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| 0593102525
| 9780593102527
| 0593102525
| 3.63
| 31,779
| May 26, 2020
| May 26, 2020
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liked it
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Ultimately this falls into the category of 'I'm glad there are more queer books out there now and the more there are, the more there will be that just
Ultimately this falls into the category of 'I'm glad there are more queer books out there now and the more there are, the more there will be that just won't be for me'. I just kept tripping over the prose. It's - there's no other word for it - clunky. It felt like Wilsner never read the "This sentence has five words" quote; there's a lot of repeated, formulaic structure and not nearly enough commas for my taste. Combined with the fact that there's a lot of telling, rather than showing, especially at the beginning of the book, and I nearly DNF'd it after less than 100 pages. The romance is... alright. It gets better with time, but I confess I wasn't really swept up in the chemistry, partly because of the aforementioned telling. It's hard to connect to characters when the writing makes it feel like they're being moved about like chess pieces on the board, and I often found myself comparing it to either a script treatment for the screen or to an outline for a novel - both of which are forms of writing where additional work by writer and/or actors will flesh things out. By the end of the book I was enjoying things a little more, but in a formulaic way, more for the beats that I knew were coming than for particular investment in these specific characters. (view spoiler)[Also, I was really surprised by the quite explicit sex scene in the last chapter - while the characters having sex didn't come out of left field, the amount of description did. I mean, the whole book is confused romantic pining with nary a hint of masturbation, and then that? It felt jarring. But it did feel exactly like what would happen in a fanfic plot structure, and I caught a telltale toeing of shoes, so it makes sense in retrospect. (hide spoiler)] I think at the end I sort of felt like I'd read someone else's daydream about making out with Lucy Liu and while I relate and wholly agree with the sentiment, I don't love it as a book. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Apr 10, 2021
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Apr 10, 2021
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Paperback
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| 0553578995
| 9780553578997
| 0553578995
| 2.95
| 128
| Aug 19, 1999
| Jun 06, 2000
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it was ok
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Read as part of my ongoing shelf audit. Verdict: From the library book sale you came, and to the library book sale you shall return. There were some in Read as part of my ongoing shelf audit. Verdict: From the library book sale you came, and to the library book sale you shall return. There were some interesting ideas here, but... this book is way too muddled to make good use of them, or even to tell a story particularly effectively. Too many POV characters, too many plot threads which seem completely disparate, too many moments that feel random and too few clear explanations. To be fair, Leith was trying to depict people grappling with something which was, to them, unknowable - but honestly, after a while I just stopped trying to comprehend her bizarre, un-descriptive descriptions or figure out when Night had been introduced or follow the battle scenes. From the descriptions of the later books, it sounds like things get even more bizarre and disconnected, so I can see why this is the only fantasy series Tricia Sullivan ever published under this pseudonym; I would not want to read another. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Nov 06, 2020
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Nov 06, 2020
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0062683241
| 9780062683243
| B07MDRX81L
| 3.63
| 5,010
| Sep 30, 2019
| Oct 01, 2019
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it was ok
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Unsatisfying. That's what I keep coming back to when I think about this book, as sad as that makes me. Every strength it has ends up being a weakness w Unsatisfying. That's what I keep coming back to when I think about this book, as sad as that makes me. Every strength it has ends up being a weakness when promises go unfulfilled: the worldbuilding is intriguing, but raises so many questions it feels incomplete; relationships are hinted at but not resolved; characters receive sketchy outlines but don't get much depth; and the plot builds and builds for hundreds of pages but is resolved almost effortlessly at the end. Even the ending feels incomplete - the events of the climax actually promise far more interesting developments than anything else in the book, but there's no time for that to be explored at all. I see what Nix was going for in trying to evoke The Three Musketeers, and there are times when that really works - something about the prose, in particular, which brings it to life - but he didn't quite hit the mark. Angel Mage is too close and too far from Dumas at the same time, and perhaps the best illustration of this is in the cast: we have a Dartagnan, a Rochefort, and a Cardinal, but they don't occupy their usual roles, and the four protagonists map somewhat - but not completely - onto the Musketeers, in a way that makes their almost-closeness more distracting than anything else. The exact audience that will be drawn to this book for its Dumas-esque style is the audience most likely to struggle with this not-quite-different-enough cast. The plot failed what I think of as the 'reverse sandwich test' - the sandwich test being whether or not the reader will put the book down to wander away and make a sandwich; the reverse is whether the book is something the reader comes back to and genuinely wants to pick up. I just... didn't care enough to come back to it for weeks on end, and had to set aside time to dig in and make progress or I wouldn't have made any. When I sat down for an hour or so, it was interesting, and the pages flew by, but there's no real momentum to the plot drawing me back in. Events unfold at a glacial pace and without much of a sense of connection between one thing and another. It also doesn't help that our four protagonists are more reactive than active - and that brings me to what I suspect is the major failing in the plot architecture. Liliath. She's the antagonist... and she's the first perspective we get. Throughout the book, she continues to get POVs, and so the reader always knows what her plans are, can always see how she's several steps ahead of everyone else. Not only does it rob the book of an element of mystery, but it makes it abundantly clear to the reader how much the protagonists don't do. Each step of their journey is orchestrated by Liliath, each choice anticipated to perfection (except at the very end, which doesn't feel earned because there's no rising action to support it) and they become less protagonists, more chess pieces. There's something interesting in watching a master manipulator at work, but even that is lost because, frankly, Liliath's scheming isn't actually very complex when you get right down to it, and it never quite feels like anything big is at stake. The biggest missed opportunity, in my opinion, is Rochefort - a morally grey lesbian standing at the intersection of political and religious power, struggling with her sense of duty and a potential affection for someone she can't have a relationship with, a gifted mage with some unusual abilities which go wholly unexplained. (view spoiler)[Why is she the only one other than Dorothea who can see the shadows of Palleniel? We'll never know. (hide spoiler)] I