That should have been my jam. Early reviews were less than glowing, but a lot of them pointed to slow pace and heavy worldbuilding as a reason, which in the past I haven’t found any obstacle to my enjoyment of a book. The first chapters, too, were promising - Chupeco quickly evokes a mysterious, rich world full of different practices of magic. But the further I got into the book, the more disappointed I found myself, as the plot promised epic feats and hard choices, but delivered Disney Channel sitcom melodrama wrapped in embroidered fabrics. On reflection, The Bone Witch’s core weakness is also one of the things that drew me in at first: its alternating narratives, one set in the past and one in the present. In the present, Tea recounts her story to a bard, all the while raising monsters from the dead for purposes unknown. In the past, she’s swept up from her rural village and taken to a foreign city for training in magic. This is a structural choice which can be fascinating when done well (as in The Lies of Locke Lamora), but here it falters early on, as the present narrative becomes much more interesting than the past. Tea’s supposed training in magic involves years of menial chores and lengthy descriptions of fashion, for chapter upon chapter - and while I appreciated the rich detail Chupeco put into her depiction of this fictional world, it was often delivered in clumsy infodumps rather than being gracefully integrated. At first, I allowed that perhaps this information was a Chekov’s Gun and would become relevant later, but having finished the book: it wasn’t. The fact that the narrative is in first person, and that it is explicitly framed as Tea recounting the story of her exile and current motivations, makes this all the worse. The story that she chooses to tell is, by and large, irrelevant, and it is clear that much more significant things happened after the point where this book ends. In fact, much of what she recounts would plausibly be public knowledge already. For a story in which one plotline centers around the protagonist learning magic, we see� very little of the magic itself. What we do see reminded me strongly of Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom series: magical marks drawn by the user to draw upon greater powers, with a special subclass of magic users who deal solely with the dead. There’s an offhand mention that many runes are unknown or not understood, which intrigued me, but like much of the magic that was barely touched on. While I could understand not delving into magical theory, there’s no excuse for how little Tea’s magical training actually features in the story. Numerous characters talk about how dangerous it is to leave her untrained and how much she’s needed as a bone witch - but it takes years for anyone to teach her meditation, let alone anything more complicated. At one point, a mentor-like character asked, “Has no one been teaching you?� and I nearly shouted “MY QUESTION EXACTLY!� at the page. And of course, because this is marketed for a YA audience, there’s romance. Or� is there? Because Tea talks ominously about the boys she loved, but they don’t really� figure into the story whatsoever. There’s no on-page development, no chemistry, and no impact on the plot. At one point a character mentions Tea “continuing [her] meetings with the prince�, who is one apparent love interest - but there haven’t been any meetings. They’ve only interacted in a few rare circumstances before then! The whole story could exist without any mention of these relationships, let alone the foreshadowing-heavy way they’re brought up. There are a lot of other little things that bothered me as the book went on. One secondary character, Zoya, is introduced pretty much just to be a stereotypical mean girl - she gets a bit of sympathetic page time near the end, but the majority of her characterization is flat and dull. In fact, Tea has no friends among her peers, and no relationships with other women that get much attention at all. (Lady Mykaela seemed poised to be a significant mentor figure, but then spent much of the book traveling across the world and very little time mentoring Tea.) Magic apparently manifests equally in both genders - something which was unclear for about the first third of the book, during which I thought it was limited to women - but the men are sent to be ‘Deathseekers�, a more militaristic-sounding organization which also seems to have a high body count. This begs the question: why waste magic users so profligately? In fact, I’d argue that the asha themselves are a waste as well, as most of what we see of them is entertaining the wealthy. Lest it seem like I unilaterally hated this book: I really did love the worldbuilding, conceptually if not in execution. While it was easy to identify real-world analogues for many of the nations described, I still found their interactions rich and fascinating. The setting felt vivid and complicated, and I found myself thinking about the story at work and before I fell asleep, largely for those reasons. The cast was diverse, and the repeated emphasis that Tea is brown-skinned was refreshing. The concept of a ‘heartsglass� - a magical manifestation of someone’s heart/soul - at first seemed tacky, but quickly expanded into something innovative and well-developed. And much of what happened in the ‘present� timeline hinted at even more expansive and interesting ideas to come, as Tea probes the nature of the daeva and the limits of her magic. There’s a lot of potential here, and a lot of good intent. That said, in the end it reminded me of Clariel, and not in a positive manner. As with Clariel, I went in with high hopes and expectations and emerged frustrated and disappointed, feeling as if I had gotten barely the prologue to the story I was promised. As with Clariel, I think better editing and revision could have solved many of the inherent issues. And as with Clariel� yes, I’ll still read the next one. There’s something here, and I want to see if Chupeco can polish it into some really excellent storytelling. Before this review ends, though: callout for Sourcebooks� copyediting. Not only did they allow a description of a palomino horse with a “chestnut� mane into the final version of this book, there are also these gems: He spun me around like I was a wooden ballerina doll and deftly wrapped my waist around a bolt of silver cloth before I had time to react. ”Reparations have been made, and if anything, you’ve actually bolstered ours among the people.� ”If there is no more fortunate time to draw in the Dark, it is now.� I was thrilled, but I also knew this was not the place I wanted him to see me at. Here’s hoping they up their game for the sequel. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 25, 2017
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Mar 27, 2017
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Feb 25, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 1492647497
| 9781492647492
| 1492647497
| 3.67
| 5,759
| Aug 29, 2017
| Aug 29, 2017
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really liked it
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This would have been an effortless five stars if not for some confusion over syntax and blocking; I was repeatedly flipping back and forth between pag
This would have been an effortless five stars if not for some confusion over syntax and blocking; I was repeatedly flipping back and forth between pages and even chapters to track who was who and where they were placed. That said: excellent. Morally complex, beautifully diverse, and tense to the very end. Longer review to come. (P.S. can we get a prequel? pretty please?) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Oct 26, 2017
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Feb 05, 2017
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Hardcover
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| B0DWVVKM9B
| 3.75
| 28,656
| Feb 07, 2017
| Feb 07, 2017
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did not like it
|
I’ve struggled for a while to review this book because, on the one hand, I detested it and I don’t want to spend extra time thinking about it - but on
I’ve struggled for a while to review this book because, on the one hand, I detested it and I don’t want to spend extra time thinking about it - but on the other hand, it has a baffling number of high-star reviews, and honestly that annoys me. There’s nothing good going on here; the plot quickly strays from its promised time-travel based moral quandary into shallow romance, a slapdash secondary conflict, and a saccharine ending. And the writing? The writing is miserably pretentious. The thing is, the blurb promises a much more complex, interesting book. A character who is forced to choose between timelines must also decide how to value human lives - does someone living in paradise have more right to exist than someone who suffers? How does one person handle the weight of that situation, where even inaction is choice? I’d still like to read that book, by the way. If someone out there who’s actually versed in sci-fi writes it, give me a heads up. Because that’s one of the things about All Our Wrong Todays that got under my skin first - it reads like Mastai is using the science fiction elements as window dressing for the story he actually wants to tell, which is basically about a less-than-ordinary guy achieving his dream life with very little actual effort. Which� alright, whatever. You want to write your boring fantasies down, fine - but why even bother to try and present that as more interesting than it is? Why introduce time travel into the equation if you don’t intend to really use it? (I’ll save the soapbox on speculative fiction as a tool for exploration of humanity for later. Just let it be known that I hate the idea that SF/F concepts are nothing more than shiny toys, because that’s literally never been true.) On top of that, Mastai’s attempt at SF worldbuilding is� bad. Abysmal. Short-sighted, shallow, flashy without any thought or depth, and obnoxiously preening. This� this part might get long. Retrofuturism, in and of itself, I find completely fascinating - in no small part because of the gaps between where people thought we’d be by the 2000s, and where we are. Those gaps often reflect unpredictable social change or scientific discoveries, the stochasticity of life that demands we constantly change our world-views. Mastai’s utopia lacks this complexity and richness. Instead, he slaps a bunch of retrofuturism stereotypes down and calls it good, never addressing all the changes in the world that happened in the intervening decades. The concepts he uses originate in the 1950s, and there are just a few little things that happened between then and 2016� - The U.S. Civil Rights Movement - The Vietnam War - Most of the Cold War - The spread of AIDS - The fall of the Berlin Wall - China’s Cultural Revolution - Nuclear proliferation - The Iranian Revolution As any student of history can tell you, none of these events happened in a vacuum. All of them were the result of processes that started long before Mastai’s fictional ‘Goettreider Engine� is said to have been invented in 1965. And� none of them are addressed. Did the USSR collapse in the utopian timeline? Did unlimited energy somehow undermine Mao Zedong? Did it solve problems of race relations around the world? (Even if Mastai didn’t want to address civil rights in the States, his book is set in Canada, where a variety of injustices against First Nations peoples led to the Idle No More movement as recently as 2012. That didn’t come out of nowhere.) It gets a little more ridiculous when you look specifically at the technology to which he attributes this utopia. The Goettreider Engine produces unlimited free energy - even if we accept the vague science behind this, which Mastai tries to handwave, how does this lead to broad social changes and fix the world’s problems? How does it lead to teleportation and flying cars when energy isn’t the limiting factor in developing those technologies now? (One of the core questions of teleportation now is ‘would a teleported person actually be the same person?