Lori

After reading Speaker for the Dead, I thought this book would be just as captivating. It was not. It just went on for too long and over analyzed everything. I just kept waiting for the point in the book where it would take me in. The story was pulled in so many different directions that each part wasn’t given the attention it deserved. Interesting ethical debates are still apart of this book but it not enough.

Characters I had cared about before, I didn’t fee that same connection with. The emotional pull of the previous book was missing from this one. Most were unlikable and I don’t feel like that was intentional. Bad characters with no emotional gravity are what hurt the book.

I can’t stop thinking about this book. I had read Ender's Game in high school and enjoyed it ever since. Now I needed a book starting with an X for a challenge and will read Xenocide after this. Although I picked this up just to get to the next book in the series, I am happy I did.

It is beyond different from Ender's Game (which I still enjoy). This one was more mature, deeper, and thought-provoking. The story took me in, and I could not put it down. The discussion of how we study other societies and the “Piggys” as a people was engaging.

The stories of the Piggys and the people researching them were captivating and emotional. I almost felt like crying as the Piggys understood what happened with Pipo and Libo. Human (a Piggy) was such a great character!

This is a must-read for anyone.

I could not believe how good this book is. The characters are beautifully written out and the interactions between them feel real. The start of the book was interesting in that it was about a scientist trying to study the paranormal. From there we learn more about the other characters brought to the house to learn about the house itself.

The character-building is what makes this book so great. Each are real with their own motivations. Dialog didn’t feel forced, and characters were driven seemingly by themselves. The slow change from scientific to paranormal was breathtakingly well done. This slow change felt natural and horrifying.

This was such a great read that I only wish I read it sooner.

This was an odd book, and I don’t quite know what to think of it. There were parts that were great in either energy or storytelling and other parts that were dragging and distortedly written. I don’t have too much experience with Straub’s works, only Ghost Story, which gave me a high expectation for this collaboration.

And collaborated they did as you can’t tell who wrote what part and with only some classic King style in there that’s all his own. This book blended great in some parts that made this feel like an effort of great companionship by both authors. On the other hand, the parts where it doesn’t blend so well are what make this book feel off.

The whole story built up a magical other world that we don’t get to see enough of. We spend so much time on the Real/regular world with the main character getting stopped at numerous pits of despair. I just want the story to go on. The book was part childhood loss and random torture. Some trials the main character/hero is put through were unnecessarily long. Other characters like Wolf and Richard could be a little annoying and only added to the trials of the MC.

All this is not to say this is a completely bad book. Although I maybe a sucker for King’s works since I have loved so much of his other novels. The feel of the book is part fairy tale but mostly dark fantasy and dark it does well. The evil and just mean for fun characters were done well and parts of the trials were good to read. It just should have been shorter and worked more with the magic of the Territories.

I am hoping that the next book fixes some of these issues as that would turn this into a great collaboration.