admit I'm biased towards this type of powerful, conflicted character, but I felt she was deeply underused. Speaking of underused: this magic system. It's interesting despite its flaws (especially the fact that Nix has the hierarchy of angels backwards), but it raises far, far more questions than the book deigns to address. For one thing, despite angels being very much a tangible force and organized in tiers according to Christian angelology, religion is a weird nonentity - there's a Cardinal, yes, but nobody seems to attend church, and the word 'God' literally does not appear in the text. This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the of angelic magic: how does it work in areas like China and India, already major world powers around the era that it's set, where Christianity isn't the dominant religion? What about in the Islamic world, where portrayals of sentient beings is sometimes forbidden? And, as Dorothea asks at several points, how in the world was this magic discovered and developed? There were plenty of small details I liked: the prose, as mentioned; the way Nix portrays a society pretty much free of racism and sexism; the inclusion of a variety of queer characters. But overall... those details don't make up for the overwhelming feeling that this book just didn't have much substance, at the end of the day. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 25, 2019
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Oct 28, 2019
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Aug 25, 2019
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Kindle Edition
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| 1481450301
| 9781481450300
| 1481450301
| 3.68
| 352
| Oct 06, 2015
| Sep 15, 2015
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liked it
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As with so many anthologies, this was very much a mixed bag. I think it particularly suffered because the stories within were all reprints, so there w
As with so many anthologies, this was very much a mixed bag. I think it particularly suffered because the stories within were all reprints, so there was very little cohesion between them. It was obvious when a story had been written for a non-climate-focused project, because the authors felt the need to explain to us how, exactly, climate change was bad- not exactly necessary in the context of this anthology, because it is safe to assume that anyone who has picked up something described as an anthology of climate fiction is already rather aware. There were a few standout stories: - "Shooting the Apocalypse" by Paolo Bacigalupi: Bacigalupi had two stories here, and both were among the collection's strongest, but I think I like this one better; it had a lot of fascinating layers going on and managed to make climate disaster a powerful part of the plot while still telling a story about other conflicts. I also quite liked the way social media was integrated into the worldbuilding, which turned out to be a common theme across many of these stories. - "A Hundred Hundred Daisies" by Nancy Kress: A story with some serious heart to it, which really focused on the difficulty of maintaining relationships under the strain of slowly-unfolding disaster. It asks the question "how will we explain this to future children?" and that question sticks with you. - "Enganglement" by Vandana Singh: While the prose of this story felt weak, it was thematically very strong and had a perspective that resonated with me. It's a very clever way to tell a story about the rich interconnectivity of ecology through a human lens. - "Staying Afloat" by Angela Penrose: In a practical sense, I am a big advocate of using ancestral knowledge to solve modern ecological problems, and this story both presented that idea cleverly and was a satisfying, tidy bit of storytelling. - "The Mutant Stag at Horn Creek" by Sarah K. Castle: Definitely my favorite of the collection, even if its presentation of natural selection's effects felt rather exaggerated. Great character voice and sense of place, and successfully layered a story of climate impacts over interpersonal and societal critiques. Like "Shooting the Apocalypse", there's a lot of stuff here about how social media might impact us in the future, but it's handled a bit more sympathetically, treated more like a coping mechanism than fiddling while Rome burns. I also loved the way the world of this story has become foreign in a very slow, inexorable way - that makes the changes all the more horrifying. A couple I particularly disliked: - "The Precedent" by Sean McMullen: Aside from an awful lot of history navel-gazing, this story felt like it was rebuking younger generations for resenting the wasteful choices of older generations. Comparing 'climate victims' to the Salem Witch Trials is not a good look. - "Hot Sky" by Robert Silverberg: So, for this story to make sense, you have to believe that in a severe global warming situation where freshwater is extremely limited, San Francisco is somehow still around and powerful, and basically choose to ignore that South America exists, because apparently an iceberg valued for the fresh water it contains can float all the way north from Antarctica to California before there's any competition over it. It just felt profoundly sloppy. - "That Creeping Sensation" by Alan Dean Foster: Contained the following actual segue into a historical info-dump: As she and the corporal worked their way through the swarm, she reflected on the unexpected turn of history. Seriously? The rest were... largely mediocre. There were several which I felt could have been poignant if positioned differently in the anthology - "Quiet Town" by Jason Gurley is a small, straightforward portrait of the moment the seas rise too far for one town, but it just sort of vanishes between longer, more complicated stories. I am, in general, not impressed with John Joseph Adams' editing here. Personally, my takeaway was that I really, really need to read some of Bacigalupi's novels - and thankfully, I have a copy of The Water Knife on my shelf already. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Apr 19, 2019
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May 19, 2019
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Paperback
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| 1492647527
| 9781492647522
| 1492647527
| 3.74
| 1,600
| Aug 28, 2018
| Aug 28, 2018
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Still good, but not on the level of its predecessor. I think this is mostly because Ruin of Stars has a much more complicated plot and a LOT more info
Still good, but not on the level of its predecessor. I think this is mostly because Ruin of Stars has a much more complicated plot and a LOT more information to deliver, but because it was still Miller's second book, some of the blocking/foreshadowing problems that were evident in Mask of Shadows were real obstacles here. Review to come. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Dec 20, 2018
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Mar 16, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 1492635820
| 9781492635826
| 1492635820
| 3.69
| 47,735
| 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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| 055327418X
| 9780553274189
| 055327418X
| 4.04
| 32,924
| Sep 1983
| Sep 01, 1983
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it was ok
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After 2014’s SFWA ‘censorship� kerfuffle, I hadn’t planned on reading any David Brin� but that wasn’t something I remembered when this book showed up
