BulbasaurusThe7th
Jack is going to die. As the book goes on, in more than one possible way, but alas, he has this illness that is definitely got good for him. He has a fatal insomnia condition, so it seems logical to do the kind of job where he needs to stay overnight; non-stop gas station attendant. It must be boring, yeah?
Except his workplace is outside a small town in the middle of nowhere, and things are not how they should normally be. Mutated raccoons steal cigarettes if you don't pay attention. Plants looking and moving exactly like human hands are growing outside that you have to burn sometimes or else they rip apart animals (and they scream while they burn). A death cult regularly comes in and buys up all the snacks.
At one point he just decided that hey, writing a blog about his experiences could work. What could go wrong?
Normally I am not super much into horror. I love the mystery parts, where you have the ominous feeling and you don't know what the hell is wrong. But the actual, being chased by the psycho with an axe? Nah. Not for me. Luckily, this was heavily based on the fact this person is telling you his story in first person. To him a bunch of the odd things are perfectly normal to him. He tells you like you would tell someone about a weird guy at work or the leaky coffee machine in the break room.
There is something cool about the almost bored tone. You know. It is what it is, the naked cowboy is in the bathroom again.
The issue with writing a review is, though, that I have no idea what to say that would sell you on this, but wouldn't say too much that is a spoiler OR that just makes me sound deranged.
We reach the big battle, where all our characters need to get together and duke it out with the White and his army. Yay!
It took me years to finally get to this book. Somehow I didn't want to do it, I didn't know how the story was going to have everything resolved. Don't get me wrong, it did, though... I would be lying if I said this wasn't my least favourite book in the series.
The ideas are still great and still, something isn't as satisfying about this one as I would have wanted it to be, which is doubly annoying as this book is LONG. There would have been space. Then again, that space was spent on repetitive descriptions of random new guns and bombs the characters just invented. On military things, like what group went in what direction. Just too much filler.
I do still recommend this series, though. The thing I specifically really appreciate about it is the fact that even the characters with supposedly good intentions mess up. Human nature was portrayed perfectly. Sure, we have a revolution and in most books, especially nowadays would have portrayed the poor workers as the noble ones. Here? They were far from ideal. They were just as clueless and prone to mindless violence.
Another thing is, relationships between people fail sometimes by the fault of none of the parties. Not every romance ends with perfection and that doesn't mean one of the people cheated or lied or was a horrible person all along. Another very well-executed thing about the portrayal of characters.
Some elements didn't go anywhere. You were made to believe the shortage of product was a huge deal or that Tinkerer was very important, then suddenly the topic just fizzled out.
All in all, a solid series, with a slightly lackluster ending.
This was genuinely one of the most grotesquely horrid things I could have picked up to read.
I really love the original series. It's innovative, it's weird. It has a ton of soul. It takes a group of incredibly flawed, unpleasant people and then it manages to break them and build them up and by the end I couldn't help caring about them. It was good. It had this defined mood. Something that worked for me.
This one, though. It feels like the writer only read some sort of a short summary without understanding what the hell the original was doing. One thing about the novels was that magic is hard work. You can't just wing it. It's boring and painful and it kill your soul a little. You grind, you make an effort. You have to be precise. You have to be a genius. Yes, even hedge witches.
Here we have a group of hedges just being allowed in to Brakebills. Why? Dunno. They don't have to take the exam, which was a crucial point in the novels. They don't have to take endless classes, they don't have to study patiently. They don't get sent to some Arctic hellhole to make them even more miserable.
Nah. They “just learnt Latin at a homeless shelter”. They just FEEL magic.
It looks like a spit in the face for the whole idea of how they gain true power in the books.
The magical protection on Brakebills just isn't a thing. Nothing exists. They literally teach battle magic to kids who don't even have the basics, because why not? Especially smart throwing in some kid who supposedly hates that they are even there. “Oh, you hate each other? FIGHT.” Brilliant.
