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| 9781476708850
| B0088P0JJQ
| 3.61
| 183
| Nov 20, 2012
| Nov 20, 2012
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liked it
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First, the disclaimer: This is essentially a romance anthology, and I’m not a fan of romance novels. I’m also not that crazy for the short story forma
First, the disclaimer: This is essentially a romance anthology, and I’m not a fan of romance novels. I’m also not that crazy for the short story format, although sometimes they make a nice change of pace in small doses. So why on Earth did I read this? I read it for the Robin Hobb story which is set in the series I’m currently reading. Since there are only five stories in the anthology, I’m just going to write a brief review for each of them. The Marrying Maid by Jo Beverley This one wasâ€� bizarre. For reasons explained (eventually) in the story, Rob must marry and have sex with a pre-determined woman before his 25th birthday or he and his entire family will die. At the beginning of the story, he finally finds the correct woman, Martha, when his time is almost out. Even if I was a fan of romance stories, I don’t think I would have enjoyed this one. The desperation of Rob and the reluctance of Martha made the story uncomfortable, and not at all romantic. 2 stars. Blue Boots by Robin Hobb This was the story that I read the anthology for. It’s set in the Six Duchies from her Elderlings series, but familiarity with the series isn’t needed to understand the story. Somebody unfamiliar with it probably wouldn’t even realize it was set in a larger series. It’s a fairly straight-forward romance, with some of what I would consider to be typical romance tropes. The romance took place between characters who barely knew each other, so I never really bought into it. It’s written well enough, so I might have enjoyed this more if I was a romance reader. I think Hobb is great at writing characters, and that showed in this story. However, it really »å¾±»å²Ô’t add any new depth to the Six Duchies setting for me. 3 stars. You, and You Alone by Jacqueline Carey This was the story that made me sit and stare at my Kindle for a minute after I finished it. I think I liked it, but it was tragic. The reader knows it’s going to be tragic from the very beginning, so that wasn’t surprising, but I actually got a little invested in the relationship in this one. I think what really helped this one feel more real was that the story takes place over several years and we see their ups and downs. There’s also a little more to this story than just romance; there’s a tiny hint of political intrigue as well. I haven’t yet read Carey’s Kushiel series, but it’s been on my to-read list for a while so I enjoyed getting a taste of her writing. I’m pretty sure this was set in that series, because I recognized some proper names from the book titles. I occasionally had the feeling that this story had a lot more meaning and relevance to a bigger picture than what I was grasping due to being unfamiliar with the setting. I’ll have to re-read this once I do finally read the series. Oh, and my read of The Iliad earlier this year paid off because there were a few references to it. :) 3.5 stars. Under/Above the Water by Tanith Lee This story »å¾±»å²Ô’t do anything for me at all. I’m not entirely sure why, but I »å¾±»å²Ô’t buy into the story and I »å¾±»å²Ô’t feel any connection to the characters. I can’t even think of more to say than that, which in itself probably speaks best for the lack of impression this made on me. 2 stars. Demon Lover by Cecelia Holland In the first paragraph of this story, a demon is essentially trying to rape the main character. So my initial reaction was, “Oooookay…â€� But actually, once it got started, the story captured my interest. The romance »å¾±»å²Ô’t have a lot of substance nor did it have much appeal but, by this point in the anthology, I wasn’t really expecting it to. I think short stories are probably not the best vehicle for believable romances. Not for what I as a reader would consider believable, anyway. I might have been interested in a longer version of this story with more focus on the other aspects of the setting aside from the romance. 3 stars. So those star ratings average out to 2.7, which mathematically-speaking should be rounded down to 2.5. However, I’m going to round it up to 3 based on two things: 1) the strength of the Carey story which I did debate giving 4 stars and 2) an acknowledgement that I really wasn’t the right audience for this anthology, and I knew that going in but chose to read it anyway. Merged review: First, the disclaimer: This is essentially a romance anthology, and I’m not a fan of romance novels. I’m also not that crazy for the short story format, although sometimes they make a nice change of pace in small doses. So why on Earth did I read this? I read it for the Robin Hobb story which is set in the series I’m currently reading. Since there are only five stories in the anthology, I’m just going to write a brief review for each of them. The Marrying Maid by Jo Beverley This one wasâ€� bizarre. For reasons explained (eventually) in the story, Rob must marry and have sex with a pre-determined woman before his 25th birthday or he and his entire family will die. At the beginning of the story, he finally finds the correct woman, Martha, when his time is almost out. Even if I was a fan of romance stories, I don’t think I would have enjoyed this one. The desperation of Rob and the reluctance of Martha made the story uncomfortable, and not at all romantic. 2 stars. Blue Boots by Robin Hobb This was the story that I read the anthology for. It’s set in the Six Duchies from her Elderlings series, but familiarity with the series isn’t needed to understand the story. Somebody unfamiliar with it probably wouldn’t even realize it was set in a larger series. It’s a fairly straight-forward romance, with some of what I would consider to be typical romance tropes. The romance took place between characters who barely knew each other, so I never really bought into it. It’s written well enough, so I might have enjoyed this more if I was a romance reader. I think Hobb is great at writing characters, and that showed in this story. However, it really »å¾±»å²Ô’t add any new depth to the Six Duchies setting for me. 3 stars. You, and You Alone by Jacqueline Carey This was the story that made me sit and stare at my Kindle for a minute after I finished it. I think I liked it, but it was tragic. The reader knows it’s going to be tragic from the very beginning, so that wasn’t surprising, but I actually got a little invested in the relationship in this one. I think what really helped this one feel more real was that the story takes place over several years and we see their ups and downs. There’s also a little more to this story than just romance; there’s a tiny hint of political intrigue as well. I haven’t yet read Carey’s Kushiel series, but it’s been on my to-read list for a while so I enjoyed getting a taste of her writing. I’m pretty sure this was set in that series, because I recognized some proper names from the book titles. I occasionally had the feeling that this story had a lot more meaning and relevance to a bigger picture than what I was grasping due to being unfamiliar with the setting. I’ll have to re-read this once I do finally read the series. Oh, and my read of The Iliad earlier this year paid off because there were a few references to it. :) 3.5 stars. Under/Above the Water by Tanith Lee This story »å¾±»å²Ô’t do anything for me at all. I’m not entirely sure why, but I »å¾±»å²Ô’t buy into the story and I »å¾±»å²Ô’t feel any connection to the characters. I can’t even think of more to say than that, which in itself probably speaks best for the lack of impression this made on me. 2 stars. Demon Lover by Cecelia Holland In the first paragraph of this story, a demon is essentially trying to rape the main character. So my initial reaction was, “Oooookay…â€� But actually, once it got started, the story captured my interest. The romance »å¾±»å²Ô’t have a lot of substance nor did it have much appeal but, by this point in the anthology, I wasn’t really expecting it to. I think short stories are probably not the best vehicle for believable romances. Not for what I as a reader would consider believable, anyway. I might have been interested in a longer version of this story with more focus on the other aspects of the setting aside from the romance. 3 stars. So those star ratings average out to 2.7, which mathematically-speaking should be rounded down to 2.5. However, I’m going to round it up to 3 based on two things: 1) the strength of the Carey story which I did debate giving 4 stars and 2) an acknowledgement that I really wasn’t the right audience for this anthology, and I knew that going in but chose to read it anyway. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Sep 30, 2018
not set
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Oct 03, 2018
not set
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Sep 24, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| 1944700447
| 9781944700447
| B07775VCP7
| 3.69
| 1,221
| Oct 24, 2017
| Oct 24, 2017
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liked it
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The end of this book reaaaally annoyed me. For some reason I’d thought it was a standalone story. That was probably a bad assumption based on not seei