After 2014’s SFWA ‘censorship� kerfuffle, I hadn’t planned on reading any David Brin� but that wasn’t something I remembered when this book showed up at the library used bookstore, and I’m weak for the idea of sentient dolphins in sci fi, so� here I am. The big ideas of this book were what intrigued me: the concept of uplift, the mystery of the Progenitors who uplifted the first other species, and the question of what the planet Kithrup had to do with anything. The problem is that, while all those big ideas are discussed, there’s just� not a lot of resolution given. Many characters are left hanging mid-plotline by the end of the book, many questions asked but not answered, and those that are given answers (like Kithrup’s history) are only shallowly explored. Overall, I left Startide Rising feeling like David Brin had made promises to his audience that he didn’t bother to keep. One of the factors that contributed to that was the sheer number of points of view. Honestly, I couldn’t even try to count the different third-person-limited (with occasional divergences into third omniscient, to my annoyance) perspectives Brin used. This meant the cast ballooned out of control rapidly, and even at the beginning it was difficult to track everything that was going on. What’s more, some perspectives didn’t even have a bearing on the plot whatsoever: several chapters were told from the POV of an alien ally to humans, who then died a few hundred pages later without having actually done anything. I found myself comparing this approach to POV with that used by Brandon Sanderson in The Stormlight Archives - while it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, I find that Sanderson’s limited main cast and brief interludes to other viewpoints worked well for me. I wish that Brin had managed something of the same grace. The unfortunate effect of the bloated cast list was that, because no one got a lot of pagetime or introspection, I just wasn’t emotionally invested in any of them. Character deaths or noble sacrifices had no resonance, because the narrative never spent enough time with them to establish them as individuals. I think the final straw for me, personally, was a marine biology failure. Brin somehow managed to completely confuse pygmy killer whales ( Feresa attenuata ) with orca whales ( Orcinus orca ). Now, I know this was published in the eighties and phylogenetic trees of Cetacea weren’t available at the time, but surely it’s not too difficult to look at those two species and realize they’re not even that closely related? And surely it’s not too much to expect a science fiction writer to actually bother to do some basic research into biology - for instance, the fact that mammal-eating orcas don’t vocalize while hunting. After that colossal mistake, it was all too easy to find other logical holes in the story. The societies of the Uplift universe carefully manage planetary resources, and yet a Terran geologist has access to atomic bombs to facilitate his research; the sexual element of the human-dolphin interactions on ٰ’s crew was redolent of John Lilly’s work; Brin completely failed to explore the patron-client relationship between humans and dolphins, even when there was ample opportunity to do so. Overall it just� it felt cluttered, incomplete, and flat. Any one or two of its plotlines could have made their own book, but together they were less than the sum of their parts. And while it’s possible that some of my questions were answered in Sundiver, after the disappointment of this book, I’m not inclined to bother reading anything else of Brin’s. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 23, 2016
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Dec 17, 2016
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Nov 23, 2016
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Mass Market Paperback
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| B0DWVVKM9B
| 3.75
| 28,654
| Feb 07, 2017
| Feb 07, 2017
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did not like it
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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
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| 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
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| 1606908855
| 9781606908853
| 1606908855
| 3.59
| 22,409
| Jun 21, 2016
| Jul 12, 2016
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liked it
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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
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| B0DSZX9YVC
| 3.61
| 3,521
| Feb 04, 2011
| Feb 05, 2011
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it was ok
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Meh. There are debut novels that need a final polish, and then there are books that flop at the 'finding the story' phase, and sadly this is one of the Meh. There are debut novels that need a final polish, and then there are books that flop at the 'finding the story' phase, and sadly this is one of the second kind. There are concepts here that might be interesting, but the plot is muddled and lacks innovation. This is far from the first "girl secretly has Super Special Magic Powers" story out there, and while I think Jensen may have been reaching for interesting issues regarding imperialism, slavery, and psychology, she never quite hit the mark. The major plot events were obvious: betrayal, romance, reveal; nothing that was actually a surprise. The ending tries to hint at deeper, more complicated machinations behind the scenes, but it's too little and too late. The Goose Girl does a very similar plot much better, with more polish, a better romance, and actual friendships between peers. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Mar 16, 2016
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Mar 21, 2016
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Paperback
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| B0DSZSTD2N
| 4.02
| 3,551
| Jan 01, 2011
| Jan 01, 2011
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liked it
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First things first: for the uninitiated, this is the novel version of , a 14 year-old webcomic with 3 Hugo wins under its belt. It's a wack
First things first: for the uninitiated, this is the novel version of , a 14 year-old webcomic with 3 Hugo wins under its belt. It's a wacky steampunk story with a visual trend towards pinup anatomy, which makes it hard to get into for some, but the story develops interestingly and is well worth the effort. If you pick up the books and find yourself wanting to know what happens next - the comic is free! Go read it! Review-wise: I've read the comic, but the last time I was caught up was... let me check. 2012, actually. I have a tendency to binge-read and then ignore webcomics for a while; so it goes. Anyhow, for obvious reasons, I've retained a lot of the major components of the story (IE, Agatha's parentage), but few of the details. This was a surprisingly effective refresher course, and an enjoyable, if quick, read. The part I like best about this whole series is still the concept of the Spark, the quality of advanced intelligence and occasionally-lowered decision-making capabilities with which some people in this world are blessed/cursed. The effect it has on the structure of Europan society (fracturing political systems and fostering smaller states ruled by individual Sparks) and on the environment in which ordinary people live (tiny mammoths in the sewer? must be Tuesday) is the right balance of off-the-wall and fairly logical. Plus, the Spark is just a damn fun idea. It's a superpower which is as much a danger to its wielder as anyone else, and there are a number of ethical considerations which go along with its existence that the story does raise. Other excellent things: the Jagers. Love the accent, love the attitudes, love their hat obsession. They've always been my faves in the comics and that doesn't change in print. Now - the most important thing about this book is probably how it compares to the original webcomic format. The bad news is that there are some structural/grammatical problems, especially sentence fragments and scenes whose pacing worked for a visual format, but is too slow in prose. Also, I found the book to be a much speedier read, which meant I was more aware of how rapidly the romantic subplot developed and consequently more annoyed with its existence. The good news is that there's a lot more character and worldbuilding background information available in the book. Obviously, a visual medium doesn't fare well with long digressions into the protagonist's head, but it's kind of nice to get a better view of Agatha's thoughts and reactions than what can be conveyed via facial expressions. The Kindle edition is no longer free (as it was when I picked it up), so if you have to pick between the comic and the book, right now I'd say go for the comic. However, if webcomics aren't your thing (I'm sure there are some reasons why, though I can't think of any), this book does a great job of conveying the same story, and as long as you can accept the weirdness for what it is, you'll probably enjoy it. ...more |