� which gets at both philosophical concepts of the soul and the root mechanisms behind memory/personality. Regular cars that are driverless are a regulatory/safety issue - flying cars have to overcome that and physics.) And then there’s this: “Imagine that the last five decades happened with no restrictions on energy. No need to dig deeper and deeper into the ground and make the skies dirtier and dirtier. Nuclear became unnecessarily tempestuous. Coal and oil pointlessly murky. Solar and wind and even hydropower became quaint low-fidelity alternatives that nobody bothered with unless they were peculiarly determined to live off the main grid.� This is a prime example of short-sighted worldbuilding. Putting coal and oil out of business also means destroying the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people around the world, not to mention disrupting the economies of every nation in OPEC for a start. Nuclear weapons would still be around, because that’s what nuclear energy was developed for and no amount of free electricity detracts from their destructive power. And there isn’t really a way to store or transmit energy cleanly - batteries and e-waste would still be a source of pollution. This change wouldn’t happen fast or easily - it would be a political mess, both domestically and internationally, and there would be a tremendous social upheaval and restructuring as a result. ...Not to mention the fact that while unlimited energy solves one of the world’s problems, it is by no means a panacea. Water and food are both key, limited resources and sources of conflict. Religion and history will both always be flash points. Diseases can’t be electrocuted out of existence. My point is this: if Mastai were actually interested in exploring the science fiction concepts he invoked in this book, the utopian world of Tom Barren’s original timeline would be vastly different in a variety of ways and would, in fact, probably not be utopian at all as a result - and that in and of itself would have strengthened the book by adding more moral ambiguity to the histories of the respective worlds. Instead, Mastai chose a flat, boring alternate future, and informs the reader that Tom has never cut into an overripe avocado as if that’s a more pressing question than whether one in nine people, largely in developing countries, still face food insecurity. So, say you get past the worldbuilding issues. What awaits you on the other side? Well� mostly faux-deep hipster garbage from the point of view of a grating, obnoxious character. And yes, Tom is supposed to be grating and obnoxious, but that doesn’t make reading his viewpoint any more enjoyable. We hear a lot about his sexual exploits, none of which are relevant to the plot and a lot of which reduce the women involved to little more than cardboard cutouts - literally, four in a row are described as “funny and smart and mischievous and sweet� in a sentence which, while poetic, is staggeringly reductive. There’s also a lot of generic ~artsy depression~ complaining, and - look, I’m not averse to reflecting on the struggles of being human, but I do take issue with a supposedly utopian society which has a startling dearth of therapists and adequate mental health systems. There are several instances when characters verge on discussing therapy as an option, but they never quiiiite make it. At one point Tom even says that “mental illness and substance abuse existed, but they were managed as health care issues,� which sounds good, except for the fact that it’s all tell and no show. Tom, his parents, Penelope - all of them clearly would benefit from psychological treatment of some kind, but none of them even try to get it. And oh, let’s talk about Penelope. Penelope (or ‘Penny� in the non-utopian timeline) is part of a pattern this book has, where every single significant female character seems to exist mostly to have their lives destroyed by a man. Tom’s mother’s entire career and life is subsumed to her husband’s needs, and yet she never leaves or stands up to herself. Penelope is brilliant, talented, and gorgeous - and prone to sex as a self-destructive behavior, leading her to a one-night stand with Tom. (More on this later. I’m still furious.) Penny, her alt-timeline counterpart, is sweet and innocent and dorky and almost instantly falls into bed with Tom, which doesn’t go well for her. Ursula Francoeur, the love of Lionel Goettreider’s life, gets brain cancer because he abuses his technology to perpetuate their affair. For those keeping score, two out of four women die as a direct result of their relationships with male characters; Tom’s mother makes an arguable third. Only Penny survives, and she gets brutally raped. Penelope’s death was, for me, the first sign that this book wouldn’t even manage mediocrity. When a one-night stand with Tom results in pregnancy, she can no longer fill her role as a cosmonaut because there’s a variation in her cellular makeup so� she commits suicide by time travel tech. There’s enough wrong here with the basic premise of ‘competent female character kills herself after having sex with Main Dude�, especially in that her death is the catalyst for the rest of the plot, but that’s not even the final nail in the coffin. No, that comes from comments like this: We could’ve brought a life into this world of wonders and that life could’ve changed us both, made us better, fixed the broken clocks inside our brains that wouldn’t let us be happy when happiness was within reach. And: She touched her stomach. I like to think that’s the moment she changed her mind and decided to have our baby and become a family. There’s a whoooole side rant here about the idea that a baby can fix its parents� psychological and relationship issues and how dangerous and destructive it is to parents and child alike, and if I had the space in this review I’d go into it but� yuck. I feel like it should be self-explanatory that a child is a person first, not a magical cure-all, but apparently, that’s a difficult concept for some people. Fundamentally it gets at another persistent problem of this book: Tom doesn’t really consider people other than himself. His brief relationship with Penelope is about his desires and insecurities, and he doesn’t consider hers. His later pursuit of Penny in the alternate timeline is also about him, not her - he’s convinced that because she’s another version of Penelope, they’re meant to be together. Conveniently, the climax arranges itself so that he never has to actually choose between his utopian world and our ‘alternate� 2016, so he doesn’t really have to struggle with his own happiness vs. the greater good - the central question the book’s synopsis seemed to promise. This comes into sharp relief after Tom rapes Penny. And yes, ‘technically� it’s not him, but another alternate-world version of his consciousness inhabiting his body and blah blah blah, but from her perspective? It’s him. It’s this possibly crazy stranger she let into her life and trusted and started to feel something for - that’s the guy who assaults her in her own bed before she’s even awake. The book doesn’t call it rape. Nor does it call what Tom does to one of his assistants in the same chapter - getting her drunk and coercing her back to his apartment to sleep with him - anything as strong as sexual assault. “I know I went along with all of it. I just wanted it to be over,� she says later, and those words made me nauseous. When Tom returns to his own body, though, the aftermath is entirely centered around him and his feelings - validating the idea that it wasn’t ‘really him� even though, to both women, it was. Their reactions are important inasmuch as they change his relationships with them (particularly Penny). As individuals who have been through a traumatic experience - they barely exist. This chapter is a horrific and jarring reading experience, and all of that seems to serve only to motivate Tom into progressing the plot. It’s callous, cheap, and sickening. If you strip this story down to its bare bones, it’s� literally just about a mediocre, uninteresting middle-aged man who gets wealth, career success, and a woman handed to him. Oh, sure, there’s lip service to the idea that John has grown and reflected on his actions, but that’s only told and never shown. The later revelation that this entire story is recounted in retrospect makes it worse, because we should be able to see evidence of his growth in the narration, but it’s just not there. The Tom who tells the story is no more mature than the past self he describes. To finish this up, a tasting menu of my absolute faaaavorite quotes. 5. The metaphor clusterfuck “I’m not much of a Freudian, but something about fame makes the id and the superego devour the ego like anacondas in a cage, right before they cannibalize each other. Fame warps your identity, metastasizes your anxieties, and hollows you out like a jack-o�-lantern. It’s sparkly pixie dust that burns whatever it touches like acid.� 4. The 101-word sentence of word vomit But around the dinner table - while I sup up the remains of the ratatouille with crusty spelt bread and my mom takes the dessert she baked out of the oven and my sister opens another bottle of sauvignon blanc and Penny listens to my dad with guileless interest while her foot occasionally presses down on mine under the table - he can speak openly without fear of any ridicule more acrid than the exasperated sighs Greta doesn’t bother to conceal as she accidentally splits half the cork into the bottle because her fine motor skills decrease exponentially with each glass of wine. 3. In the Ideal Future, people don’t smile anymore My fifteen employees started applauding and flexing their zygomaticus muscles to bare their teeth and gums, which makes me recoil until I realize they’re smiling at me. 2. Give your ex your genetic material so they can fuck your clone Like, okay, in my world, when you break up with someone, it’s considered gracious to offer the person you dumped a lock of hair so that, if they want, they can get a genetically identical surrogate grown for whatever purposes they need to get over you. It has no consciousness, but it looks exactly like you and can be used for rudimentary physiological functions. Like, you know, sex. 1. Optimism is totally the same thing as manifest destiny The belief that the world is here for humans to control is the philosophical bedrock of our civilization, but it’s a mistaken belief. Optimism is the pyre on which we’ve been setting ourselves aflame. The conclusion of All Our Wrong Todays suggests that Mastai was aiming to communicate the idea that there’s no one right way to live your life, and I have to say that I agree and think that’s an important message. But this delivery of it has no redeeming features whatsoever. Don’t waste your time. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 04, 2016
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Jan 02, 2017
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Nov 04, 2016
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ebook
| ||||||||||||||||
| 1616962445
| 9781616962449
| 1616962445
| 3.56
| 1,331
| Sep 2016
| Sep 06, 2016
|
it was amazing
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A copy of this book was provided to me by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. No external considerations went into this revi