The end of this book reaaaally annoyed me. For some reason I’d thought it was a standalone story. That was probably a bad assumption based on not seeing any series info associated with the book and this book having a publication date of over 6 years ago. I have no idea whether or not there will ever be any sequels, but this is not a complete story. The premise was kind of fun. There are a couple main POV characters, but we start off with Indelbed, a young boy living in poverty with an alcoholic father. He soon learns that his life isn’t what it appears to have been. Djinn are real, and his mother was one, and his father is an emissary to the djinn. Indelbed gets imprisoned by a djinn and tries to escape. Meanwhile, his cousin and aunt, who have also just learned of the existence of the djinn, take a crash course on djinn politics. For some reason the story really »å¾±»å²Ô’t hold my attention well, even though I kept feeling like it was the sort of thing I should have enjoyed more. The writing was fine, the setting was fleshed out pretty well, I liked the characters ok, and I was interested in the story on the surface of things, I just never felt compelled to read more to find out what would happen next. It also started to go downhill for me closer to the end. I’m not convinced the main villain’s motivations made that much sense and I was very, very unhappy with the direction one of the characters took toward the end. I was going to give this 3 stars until I read the abrupt and unsatisfying ending. That pushed it down to 2.5 stars and I was tempted to go even lower, but I’ll round up to 3 on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ based on my enjoyment level for the rest of the story. ...more |
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1
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Nov 30, 2023
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Jan 06, 2024
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Nov 30, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| B09GGXL8D9
| 3.62
| 50,233
| Aug 02, 2022
| Aug 02, 2022
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None
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1
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Nov 25, 2023
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not set
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Nov 25, 2023
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Audible Audio
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| B011MYPIY0
| 4.05
| 59,511
| Jun 1970
| Jun 2021
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liked it
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I went into this book with pretty low expectations. I’d disliked the author’s Lord of Light quite a lot. I did think A Night in the Lonesome October w
I went into this book with pretty low expectations. I’d disliked the author’s Lord of Light quite a lot. I did think A Night in the Lonesome October was cute, but nothing special. I think my reaction to this book leaned more toward the latter, but I liked it better than I feared I would and it’s less than 200 pages so it was a quick read. The setting was initially more modern than I expected, set I guess around the time the book was published in 1970. We’re introduced to the main character, Corwin, as he wakes up in a hospital with no memories of who he is or how he got there, and it seems he’s being kept against his will. Through a combination of pretending to know more than he does and convenient intuition, he manages to get away and find allies. The actual plot doesn’t take off until a good ways into the book, so I don’t want to spoil it. I never felt any great investment in Corwin or any of the other characters, but I remained moderately interested in him throughout the book and the plot held my attention pretty well. The amnesia trope got a little frustrating to me in the beginning because I had trouble buying into all of Corwin’s convenient intuitions. In retrospect it might be believable, but it »å¾±»å²Ô’t feel that way at the time I was reading those parts. I was curious about what was going on though, so that helped to hold my attention, and then the story became more interesting to me further on, although it did have some slow spots. This story isn’t very satisfying by itself. It doesn’t end on a true cliffhanger, but the main plot is definitely not resolved and there are a lot of open questions. I might have given in to the temptation to keep reading if I’d had it in the omnibus format, but I just had this as a single volume and I don’t feel a burning desire to read more of the series so I don’t plan to seek it out. I’m rating it at 3.5 stars and rounding down to 3 on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 24, 2023
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Nov 30, 2023
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Nov 24, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| B018UG5G5E
| 4.30
| 246,683
| Jun 09, 2009
| Dec 03, 2015
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really liked it
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This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: Yes. Audio Narration The na This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: Yes. Audio Narration The narrator is Alyssa Bresnahan. I thought she did very well. I don’t have any complaints about any of her choices, and I thought she was one of the good kinds of narrators who somehow manage to fade into the background so that my focus remains fully on the words of the story and not on the person reading them. Story This is one of Brandon Sanderson’s older books, published in 2009. There are a few POV characters, but most of the story focuses on two princesses, Siri and Vivenna. (The book was published before either Siri or Alexa had become household names for voice assistant software, but a warped side of me thinks it’s a great pity that Vivenna »å¾±»å²Ô’t happen to be named Alexa instead.) Their father has to fulfill a long-ago agreement to give a daughter to the God King of a neighboring country to avoid a war, but everyone believes a war is inevitable anyway. One daughter is sent to meet the agreement and hopefully stave off war for a little longer, and the other daughter sneaks off to try to save her from her horrible fate but gets caught up in a bigger mess than she expected. As one would expect from Sanderson, the story has a detailed and mostly interesting magical system. This one involves breath and colors which allow inanimate objects or even dead people to be animated and fulfill commands. Each person is born with one breath, and it’s impossible to steal the breath from another person, but breaths can be given willingly. This causes breaths to become a commodity of sorts. Some people have accumulated more breaths than others and therefore have greater power, influence, and skills. I enjoyed this quite a bit. The story held my interest well. At times it seemed to run the risk of becoming a pretty standard story, and I often thought I knew where things were going, but it never quite went where I expected it to with maybe a couple exceptions. (view spoiler)[I did predict that Lightsong would heal the God King. (hide spoiler)] There were some ambiguous characters and people whose motivations and goals weren’t quite what the reader is led to believe they are, which helped make the story feel more twisty. There was a lot of humor sprinkled throughout, which I enjoyed too. I liked the main characters, although I never developed any major investment in any of them. It probably isn’t the book to choose if you’re looking for some strong female characters, although Siri and Vivenna did have their moments. At times I grew impatient with them, especially Vivenna. My other very mild complaint is that sometimes I felt like the magic system was cobbled together and in danger of falling apart if I breathed too hard, but it never went too far off the rails and mostly made sense. This book tells a complete story, although there’s clearly room for more stories to be told and I know the author has said he plans to return to this at some point. I’d enjoy revisiting this in print, along with any other sequels that get written. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 03, 2023
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Oct 29, 2023
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Oct 29, 2023
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Audible Audio
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| B0927D3CHF
| 4.07
| 8,149
| Apr 19, 2022
| Apr 19, 2022
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liked it
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This book is very short at under 200 pages, but it took me forever to read it. It wasn’t bad, and there were things I liked, but for some reason it ju
This book is very short at under 200 pages, but it took me forever to read it. It wasn’t bad, and there were things I liked, but for some reason it just »å¾±»å²Ô’t hold my interest at all. I think I was most interested during the beginning, when I had absolutely no idea what this story was about. We’re introduced to a young girl with no name, who lives with her somewhat crazy mother in a cave in the middle of nowhere. She ventures further from her home in her explorations, she can communicate with animals, she observes people from hiding and sometimes does them small favors, and she seems to have special abilities. Something is calling to her, and she eventually leaves her home to search out her destiny. I was pretty far into the story before I realized what it was based on. I doubt most people would consider it a spoiler, but this book is so short anyway that I’m reluctant to reveal it and possibly ruin a surprise for someone. (view spoiler)[It wasn’t until the point where Nimuë was first mentioned that I realized this story was based on Arthurian legend. As soon as I saw that name, some of the other character names flashed back through my head and I was like, “Ohâ€� duh.â€� My knowledge of Arthurian legend isn’t great, and it wasn’t until I skimmed the author’s notes at the end that I learned who the main character, Peretur, was supposed to be. (hide spoiler)] This is a non-traditional retelling ofâ€� the thing in my spoiler tags. I suspect a lot of it went over my head anyway, but I did find the author’s choices that I recognized to be interesting. I was relieved that the thing I most associate with these retellings and thoroughly dread ((view spoiler)[the love triangle between Arthur, Gwen, and Lance (hide spoiler)]) played very little role in the story and wasn’t a source of drama. I liked the main character and was moderately interested as more of her back story was revealed, and there was nothing about the story that I found unpleasant to read, but for some reason there just wasn’t anything that gripped me or helped propel me toward the end. I’m rating this at 2.5 stars and rounding up to 3 for Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 22, 2023