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1
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Feb 08, 2016
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Feb 10, 2016
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Feb 08, 2016
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ebook
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| 1312758619
| 9781312758612
| 1312758619
| 3.50
| 2,270
| Jan 15, 2012
| unknown
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did not like it
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Nope. I kept trying and trying and at this point I really need to cut my losses and walk away. DNF at 27%. This books' biggest flaw is its prose. Dear Nope. I kept trying and trying and at this point I really need to cut my losses and walk away. DNF at 27%. This books' biggest flaw is its prose. Dear god, its prose. She was too young, too young for him to behold in the nude! And I could go on. I might forgive this from the isolated mermaid princesses, but the book is riddled with this kind of crap - human dialogue, mermaid dialogue, and regular old narrative prose. You know how some kids, upon figuring out what a thesaurus is, start randomly replacing words in their writing with 'synonyms' they think make it look more intelligent? That's this book. That's exactly what it reminds me of. Then there's the sexism/slut shaming. This book is coated with it. Our Heroines may dance in a strip club - but they aren't strippers, oh no. They've adopted those women's method of making money, but it's made very clear that they should't be associated with them at all. No big deal, just take advantage of a market created and maintained by other women and abuse them for having done so. The sexism is at times blatant: Aazuria has a gratingly poorly written confrontation with another female character in which we are constantly told how the other woman is 'embarrassed by the feminine appearance of the girl, and her elegant mannerisms' and 'was suddenly conscious of her own ragged jeans, flannel shirt, and manly shouting'. Because self-confidence can only ever come from femininity! And femininity makes some women better than others! not to even touch on the agonizing, moronic debate about the color of the ocean the two immediately get into. It's a manufactured catfight and it's gag-worthy. At other times it's subtle: Trevain pays Aazuria for a 'private lap dance' and then only asks to talk with her... but the conversation quickly turns to him and remains there; her only function in the room is to admire and titillate him. I can't put up with this anymore. What a waste of time. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Oct 19, 2015
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Oct 19, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 131032462X
| 9781310324628
| 131032462X
| 4.12
| 1,355
| May 08, 2015
| May 08, 2015
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it was ok
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2.5 stars, rounded down because I left this book with a sense of... incompleteness. I have to agree with this review's assessment that this book reads 2.5 stars, rounded down because I left this book with a sense of... incompleteness. I have to agree with this review's assessment that this book reads like an early draft brought in to a writing group. Their critique is a lot more detailed than I'm going to get into here, but the takeaway is the same. Technically, the writing often lacked polish; the delivery of information was stilted at best; and the plot... meandered, to put it kindly. I wanted to like this book, really I did. You all know at this point how I feel about f/f, dragons, and medieval fantasy - at least, I feel like you should know this. If not: I love all three of these things, and a book which promised to deliver all three should have been a shoo-in favorite for me. The thing is that Dragonoak just... failed to convey information. Flat-out, that's the issue I had here. I don't have an issue with worldbuilding-heavy books, and I'm in favor of the school of thought that advises not just infodumping to acquaint the reader with the world, but at the same time... it's not easy to read a book where, from practically the first page, you feel like you missed the memo on something important. Partly because of the way information was doled out, and partly because Rowan, the POV character, was almost constantly in the dark, I had the sense of never actually being caught up with what was going on. Now, to a degree I'm willing to deal with not knowing things because the protagonist doesn't - but the amount that wasn't made clear about Rowan herself does not get a pass on those grounds. To be perfectly frank: there was so much withheld about Rowan, for so long (why was she ostracized by her village? what are her powers? What the hell is society's beef with necromancers, who from what we're shown seem to mostly be super-healers?) that I could never connect with her as a character. Too much was held back for me to develop a sense of who she was and what she'd experienced, let alone her growth. Because her experiences in the village were cagily withheld, any steps she takes towards growing away from them aren't impactful. There's just not enough emotional depth here for anything to count, honestly. That said: Farren definitely gets props for writing a diverse fantasy. Queer characters, characters of color, trans and nonbinary characters - they're all here, integrated without a second thought into pretty much every society we see. And this isn't a case of well-meaning but rockily written representation: this is the smoothest aspect of the book, I think. (I would argue that as of this volume, Ran is not confirmed asexual - her species reproduces asexually, but that's different from the identity of asexuality, a distinction that, as an asexual biologist, is important to me.) The thing is, after all that, I still kind of want to read the sequel. Partly that's because I want to understand, partly because I'm invested in some characters (Ran) and the consequences of others' actions (Katja, because what the heck). But I'm not... interested enough to pay $8 for it, so it's probably never gonna happen. I don't really have time/money to spend on another installment wherein I understand virtually nothing. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Feb 03, 2016
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Oct 14, 2015
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ebook
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| 0330493744
| 9780330493741
| 0330493744
| 4.02
| 82,536
| Jun 23, 2001
| Sep 05, 2003
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it was ok
