Former academic, stay-at-home dad, hobbyist programmer/data nerd. Reads mainly SF/F and historical fiction. Follow me on Mastodon!
This link opens in a pop-up window
An alien armada lurks on the edges of Teixcalaanli space. No one can communicate with it, no one can destroy …
Arthur C. Clarke winner and Sunday Times bestseller Adrian Tchaikovsky's triumphant return to fantasy with …
I really enjoyed this book. It has a sort of fantasy setting, but it has a sci-fi vibe, and I'm not sure how better to describe that. I approached this with some hesitation, because I didn't particularly enjoy Children of Time, which is the only other Adrian Tchaikovsky book I had read. But this one had none of the flaws I found in Children of Time, and really demonstrated Tchaikovsky's obvious talent.
It's not the most focussed of narratives, but then it is really the story of a city, rather than any individuals in it. So that makes sense. The worldbuilding is well done, the characters are interesting, the prose is satisfying. Strong recommend.
Arthur C. Clarke winner and Sunday Times bestseller Adrian Tchaikovsky's triumphant return to fantasy with a darkly inventive portrait of …
In the vibrant city-state of Castellane, the richest of nobles and the most debauched of …
Cassandra Clare takes her time here to build a rich, if fairly conventional, high-medieval fantasy setting. The book can drag in places as Clare's main tactic for building tension is to have something dramatic happen to one character and then have several chapters focusing on boring things happening to the other characters. I understand that a lot of the boring parts are building the world, allowing events in the latter half of the book to have their proper impact, but I certainly found my mind wandering during some of the earlier parts.
The main characters are Kel, a bodyguard for the crown prince, and Lin, a healer from a shunned and excluded minority group. Kel is quite a boring character. There doesn't seem to be much inner life to him for a lot of the book. He goes around and events happen to him. Lin is a little more interesting, …
Cassandra Clare takes her time here to build a rich, if fairly conventional, high-medieval fantasy setting. The book can drag in places as Clare's main tactic for building tension is to have something dramatic happen to one character and then have several chapters focusing on boring things happening to the other characters. I understand that a lot of the boring parts are building the world, allowing events in the latter half of the book to have their proper impact, but I certainly found my mind wandering during some of the earlier parts.
The main characters are Kel, a bodyguard for the crown prince, and Lin, a healer from a shunned and excluded minority group. Kel is quite a boring character. There doesn't seem to be much inner life to him for a lot of the book. He goes around and events happen to him. Lin is a little more interesting, a woman determined to be a doctor in a society where only men can train to be doctors.
I did enjoy this book up until the point when I realised that the book was not going to have a satisfying ending: it was going to end on a cliffhanger to set up the next book. Now, I like a book series, I love the time and space you can have to build a rich, interesting world when you don't have to do it all in under 600 pages or whatever; but that is not an excuse to simply stop your book without providing any kind of satisfying closure. Of course, some plot strands can remain unresolved to give you some interesting tension going into the next book in the series, but Sword Catcher just kinda stops? None of the plot arcs have reached any kind of conclusion really. It is quite unsatisfying. I'm complaining about this because it's a bit of a bugbear of mine, but it doesn't prevent me from recommending this book, at least to the kind of people who know that they're going to have to finish the series to have any kind of closure.
In the vibrant city-state of Castellane, the richest of nobles and the most debauched of criminals have one thing in …
The city of dreaming spires.
It is the centre of all knowledge and progress in …
I love the central idea of this book, it's a wonderful conceit that translation is magic. The story itself is sometimes driven along by things that don't make sense in the context of the world Kuang has built (see my two spoilery comments for a couple of examples) but on the whole it's an enjoyable book, albeit one that is perhaps a little heavy handed in making the morals clear.
Magician is a fantasy novel by American writer Raymond E. Feist. It is the first …
Magician is an straightforward fantasy epic. It suffers from being among the templates that all fantasy novels since are borrowing from. But it is pretty well written, the characters are likeable and reasonably well differentiated, and the story is engaging and pacy enough. (There are some parts that drag a little, but compared to some offerings in the genre, this does a good job of keeping things moving along).
What would you give to win the world?
Zhu Yuanzhang, the Radiant King, is riding …
Content warning Spoilers ahoy
I enjoyed reading this book. I think it's pretty good. It concludes in a reasonably satisfying way. I have some caveats though.