A copy of this book was provided to me by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. No external considerations went into this review. In college, I flew to and from Portland, Oregon several times a year. I love flying, but I particularly love flying in over the Cascades and the Columbia River, seeing volcanoes out either window and the pine forest below, and looking west down the river as the plane turns for the final approach, knowing that the ocean is out there somewhere. There’s a feeling� it’s hard to describe. A lightness in my heart, a nerve-tingling energy, a feeling of rightness at returning to the Northwest. That’s what I got from Summerlong. It’s a rare book that strikes me this way. I read a lot of things I enjoy, and a lot of things I love, but far fewer that feel like puzzle pieces fitting into a space I didn’t know existed. Summerlong resonated deeply with me - its setting, its subtle unconventional magic, its complicated and idiosyncratic characters. Absolutely everything about it was lovely and absorbing, and I don’t just say that because Beagle’s rich, loving descriptions made me homesick for Seattle and Puget Sound. (Though that’s definitely a plus; there’s a deep sense of place running through this book that really brings it alive.) Tachyon Press describes Summerlong as ‘literary speculative fiction�, which I find apt in the way it suggests a slowness of plot and a meditative quality not found in most fantasy novels. It’s about ordinary people, who are nonetheless marvelous in their quirks and variations, whose lives are disrupted by something subtly extraordinary. In particular there are three players: Abe, a retired history professor; his sort-of girlfriend Joanna, an aging Sicilian flight attendant; and Joanna’s daughter Lily, a young journalist with consistent bad luck in the women she dates. They’re a family unit without all the usual trappings: Abe and Joanna’s relationship is committed and caring, but not formalized; Joanna and Lily struggle to get along, but are deeply loyal to one another; Abe is something of a fond uncle to Lily. They all feel incredibly real, and I found myself getting drawn into and invested in their lives almost before I noticed. And then there’s Lioness, she who disrupts the status quo: Thick and heavy and desert-colored, her hair caught the candlelight and gave it back with the added rawness of a living thing when she turned her head. Ohh, that description. Having read the synopsis, I was actively trying to figure out who or what Lioness was, and it took me less than a fifth of the book to be certain. However, it didn’t feel like Beagle was trying to keep this a secret from the reader, who’s primed to expect something of the fantastical in this novel; in fact, I enjoyed picking out all of his subtle hints and references after I knew the secret more than figuring it out in the first place. There was another interesting side effect, too: knowing that Lioness herself was extraordinary, I found myself guessing at every side character. Were they supernatural as well, or just unusual humans? It made me question the value of making such a distinction at all. Lioness is� not a non-entity, but by necessity not as vividly characterized as Abe, Joanna, and Lily either. Her role in the story is to be a disturbance; she is a stone thrown into calm water, disturbing the status quo for better or worse by introducing ineffable magic to this small corner of the world. It’s not dramatic, but neither could it be prevented. From the moment of her arrival, the lives of humans around her change course, and much of the book is just watching those new courses play out. Change necessarily brings loss, though, and there is an eventual� collapse at the end of the book that took me by surprise. One of the themes that many fantasy novels have explored is the idea that darkness and light must exist in a kind of symbiotic balance. “To light a candle is to cast a shadow,� writes Ursula K. LeGuin in A Wizard of Earthsea - a book which, at its heart, affirms that darkness is just as natural and as necessary as light. Summerlong presents similar dualities - courage and fear; love and rejection; growth and loss. The question it seemed to be asking is this: knowing what it may cost, would it be better not to experience magical things at all? I’m still not sure what my answer is. ((Aside: I admit that I particularly appreciated the part of this book in which there were whales. However, I felt there could have been more whales. There are never enough whales.)) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 06, 2016
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Sep 30, 2016
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1626396132
| 9781626396135
| 1626396132
| 3.77
| 115
| May 17, 2016
| May 17, 2016
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did not like it
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I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. No outside considerations went into this review. I re I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. No outside considerations went into this review. I really, really wanted to enjoy this book, and not just because, as a queer woman, I feel bad on principle for knocking a lesbian romance story. The thing is, I also wanted to enjoy it because the synopsis promised an exciting, tension-filled adventure and that... just isn't what I got. The history between Claire and Sochi should be the heart of it all. The synopsis certainly promises something dynamic between them - a cat-and-mouse game, or a race to the treasure, or bitterness slowly becoming reconciliation. In actuality, though, they don't even see each other for over half the book, and it takes them several more chapters to exchange words; when they do, despite each woman being bitter about the break-up for her own reasons, there's hardly any recrimination. After half a book of build-up, the way they rebuild their relationship is laughably easy. (view spoiler)[Notably, this is because their break-up was engineered by a man angling for Claire's job who wanted her out of Peru - a twist which is incredibly easy to predict after seeing the break-up from both women's points of view. Not... that there's really any reflection on what he did, what kind of a betrayal that is of Claire, his supposed friend. He also never faces consequences; the closest to confrontation between him and Claire/Sochi is over the phone, as he's leaving the country. It's all resolved in the most boring, passive manner possible. (hide spoiler)] I understand the desire to write about relationships between women that aren't angsty, truly. But the danger there for an author is that the relationship ends up falling flat instead. Claire and Sochi have no major ideological disagreements, or really arguments of any kind; the one time one of them gets angry at the other, it's illogical, manufactured to delay their relationship within the book. They are not, as the synopsis, suggests, on different sides of the conflict over looting Peruvian artifacts; everything is misunderstandings, easily resolved and forgiven. There's no negotiation, no tension, no battle of head over heart. The non-romantic plot is much the same: slow in pace, without much draw or a sense of stakes. The antagonist is almost cartoonish - he literally refers to his machinations as his "Plan of Ultimate Retribution". (view spoiler)[This plan, by the way, seems to have already been set in motion by the time he's defeated, but there's absolutely zero mention of whether or not it actually destroyed the Peruvian economy as intended. This seems like something worth addressing? (hide spoiler)] The treasure hunt relies almost entirely on Claire's supernatural visions, not her actual skill - I'm not an archaeologist, but I was left with the feeling that she hadn't really displayed the skills of her profession at all in the book. Everything she needs is (eventually) handed to her. Overall - perhaps the problem here is the misleading blurb, which promises a far more exciting story than what's actually inside. A resounding disappointment. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 20, 2016
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Jul 2016
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Jun 20, 2016
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1101904097
| 9781101904091
| 1101904097
| 3.46
| 501
| Jun 14, 2016
| Jun 14, 2016
|
it was ok
|
I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. First, let's get a necessary disclaimer out of the way: I'm not Jewish. I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. First, let's get a necessary disclaimer out of the way: I'm not Jewish. In fact, I'm an atheist, and was raised that way, so my knowledge of any religion is relatively cursory. In many cases, that's not an obstacle to me as a reader. Here, it definitely ways. Hence the disclaimer: Jewish readers, or readers with a stronger foundational knowledge of Jewish belief, may get more out of this book than I could. The sad thing, for me, is that what drew me to this book was interest in what a Jewish alternate history fantasy novel would be like. It's a bummer to reach the end of the book and realize that the cultural perspective I was so curious about was part of what made the book hard to follow. It would have been easier with a map, and a glossary or footnotes of some kind, and perhaps the publisher has added these components to the hardcover. My reading experience without them was frustrating, to say the least, because I couldn't quite understand the day-to-day conversations between the characters, let alone picture Khazaria's location and role on the international stage. After the end of the story, too, I'm left wondering if there's some sort of religious significance to the point at which things ended that I'm missing... because if there isn't, then the only conclusion I can come to is that Barton just plain didn't bother to craft a satisfying ending. Here's the thing: any reader of this book is guaranteed to be far more knowledgeable than the characters about the consequences of Germany conquering Khazaria. We all know what lies at the end of those train tracks, what the refugees are fleeing, and the looming threat of the Holocaust lends the book natural tension. The premise demands emotional investment, because we're all too aware of the stakes. So when the plot meanders extensively, seeming to prioritize everything else imaginable over the actual horrific threat bearing down on this nation, the reading experience gets... frustrating, to say the least. At least a full third of the story is just Esther riding out to the Kabbalists, and there's quite a bit to do with her journey back. The reader knows from the beginning that battle must be joined by the end, and can also reasonably imagine the military strength of the invading Germans. Perhaps this won't bother everyone, but for me, it made every page devoted to something other than repelling the invasion I got more and more frustrated. (view spoiler)[This was not at all helped by Esther's decisions upon returning to the capital city. Instead of taking her army to the front lines directly, which it sounded like she could easily have done, she practically turns herself into her angry father. Then, to prove he's wrong about her ability to lead her forces, she literally breaks into the palace of her nation's leader. She could have just snuck out the gate and gone to the front, with no one able to stop her or turn her around! The fact that breaking into the palace worked makes no sense; that's nigh on treason, unless Khazaria has a significantly changed definition thereof. It required little to no strategic skill, but instead relied on luck and force of numbers - there's nothing about this that should have impressed anyone. (hide spoiler)] The ending of the book is... abrupt. Of all the questions raised throughout the story, only one is answered, and that only partially. Character arcs, big moral questions, and consequences of major plot events all go un-resolved. I'd seen a review commenting that a sequel was needed, but I wasn't prepared for how completely sharp and unsatisfactory that ending was. One thing that this book does still have in its favor, and a secondary reason I requested it in the first place, is the way it touches on LGBT themes. Esther's attitude towards her own gender seemed almost like that of a character who was agender, but lacked the vocabulary to articulate it; additionally, one of the major characters is trans, and the means of his transition was an interesting element. Esther's attitude towards him isn't always pleasant to read (she speculates a lot about his genitals, and (view spoiler)[accidentally outs him (hide spoiler)] at one point), but given her background it seems like it's to be expected. Now, for the alternate history components of this book - I certainly didn't expect the dieselpunk mechanical horses! I also... still don't really see the point of them, to be honest, since Seleme seemed to make travelling more difficult for Esther and Itakh, not less. It's a neat concept, but... perhaps one that made it in by virtue of Kitchen Sink Syndrome. As other reviewers have pointed out, though: no matter how cool the tech sounds, it's bizarre to imagine a society in the 1930s-40s that would be this technologically deficient compared to its neighbors. I'm sure they existed at the time, but again - I find myself running up against the conflict between audience meta-knowledge and character knowledge in the books. This goes back somewhat to knowing the stakes, too, because the Khazar kaganate is so helplessly outgunned that their defeat seems like an inevitability. At the end of the day, I would encourage people to give this book a try, because I do feel like the experience is going to vary significantly between readers, but personally I found the reading experience almost entirely unsatisfactory and, given the lack of resolution, very nearly pointless. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 15, 2016