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Nov 07, 2023
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Sep 22, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| B07YK1K1YK
| 3.67
| 404,936
| Jun 30, 2020
| Jun 30, 2020
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liked it
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Mexican Gothic is a standalone fantasy novel. It has a lot of horror elements, so it might be more accurate to call it horror. I personally »å¾±»å²Ô’t fin
Mexican Gothic is a standalone fantasy novel. It has a lot of horror elements, so it might be more accurate to call it horror. I personally »å¾±»å²Ô’t find it scary, but I can’t even think of a horror book that scared me as an adult, so I’m a really bad barometer for that. The story is set in the 1950’s in Mexico and centers around the main character, a young woman NoemÃ. Her father receives a disturbing letter from NoemÃ’s recently-wed cousin, Catalina, who seems to think her husband is poisoning her. She claims she’s trapped in her home, and she writes other more incoherent things that calls her sanity into question. Catalina specifically asks for Noemà to come save her. When NoemÃ’s father contacts the family to try to find out what’s going on, they claim she’s been ill. NoemÃ’s father asks her to go stay with Catalina and her husband and his family to find out for sure what’s going on. This was a fast, easy read that held my attention, but I »å¾±»å²Ô’t always think it was terribly logical and the charactersâ€� motivations often »å¾±»å²Ô’t make sense to me. As an example from the beginning of the book, Noemi’s father is at least considering the possibility that something is really wrong, and he seems to have some distrust for Catalina's husband. He »å¾±»å²Ô’t seem like a negligent father, so I »å¾±»å²Ô’t think it made sense for him to send his daughter to stay with a family they barely knew in a situation where there had been claims of danger. Although Noemà is pretty independent and self-sufficient, I’ll reiterate that this was set in the 1950’s. These are some other issues I had that are more spoiler-ish, so I’ll put them behind tags: (view spoiler)[I also found it quite selfish of Catalina to ask Noemà to come help her, when she had to have known that Noemà wasn’t likely to be able to do anything and would just end up trapped too. Catalina »å¾±»å²Ô’t even seem to feel any remorse at getting Noemà into this mess. It’s not far from the end of the book when Noemà expresses regret for not just fetching Catalina and taking her away when she read the letter, but Catalina says that they wouldn’t have let her, which is true enough, and then she says that it was enough that Noemà came because her presence made her better. Soooo selfish! Another issue I had was that, when Noemà arrived, she barely spent any time with her cousin. The family did make it difficult, but it felt like Noemà made very little effort. It felt unrealistic to me, like the author just »å¾±»å²Ô’tâ€� have much story to tell that involved Catalina despite using her as the premise for NoemÃ’s presence in the house. At the very least, I thought Noemà should have requested daily visits, maybe asked for a specific time of day when it would be suitable for her to visit and then faithfully showed up on that schedule. If the family wouldn't permit this then it needed to be reported back to her father. Noemà »å¾±»å²Ô’t seem to take any initiative, she just showed up now and then and asked if she could see her, and was more often than not disappointed when she couldn’t. I also never really understood exactly why they ate babies, other than because the author wanted to include something especially horrific in her story. They said the children were born infected with the fungus, so eating their flesh meant ingesting the fungus. So why was that better than just eating the fungus directly? There was some mumbo jumbo about the inter-connectivity with the priests and Agnes and each other, but even if you buy into that, it »å¾±»å²Ô’t seem like the babies fit into it since they »å¾±»å²Ô’t have any knowledge or experience. (hide spoiler)] Soâ€� I definitely had some complaints. Despite that, this was written in an entertaining way and I did like Noemà pretty well despite not always understanding her choices. I’m rating this at 3 stars based on my mixed feelings. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 09, 2023
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Sep 22, 2023
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Sep 09, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| B0BNQH593J
| 4.11
| 3,947
| Sep 01, 2022
| Sep 01, 2022
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really liked it
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This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: Yes, probably. Audio Narra This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: Yes, probably. Audio Narration The narrator is Aoife McMahon. She spoke with a lovely, mild Irish accent that worked perfectly for the story and I enjoyed listening to her. The book alternates between two female POV characters. For the first couple of chapters, I was confused because the Irish names were difficult for me to understand, and all my American ears could hear from the narrator was “Irish accentâ€�. At first I was confused as to whether the characters were the same or not. Then I realized the locations, dates, and character names were in the chapter titles, which I could see from the Audible player I was running on my computer, and the story started making much more sense with that visual information to rely on. I also started picking up the nuances of the voices the narrator was using for each character. Before long, I was easily hearing them as two obviously distinct characters. Aside from that initial difficulty, I »å¾±»å²Ô’t have any trouble with her narration at all, and I easily kept the various characters straight. Story This is a fantasy story set in Ireland in the time of the Vikings when Christianity was starting to take over the old religions. In this setting, there are two factions of supernatural people, both of whom have lifetimes that are far longer than that of normal mortal humans and some magical abilities, but they can pass as humans and live among them without being detected. One of those factions has been nearly destroyed by the other and there are only two of them left. We alternate between the POVs of one character from each faction, Gormflaith and Fódla. Gormflaith is from the faction that has been nearly killed off. She’s very manipulative and opportunistic, trying to help her mortal son gain power and improve her own lot in life. Fódla is more compassionate, but she’s been taught to fear human men. She’s sent on a mission to spy on one of the more powerful kings. I don’t know that this story necessarily has a strong plot, it’s mostly just a bunch of human factions vying for power, but I liked it anyway. Gormflaith was a difficult character to like, but her manipulative maneuvering held my interest and I kind of felt sorry for her at times. I liked Fódla quite a lot and I enjoyed her chapters the best. I liked that there aren’t clear-cut good vs evil sides, although there are definitely individuals with purer motives than others. There’s a pretty strong theme of women being powerless and at the mercy of men’s whims, but I »å¾±»å²Ô’t think it was as heavy-handed as what I’ve sometimes encountered in other books and it fit the setting well enough. There isn’t any sort of closure to this book. It doesn’t end on a major cliff hanger, but it felt to me like a slow and meandering story that was cut off when a certain number of pages was reached. Maybe if/when I read the rest of the series, the reason for stopping where it did will seem more obvious to me. I did enjoy this though, enough that I intend to seek it out and read it in print someday when the series is complete. ...more |
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1
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Aug 19, 2023
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Aug 31, 2023
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Aug 19, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| B014JT71SQ
| 4.05
| 23,514
| Sep 15, 2015
| Sep 15, 2015
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it was ok