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TW for this review: long discussion of rape and consent. Edit: No, one more thing. WHERE ARE THE CONTRACEPTIVES. WHERE. Edit x2: Is it bothering anyone TW for this review: long discussion of rape and consent. Edit: No, one more thing. WHERE ARE THE CONTRACEPTIVES. WHERE. Edit x2: Is it bothering anyone else that Phedre's name is apparently pronounced close to 'FAY-dra', but the accent on the first e is an accent grave? as opposed to an accent aigu, which would actually produce that hard 'a' sound in French? Because it's bothering me. If you're gonna do expy!France, don't fuck up the language. What's written there is closer to 'Fedruh'. Edit x3: I stand corrected. I first encountered this book when I was much younger and just getting into Orson Scott Card's work - they're shelved next to each other in most bookstores and libraries, and after a while I got curious about the huge books with the rather prominently placed half-naked women on them. Reading the dust jackets, I concluded a few things: 1. that these were Sex Books; 2. that the main character would get raped, probably repeatedly; and 3. that they were not for me. I was, as it turns out, correct on all counts. A friend of mine convinced me to give them a shot this year, insisting that the political intrigue was fascinating and the sex wasn't that bad, really. I don't like gainsaying my friends, especially in an area where they objectively have more knowledge than I do, so I agreed, tracked down an ebook, and slogged through it. I came out the other side with... well, I guess I can argue back if anyone tries to convince me to read them again. There were two major disappointments for me in this book: court intrigue and consent. Consent is, obviously, the more important one, so let's talk about that first. One of the interesting things about this book is that it's written as if Phedre is looking back on the events of her life - there's a lot of "if only I had known then" which, believe you me, gets annoying. What this means, though, is that there's no room for character development to change perspective. The perspective of the narrator is that of adult Phedre and is cast as knowledgeable, omniscient as a result of hindsight. I mention this because, were this not the case, some of Carey's choices could be explained by Phedre's lack of knowledge or self-reflection in earlier stages of her life - but that's not an option. Maybe it's an asexual thing, to be hyper-tuned to situations of dubious consent and grooming? I definitely seem to be in the minority both here and with regards to Deathless; I can only guess that, because compulsory sexuality is so inherently threatening to me, it stands out more than it does for allo people? The Night Court runs on child grooming. They raise kids from infancy in a situation where sex work is normalized, start teaching them about it sometimes as young as six, and initiate them at 13. (not that they weren't sexual objects before then - a 10 year-old boy is once told that "They'll be marking their calendars until you come of age".) Now, here's the thing: I don't believe there's anything wrong with choosing sex work freely. However, the Night Court and its influence are coercive - we see this in Alcuin, who nearly gets himself killed trying to make his marque and get out of his contract, and earlier in a comment a Valerian House adept makes regarding the use of flechettes as a sex toy: "He gave an involuntary tremor beside me and his voice changed. 'I hate them.'" Both of these characters have clearly been put into sexual situations in which they weren't comfortable, and continued to participate as 'Servants of Naamah' nonetheless. That's coercion, not consent. And then there's Phedre, who gets pleasure in pain, and so whose contracts always include a safeword. Which she then never uses, even when a client burns her skin with a poker. The thing about this is - yes, technically speaking, it's possible for someone to have a safeword and never encounter a situation that crosses their boundaries. But that doesn't work here. This whole situation is constructed; Carey chose to give Phedre a safeword but never to show her using it. This means we never see her exercising control over her assignations, nor do we get a demonstration that the nobles of Terre d'Ange would actually respect her choice to end a scene/encounter. The safeword, unused (view spoiler)[except for when Melisande orders her to use it (hide spoiler)], has no power. Finally: the handling of rape in this book. As I said, I anticipated it and rightly so, but what I didn't anticipate was Carey's choice to draw a division between kinds of rape. Minor spoilers: Terrible things happen and Phedre gets drugged by the series antagonist and sent to be a slave to the not!Germans over the border. Before she's sent away, though, the antagonist rapes her. Well. I say 'rape', because she was drugged and bound and never asked for consent, and because the sex was literally used as a coercive attempt to get information from her. What Phedre - and thereby Carey - says is this: What she did to me that last night... she would have ended it, if I'd given the signale. I do believe that. It was my choice to withhold it. So, when someone feels they can't safeword out of a situation because of other pressures, that somehow becomes consensual? Since when is rape defined more by whether the attacker will stop if the victim gives them what they want, rather than by the fact that they started against someone's will in the first place? This is made worse by the way that Phedre's hindsight is used to emphasize it: "It was my choice". 'Choice' it might nominally be, but consent can't be freely given when the choice is weighted with the lives of people you love and the stability of an entire kingdom. 'Submit to assault or betray your friends and family' isn't a balanced decision at all. The entire setting is built on the idea of "Love as thou wilt" being the guiding precept of the land, and while I sort of see where Carey was going with that idea, it just wasn't carefully considered enough. (For a smaller example, as other reviewers have pointed out, 'whore' is still an insult in this culture even though one of their minor deities was literally a prostitute by trade.) If compulsory sexuality is a problem in the real world, it's even more so here, where everyone is expected to be just merrily fucking their way along. (Well - at least, the people we see most of are. Which are the nobles and wealthy merchants. Does 'love as thou wilt' extend to the peasantry? Does Carey care? We may never know.) Right. So. Consent: F-. Abject failure. On to the thing that persuaded me to read this book: the promise of court intrigue! [image] I finally put my finger on why this book's 'intrigue' didn't work for me, and it's this: there's only ever one thing in play. Everyone wants the throne. Right. I get it. But because the major players all have one sole interest, they rarely interact in complicated ways - they're all just rivals for a single thing. Nobody is, say, out to get a better trade agreement with so-and-so, but will trade a favor for a favor even though they don't care about the rest. The 'machinations' at work here are ehh... I'd say maybe four steps at most? This is partly because none of them are playing within the system (if there is a system - we got very little info on the actual political structure of TdA) and they're all just gathering up armies to smash it from outside, but it just had no spark. The intrigue was, well, unintriguing. There's little more to say about it because it was just so damn shallow and dull. I'm still a bit iffy on giving this book two stars, but for the moment that rating stands. The reason for the second: the last quarter or so was pretty much straight up epic fantasy fare (clashing armies, desperate alliances) and that, despite everything else, was pretty enjoyable. Not that there weren't issues involved in those parts - see 'Phedre has hardly any close relationships that don't involve sleeping together' and 'sex is the solution to every problem' - but the pace picked up. So, extra star for that. Oh god, and before I end this review: the writing and the constant insistence that Terre d'Ange is the greatest thing that's ever existed, and all D'Angelines are supernaturally beautiful and no one else will ever be as pretty as them and blah blah fucking blah. Ugh. Infuriating. By the end of the book I about wanted TdA to get razed to the ground by invaders - though I suppose then all the characters would just wax poetic about its lost beauty. You can't win against this arrogance. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 10, 2015