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Jun 15, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 1606908855
| 9781606908853
| 1606908855
| 3.59
| 22,411
| Jun 21, 2016
| Jul 12, 2016
|
liked it
|
I received this title from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. No external considerations went into this review - like you'd
I received this title from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. No external considerations went into this review - like you'd need to pay me to talk about Sanderson anyways, jeez. I've been struggling with writing this review for well over a month now, and I think the main reason is... this is my favorite author's first graphic novel, and it took me a while to admit that I just... don't feel it's that good. First off, the complaint I've seen from a lot of reviewers: the art is grainy and pixelated in the galley. This isn't just a quibble about it not looking nice; this makes it genuinely difficult to follow the action scenes and distinguish faces, especially among characters who are all dressed the same. I assume that the final copy will be much, much cleaner than this. Now, the real meaty stuff - I reread this volume today and in doing so was struck by how many of the hallmarks of a Sanderson novel I could see here, just... not at their full potential. It must be very difficult to adapt such a worldbuilding-heavy writing style to a visual medium, and especially an episodic one, but with all due sympathy and respect for those who undertook this momentous task: I'm not sure it entirely paid off. The first chapter of the book is functionally a 'tutorial level' for the reader, familiarizing us with the magic system and the main character, and yet for all the important information that's delivered, it feels completely extraneous to the plot. The events of that first chapter (Kenton running the Mastrell's Path) have so far had no impact; there is perhaps one later event that might have been affected, and even there it could have turned out as it did regardless. Kenton's choices are relevant to establishing his character, but much of the chapter is taken up with worldbuilding and magic-system explaining. This isn't a surprise, coming from Sanderson; however, because this isn't a complete story, the reader finishes the volume without actually understanding things that are significantly plot-relevant. Kenton himself is an interesting character. Mixed-race and multicultural, he's immediately shown to be too stubborn for his own good, someone who has turned to unorthodox methods to get ahead in a strictly orthodox subculture. Sanderson contrasts the sheer power of other Sand Masters with Kenton's refined skill - a sort of Ideal Gas Law sort of equation, where Kenton's technique and precision balance out his lack of raw ability. He winds up as both a scrappy underdog and a pig-headed jerk, which... makes him an interesting protagonist, I suppose. His tenacity is his most heroic trait at this point, even if it gets him into trouble more often than not. However, the character I'm most excited about - to the surprise of virtually no one - is Khriss! So far we know very little about her, but what we do know is interesting. Honestly, Khriss in this volume is most intriguing in light of what Cosmere readers know her future to be: she will become the author of the Ars Arcanums found in other books. We're just not sure how yet For now, she and her entourage provide cultural contrast, political savvy, and a hint at future plot points to be developed later. The one thing that I missed when it came to characters in this book was a good internal look at their perspectives. Sanderson excels at this in the multiple viewpoints of the Stormlight Archive, and it really brings the story to a new level. Here, I found myself really feeling the lack of that view; we don't really get to see how relationships develop or attitudes change. Kenton makes several rude/snarky comments towards Khriss for no apparent reason - attitudes that previously he'd only displayed towards his overbearing father. Why direct it at a woman he's barely met? We just don't know, and I struggled to remain patient with him after that. Perhaps sometime in the future we'll get prose novellas set on Taldain that will illuminate things a bit more. I fully expect this book to be a hit among those who are already fans of the Cosmere. It does have all the traits we've come to expect from Sanderson's work (including some really neat flora/fauna worldbuilding). Personally, I'm intrigued and will keep up with it as Vol 2 and 3 are published, but I feel like it may end up being a better reading experience when all three volumes are out. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 04, 2016
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May 04, 2016
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May 04, 2016
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 110196751X
| 9781101967515
| 110196751X
| 3.75
| 4,607
| Jul 12, 2016
| Jul 12, 2016
|
it was amazing
|
CONTENT WARNING: This book, and by necessity this review, contains discussions of rape. I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest r CONTENT WARNING: This book, and by necessity this review, contains discussions of rape. I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. No outside considerations went into this review. All quotes are taken from a galley copy of the book, and may differ from the final printed version. It's been over a month since I finished this book, and I've been putting off writing a review for it because I just... don't know what to say. Partly this is because The Devourers deals with heavy, uncomfortable subjects, many of which I'm unsure how to approach in a review; partly it's because this book is such an incredible experience that I don't want to give too much of the game away in talking about it. This is fundamentally a book about what it means to be monstrous. Monster-as-allegory is an old concept in fiction, but... I feel that its most common use has been to designate that which is other, in behavior and appearance. In a way, such metaphors export the worst aspects of humanity to non-humans, allowing a writer and their audience to engage philosophically with ideas but never asking them to accept that such monstrosity could be found in someone they know. We see this in politics, as well, every time people try to attribute gun violence to mental illness despite the fact that mentally ill individuals are far more likely to be victims of violent crime. Perhaps it's human nature to want that separation - I can certainly understand why, in the event of something horrific, people would want to distance themselves from the perpetrators. But in a lot of ways - especially in fiction which purports to explore the darker side of human nature - I find it dishonest. This is a book about monstrosity, both of strangely eldritch werewolves and of humanity. It... there's no way around this: it's a book about rape. I don't want to disclose too much of the plot, but I think that does need to be mentioned first. One of the key events of the story, which happens early on, is one of those eldritch werewolves raping a human woman. It's told first from his perspective, and he attempts to justify it extensively. I expect that for some readers this will be a deal-breaker, and that's understandable. It is every reader's prerogative to avoid works that may be traumatic. Truth be told, I considered not finishing the book at that point, but in the end I'm glad I chose to continue. Part of what motivated me to go on was the fact that earlier, in a frame narrative told in the voice of a different character, Das had shown an awareness of consent. Part was a suspicion - confirmed later - that the story would later be told from the woman, Cyrah's, perspective. I don't wish to spoil her story, and obviously reader viewpoints will differ, but I can say that I felt like Das handled her reaction and subsequent action deftly and respectfully, and that the question of what she wants for her life dominates the latter half of the book. The frame narrative, too, validates Cyrah. This is significant - the structure of this book is such that the frame narrative characters are interpreting and responding to the framed stories, and this allows Das to offer new perspectives on them. "Am I supposed to be sad for the narrator here?" one asks, angry at the treatment of women in these stories. There is a sharp awareness, a meta-commentary, to this frame narrative, and it's put to excellent use. Back to the metaphor of monstrosity. One of the most powerful lines in the book is this: "He raped me." It would have been so easy for Das to write as if rape were an act of inhuman monsters. Instead, one of those very same monsters attributes it to humanity. Das's werewolves are terrifying, bloodthirsty, vicious predators of our species - but they are predators, their actions animalistic, their rituals marked in blood and urine, and all of their violence is animal. Human violence is treated as something wholly different from what they do. It makes the story more uncomfortable, allowing for no pretense on the reader's part that such actions are separate from our own societies and history. At the same time, though, this is a story about recovery and moving forward, and it's not wholly pessimistic towards humanity. I would love to be able to quote some of Cyrah's dialogue later in the book, but as I mentioned - I don't want to give anything away. There are other elements that are significant in this. Race is one - the book takes place in India, past and present, and the majority of its characters are not white. The werewolf who rapes Cyrah is one notable exception, and the fact that he is a white European man attacking a brown Muslim woman is not ignored. Gender and sexuality also come into play, particularly at the end of the book. Appropriately for shapeshifters, nothing about the werewolves is set in stone beyond their personal choices - but they're not the only characters fluid of identity or presentation. I think I struggled to write this review for so long, not just for the reasons I mentioned before, but also because it's fundamentally a book that asks for introspection from its readers. What does it mean to be the people we are? What, or who, made us that way? What values do we hold, and what choices have we made that may contradict those? It... left me pondering, with a deep sense of weightiness, and that's a hard thing to convey in a review. I'm still not sure I've done it justice. I hope I've encouraged someone to read this book, at least. One last thing - Indra Das ends this book with a lovely Acknowledgements section, which I read through because... that's just how I roll. The last line of these acknowledgements had what I find to be one of the hallmarks of a thoughtful content creator: "I'm willing to listen and learn so I can do better next time." Between that attitude and the incredible quality of this debut novel, Indra Das is definitely an author to watch. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Apr 24, 2016