The relationships between people are laughable. The whole thing starts with people kissing each other's ass and telling each other how lovely they are. Fuck off. The Magicians, the REAL ones had complex ways people related to each other. This one has “yassss, you are so GOOD, YAAAAS”.
Also insta love left and right. Two seconds of conflicts about it. Which gets resolved like nothing with 2 lines of dialogue.
What is pacing? We don't need no pacing.
Nor do we need art that looks good in any way. This was unpleasant to look at. The covers made me think this was going to at least be visually okay. Nah, mate. HORRID.
So basically shitty characters, done ugly, doing random illogical things, not following the in universe rules, the conflicts get left at nothing, nothing matters, the mood is ass...
I wouldn't recommend this to any living being.
Year 3 arrived and things are even more complicated than before.
I realised something. Did any of you grow up watching anime (or reading manga) that is long, usually shounen and has a million arcs? Some of them typical for all. They usually have a tournament arc, some kind of epic, midfuck-y fight, usually a couple fun episodes with things like characters going to the beach or having to wear costumes/uniforms for a bit. Parents show up and turn out to be more important than you thought. Someone presumed to be dead, but still alive.
Yep. This series is basically that, in a novel format.
If you like it, you will love this. It's not the best written stuff, some things are cringe and sometimes sentences are awkward as hell. I'm pretty sure the author forgot about some things and characters halfway through. Sometimes the characterization is not super consistent.
But you will have fun with it.
Now this specific volume had some things that made me roll my eyes that didn't even pay off (EHMspoiler: ElizaEHM), but I am still into it.
I would also like more time spent on certain characters, like Dean Blaine or Sean Pendleton. Then again, I'm probably just getting old when I relate to the teachers more than to the protagonist kids. That's life, I suppose.
All in all, still a good read, even if the books are getting damn long. For my very first web serial, this was a super solid choice.
In this one our kids go on to year two of their superhero education. Exams happen, fights, some parties. People outside the college are getting involved with them and big events in the outside world are influencing what happens to them.
I would say this was more of the same as the first book. I still enjoy it. I feel the writing has improved, even though there are still some awkwardly overwritten parts, they are less and less at this point.
I have one issue with it, though. It's small, but still. There are a lot of characters, all of them with their own superpower. Sometimes I really didn't remember who did what, especially because some of the skills overlap in use. One girl has siren song, another manipulates noise to attack. Which is which now? Sometimes a character gets mentioned and I don't remember what they can do, but then it turns out maybe we weren't even told yet.
Before anything else, I have to point out that I have not seen the show and I honestly am not very interested in it. I prefer this cover over the old ones, though, so I picked this one.
My grandfather used to play chess. Not professionally, just local little tournaments. I never learnt. He could also do things like count cards, so it's safe to assume he was the smart one in this family. He also didn't care about vanity and was extremely... clean, I suppose. Never drank, never even thought of using drugs, he just lived simply and was extremely introverted.
Our main character, Beth is also introverted, though she doesn't skip on a good drink or pills to help her nerves. Damn, girl. She is also a chess prodigy and an orphan. Once she gets adopted in her early teens, she starts her professional chess career that leads her to international fame and even playing against the Russians.
So what was the thing about this book? Beth is extremely successful at chess, but a failure at adjusting to normal life. She doesn't care about anything else, has no other interests. She doesn't care about people who can't challenge her at it and loses interest in people once she is better than them. This includes her lovers; the moment they aren't just at least her equals at chess (either because she is better or they care about other things), she gets disappointed and leaves.
Now some of you will say that's the point. It still made me bored with her. I already knew the end of every interaction and relationship right at the beginning. There was no excitement about seeing her meet a new person, because you knew how it was going to end.
Her only real skill doesn't make that easier. You just know she is going to win. Some few times she gets a bit of hardship, but never more than a few pages and it's all half-hearted. So you know she will be better than anyone. We are told she studies games and replays them and such, but it never feels like she actually struggles. Oh, she does get annoyed when someone twice her age is better than her for a brief time before she beats them, but that's all.