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This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: NO! Audio Narration The nar This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: NO! Audio Narration The narrator is Christine Marshall. I »å¾±»å²Ô’t really care for her narration. Something indefinable just »å¾±»å²Ô’t work for me. Part of it might be that I disliked Baru, so maybe that influenced my feelings for the voice that was narrating her, but I felt the same way even in the beginning when I was still interested in her. I definitely had some trouble telling who was talking at times, as well as telling if Baru was speaking out loud or internally. The narrator could have done better at distinguishing voices, but I also blame this issue to some extent on the text itself for not having more cues that would work well in an audio format. I have by this point listened to many narrators who »å¾±»å²Ô’t do the greatest job at distinguishing between character voices, and it can be a non-issue if the text itself makes it clear. Story When Baru’s a child, her people are conquered by an empire with advanced technology and a rigid belief system. Baru’s intelligence captures the attention of the empire and she’s sent to one of their schools. She excels there, but she never forgets her roots, and hopes to gain power within the empire so that she can eventually bring about their downfall. When she finishes school, the empire sends her to be the “Imperial Accountantâ€� in a position where her two predecessors were both murdered. In the beginning, I thought I was going to like this. Baru seemed like an interesting and nuanced character, and the story was heavily political which is something I often enjoy. However, all the plotting and the politics somehow began to grow tedious and I started spacing out on it. Additionally, I grew to dislike Baru more and more. With neither the main character nor the story holding my interest, this became a chore to listen to. Baru is portrayed as a savant, at least in terms of finances and political strategy. However, I wasn’t convinced that she always made logical decisions. In any case, she often seemed incapable of considering multiple perspectives or accounting for the possible actions and reactions of the people around her. She’s very single-minded, wanting to achieve her goals at all costs, no matter how much damage her actions cause. I was sick to death of her by the end. The following is a big spoiler for the ending. (view spoiler)[I thought the title at least somewhat spoiled the twist(?) at the end, when Baru betrays her fellow traitors. If the title had just referred to her being a traitor to the empire, it would have seemed way too obvious. I knew it was definitely possible that there was nothing more to it than the obvious explanation, but I’d also considered that it might have a double meaning, so I wasn’t surprised by her choices. Besides, it seemed like the scummy sort of thing she’d do. I also very much disliked the connivance to keep this “twistâ€� from the reader even though we were in Baru’s head. It »å¾±»å²Ô’t feel genuine to me that she’d simply blocked it from her mind until the moment came because she was so horrified by it. Having Baru question herself about it afterward and bemoan it at length »å¾±»å²Ô’t make it feel more genuine for me (hide spoiler)]. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 30, 2023
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Aug 19, 2023
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Jul 30, 2023
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Audiobook
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| B005DB7O0U
| 3.81
| 11,930
| Sep 1981
| Sep 2022
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it was ok
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It took me forever to get through this book. It has sleep dust embedded throughout its pages, and apparently they’ve invented a release mechanism that
It took me forever to get through this book. It has sleep dust embedded throughout its pages, and apparently they’ve invented a release mechanism that works even with e-books. Seriously, I don’t think there was a single session where I sat down to read this book during the day and »å¾±»å²Ô’t fall asleep at some point before standing back up, and I rarely take mid-day naps. Likewise, when I read it before bed, I usually ended up going to sleep earlier than I normally would. Soâ€� I guess that’s the main thing I got out of this book. I’m now very well rested? The story revolves around a large and very convoluted family, most of whom live in or around a large and very convoluted house in the middle of nowhere. There's some overlap with the fairy realm there, so that some family members are able to see them, although others can’t, and most lose the ability as they get older. My Kindle edition had a family tree â€� at the very end of the book, with no reference to it in the table of contents that might have clued me in to its existence. By the time I saw it, it was too late to do me much good. The most critical people were pretty easy to keep track of though, and since I was reading on the Kindle I was able to search and find prior references if I forgot who someone was, so I did ok without the tree. In the earlier parts of the book, it jumps back and forth in the timeline quite a bit and introduces a large number of characters, but this wasn’t the part I disliked. It felt a little confusing at times, but I was able to follow it and the setting seemed really interesting, so I’d looked forward to learning where everything was going. The further I got into the book, the less I liked it. The timeline got more linear and the character focus narrowed, but the story became more nebulous. It became more metaphorical and less logical, and there were long sequences where the author wrote about things happening to characters, except that apparently those things weren’t actually happening, or at least not in the way the characters thought they were, to the point that sometimes I was confused about what was “realâ€� in the context of the book and what wasn’t. And then you have (view spoiler)[people becoming fish, birds, and trees (hide spoiler)]? It probably »å¾±»å²Ô’t help that, by this point, I was in a perpetually sleepy haze myself whenever I read the book. Reading this made me feel like what I imagine it would feel like to be on drugs, and I’ve never enjoyed books that give me that sensation. The writing style is more literary I guess, with some odd ways of phrasing things that occasionally required me to re-read a sentence. I wouldn’t call this a funny book, but there were times it made me burst out in surprised laughter because something unexpectedly struck me funny, even toward the end when I wasn’t enjoying it anymore. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure if the things that made me laugh were supposed to be funny. It’s possible I might have been delirious. The ending was as unsatisfying as I expected it to be by the time I finally reached it. This book I think is more about style and atmosphere, but the story itself lacked enough substance for me to sink my teeth into. I’m rating this at 2.5 stars and rounding down to 2 because I think I would have preferred less sleep. ...more |
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Jul 23, 2023
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Sep 09, 2023
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Jul 23, 2023
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| B082YGDV5P
| unknown
| 4.01
| 25,186
| Sep 22, 2020
| Sep 22, 2020
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liked it
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This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: probably not. Audio Narrat This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: probably not. Audio Narration The narrator is Alex McKenna. Her narration was easy enough to follow, but her character voices were too cartoonish for my tastes. Since this is a superhero/villain type story, that might have been an intentional choice and/or a choice that others would appreciate. It’s not a style I like, though. Aside from that, I don’t have any particular complaints. Story This is kind of a subverted superhero story. In that respect, it reminded me of the graphic novel Watchmen which is the only other story along those lines I can remember encountering. The setting is an alternate version of earth where there are both superheroes and supervillains with special powers. The story focuses on Anna, a “henchâ€�. A hench is a normal person who chooses to do the grunt work for supervillains. These henches are often hired out through temp agencies. Anna is basically a data analyst. She starts crunching numbers and finds that superheroes do an enormous amount of damage both to property and people in the process of their “heroicâ€� actions. I enjoyed the first half more than the second half, although the second half has more action. I mostly liked reading about Anna, but I »å¾±»å²Ô’t always like her choices and I often found her to be hypocritical. To a large extent this is a revenge story, and I’m not usually a big fan of those. I couldn’t always get behind her decisions or her motivations, and even less so for some of the other character. It was pretty melodramatic at times, and some things »å¾±»å²Ô’t make a lot of sense, but I guess that’s a superhero story for you. One of the more mundane aspects I had trouble with was the idea that Anna (view spoiler)[was placed in charge when Leviathan was kidnapped, even though she really shouldn’t have had the experience or the expertise to be a logical choice by that point (hide spoiler)]. There was at least one part of this book that was super gory. Honestly it was so over the top that I couldn’t take it seriously or even really be horrified by it, but it went on and on and on. For that reason, I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone who doesn’t like gore in their reading material. The main story comes to a conclusion, but there are several threads left unanswered and the end of the story is a pretty clear lead into the next book. The writing was ok and the story held my interest, but I »å¾±»å²Ô’t enjoy this enough to want to continue the series. I might have appreciated this more if I were a bigger fan of the superhero subgenre. ...more |
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1
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Jul 22, 2023
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Jul 29, 2023
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Jul 22, 2023
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| B08QGL9BZD
| 4.10
| 114,433
| Apr 26, 2022
| Apr 26, 2022
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really liked it
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Nettle & Bone is a standalone fantasy novel by T. Kingfisher. The story centers around Marra, the third daughter to the queen of a small kingdom that�
Nettle & Bone is a standalone fantasy novel by T. Kingfisher. The story centers around Marra, the third daughter to the queen of a small kingdom that’s threatened by kingdoms to the north and south. There is some backstory from Marra’s younger years, but she’s around 30 years old for most of the story. To avoid giving too much of the story away, I’ll just say that one of Marra’s older sisters is in danger, and Marra herself is powerless to help, so she seeks out help from a woman whom she hears has powerful magic. Most of the story is about Marra securing that woman’s help, and their quest to solve Marra’s problem. I enjoyed this a lot. The story is simple but entertaining, and it »å¾±»å²Ô’t feel derivative of anything I‘ve read before. Where it really shone for me was with the characters. The cranky old dust wife with her demonic hen was a favorite, but the bumbling old fairy godmother Agnes was a lot of fun too. I liked all the main characters, really. They made me laugh. The world-building was interesting too, and there were hints of other things going on that could inspire other interesting stories, either with different characters or the same ones. I was sorry there weren’t any more books set in the world. I particularly would have liked to learn more about the “blistered landâ€�. There seemed like a lot of setup surrounding that, but then Marra moved on and nothing came of it. The book »å¾±»å²Ô’t provoke any deep thoughts or any rambling complaints, but it was a fun story that I’m glad I read. ...more |
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Jul 04, 2023
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Jul 22, 2023
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Jul 04, 2023
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| B0DLSTNHCM
| unknown
| 4.02
| 20,709
| 2007
| Nov 13, 2018
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liked it
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This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: ???! Audio Narration The na This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: ???! Audio Narration The narrator is Jessica Ball. I thought her narration worked really well for this story, although it might have grated on me in a different story if she’d used the same tone. She spoke in a light, almost overly cheerful type of tone that somehow enhanced the darkness of the story. I think the only complaint I had with the audio format had nothing to do with the narrator, but probably with the editing. There needed to be longer pauses between section breaks. It was jarring at times the way the story flowed from one section to another. Sometimes the only way I knew there had been a section break was because the story unexpectedly shifted in time. Story I can’t explain much about this story without revealing too much and spoiling the fun of discovery. Things are happening to the main character that she doesn’t understand and we learn more about what’s going on along with her. The story is told from the perspective of Sasha, a girl in her mid to late teens at the start of the book. It starts off with her on vacation with her mother at a beach. She encounters a creepy man who seems to be stalking her. When she fails to evade him, he demands that she accomplish a strange and seemingly pointless task. If she refuses to comply, Sasha knows something terrible will happen. Things get stranger from there. In some ways this story was really very repetitive. It’s most obvious at the beginning, when Sasha is completing tasks, yet I »å¾±»å²Ô’t get bored with it because I was very curious to see where things were going. Later, (view spoiler)[at the school (hide spoiler)], it also got quite repetitive in the sense that Sasha tended to follow the same patterns in the way she dealt with what was going on. That started to wear on me a little. But overall the story held my interest well and kept me curious to learn more. Things fell apart for me toward the end. A big premise of the story is that it’s impossible for the people who know what’s going on to explain anything of substance to the people like Sasha who are still in the dark. This of course frees the authors to not have to explain anything substantial to the reader if they so choose, and I felt like this was what happened here. It was all quite nebulous and metaphorical, which is something I tend not to have a lot of patience with. I like more solid plots, whether intricate or simple, and I like all the puzzle pieces to fit together by the end and form a clear picture in my head, regardless of whether the author explains to me what the picture is supposed to be or leaves me to infer it on my own. I was particularly unsatisfied by the abrupt and ambiguous ending. Maybe reading this in print would add greater clarity than what I got by listening to an audiobook, but I suspect in this case I would have had a similar reaction in print. There is another related book published, so maybe that answers some questions. This was originally published in Russian. The original series has four books, but only the first and fourth have been translated into English. However, if I understand correctly, I believe the second and third aren’t directly related to Sasha’s story and the fourth book, which is translated, continues it. I’m somewhat undecided on continuing this series in print someday, but I’m leaning toward no. It was interesting and held my interest, but it was ultimately unsatisfying. I suspect this is more a factor of the authorsâ€� writing style than it is a matter of the story simply not being complete yet. I’m rating it at 3.5 stars and rounding down to 3 on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ. I was somewhat amused when I tried to listen to part of the audiobook during a road trip. I don’t do great with audiobooks while driving, so I only listened for maybe 30 minutes before I’d had enough and tried to switch back to music. And suddenly I felt as trapped as Sasha in my situation, because I could not get out of the audiobook. The car’s screen would claim I’d switched to FM, or whatever else I tried to switch to, and then the audiobook would keep playing. And playing. And playing. I tried disconnecting and reconnecting the phone. It kept playing. And playing. And playing. I ultimately had to disconnect my phone from the car and let it sit for over a minute before I could reassert my own will about what I listened to in my car. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jul 04, 2023
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Jul 21, 2023
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Jul 04, 2023
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| B0B46R6KQW
| 4.07
| 277,853
| Feb 22, 2022
| Jun 16, 2022
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really liked it
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This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: probably. I could even se
This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: probably. I could even see myself continuing with it in audio. Audio Narration The narrator is Travis Baldree, who is also the author of the book. He’s apparently an experienced narrator, and his narration style worked well for me. I »å¾±»å²Ô’t really give much thought to his narration at all while I was listening to him, which for me is the best kind of narrator â€� the ones that fade into the background and allow me to just focus on the story. I have no complaints about any aspect of the narration. I was never confused about who was talking, and I never had trouble distinguishing between internal thoughts and dialogue. Maybe as a professional audiobook narrator, he was more aware of how to write his book so that the text would also help provide the necessary auditory clues for an audiobook listener. I have no idea since I wasn’t conscious of any of that while I listened, I was just focused on the story. Story The story is told from the first-person perspective of Viv, an orc who has been working as a sort of mercenary or adventurer. At the beginning of the story, she puts that life behind her and pursues a new career â€� that of a coffee shop owner in a city where its residents have never heard of coffee. This is a different sort of story, and maybe not a great choice for someone who’s in the mood for something high in action or who’s looking for an intricate plot, but I really enjoyed it. It’s definitely a character-driven book. There is a plot of course, and some action too, but it’s a relaxed and straight-forward story. There’s some romance, but it’s more subtle, at least in the first half. It doesn’t dominate the story and it »å¾±»å²Ô’t have any annoying romance tropes that got on my nerves. After about the first hour of listening, I was raising my eyebrows and asking myself if the entire book was going to be about building a coffee shop, but even by then I was already enjoying it pretty well. The characters are great. I liked Viv, but I also liked the secondary characters. Some of them had unique personalities and there were some whom I wanted to learn more about and spend more time with. I particularly liked Cal, and I really wanted to learn more about the chess guy whose name I can’t remember. I was surprised when the story ended about 60 minutes before the end of the audiobook. There was a short story at the end that’s set before the events of this book. I liked it, but not as much as the main book. I felt like the characters and motives needed to be fleshed out better to make it more enjoyable. This book stands alone perfectly well. There’s apparently a prequel due out later this year and I have no idea if more books are planned beyond that. I’d love to read more about Viv and the friends she made in this book, so a prequel isn’t as appealing to me, but I imagine I’d probably enjoy it anyway. ...more |
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Jul 2023
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Jul 04, 2023
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Jul 01, 2023
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| B01922I1FM
| 3.62
| 11,473
| Apr 29, 2010
| Aug 16, 2016
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liked it
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Zoo City is a fantasy story set in a fictional version of Africa. If you kill somebody, an animal will randomly show up and be magically bonded to you