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Apr 24, 2016
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0192742752
| 9780192742759
| 0192742752
| 3.98
| 3,108
| Oct 01, 2015
| Oct 01, 2015
|
it was amazing
| "The Guardians mean well, but they have shunted the whole human race onto a branch line of history, and we keep trundling round in circles. It's time "The Guardians mean well, but they have shunted the whole human race onto a branch line of history, and we keep trundling round in circles. It's time someone changed that." A copy of this book was provided to me by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. No external considerations went into this review. I've been meaning to read Philip Reeve for years, but the library gods have always conspired against me - the first Hungry Cities book is never in the same branch that I am, ever, and since Fever Crumb is set in the same universe, I don't want to just start there... but after this book, I'm going to need to make more of an effort, because Reeve's writing is fabulous. Sci fi and fantasy are my 'home' genres, my literary comfort zone, but the more I read the more a sense I have that not all of them are really... written in a way that reflects the modern world of their authors and audiences. There's such a wealth of history to both genres, ideas that have been proposed and explored and re-examined, tropes that have become iconic or hated - and of course, the people who tend to grow up to write speculative fiction are also those who grew up reading it, so they're saturated in decades-old conventions, and in a lot of ways even the most diligent author ends up echoing those conventions. What was immediately refreshing to me about this book was how much it felt like a projection of the future really grown out of our current world. The technology feels like a natural derivation of current innovations (drones, and a vast interstellar internet known as the Datasea), the worldbuilding pushes biotech and 3-D printing into the limelight, and the culture is big and messy and... I don't know how to say this other than it has a Millennial feel to it that I loved. It's also a setting in which the vast majority of people aren't white, to the point that seeing someone who is is extremely weird. Add to that a few little nods to science fiction's history, like the fact that the energy of the train gates is 'Kwisatz Haderech' energy, named for "one of the languages of Old Earth", or the mention of Klingon as one of those languages, and it's just... simultaneously so much more concrete and so much more creative than a lot of the science fiction settings I've encountered. I'd like to talk about the plot of this book, but honestly I'm not sure I can discuss the most interesting aspects. Of course, it's not just a heist story; when is anything just a heist story? Politics, morality, radicalism, survival, prejudice - all of these factors come into play to varying degrees. Perhaps most fundamentally, it's a story about Zen Starling becoming more than he was and more than he imagined he could be. And, like many science fiction stories, it's about what humanity means, both in terms of the definition of personhood and a sense of what we, as a species, are meant to be. As Robert Browning said, "A man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" Science fiction is one of the ways we reach, and Railhead does a lovely job of portraying that, especially in its resolution. Characters I can discuss, if perhaps not as many or in as much depth as I want to. Essentially, it boils down to two: Zen Starling struck me as... someone soft-hearted, despite his criminal livelihood, who simply wanted stability and security and the chance to experience the beauty of the universe. It made him sympathetic, as he was sucked into centuries-old schemes, because his desires were so simple. He's not caught up in the drama so much as dragged helplessly into it, wanting nothing more than to do what is asked of him so he can get out. Nova was one of those characters who fundamentally gets at the question of what it means to be human. (Interestingly, the book mentions that androids like her have been reclassified as 'human' to allow them to serve as cheap labor despite quotas designed to keep robotic workers out- another layer to the conversation.) She suffers a little bit from being the only female character really present for most of the book, and functioning largely as support for Zen to boot, but she's still interesting to read about, and the interplay between her personality and Zen's preconceptions about Motoriks makes for an interesting development as they begin to get to know each other. Other characters' participation and development is too spoilery to be mentioned here. However, about all of them I can say this: when I finished, I was left with the strong sense that this book needs a sequel. It absolutely can stand alone, but there are so many drastic changes in the resolution, so many characters embarking on new paths, that there are clearly more stories to be told in this universe. I hope Reeve chooses to do so, because I'd love to read them. P.S. Other cultural thing I loved, but couldn't work in earlier: marriages, both dynastic and romantic, between queer couples. Also, there was a genderfluid character, which is always exciting! (view spoiler)[I wish they hadn't been both a) a robot and b) killed off at the end, because both of those fit into really awful patterns regarding non-gender-conforming characters, but I enjoyed Flex while they were alive, especially because their art - a trait so often thought of as purely human - was held up as exemplary enough to sway a loco's decisions. (hide spoiler)] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 29, 2016
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Apr 02, 2016
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Mar 28, 2016
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| B019JJGFRE
| 3.88
| 177
| Mar 08, 2016
| Mar 08, 2016
|
it was amazing
|
A copy of this book was provided to me by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. No external considerations went into this revi
A copy of this book was provided to me by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. No external considerations went into this review. Also, full disclosure, I'm kinda-sorta-internet-friends with Foz. It feels, sometimes, like every second series is an adaptation of something else - fairy tales, classic novels, what have you. As a reader, I'm getting a little jaded, tired of this unoriginal content. What Monstrous Little Voices clarified for me was this: that adaptations don't have to be unoriginal. This is a collection which treads the time-worn boards of Shakespeare's stage with entirely new steps, and entirely new feet. It expands and illuminates the worlds of his stories, and provides a refreshing new perspective on old tales. The story that I enjoyed the most, personally, was the first - Foz Meadows' "Coral Bones", which follows Miranda after The Tempest, in a Just Ella-like exploration of a happily ever after that isn't what it seems. Foz set the stage for the entire collection with an expansively diverse cast (fitting for the diverse, trade-enriched Mediterranean region, which was by no means monocultural or mono-ethnic) and a narrative which weaves gender, identity, and fairy magic smoothly into a single tapestry. The writing was beautiful, capturing the spirit and style of the Bard's prose while offering new perspectives. The subsequent stories were also enjoyable. Every writer in this anthology is clearly very skilled with language, and while the voice varies from one story to the next, they all have a tone in common that is clearly Shakespearean. The dialogue is excellent, often snappy, and the stories are often structured into acts or parts such that I could imagine them on the stage. "The Course of True Love" combined a charming romance with supernatural and ordinary politics, and I loved its romantic leads and their developing relationship, which felt natural despite taking very little time. "The Unkindest Cut" seemed straightforward, but turned out to be anything but; this is more in the vein of Shakespeare's tragedies than his comedies. It's much darker than the first two, but stood out most to me for the excellent characterization of its protagonist, who sees the world through an interestingly limited lens. "Even in the Cannon's Mouth" smashed all of my existing notions of what this collection was as a whole, revealing an arc plot much more extensive than I had anticipated. It brought characters together and revealed information in a way that I didn't expect at all, but which showed the entire project to be even more innovative than I'd thought. And then there's "On the Twelfth Night", which I can barely discuss without spoiling the overarching connections through the stories. You'll just have to discover that one for yourselves. The one disappointment I had in reading this was that there were several narrative threads from individual stories that weren't quite resolved by the ending. "On the Twelfth Night" is an abrupt jump in some ways, wrapping up the whole narrative without directly addressing the details of the preceding stories, and while it was satisfying in and of itself, I found myself still wondering about consequences of earlier events after finishing the book. (The end of "The Unkindest Cut", in particular, left a lot of questions that I'd hoped to see addressed.) One more story - or an epilogue, perhaps? - would have wrapped things up a little neater. That aside, it's still a five-star book. The concept and execution are both fabulous and innovative, and for once I found myself finishing an adaptation hoping that it would inspire more of the same. This kind of boundary-pushing, explorative storytelling is an amazing way to present Shakespeare to a modern audience. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 13, 2016
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Jan 16, 2016
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Jan 13, 2016
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 1597266833
| 9781597266833
| 1597266833
| 3.85
| 178
| Dec 13, 2010
| Feb 23, 2011
|
it was amazing
|
A copy of this book was provided to me by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. No external considerations went into this revi