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Apr 29, 2015
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Apr 10, 2015
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Paperback
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| B004CFAN1A
| 4.10
| 88
| Nov 14, 2010
| unknown
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it was ok
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Post-nuclear-apocalypse furries wielding magic crystals. Honestly. I'm struggling to talk about this book without just... pointing to that sentence up Post-nuclear-apocalypse furries wielding magic crystals. Honestly. I'm struggling to talk about this book without just... pointing to that sentence up there and raising my eyebrows. I should probably play nice because this was a Kindle freebie but really. Post-nuclear-apocalypse furries, I swear, what the actual hell. Okay, okay. An attempt at a real review, in some form. - Plot: Balanced between 'completely transparent' and 'where the fuck did that come from and why didn't you bother to foreshadow it', with the former dominating the earlier portions of the book and the latter taking up much of the conclusion. Note that when I say 'balanced' I don't mean that it all came out well, 'cause it didn't: the stuff that was completely obvious was often ignored by the characters, which left them looking stupid, and the things that came out of left field were crucial to the plot, which meant pretty much the whole conclusion of the book just had to be swallowed whole. Also, the epilogue jumps two years and just roughly summarizes the interval, in which all kinds of interesting things and developments happened, in a few paragraphs. Really? - Setting: Grandiose self-aware infodumps that really, honestly, read like a child's history essay at points. Completely inconsistent technology/awareness thereof - no one is confused when ancient secrets about nuclear physics become a topic of discussion, yet they're still predominantly wielding swords and bows. Is this supposed to be a medieval-tech society? Is it industrial? Is it electronic? I HAVE NO IDEA, and apparently neither did the author. - Writing: Started off on a bad foot with countries being referred to as "sovereigns" (that means ruler, not nation) and carried on from there with words that were either incorrectly applied or just plain made up. "Malefically" remains my favorite of the ones that don't actually exist. - Characters: Stock fantasy tropes, occasionally with a side of annoying (whatsisface the raccoon) or just plain dumb (the guy who, given the opportunity to kill his lifelong rival and one of the major antagonists, FAILED TO STAB THE DUDE AND NECESSITATED YET ANOTHER LONG DRAWN-OUT SWORDFIGHT WHICH ALMOST KILLED HIM). Relationships were predictable and uncomplicated, and I just generally don't give a fuck. Basically: If you want sword and sorcery with woodland creatures, read Redwall. If you want innovative epic fantasy, read any number of other series - if it's the young female protagonist who must learn to master her powers that gets you, I suggest The Final Empire. But at the end of the day there isn't enough originality in the concept nor quality in the execution to make this one worth your while. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 28, 2015
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Apr 05, 2015
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Mar 28, 2015
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0441757227
| 9780441757220
| 0441757227
| 3.57
| 957
| Jun 01, 1991
| Jan 01, 1991
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it was ok
|
I gave this book a shot on the word of an Alaskan friend who's a fan of Stabenow's work - though I think she likes the mysteries, not this stuff. Mayb
I gave this book a shot on the word of an Alaskan friend who's a fan of Stabenow's work - though I think she likes the mysteries, not this stuff. Maybe those are better. I certainly hope so, because this book just wavers back and forth between 'mediocre' and 'terrible', and even for a first novel it strikes me as weak. The one strength of the novel - despite Stabenow's introduction explaining that she was worried most about getting it wrong - is actually the scientific research that went into it; even when I couldn't follow it all, and even though it was often dished out in infodumps, it was clear that she'd put a lot of time and energy into getting the tech right, or at least logical. It is also abundantly clear that she didn't want to leave much of that out of the reader's sight - hence the infodumps. This book's primary writing flaw is one of 'too much of a good thing': in this case, straightforwardness. Too many infodumps on tech or people; characters who are similarly straightforward and uncomplicated, as nuanced as cardboard cutouts. Stabenow makes an effort to have a diverse cast, which is nice, but it goes little further than food/accent/looks. There is little sense of 'culture' to this book except for Star's - which is, of course, the secular Alaskan Libertarian-ness with which she (and at a guess, Stabenow) was raised. Then there's the 'romance'. Honestly, this is also a problem with Star's character - in that the 'romance' arc undercuts her characterization at critical points. For someone brusque, professional, in control and strict, she never chastises her love interest (who is also her employee) for his forward behavior when they've only known each other for days. He brazenly flirts with her and touches her, and she barely even responds, let alone point out how unprofessional his behavior is. Whether it's welcome is one thing - Star's character as it's established doesn't seem to be one that would permit this guy's behavior, and yet she does. In fact, she tolerates his repeated violations of her rules and orders, and even praises him for some of them. His behavior, to her, is above reproach. To me, as a reader, it was completely out of line. He picked her up and shook her when she criticized him for making a rash decision. What the fuck? (view spoiler)[and that's not even getting into Star letting a 10 year-old come with her into a war zone and then letting same 10 year-old go gallivanting off with a previously unknown alien race without even telling her parents first, and then utterly failing to be sympathetic to the loss those parents feel afterwards. Did I mention the 10 year-old is Star's niece? (hide spoiler)] I'm guessing by the fact that this book 'sank without a trace' according to the author bio (what a terrible decision to include that in end of the book in question) that this isn't representative of Stabenow's entire body of work, but damn if it doesn't make me less inclined to find out any time soon. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jan 24, 2015
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Jan 24, 2015
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Paperback
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| B00EFBE1R8
| 4.05
| 19
| Aug 08, 2013
| Aug 08, 2013
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it was ok
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This book doesn't know what it is. Is it a story about a woman dealing with the idea that her entire family, and indeed her entire society, has been w
