Reviews and Comments

I really enjoyed A Memory Called Empire, but this I didn't enjoy nearly as much. I'm not entirely sure why. I think part of it was that Memory built an interestingly different world and learning about it was part of the fun of the book. Desolation, on the other hand, is just another story set in that same world. I didn't feel it did as much to add to the world, and I didn't find the story all that engaging. Don't get me wrong, it's fine, but I definitely found this book disappointing after the first one.

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.

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 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).

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.

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).

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,

In the future, the very wealthy are functionally immortal, and also literally just bigger than normal folk. That is the very silly, very on-the-nose premise of this otherwise enjoyable and down-to-earth thriller. Despite its near-future setting, the prose feels authentically "noir". The main character is likeable and the plot has the right amount of twists and turns: you can follow along, but you can't quite predict it.

I'm really enjoying this. I read Gnomon and found it very weird, but this is much more straightforward. Harkaway captures a kind of techno-noir vibe perfectly. The fact that the rich and powerful are literally much larger than other people is a kind of hilariously on-the-nose, absurd touch in the middle of an otherwise quite down-to-earth near-future thriller.

I really enjoyed this. The slow-burn reveal of the over-arching plot of the whole series is handled so so well.

Each of the Steerswoman books are great, individually, but taken together it's one of my favourite series I have read. I'm not going to give a summary of the story, because I don't want anything I write to count as a spoiler for earlier books. But it's a lot of fun, probably my favourite so far. Apparently books five and six are in the works. I can't wait.