A copy of this book was provided to me by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. No external considerations went into this review. It's an unfortunate fact of life for people interested in ecology - particularly in marine systems - that pretty much every book on the subject is... well, depressing as hell. Like... let's be real here. Humans have screwed up our planet pretty badly, and we continue to do so. On land we can at least see some of the most severe effects of our destruction, but the ocean has historically been opaque to us: we've damaged it severely, possibly irrevocably, but until very recently we haven't been forced to confront that fact. Scientifically speaking, my interests tend towards the largest megafauna on the planet: whales. As a result, I know a fair amount about their behavior and some about the ecological factors which can affect them... but as this book made me realize, woefully little about coastal ecosystems, even though they are often some of the most productive in the world and cornerstones of the ocean as a whole. I should probably fix that, and this was a fair start. I've kayaked through mangroves (once, in Puerto Rico when I was 10), but until this book I didn't know much about them beyond the fact that they were trees that could grow in salt water and were important barriers protecting land behind them from oceanic storms. I had no sense of how vital they were as nurseries to all kinds of different organisms, marine and terrestrial. I didn't even know that there was more than one species of mangrove (and I'm kind of embarrassed by that fact!). The fact that there are 70 species from 24 different plant families completely blew my mind. The portions of this book that touched on shrimp farming were sadly familiar. While aquaculture can be practiced sustainably (in contained ponds, with organisms no higher up the food chain than primary consumers and very careful waste management), there's a lot of money to be made in exploiting the ocean's naturally bountiful regions in a marine version of slash-and-burn agriculture. The story of shrimp that Warne relates here is strikingly similar to that of salmon that Alexandra Morton tells in Listening to Whales: What the Orcas Have Taught Us: corporations identify areas where their target species are abundant in the wild, place their facilities in the same location, and raise as much of their product as they can before they've completely stripped the very balance of resources that drew them there. When they leave - if they leave - natural habitat for wild species is destroyed, waste from the farming operation may have accumulated and polluted the water, and what used to be a haven runs the risk of becoming a dead zone. In the case of shrimp aquaculture, this doesn't even serve a real food benefit; as Warne points out, shrimp is rarely a dietary staple (and when it is, only in regions where it has historically been wild-caught, and where those wild populations suffer when aquaculture moves in). What Warne touches on in-depth, in every location he discusses, that I particularly appreciated is the relationship between the local people and the mangroves. Conservation efforts around the world have pretty consistently shown that the people who are physically closest to natural resources absolutely must be involved in their protection. Often the locals in exploited areas are themselves being exploited, and may be in poverty or struggling to maintain a way of life as the world industrializes around them. External conservation organizations which simply impose new restrictions on them without regard for their needs or desires are just another way they lose control of their lives and their homelands. Conservation that involves people gives them motivation and a sense that they can change their lives for the better. Warne seems to understand this: he gives special attention to efforts which have integrated the needs of people with the needs of the mangroves, to the benefit of both. To Warne's credit, he works hard to provide a generally positive outlook on the potential for mangrove restoration. Given the scale of deforestation, destruction, and plain old disregard I'm not sure I'm completely swayed, but there is a path forward here. One of the advantages of reading this in 2015 (instead of 2011, when I first got access to the galley... oops) is that shortly after I finished it, information was released on the accord that came out of the Paris climate conference. One of the outcomes of those talks was something Warne mentions being missing from Kyoto and other accords: a way of counting forests as carbon resources, making them more valuable alive than as hardwood. I cheered aloud when I heard the news. As with all ecological books, I highly recommend that anyone interested read the whole thing themselves. The research that went into this is extensive, and there are far more fascinating details than I could ever mention here. Additionally, we all as human beings have a duty to be conscious of our environment, and having such a clearly written book to turn to certainly helps with that understanding. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Nov 28, 2015
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Dec 26, 2015
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1933718552
| 9781933718552
| 1933718552
| 3.99
| 26,168
| Oct 14, 2011
| Oct 11, 2011
|
did not like it
|
Edit: Downgrading my review to 1 star because, on reflection, I really disliked the gratuitous nature of violence in this book. Note that this is not
Edit: Downgrading my review to 1 star because, on reflection, I really disliked the gratuitous nature of violence in this book. Note that this is not an objection to the inclusion of violence, but to the fact that it often had only the most minimal narrative impact, in moving Alex and Darla from one point to the next. One of the clearest examples of this is the break-in that occurs at the beginning of the book, when Alex is sheltering with his neighbors, which ends with one of those neighbors shooting two of the three attackers. The purpose of this event, in addition to shock/horror, seems mostly to be getting Alex out of the house, but the impact on characterization is minimal. Throughout the book, violence gets a cursory mention after it occurs, but seems to have no long-term implications (except the idea that Alex has 'become an adult' partly due to it) or psychological impacts. This is clearly a writing choice, conscious or unconscious, resulting from presenting all of the book's aggressors as cartoonishly shallow villains. Those three looters could have included someone Alex or his neighbors knew or recognized, to drive home a point about how trauma and crisis had changed people; instead, they are (in short order literally) faceless menaces. It's all so shallow your feet barely get wet. Disclaimer: I read this book with the specific intent of boosting my NetGalley statistics. My access to it on NetGalley has long since expired, so obviously that had no impact on my rating or review, but I feel like I should explain why I picked it up. So: it was that, and it was morbid curiosity only permitted by having forgotten why I took it off my to-read shelf in the first place. A lot of people love this book and this series, which I'm sure is great for them. Personally, it's not my jam; it never has been since I read the synopsis, but with all those rave reviews I thought... why not? Why not give it a chance and see if Mike Mullin's writing can get me past his premise? The writing is the reason I nearly gave up in the first three chapters. Had I not been reading this with the specific intent of giving it a chance, I would have just walked away there, because the beginning of this book is - to put it nicely - clearly amateur. There's an agonizingly detailed infodump on Alex's life, in which the reader is thoroughly informed that he does taekwondo and subjected to an honest-to-god description of grinding in Warcraft. The amazing thing about this is that as the book progresses, the prose does get considerably better; I can only conclude that the beginning of the narrative was... entirely skipped in the editing/polishing process, that any of this stuff made it in. (With the exception of the taekwondo, which the reader hears about at length for the rest of the book, none of this even serves as a Chekov's Gun.) The other big factor here, which underlies some of my other problems with the book as a whole, is quite simply its premise. I'll give Mullin his due: he's clearly done a lot of research into what a Yellowstone eruption would look like and how it would impact the world. Where it falls apart for me is even earlier than that, though, because the idea of the suddenness with which it happens in this book is beyond my ability to suspend disbelief. I can't do it. There's no way I can look at it and either say "Yes, that makes sense," or "That makes no sense, but I'll ignore it for the sake of the story". And here's why: the suddenness of the eruption is the driving factor behind Mullin's projections of human behavior. Everything else about the book falls out because the eruption was sudden. The sense of crisis, the fear of food shortage, the speed at which people turn to violence - it's all founded in the idea of this abrupt change in the world, unpredictable and unavoidable, in the face of which some people band together and others go on a rampage. But because the premise is implausible, the crisis feels manufactured - just as Alex's oh-so-convenient habit of passing out hungry on the doorstep of someone generous feels manufactured. There was a constant feeling of artificiality tugging at my mind as I read - a problem of particular magnitude in, say, some of the scenes of extreme violence. When everything feels manufactured, the volcano comes to look like an excuse for the desolation and violence of the landscape (from a writing perspective), not the cause. I would like to put forward the idea that a similar story could have been written in which the eruption was predicted and an evacuation at least begun (though for shock and drama, the volcano could still erupt before Alex gets out). It'd raise some interesting questions: How do you prepare for a volcanic eruption on this scale? Does the US even have the infrastructure? Would we see, as we did in post-Katrina evacuations, a race/class stratification of who gets out first, who gets helped? And how does it reshape people's reactions if they had believed they would escape, and instead find themselves trapped? There's a fantastic essay I can't track down about The Walking Dead as a fantasy, that essentially by stripping away society the story strips away limitations on its characters. TWD's heroes are all extraordinary, this essay argues, because they may well be the last of the human race. Their every action has great import, and their survival (at any cost) is paramount. This book falls into that same trap, particularly near the end: "During the trip, I was free. In Cedar Falls or here, I'm just somebody's kid. In between, I was Alex. I decided where I slept and when, who I talked to and who I avoided. Sure, the ash and psychotic killers weren't fun, but I've only been here one day, and already I miss that feeling of freedom, of being my own man." The worst part of this is that the fantasy of post-apocalyptic freedom from society is, here, overriding the fact that Alex and Darla should be carrying some deep, deep, complicated trauma, which they never show any sign of. Plausibility falls by the wayside: the book in a nutshell. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Dec 15, 2015
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Dec 19, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 0738746916
| 9780738746913
| 0738746916
| 3.87
| 7,460
| Feb 08, 2016
| Feb 08, 2016
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it was amazing