Zoo City is a fantasy story set in a fictional version of Africa. If you kill somebody, an animal will randomly show up and be magically bonded to you, and you’ll also gain some special ability. This book focuses on Zinzi, a young woman who is bonded to a sloth and has the ability to find things people have lost. She’s gotten herself tangled up into some trouble, mostly of her own making, and she gets herself into even more trouble trying to get out of that trouble. I had very mixed feelings about this one. I liked the premise and the world-building. I liked Zinzi, the main character. She had depth and nuance. I liked the sloth. I liked her boyfriend, although we »å¾±»å²Ô’t see that much of him. The story started out interesting, but the plot could have been more coherent than it was, and I thought things grew less and less clear as the book progressed. Toward the end, it was often unclear to me why Zinzi chose to go certain places and do certain things. It all kind of fell together at the end, but I never bought into how Zinzi drew her conclusions. I think the author tried too hard to keep the reader in suspense, but neglected to give us a chance to figure things out on our own so that the explanations we finally got at the end didn't really feel earned. I grew less and less happy with the direction the story went in, and I was very unsatisfied by the way it ended. Spoilers about the end: (view spoiler)[I was exasperated that nothing Zinzi did managed to help anybody or make anything at all better. The kids she was trying to help all died, her boyfriend may or may not die, the people who were primarily responsible for all the death and mayhem in the book are on the loose, and Zinzi herself is on the run with counterfeit money, apparently off to exploit the connections of her boyfriend’s lost wife and kids, and we have no idea how things will turn out for her. I prefer that a book end with, at the very least, some sense that something positive has been accomplished, so there was pretty much nothing I liked about the end of this book. And it never made sense to me, even in the context of the fantasy, how or why Zinzi was getting cryptic e-mails from the murder victims. (hide spoiler)] This is the second book I’ve read by the author. I read Broken Monsters 4.5 years ago, rated it 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4 on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, and I remember almost nothing about it. I think I’m likely to remember this one better, although I may prove to be wrong, but I’m rating it lower at a plain 3 stars. I was thinking 4 stars for the first half, but the closer it got to the end, the less I liked it. I would love to read a different type of story with a similar setting though. ...more |
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Jun 19, 2023
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Jul 04, 2023
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Jun 19, 2023
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| B0DLT2HQDK
| 4.08
| 111,674
| Jan 11, 2022
| Jan 11, 2022
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liked it
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This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: probably not. There were
This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: probably not. There were several things I liked about it, but it was too heavy on the romance for my tastes. Audio Narration The narrator is Natalie Naudus. She was one of the narrators in another audiobook I’d listened to early this year, The Bone Shard Daughter. I liked her in that one, and I liked her here. Her narration fit the tone well, and she did well with conveying the emotion that the main character was feeling. Story The story focuses on a girl named Xingyin who grew up on the moon. Her mother had been sentenced to live in isolation on the moon for a crime explained in the story, and she’s kept the existence of her daughter a secret to protect her. When something happens and Xingyin becomes in danger of being discovered, she’s sent away to the Celestial Kingdom to try to make a life for herself, while of course keeping her identity a secret. I can’t remember if Xingyin’s age was provided, but she came across to me as being in her mid to late teens and the story itself had a young adult feel. It was so very full of romance tropes, right down to the love triangle. Because the romance played such a large role in the story, it made the general events and plot “twistsâ€� easy to predict based on where one would expect the romance stuff to go to stick with the tropes. There were some lengthy passages in which Xingyin angsted over the romance-related situations she found herself in and there was a lot of eye rolling on my part. I think if the romance had been toned down, or better yet just replaced with close friendships, I would have enjoyed this story a lot more although it would also have been a lot shorter. Because aside from that, I actually really enjoyed the rest of it. The world building was interesting and the story held my attention well when there was an actual story being told. I liked the characters, and I was happy that Xingyin usually made decisions I could understand and respect. It wasn’t until just now, after I had finished the audiobook and looked up the book description so I could get the correct spelling of the main character’s name for this review, that I learned this book was inspired by a real-world legend of the Chinese moon goddess. I don’t know how much of the story is influenced by that legend because I’m not at all familiar with it, but the story was perfectly easy to understand without any background in either the legend or the culture. This tells a complete story. There are some unresolved questions at the end, but nothing that left me feeling annoyed at being left hanging. I’m rating this at 3.5 stars, rounding down to 3 on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ. ...more |
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May 20, 2023
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May 28, 2023
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May 20, 2023
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| B00BU8DV2K
| 4.13
| 128,228
| Apr 23, 2013
| Apr 23, 2013
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really liked it
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This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: Probably. I’d even consid
This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: Probably. I’d even consider continuing it in audio if I were looking for more audiobooks to listen to. Audio Narration The narrator is George Guidall. For my tastes, he was perfect. He was easy to understand, and he completely faded into the background. I never once thought about his performance, either good or bad, until I sat down to write this review. That’s exactly what I like, and what I rarely get â€� I don’t want to be distracted by the narrator, I just want to focus on the story. At no point did I feel like he was using the wrong tone for the story, nor did I ever get confused or annoyed by his character voices. Story This is a somewhat meandering fantasy story about a variety of characters, all centering around the two titular characters â€� a golem and a jinni. The golem was created in the form of a woman to serve as a wife for a man who had plenty of money but lacked personality. She’s bound to serve him, but something happens early on in the story to leave her without any master, free to make her own way in the world. The jinni, on the other hand, was enslaved in a flask that was passed down as a family heirloom for hundreds of years, with nobody having had any idea that the jinni was there or that such creatures could even exist. Then he accidentally gets released. We also learn the backstories of a variety of other characters whose lives affected the main characters in some way. It all weaves together into a fairly cohesive story by the end. The golem and the jinni find themselves in New York around the late 1800s/early 1900s, which is where the majority of the story is set. For the first half of the book, the plot felt more like it was driven by the backstories than anything else, with a larger picture slowly forming to show how all these stories fit together. The action focusing on the golem and the jinni in their current state was more slice-of-life type stuff as they learned about their surroundings, found ways to deal with their situation, and searched for purpose and happiness while being surrounded by humans who couldn’t possibly understand them. I think it was getting close to the halfway point in the book before the two even met. Toward the end, though, the story does start to take off with some more immediate action affecting the characters in their present day. I can look at it objectively and say the story is pretty slow, but I don’t think I was ever once bored by it. I was interested in the backstories as well as in the charactersâ€� attempts to integrate into society. The golem and the jinni both had personalities that were somewhat opposite extremes of each other, and as such I »å¾±»å²Ô’t relate much to either of them, but I still liked them and cared about what happened to them. Some of the secondary characters were quite interesting too. The magic side of things isn’t very clearly defined. Some of the abilities of the characters, and the side effects of their abilities, don’t stand up to much scrutiny. For the most part I was able to suspend disbelief and just enjoy the fantasy story. The one thing that constantly niggled at me though was the jinni’s memory loss. It was just too convenient, with his memories cutting off at the perfect point to leave him completely clueless as to what happened and allow the author to slowly reveal his story to the reader. Even by the end when we understood the jinni’s enslavement better, I never saw a logical explanation for the memory loss. Especially since (view spoiler)[his memories conveniently cut off long before he met the wizard who enslaved him. (hide spoiler)] This story comes to a satisfying conclusion, although it did feel a little rushed or forced or something. I think it’s just one of those cases where a story meanders so much that it can be a little jarring if that story suddenly starts racing toward a conclusion at the end. I wanted the end to be drawn out with a little more detail. (view spoiler)[I was actually surprised the golem and the jinni were both in somewhat hopeful circumstances by the end. Not all their problems were solved, but one could imagine that some better resolutions could be found in time. There was so much dark foreshadowing throughout the story, that I really expected one or both characters to sacrifice themselves by the end. It wasn’t until they actually attempted to do so and failed that I realized the story probably wasn’t going to go that way after all. (hide spoiler)] I don’t know if there’s a plan for how many books this series might have, but I’d definitely like to revisit it if at some point in the future it seems to be complete. The story has a lot of depth to it, but it’s also a very simple story to follow. For that reason, it made a particularly good audio listen. I always feel like my comprehension and retention is better with print than audio, but I »å¾±»å²Ô’t feel that gap as strongly with this book as I usually do with others. I could see myself coming back to this in either print or audio format, at least if they keep the same narrator. ...more |