I never felt any real pressure.
The prose played into that. I am not a professor of literature. I don't have a degree, I just read a lot. So bear with me when I have no idea what this style of writing is called. Everything is described with random details, but with some sort of emotional detachment and making everything feel like the bored analysis of the surroundings by a person who notices the weird and unnecessary details. Do I care Beth ate boiled eggs with salt? Do I care about the colour of hand soap? It just makes the book have even less excitement.
Now I didn't expect traditionally defined action. This isn't a book about war, but chess. But still, it made Beth sound so boring.
The other people around her are all defined by how much use they were to her. Her adoptive mother, her fellow competitor Benny Watts, friend Jolene. They are all nothing more than stepping stones so Beth can play more and better chess.
I liked certain things, though. When I first heard this is about a female chess player, I assumed it was going to be yet another tired story about “but like, everyone was so mean to her, because woman and like, life is horrible as a woman” while also telling you women are the greatest thing. On that note, I love the contradiction of those stories; being a woman is the greatest thing, but also let us tell you how being a woman is worse than anything ever and is pure torture.
Here it was handled well. Woman players are rare. But Beth did it and at that point she stopped caring what people said. As long as she wasn't outright banned (which she wasn't) she just did her thing and let that speak for her. And surprise surprise, people were fine after all.
I still can't say it is worth a read other than if you really really want to and have plenty of time. I never questioned Beth being the best. I never thought it could end badly for her.
Hell, even her substance abuse was treated weightlessly; sure, sometimes she got a bit sick, but she bounced right back with no issue and there were no real repercussions. Everything she did just happened without influencing anything else.
It's short, though. So there is that. Short read, which can come in handy by the end of the year, when you are having trouble finishing your challenge, if you care about such things.
Quit at 56%. I am just not getting on well with this series. On paper I should like it, but it's tedious, lifeless and just can't hold my attention.
Also, the model on the cover is a completely different person from the book 1 guy. I prefer book 1 Eric and that's it.
UPDATE:
I read this, finally. Still bothered by the fact the covers all have a different guy.
Eric realises that someone can murder people and steal their appearances when he gets attacked by the person doing it. But why would someone do that and what can be done about it? Meanwhile, someone assumed dead starts talking to him again. Even for a necromancer, it's slightly weird.
The big issue with this series is that we have big reveals that are supposed to be emotional, but they have zero emotional punch, because we don't know these characters that much. The payoff doesn't really do anything when the characters barely even did anything and half of that was freaking annoying anyway.
The mysteries are competent, the action is pretty good. Hell, Eric is fine as a character, I am okay with him. But something is missing. Sure, the books are pretty short and we are two books in, but what will be left for book 10 to do that has emotion if we blow everything on the first few, when it all doesn't matter that much either? That is my biggest question. At this point people are all just dead around Eric. So we will have new, throwaway, random people forever, because nobody is allowed any development. Plus, we are back to square one with the new ones not liking or trusting Eric.
I would love to see more of the big power players behind the story. So far it all just leads back to the same people, so I don't know if that will stay the same. This is less of a problem, we have more than enough time for developing the world.
Something about the book just doesn't work for me. It's short and shouldn't take an effort, but somehow it doesn't read smoothly enough.
The supporting characters are uninteresting and even though Eric is fine, right now I don't feel like forcing myself to go on with it. Maybe later. Maybe in a different mood, I mean it's not bad by any chance just... I don't know.
###
UPDATE: I read it. I tried the book for a second time and now I finished the whole thing.
Eric Carter is a necromancer and pretty emo if you're asking me. After 15 years away from his home in LA he returns because of the brutal murder of his sister, Lucy, his only remaining family. He needs to find out who from his past could have done such a thing, while meeting some old friends who all feel he had abandoned them.
Look at that cover and tell me it doesn't remind you of a certain edition of the Dresden Files series. Even the premise is similar, urban fantasy with this angsty, angry young man who feels he doesn't have any roots. Even the fact supernatural powers are interested in him is Dresden-like.