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Update: oops. It's been a while since I've done a NetGalley review. Anyway - A copy of this book was provided to me by the publisher via NetGalley in e Update: oops. It's been a while since I've done a NetGalley review. Anyway - A copy of this book was provided to me by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. No external considerations went into this review. This book is everything, everything that I wanted it to be - and more. I've been excited about it since the cover was first released, and I actually overhauled my entire NetGalley profile specifically to request it. Being that invested in the potential of a book is risky, and as I started reading I was anxious that it might disappoint, that all of that buildup would have been for nothing. I had nothing to fear. What weaknesses this book has are clearly first-novel weaknesses, the kind that are worked out by more practice. There's an awkward infodump at the beginning of the book, and some fairly blatant foreshadowing which could have been more subtle. Once the plot really gets going, though, all of that fades to the background. One of the most delightful elements of this book, for me, is the worldbuilding. I'm a biologist by training, a marine biologist by aspiration, so a sci-fi setting featuring genetically engineered chimeras of marine animals is right up my alley. Skrutskie's science is solid and, moreover, interesting to read about - I was particularly delighted that she addressed the impact of enormous predators on the NeoPacific's food web. The descriptions of the Reckoners, too, were excellent and engaging. The book has a kind of Pacific Rim vibe to it, but not in a way that makes it feel derivative, just similarly awe-inspiring. (This contrasts beautifully with the way Cas, the protagonist, talks about the beasts like they're ordinary household pets - one is a "big dumb turtle"; another is "little shit" and it's all so casually affectionate that it's incredibly charming.) My one worldbuilding quibble is that there's no clear explanation for why the ocean has been renamed the NeoPacific. At first I assumed that catastrophic sea level rise had reshaped the coastline, but some of the locations mentioned belie that explanation. My next guess is that the institution of 'Reckoner justice' led to the renaming, but there's no firm answer. The biggest crucial element of any book is, of course, plot... and with this book, that's not something I can talk about much in and of itself. I won't even put spoiler tags in this review, because it's too long until the book comes out and I don't want anyone to succumb to temptation. So instead of talking about plot in-depth, I'll say this: in other books, this premise would have meant the author writing themselves into a hole. Emily Skrutskie blew her way out of that hole with high-grade explosives and took the resolution a direction I had never expected, and which I can't wait to (hopefully?) see play out in a sequel or three. That leaves one more component: characters. Saving the best for last, here, because the cast of this book is exactly the kind of thing I've wanted to see in SF/F for years. It's full of women, for one thing - think less 'Bechdel Test pass' and more 'Bechdel Test touchdown'. It's racially diverse, for another: Cas is of Chinese ancestry; there are several Hindu supporting characters; Santa Elena is clearly nonwhite; and perhaps most importantly in a book set on the Pacific Ocean, there are native Pacific Islander characters. I want to emphasize, especially with that last point, that this is important not just in creating a presence for different kinds of people in fiction, but also because it is in no way realistic for the cast not to be diverse. Skrutskie is representing the real world, and how that would manifest itself in a pan-Pacific pirate crew, and she does a magnificent job. And of course: Cas and Swift. There's already one review out there complaining that they were 'tricked' into reading about lesbians, so let me be clear: this book is about lesbians . (or at least two girls who are attracted to each other - one or both might be bi/pansexual; we don't know.) [image] On a personal note: One of my favorite tiny details about this book was that neither girl's sexuality was made an issue or an obstacle. Cas mentions, offhandedly, girls she'd dated in high school - and that's it; there's no anxiety from either her or Swift about the other not being attracted to girls. The process of them falling in love is treated as exactly as natural and normal as a heterosexual romance, and that was beautiful to read. The thing is, though, that this is a romance and a relationship which stacks up favorably next to most that I've read. Cas and Swift's interactions are complicated and nuanced, and they grow as individuals even as they grow together. There's a blurry line between alliance and friendship, and then friendship and romance, and the way they make these slow, unsure transitions is wholly realistic and charming. The relationship also offers a lens into the complexities of their different moral viewpoints - almost like literary foils, they push each other out of their comfort zones and into a grey area of self-examination. It's fascinating to read. The morality of the book as a whole is, as other reviewers have commented, grey. Obviously this verges into plot spoiler territory, but I will say that by the end I wasn't sure who was right or wrong, only that survival for these characters necessitated many of their actions and that, in and of itself, was as close as they'd get to rightness. I'm still not sure how I feel about some decisions made/revealed at the end - except that I want desperately to see what comes next. The biggest problem with this book is that it's so short - not that it feels incomplete, but that there is so much more that I want to see unfold in this world that doesn't fall within the scope of this narrative. I can only hope Skrutskie has a sequel in the works. In the meantime, I'm going to pre-order this one in hard copy for myself, and maybe for a few friends. (They've already been getting the sales pitch for the last six days anyway.) Here's hoping for great success in February, and in the future! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 12, 2015
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Oct 14, 2015
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Jul 06, 2015
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1515095282
| 9781515095286
| 1515095282
| 3.52
| 384
| Apr 01, 2007
| Jul 25, 2015
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it was ok
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(review to come)
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Feb 14, 2012
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Feb 15, 2012
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Paperback
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| 159582748X
| 9781595827487
| 159582748X
| 4.37
| 24,382
| Jul 05, 2011
| Jun 15, 2011
|
liked it
|
I... am not all that impressed. This collection of stories is definitely cute, don't get me wrong, but it adds very little. There were a couple stand-
I... am not all that impressed. This collection of stories is definitely cute, don't get me wrong, but it adds very little. There were a couple stand-outs - 'Relics' and 'Combustion Man on a Train' (despite the latter's ridiculous title) added nicely to Aang's character in little ways. Mostly, though, these read like brief vignettes and don't contribute that much to the overall story of the show - which is good, I suppose, since it prevents the show from feeling like there were plot holes. A few of them bridged seasons 2 and 3 nicely - they didn't really contribute anything that hadn't already been covered in flashbacks, but it was fun to read/see them anyhow. My one major complaint is that the art varied widely - sometimes it looked like screencaps from episodes that never aired, and sometimes (as in 'Reach for the Toph') it looked... amateur. I'm all for stylistic variation, but some of this came off as sloppy. Overall, though, this gets three stars more for not being extraordinary than for any particular failings. It was a lot of fun to get to see the Earth King (one of my favorite characters) again, and I also quite liked the story of how Zuko and Mai became a couple. I've always quite enjoyed them as a pair, but felt like they didn't get very much time together in the show for viewers to see what made that relationship tick; while this story doesn't add a whole lot, it helps a bit, and it's pretty cute. And of course there's a little more Iroh - "Old people represent!" made me giggle. Oh, one more thing... the 'New Recruits' story at the end was a little bit wince-inducing. I like the idea of including fan-created characters in a brief interlude, but some of them were, well... simplistically silly. I'm not sure if that's just the characters who appealed to the comic artists or if that's most of what they got when they called for submission, but either way it didn't work super well. Maybe something obviously out of character like the mini comics at the end of a volume of manga would have suited better? The art at the back, however, was absolutely gorgeous. I want some of those pieces as desktop backgrounds! And I'll definitely keep an eye out for the official art book. Full disclosure: I recieved a galley copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley. No external considerations went into this review. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Nov 26, 2011
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Nov 26, 2011
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0778313077
| 9780778313076
| 0778313077
| 4.13
| 46,800
| Dec 11, 2011
| Dec 20, 2011
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it was ok
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I'm definitely coming at this book from a different perspective than a lot of people I know, many of whom have read and loved at the very least Poison
I'm definitely coming at this book from a different perspective than a lot of people I know, many of whom have read and loved at the very least Poison Study, and often more of Maria V. Snyder's books. This is my first by her and to be honest, I'm underwhelmed. The concept is by far the strongest part of this book. Fifteen kingdoms, eleven types of magic, a land recovering from a deadly plague - glorious. While I have certain issues with the varieties of magic (they seem to almost-but-not-quite be elemental, and moon/sun magic sounds basically useless), I like that there were so many different types, and that within them there seemed to be some variation in the strength of mages. I also enjoyed that the Fifteen Kingdoms seemed to have a lot of political variation in them, though as other reviewers have pointed out, some of the systems and terms felt anachronistic. I guess that's the primary problem I had with this book: strong concepts, but just not enough explanation to make them fit. Would reading 'president' in a world filled with princes bother me if it had been elaborated upon a lot? Probably not. But when you're already asking me to accept moon and sun magicians, giant flowers that eat people, and some really wonky pacing, well, the background needs to be rock solid and putting a democracy on a continent filled with monarchies doesn't cut it. The other big thing I wanted to mention was pacing. Whee-oo, did I have trouble with the way this book was paced. One page would be a single moment that dragged on far too long, and on the next weeks would skim by. I honestly gave up completely on keeping track of time here, because it was just so erratic and jumpy. Unfortunately, the fact that I had little sense of time also meant that I had little sense of character development. There were a couple of other things that bothered me - use of modern language throughout, some typos which were far worse than I've ever seen in an ARC (including a they're/their confusion), the really strange and rocky development of the romantic relationship between Kerrick and Avry, and a lot of plot points which were never dealt with. I was disappointed that even the main problem of the book wasn't actually resolved at the end, let alone some of the other plot points that had cropped up along the way. To be honest, the book felt too short in a lot of ways - too short to develop its concept properly, too short to wrap up the plot in a tidy fashion, too short to convey the amount of time the characters spent travelling and changing to the readers. Maybe the sequel can fix a lot of these issues, but I won't go out of my way to find it first and see. It's going to take glowing reviews from other people before I return to this series. I will, however, still seek out Poison Study, since Maria V. Snyder has one heck of an imagination. Full disclosure: I recieved a galley copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley. No external considerations went into this review. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Nov 25, 2011