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Apr 29, 2023
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May 07, 2023
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Apr 29, 2023
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Audible Audio
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| 1612941192
| 9781612941196
| 1612941192
| 4.32
| 2,702
| Jul 10, 2018
| Jul 10, 2018
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liked it
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This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: probably not. Audio Narrat This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: probably not. Audio Narration The narrator is Annette Romano. She was ok. I had complaints, but I think some of them may be more due to the text than the narrator. For example, the narration often sounded robotic to me, not due to lack of emotion in the reading, but just because of the cadence of how the words were said. I think a lot of that was caused by a serious underuse of contractions in the writing, especially in the dialogue. The tone was a little over-dramatic for me, especially when the main character started expressing some of her many, many, many, many lustful longings. The narrator differentiated between character voices pretty well, but I did have some trouble telling the difference between the main character’s internal thoughts and spoken dialogue. It was usually clear enough after the fact though that something must have been an internal thought when nobody reacted to her wildly inappropriate words. Story This is fantasy I guess, although there aren’t many fantasy elements in it. The story focuses on a young woman named Compass Rose who has an unerring ability to tell what direction things are in, making her very useful in her role as a navigator on a submarine. That was probably the most magical aspect of the story. The story is set in some sort of post-apocalyptic version of our world in which the land is uninhabitable and everybody lives on various ships (water ships, not spaceships) or stations. Pirates, and to a lesser extent mercenaries, are a problem. Compass Rose is asked by her captain to take a secret mission working for a mercenary captain to gain information about pirate movements for the Fleet she serves. Rose is a little nuts. She’s completely driven by her libido. Way too much of the story focused on Rose lusting after people and being overwhelmed by their presence and their smell and their eyes and their breath and� you got the idea. Her judgment is perpetually clouded. It just came across as silly to me and there were lots of eye rolls while I listened. If all of that had been taken out, this probably would have been a novella-length story. And I probably would have liked it a lot more. Because aside from those parts, I kind of enjoyed the story, when Rose wasn’t around the main object of her obsessive desires and was just acting like a normal person with a job to do. I’m not sure everything made sense exactly, but I tend to notice that less with audiobooks anyway and I don’t trust my judgement that I haven’t missed details I would have caught better in print. I found myself listening surprisingly intently during some of the action sequences, which is unusual for me. Normally, when listening to an audiobook, the action scenes tend to lose my attention. And it was kind of an interesting setting. Rose annoyed the heck out of me for all the aforementioned reasons, but the other characters were ok. A little over-the-top and/or cliché, maybe, but likeable. Still, even though there were things to like, I doubt I’ll ever want to read more. ...more |
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Apr 17, 2023
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Apr 29, 2023
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Apr 29, 2023
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Paperback
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| B0143PGLLE
| 4.18
| 47,507
| Sep 29, 2015
| Sep 29, 2015
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liked it
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This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: probably. Audio Narration T This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: probably. Audio Narration The narrator is Euan Morton. I liked his narration and have no complaints except that sometimes his female character voices sounded a little too pouty to my ears. Other than that, he mostly faded into the background so that I was just focused on the story itself rather than constantly being aware of the narrator’s performance, which is how I prefer it. Story The surface of the world is uninhabitable and full of dangerous creatures like “silk weaversâ€�. The people live in very tall spires and use airships to travel between them. The inhabitants of two of the spires are at war, and that’s the main catalyst for the events in this story. The setting is somewhat steampunk-ish, at least insomuch as there are airships, although it doesn’t extend much further than that. There is magic, so this is definitely fantasy. However, sometimes I had trouble remembering that I wasn’t reading science fiction because the battles that took place on the airships constantly reminded me of spaceship battles until the author mentioned something like mist that reminded me they weren’t in space. I »å¾±»å²Ô’t feel like I had a great sense of the world-building, either in terms of the physical world or the politics. I’m not sure if that was because there was a lack of detail, or if it was because I spaced out during those parts which is often a problem for me with audiobooks. After a couple years of audiobooks, I think I’ve finally broken myself of the habit of constantly rewinding to re-listen to what I missed when I spaced out, and I’ve just accepted that I’m not going to catch all the details and nuances when listening to an audiobook that I would have caught in print. If I think it’s something I’d like well enough, I’ll re-read it in print someday and do a better job of getting all the details. Despite some gaps in my understanding of the setting, I did enjoy the story fairly well, although I thought it was predictable at times and there were a lot of battle scenes that I kept spacing out on. Keeping my attention on battle scenes is always more of a problem for me in audiobooks than in print. Some of the characters were pretty stereotypical, but there were also some fun ones, and I did like them all pretty well. The end doesn’t have a major cliff hanger, but there isn’t much closure either. There are several POV characters ranging from younger people (Late teens? Early 20’s?) attending some sort of battle school, to older and more experienced characters. And then there’s Rowl, the cat who is of course the real hero of the story, but the foolish bumbling humans did try their best. A handful of characters can speak “catâ€�, and the cats in this world are intelligent if you know how to speak their language. The conversations with Rowl were pretty amusing, at least for me as a cat lover. There were also some characters known as “etherealistsâ€� who are half mad and they were quite funny, although most of the humor took place when they were first introduced and tapered off as the story got going. I’m rating this at 3.5 stars and rounding down to 3 on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ because of how often I caught myself spacing out. If I’d read this in print, I suspect I would have rounded up instead, or possibly even given it a full 4 stars. I think his Codex of Alera series was more up my alley, but I liked this enough that I’d like to revisit it in print someday when he’s done with the whole series. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 2023
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Apr 16, 2023
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Apr 16, 2023
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| B01HIHJ1C0
| 3.97
| 74,789
| Oct 25, 1988
| Jul 05, 2016
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liked it
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This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: probably not. I might try