This book doesn't know what it is. Is it a story about a woman dealing with the idea that her entire family, and indeed her entire society, has been wiped out by a nuclear holocaust? Is it a story about a man trying to make up for past misdeeds and right wrongs against him? Is it about the two of them coming together? Or is it just the opening sally to a larger series spanning multiple planets? WHO EVEN KNOWS? The biggest absence I felt in this book was, distinctly, Annie's reaction to the idea of everything she knew having been destroyed. Oh, sure, she cried herself to sleep sometimes (a lot, to the point where the phrase got annoying - and while I'm at it, so did the word 'sneer'), but there was never really any investigation of her emotions. The deepest insight we got into her reaction was at the beginning of the book, when she's still on Earth and packing to leave the city; but once she reaches Tahldia, she seems to throw herself into her new world and its conflicts without much thought for what she's just gone through. It doesn't even read like denial, either, because she does think of it briefly from time to time, but never in a way that conveys pain, shock, disbelief, or really any emotional response. As for Tahldia, which quickly overtook everything reminiscent of Earth: all I can really say is 'meh'. It's framed as something Annie adapts for an RPG, and it pretty much reads like standard RPG fare. There's elves, dwarves, dragons, gryphons, demons, mages, and human kingdoms - even magic crystals! The only concept that felt more creative was the idea of warlocks, which a) wasn't explored very thoroughly, likely because this was obviously set up for a sequel and b) wound up, when more information was revealed, being extremely overpowered. What I will say in this book's favor is this: it's an easy read, and fairly engaging. I made it through the whole thing, and if it had been longer (and it probably would have been more satisfying if so) I'd have certainly read more. However, since finishing it I've had a chance to look back, and I don't think I care enough to pick up a sequel. This was a one-time-only thing. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Dec 22, 2014
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Jan 05, 2015
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Kindle Edition
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| 1453860959
| 9781453860953
| 1453860959
| 3.96
| 18,452
| Sep 28, 2010
| Oct 06, 2010
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it was ok
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This book is ridiculous. You know it's ridiculous, because the synopsis throws our protagonist in with a rock star in a zombie apocalypse. It is, in f
This book is ridiculous. You know it's ridiculous, because the synopsis throws our protagonist in with a rock star in a zombie apocalypse. It is, in fact, even more so: the heroine winds up with a bizarrely loyal lioness following her around, wanders through Las Vegas, etc etc etc. The rock star falls in love with her (of course), there are conveniently fueled cars whenever they need them (of course), the heroine is capable of black-belt-level hand-to-hand combat with zombies (of course)... it's just all completely over the top. And y'know, as a power fantasy? as something that was probably fun to write and is fun for some people to read? that's totally fine. It's not what I'd call a good book, but it's far from toxic the way a lot of mainstream YA is, so I'm not gonna rag on it too hard. It's silly, and tbh that's okay. (the one thing that really bugged me, though, was the geography - as someone who lives in the Western US, it was all wrong. The amount of territory they crossed, the descriptions of it - it all rang totally false. Obviously Ms. Hocking doesn't live out here, buuuuut if she wants to use it as a setting, it would behoove her to do some more research.) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Dec 22, 2014
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Jan 02, 2015
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Paperback
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| 0593072693
| 9780593072691
| 0593072693
| 3.98
| 97,395
| Jul 08, 2014
| Jul 17, 2014
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liked it
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I've spent about half the day trying to figure out what to say about this book, and I'm still not sure. Everyone on my feed rapidly fell into either '
I've spent about half the day trying to figure out what to say about this book, and I'm still not sure. Everyone on my feed rapidly fell into either 'loved it' or 'hated it', but I find myself in this awkward in-between state. There were a lot of things in this book that frustrated me, a lot of first-author flaws... but there was a lot that was compelling, interesting, and well-developed too. So: a nice, middling three stars it is. There is one factor which I think significantly impacted my reading of this book compared to others', and that's that I knew the background of the setting going in. Honestly, that was the most intriguing aspect of the book for me - the idea of a post-modern society somehow interacting with magical things and reverting to an earlier state of a society has a lot of potential. Knowing that - expecting it - meant that I was hunting for references to our present day as Easter Eggs, rather than being thrown out of the story by their unexpected inclusion. I will grant, though, that especially going in aware of what the Crossing was, I was disappointed that very little was revealed in the actual book. What I knew going in was basically what I knew coming out. There's obviously a lot more here to tell (and several hints dropped that discovering more will be part of Kelsea's story). As for the plot... this is where a lot of my internal conflict comes in. This book clearly has the pacing of a first novel: there's a huge chunk of it in which goals are vague, information is withheld from Kelsea (and by extension, from the reader), and it feels like very little progress is being made. In the broader context of a series this makes sense, but it makes the reading experience early on somewhat frustrating. Once goals and antagonists are more clearly defined the pacing picks up significantly, but this doesn't happen until the last third or so of the book, at which point the story gets significantly stronger. Information being withheld from Kelsea is a component of a larger problem, and by far the thing that I found most frustrating: the constant disrespect of people around her, especially her own guard, for Kelsea herself. I find myself of two minds here, too: on the one hand, there are some possible reasons for their behavior and some narrative reasoning behind the choice; on the other hand, it is frustrating to read both because Kelsea is the reader's window onto the story, and because she is being established by the chapter-heading epigraphs as a legendary figure. It's difficult to reconcile this idea of 'The Glynn Queen' posited by these quotes with the girl whose own guards refuse to tell her about recent events in the kingdom she's about to rule. (view spoiler)[This is a huge part of why I never grew attached to Lazarus/Mace: he repeatedly and flatly told Kelsea that he would not obey her authority, even long after she started to gain the respect of others. Moreover, his arguments were often completely illogical - what does it mean for someone to claim 'being a Queen's Guard' to his Queen as a reason he won't obey her orders? He also often directly impedes her development/assumption of her authority by cutting her feet out from under her, as when he confiscated her uncle's belongings and then, when Kelsea objected to her name being used while she was unconscious: "Still, it's my name. Maybe you could wait for me to wake up next time." Mace doesn't allow her control, unless he already has the situation in line to limit her options