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Nov 25, 2011
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1613770227
| 9781613770221
| 1613770227
| 3.64
| 356
| Nov 22, 2011
| 2011
|
it was ok
|
Quick! Think of everything you don't like about medieval fantasy. Now think of things that make comic books unpleasant reading experiences. Now think
Quick! Think of everything you don't like about medieval fantasy. Now think of things that make comic books unpleasant reading experiences. Now think of all the things that have the potential to go wrong in Doctor Who. Of all three categories, this book (or at least, the first fourth as available on NetGalley) did probably about half of the things you thought of. 1. Highly stereotypical and, you know, BORING fantasy setting: check. (Somewhat explaned, but still annoying.) 2. Ridiculous clothing: check. 3. Billowing capes everywhere even when it's not useful and/or physically practical for them to be billowing as they are: check. 4. Poor art: check. (No, really, the faces... *shudder*) 5. The Doctor pushing his companion off to the side/minimizing her involvement in the plot: check. 6. Time Lord-ness used as a get-out-of-jail-free card for danger: check. 7. Random disappearing TARDIS: check. 8. Plot which feels, therefore, extremely contrived: check. This could be an interesting story if told onscreen, but it doesn't make a very good graphic novel. The art is verging on unpleasant - no, I couldn't do better, but I know several people who could and none of them have graduated college yet - and the storyline, while full of potential, depends on a passive Amy, about which I am less than enthused. Also, I was confused as to where this took place in the timeline - before the Hungry Earth double episode or after it? - and that unanswered question limited my enjoyment of the rest of the story. Maybe the other 75% of the book will improve it, but I'm not interested in finding out. Full disclosure: I recieved this book from the publisher via Netgalley. (It's my first Netgalley read!) No outside considerations went into this review. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Sep 25, 2011
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Sep 25, 2011
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Paperback
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| B004ZZP5SS
| 3.89
| 6,681
| Dec 01, 2011
| Dec 27, 2011
|
really liked it
|
I took far, far too long to read this book. It was one of the first things I was approved for on Netgalley, and I downloaded it back in September alon
I took far, far too long to read this book. It was one of the first things I was approved for on Netgalley, and I downloaded it back in September along with four other books, excited to finally have my hands on these fabulous e-galleys. Unfortunately, I overestimated my ability to read for long stretches on the tiny screen of my iPod, and so while I'd gotten over halfway through this book when it expired, that wasn't enough. The end result was that yesterday, when I decided I felt like finishing it, I had to go and jump through hoops to re-download it and search out my stopping point. I also lost all my bookmarks, so this review will be less coherent than I intended it to be. Once I'd retrieved a copy, I tore through what remained of this book in less than an hour. It is without a doubt one of the best YA paranormals I've read recently, and here is why: it avoids almost every single flaw the genre is so plagued with. For instance... 1. The heroine in your conventional Twilight/Fallen/Halo YAPNR is often an ordinary girl who we are constantly told is not pretty, despite the opinions of all the guys around her. She's shy, supposedly book-smart though her actions generally bely that, virginal and easily overcome with hormones when her love interest shows up, and really mostly just a stand-in marking where the female reader should insert herself, particularly when the book is written in first person. Not Kali D'Angelo. Oh, she's the furthest thing from it. Our first introduction to this badass chica is her beating up on hellhounds with extraordinary martial competence and no regrets. She's definitely supernatural, though she doesn't know what kind. 'Shy' is not a word that could be applied to her; rather, I would say that she is 'reserved' and more out of a conscious decision to distance herself than anything else. She's intelligent, though it's mostly street-smarts and martial know-how. (I'm not complaining; at least she makes decisions for good reasons.) Her virginity, hormones, and appearance have nothing to do with the plot. Words cannot express how happy I am for this. After the whole book, I couldn't describe Kali to you, nor could I tell you how HAWT the guys were, and I cannot overemphasize hwo great this is. Because really, if this girl is going out and killing supernatural critters every other day, why would I want to get distracted by her looks or those of her love interest? All I need is her personality. Speaking of - I love this girl's soul. She's genuninely a good person, though she doubts it every now and again. She does what she does for others, or at least she needs to believe that she does. She is strong; makes sacrifices, takes chances, puts the benefit of the general population before her own without judgement or much bitterness. If you were frustrated with Scarlet of Sisters Red for the way she dismissed non-hunters, Kali will alleviate that. The book's first major event is her luring a chupacabra from the body of someone she doesn't like into her own, counting on her unusual nature to save her but not sure that it will. She does it because it's right, and that's all it takes. 2. The love interest here, if you can even call him that, is distant and has very little effect on the plot. I couldn't describe his abs to you if you tortured me, because they're never mentioned. He doesn't smolder or have a crooked grin or whatever the fuck other love interests are doing these days. Kali doesn't melt around him or become an airhead. He's got a hint of overprotectiveness - there was one scene when he intervened in a situation that she was handling just fine, and I was worried, but that was the end of it. Their relationship had an interesting dynamic and while I wasn't really into it, I think I'm happy with how it turned out. 3. The supporting cast are teenagers and also actual people. Thank goodness. I can't possibly tell you how frustrated I've become with two-dimensional teenage characters that exhibit only the worst possible stereotypes of my age group. It's insulting, unfair, and immature on the part of the authors. The teens here are simply fabulous. Skylar is my favorite, of course, because she's spunky and funny and nothing keeps her down, but I was happiest to read about Bethany - the gorgeous, wealthy, blonde cheerleader who is for once in a hundred novels not a bitchy fashion-obsessed bimbo. She actually comes close to Skylar in my mental ranking of characters: she's smart, dry-witted, loyal, kind beneath her facade, and the kind of person I'd want to be friends with. There's also Skylar's broad array of brothers, who added a nice dimension to the cast and also made for a good, light running gag. 4. Supernatural creatures. Sparklepires? Fursploding werewolves? Fey? Angels? Nope. Try chupacabras, dragons, basilisks, kelpies, manticores, hellhounds, zombies, hydra, and more. I don't want to say too much because this is one aspect you'll probably enjoy more if you let it unfold naturally, but the supernatural creatures are wonderfully varied and the explanation for their existence is extremely interesting. The way they've been integrated into society is cool as well, and felt very believable to me. 5. The finale is... unusual. There were a couple of big surprises and Kali had to make some hard choices, but I felt like they all came from a good place and they were the right choices for her. There's also no cliffhanger to this, but instead a tidy denouement which actually made me sniffle a little and then a last chapter that feels like the lead-in to a truly badass series - one which I will definitely read. 6. Love triangle? Nope. I realized when I was reading this that I've started playing 'spot the love interests' with YA books, because there are almost always two and they're usually very identifiable. I was completely, utterly wrong here. The guy I thought would be a love interest wasn't (thank goodness) and the one I figured for a mentor figure was (not so thrilled about this, but it'll work in the end, I'm sure). It was so refreshing. And you know, in a book this light on romance even the one fellow didn't actually matter that much. Lovely. 7. The relationship between parent and child is something that many YA authors have trouble with; they resort to Disappearing Parent Syndrome in order to explain things away or let their characters do things they otherwise wouldn't have managed. Kali's dad, while not the most present of parents, is a really great guy. Explaining why would be spoilers, but let's just say that their eventual heart-to-heart made me want to give my parents big hugs. Like every parent, he's doing the best with what he has, and he's made mistakes, but his heart is really in the right place and he tries. There will be aspects of the ending that not everyone will take as easily as I did. One of the major revelations really changes the background of the book and the potential nature of the sequels; I think it opens up new territory, but that's an individual judgement call that each reader will need to make for themselves. The reason this is a four-star book and not a five: at times the narrative was repetitive/redundant, often in a way which made Kali seem momentarily frustrating. Mostly I liked her, but she sometimes assumes that everything has to do with her even when it's completely illogical. Also, I should mention one more thing (being dropped in here courtesy of my lost bookmarks from the beginning, or else I would have mentioned it earlier): Kali's emotions about the transition between her human and non-human times are intense and well-crafted. Understandably, she feels like she's losing part of herself when she makes the change, and that made her really sympathetic to me. I'm not sure this is one I'd advocate that you buy, but it does come out right around Christmas and there are worse books to get as gifts, so at the very least it deserves a place on your wishlist. Full disclosure: I recieved a galley copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley. No external considerations went into this review. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Oct 30, 2011
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Oct 12, 2010
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 1406318159
| 9781406318159
| 1406318159
| 3.88
| 4,364
| Jul 07, 2011
| Jul 07, 2011
|
really liked it
|
don't mind me, sitting here in my pit of unwritten reviews. I'll dig my way out sometime soon. But anyhow. This one was good. I took about a three hour don't mind me, sitting here in my pit of unwritten reviews. I'll dig my way out sometime soon. But anyhow. This one was good. I took about a three hour chunk of my morning to finish the last 30+% of it; it was really absorbing and I the ending was incredibly satisfying. A+ and a confirmation of my utter faith in Zoe Marriott. Proper review later. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Mar 31, 2012
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Oct 10, 2010
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Paperback
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