First, it's kind of unclear why we would expect Zhu to be a better leader than, say, Wang Baoxiang. He has experience of administration, education... Wang does a lot of bad things to get his chance to be emperor, but then, Zhu is also responsible for a lot of deaths of people under her command. Particularly in the second half of the book, I often found myself asking "What would actually be the best outcome for the people?" and it was never super clear that the answer was that Zhu's being emperor would be best. It's also kind of unclear why either of Wang or Zhu wants to be emperor. Maybe having the Mandate just makes you want that? Like, what happens when Zhu becomes emperor? Why is she the one best capable of rebuilding the years of devastation that she is in part responsible for? Is there any reason to think that preventing Wang (or, for that matter, the Zhangs) from becoming emperor will materially improve anyone's lives?
Lots of people die as a result of Zhu's actions and ambition. It's never really clear why she evinces such loyalty in the people who follow her. Or rather, who follow the man she is pretending to be: it's never really explored what might happen if he gender became common knowledge.
Speaking of gender, this book seems to have gender as one of its central themes. Zhu is pretending to be a man, Ouyang is a eunuch, Wang is hated for his effeminacy, Lady Zhang works through manipulating the men in her life because she can't hold power directly. Given that, it does surprisingly little with the idea. There's no suggestion that Zhu or Wang might be trans or non-binary. (I mean, I guess you could read it in there between the lines if you wanted to, but I don't think there's much in the text to suggest it).
Zhu's wife was an interesting character in the previous book. She is almost completely absent from this book, until she is required to make terrible sacrifices for the benefit of Zhu's ambition. I feel very sorry for her.
Don't get the wrong idea: I enjoyed this book, and raising these criticisms is evidence that I thought about the story. It's well written and the worldbuilding is engaging.
When Ariel Manto uncovers a copy of The End of Mr. Y in a second-hand …
I was intrigued by mentions of Quantum Mechanics and Derrida in reviews of this book. I was disappointed that these ideas are mentioned, but never really used. There's some dialogue that serves no purpose except to demonstrate how widely read the author is. (For example the scene at dinner where Ariel meets Adam at the biologist's house. Almost none of what they talk about really has any bearing on anything).
It's fine as a sort of modern fantasy thriller, but some of what I'd read about it promised something more interesting.
This is a very ambitious and interesting book. A book told from the perspective of a bee. Lots of thought has gone into the careful worldbuilding here. However, because it's such an alien setting, it is often unclear what the rules are. This takes me out of the story. For example, and I don't think this is too much of a spoiler to tag, the protagonist bee changes jobs from being a drone to being a bee who goes out to gather pollen. Now, this was probably necessary from a plot perspective, but the first part of the book hammers home this idea that the bees' social roles are immutable. So to some extent we've had the rug pulled out from under us. So what are we to take as the rules the story is playing by? Because a lot of the tension comes from the protagonist bee's attempts to …
This is a very ambitious and interesting book. A book told from the perspective of a bee. Lots of thought has gone into the careful worldbuilding here. However, because it's such an alien setting, it is often unclear what the rules are. This takes me out of the story. For example, and I don't think this is too much of a spoiler to tag, the protagonist bee changes jobs from being a drone to being a bee who goes out to gather pollen. Now, this was probably necessary from a plot perspective, but the first part of the book hammers home this idea that the bees' social roles are immutable. So to some extent we've had the rug pulled out from under us. So what are we to take as the rules the story is playing by? Because a lot of the tension comes from the protagonist bee's attempts to subvert other aspects of the hive's rules.
The setting, the concept, the worldbuilding are all a lot of fun. The story however, kind of falls flat. It is undermined by a lack of clarity as to what the rules of the story should be.
In the vibrant city-state of Castellane, the richest of nobles and the most debauched of criminals have one thing in …
Fetter was raised to kill, honed as a knife to cut down his sainted father. …
I can't quite pin down why I didn't get on with this book. It's well written, there's some interesting worldbuilding, but ultimately, the story is kind of unsatisfying. I don't really like magical realism, I'm not sure if this counts as magical realism (it's set in a whole distinct fantasy world, it's not got much realism there) but I get magical realism vibes from it, and I think I didn't like it for the same reasons I don't like magical realism. (Which I also can't really pin down or express precisely).
Princess Sun has finally come of age.
Growing up in the shadow of her mother, …
I enjoyed this. A few times I found the writing a bit jarring: weird word choices, odd turns of phrase, but the story was interesting and the characters reasonably well defined. The best part of the book was the worldbuilding. I really liked the setting that Kate Elliott has created. There's definitely scope for more fun stories in this universe.
I will probably read the sequel or sequels but I'm not in a desperate rush to start the next book,
Princess Sun has finally come of age.
Growing up in the shadow of her mother, Eirene, has been no easy …
Princess Sun has finally come of age.
Growing up in the shadow of her mother, Eirene, has been no easy …