This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: probably not. I might try another work by the author someday, and I think I might have enjoyed this one better in print, but right now I can’t imagine sitting through it again in any format. Audio Narration and Other Audiobook Notes The narrator is Andrew Wincott. He was fine, he was pleasant enough to listen to, and he »å¾±»å²Ô’t do anything I found too annoying. I did think he sometimes read the text in a way that gave it a different interpretation than I would have read it, and sometimes I felt like his enunciation could have been more clear. Probably the biggest issue I had was with keeping secondary characters straight, but there were a lot of characters so I definitely don’t blame him for not being able to come up with easily distinguishable voices for all of them. This audiobook really could have benefitted from a PDF character list like I recently encountered in another audiobook. I probably should have searched the internet for a character list sooner instead of waiting until I wrote my review, but at the beginning of the story I was worried I might encounter spoilers while searching for the list. Then later on I just wasn’t invested enough in the story to care what the real names were and I felt like I was following things well enough. But I hate to spell character names wrong in a review, so I ended up looking some of them up anyway. I spent the entire book thinking Binabik’s name was “Benedictâ€�. I did think that seemed like an odd name for a troll, but I haven’t known very many trolls, so what do I know? There was another character, Isgrimnur, whose name drove me crazy. For quite a while after his initial introduction, I thought they were referring to him as “his grimoireâ€�. I kept wondering how on earth the guy had earned the odd title of “Grimoireâ€� when he »å¾±»å²Ô’t seem to have any magic-related abilities and »å¾±»å²Ô’t seem to have any words or symbols or anything like that on his person. Even after I realized that couldn’t possibly be what they were saying, I still heard it that way. Story This was originally published in 1988, and I think it suffers from its age, at least for a reader with much epic fantasy under her belt. I »å¾±»å²Ô’t feel like there was anything very original here, although there probably was at the time it was published. Epic fantasy is one of my favorite subgenres though, so I don’t necessarily have a problem with books that are chock full of tried-and-true epic fantasy tropes if they’re done in a way that appeals to me. This one wasn’t. It's hard to give a spoiler-free idea of what the story is about because it takes so long to get going. A large chunk of the beginning is focused on getting to know the main character, Simon. I think he’s supposed to be in his mid teens, but he came across as being a lot younger. To be super vague, an unhappy person in power gets influenced by evil people and does bad things, and Simon gets caught up in events related to that. My biggest complaint is probably with Simon. He started off as an obnoxious, whiny brat. I felt like the author wanted us to sympathize with this poor boy who »å¾±»å²Ô’t fit into the mold that other people expected him to fill and who just wanted to be left alone to do what he wanted to do, but instead he came across as a self-absorbed child who »å¾±»å²Ô’t care how his actions impacted other people. He did improve as the story progressed, but it took quite a while and I never warmed up to him much. He’s also one of those characters who tends to get lucky (or unlucky) a lot. Things just kind of happen to him. He randomly gets into trouble, and then he randomly gets out of trouble, without there being much direct impact from his own actions. The author also used some tropes that I don’t care for. Simon is remarkably ignorant about the world he lives in. This allows the author to explain his world to the reader by making other characters explain stuff to Simon. Even these characters seemed annoyed about how much stuff Simon »å¾±»å²Ô’t know. The poor boy also can’t seem to remember much. He has various dreams and visions and even real-life encounters in which he gains info that is useful to the reader and would possibly have been useful to Simon’s companions too, except that he never remembers them until the author is good and ready for him to do so to move the story forward. The things he »å¾±»å²Ô’t remember were all supposed to be fuzzy and terrifying and unreal-seeming, so he legitimately »å¾±»å²Ô’t remember them, but it still felt very manipulative on the part of the author. If I’d enjoyed the story and characters more, neither of these things would have bothered me as much. In general, I also found the motivations for many of the characters to be vague, which is probably another reason I »å¾±»å²Ô’t get into the story very well. Maybe those motivations will be explained better in subsequent books, but I’m more likely to get invested in characters and their story if I understand why they’re doing what they’re doing, regardless of whether I think their actions are good or bad or logical or illogical. I liked Binabik the most, and the story picked up for me after Simon met him. I »å¾±»å²Ô’t dislike the beginning, but Simon was so annoying at that point that he dragged things down for me. It was more interesting in the middle parts, but I started to lose my investment by the end when everything was just a mess and we were focusing more on secondary characters whose identities I couldn’t keep straight. That part would have been less problematic for me in print. The end of this book, not surprisingly, left everything pretty much up in the air so it’s not a very satisfying place to end the story, but I »å¾±»å²Ô’t enjoy it enough to want to read further. I’m rating this at 2.5 stars, rounded up to 3 on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 04, 2023
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| 3.61
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liked it
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Oct 03, 2018
not set
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Sep 24, 2024
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| 3.69
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liked it
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Jan 06, 2024
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Nov 30, 2023
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| 3.62
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not set
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Nov 25, 2023
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| 4.05
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liked it
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Nov 30, 2023
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Nov 24, 2023
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| 4.30
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really liked it
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Oct 29, 2023
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Oct 29, 2023
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| 4.07
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liked it
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Nov 07, 2023
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Sep 22, 2023
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| 3.67
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liked it
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Sep 22, 2023
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Sep 09, 2023
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| 4.11
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really liked it
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Aug 31, 2023
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Aug 19, 2023
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| 4.05
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it was ok
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Aug 19, 2023
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Jul 30, 2023
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| 3.81
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it was ok
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Sep 09, 2023
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Jul 23, 2023
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| 4.01
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liked it
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Jul 29, 2023
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Jul 22, 2023
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| 4.10
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really liked it
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Jul 22, 2023
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Jul 04, 2023
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| 4.02
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liked it
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Jul 21, 2023
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Jul 04, 2023
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| 4.07
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really liked it
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Jul 04, 2023
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Jul 01, 2023
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| 3.62
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liked it
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Jul 04, 2023
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Jun 19, 2023
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| 4.08
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liked it
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May 28, 2023
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May 20, 2023
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| 4.13
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really liked it
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May 07, 2023
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Apr 29, 2023
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| 4.32
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liked it
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Apr 29, 2023
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Apr 29, 2023
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| 4.18
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liked it
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Apr 16, 2023
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Apr 16, 2023
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| 3.97
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liked it
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Apr 2023
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Apr 01, 2023
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