and/or do whatever he wanted in the first place. She tries to take authority and responsibility for actions done in her name, and he cows her back into 'place'. This is, moreover, repeated - especially notable when he refuses to tell her about 'details' in how the Guard defends her life, with the strong implication that this involves killing people. There's an argument to be made here that this is part of a character arc for both Mace and Kelsea - that he is in the process of learning to respect her and that, until her show at the pass at the end, she hasn't 'earned' that respect. However, this still requires Mace to be incredibly resistant to growth, which doesn't exactly make him easy to like. (hide spoiler)] The other aspect of this is that withholding information can have dramatic effect, but it can also backfire when the reader feels like the information has no good in-world reason to be withheld, but is simply done for dramatic effect. Such was the case here, especially for the early portions of the book. It makes no sense for Kelsea to be uninformed about the state of her kingdom... except to preserve for the reader the shock factor of their arrival in New London. I feel like I should address the aspects of Kelsea's personality that many readers found frustrating, but honestly there's little I can say. I was bothered by a lot of them as well (especially her fixation on appearances), but... by the end of the book, I feel that she's grown and matured so significantly that I can no longer hold that against her. In light of that final segment of the book, it seems more and more likely that her more frustrating character traits are intentional in order to give her room for growth. The sequel is where this will play out, but I remain optimistic. Kelsea's politics, though - that bothered me. Not for what they were, as I agreed with her ideologically, but for how out of place they felt in the setting and the problems she faces. She had a political cast I've seen a lot from people in our age group on Tumblr, which was jarring in this context. One thing that will, I think, draw YA readers to this book: there's no love triangle for once! There are, in fact, no clear love interests at all. (view spoiler)[Personally, I'm rooting for Pen - there were some subtle tender gestures near the end that made me think he might be having ~feeeeeelings~. The obvious choice is the Fetch, but a) he's basically a magic zombie and b) I find it hard to root for a potential LI whose first conversation with the protagonist included him saying she was too unattractive for him to have raped her. His smile widened. "But you needn't worry, girl. You're too plain for my tastes." Nah, no thanks. (hide spoiler)] The lack of romance subplot really improves the book as a whole: it keeps the focus on Kelsea and external conflicts, and it makes a nice break from the formulaic norm of much YA. Would I recommend it? I'm honestly not sure. For a lot of people, clearly, this has been a frustrating and unpleasant reading experience; for others it's been wonderful. I can see where both sides are coming from, and I don't think this is a book that could ever be blanket-recced. For people who are on the fence: I suggest waiting until reviews start coming for the sequel. The first book has potential; the sequel is where we'll see how well Johansen builds on it. I'm looking forward to doing so. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Feb 24, 2015
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Jul 11, 2014
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 3.63
|
liked it
|
Apr 10, 2021
|
Apr 10, 2021
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|
| 2.95
|
it was ok
|
Nov 06, 2020
|
Nov 06, 2020
|
|||||
|
| 3.63
|
it was ok
|
Oct 28, 2019
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Aug 25, 2019
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|||||
|
| 3.68
|
liked it
|
Apr 19, 2019
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May 19, 2019
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|||||
|
| 3.74
|
Dec 20, 2018
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Mar 16, 2018
|
||||||
|
| 3.69
|
it was ok
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Mar 27, 2017
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Feb 25, 2017
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|||||
|
| 4.04
|
it was ok
|
Dec 17, 2016
|
Nov 23, 2016
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|||||
|
| 3.75
|
did not like it
|
Jan 02, 2017
|
Nov 04, 2016
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|||||
|
| 3.77
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did not like it
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Jul 2016
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Jun 20, 2016
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|||||
|
| 3.59
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liked it
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May 04, 2016
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May 04, 2016
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|||||
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| 3.61
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it was ok
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Mar 16, 2016
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Mar 21, 2016
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| 4.02
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liked it
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Feb 10, 2016
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Feb 08, 2016
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|||||
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| 3.50
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did not like it
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Oct 19, 2015
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Oct 19, 2015
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|||||
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| 4.12
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it was ok
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Feb 03, 2016
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Oct 14, 2015
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|||||
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| 4.02
|
it was ok
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Apr 29, 2015
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Apr 10, 2015
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|||||
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| 4.10
|
it was ok
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Apr 05, 2015
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Mar 28, 2015
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|||||
|
| 3.57
|
it was ok
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Jan 24, 2015
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Jan 24, 2015
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|||||
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| 4.05
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it was ok
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Dec 22, 2014
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Jan 05, 2015
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|||||
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| 3.96
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it was ok
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Dec 22, 2014
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Jan 02, 2015
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|||||
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| 3.98
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liked it
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Feb 24, 2015
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Jul 11, 2014
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