What makes this not Dresden-like is the fact Eric lacks so much of the charm of Harry. This is not a funny book. He has no lightness about him, not much sarcastic, wiseass flair. Which is fine, he is a darker character from the get go, but I am just warning everyone; this isn't going to be a haha fun times. If anything, Eric is a lot more unashamed about just killing people. He goes in, does his thing, messes with the dead and it's the end of it.
In that regard, I have no idea how we can raise the stakes here. How will this get more serious? Not sure how much that will work when it's already borderline depressing in here.
In a way, I feel having big, emotionally significant deaths in the first book is a bit of a mistake when it's so short and will be part of a longer series, anyway. I don't care about Eric that much so far. That's just a fact, he is fine, but he isn't a character we spent years following. A lot of the impact of book deaths comes from us having a soft spot for either the victim or the surviving other (or both), but in this case Lucy was never a real character and Eric is just... I don't know yet?
In that sense a lot of the drama feels wasted.
Now don't get me wrong, this wasn't a bad book. It's adequate. I wind the urban fantasy genre to be very easily readable, like this one, so in that sense it's successful. It's competent. But it went in too fast, which took a lot out of its impact. I want to read more of this series, but I can't promise I am 100% on board.
I will be honest, I find many journalists are full of themselves and have some sort of a god complex. At some point I felt Adelstein is one of said journalists.
In the early 90s he moved to Japan, went to university and then ended up working for the biggest newspaper of the country. This was the part I enjoyed the most. A young guy, not really knowing what he was doing and having to deal with a culture he wasn't perfectly familiar with, ending up in hilarious and weird situations. At one point Jake gets caught up in a fistfight at a company party. I mean, I never expected Japanese journalists to be so wild.
Then, as his career progresses, he starts working on covering the vice division of the Tokyo police. Surprise surprise, it's all connected to the yakuza, who also don't like people meddling in their affairs. Things get dark and dangerous for Jake as he uncovers things that connect the yakuza even to the US.
I don't think you are meant to like Jake too much as a person. He has certain characteristics that can be admired, but he is also very limited in certain areas. His drive is insane. He also sounds like he is really in love with himself and a lot of the things he does is because he likes hearing his own voice. I don't think he is malicious, but he is not saintly.
One person I wish I could have met was Mr. Sekiguchi, a police officer who was a friend and mentor for Jake. I don't know how accurate his portrayal was, but I feel the way the author talked about him was the purest and most honest. I can appreciate that and he sounded like one hell of a person. Again, maybe it's Mr. Adelstein being extremely biased, but he was one of the shining stars of the book.
Now I will say something that may sound mean. One of the main points of the book is how multiple yakuza bosses got liver transplants at the UCLA. Tadamasa Goto was allowed to enter the US because he provided info on other yakuza members to the FBI (and also money). The others supposedly just donated money.
I refuse to believe the doctors and the administration of UCLA had no idea the sophisticated and extremely rich, heavily tattooed foreign men arriving with secrecy and personal protection were connected to illicit things. The yakuza is so iconic, even my backwater Eastern European self would have known these people were something bigger than just old dudes needing a liver real quick.
In that sense I don't know why those people should be held to a lower standard of responsibility when it comes to collaborating with the yakuza. In Japan they are in all sorts of business, from politics to entertainment. Yes. That's not good. But a university just taking money and then still pretending they are some high and mighty establishment for education and social progress sickens me.
Another interesting thing about this was how... certain things seemed to be part of Japanese culture that everyone knew were about you getting your way, but everyone still accepted them as a polite thing. By that I mean the way journalists went around being all buddy buddy with cops, to get info. Could you sit around accepting snacks from another person, spending time together on a regular basis when you knew it was to get things out of you? I don't know how I would handle that.
All in all, it was an interesting read, though to me mostly at the beginning. I don't know if I could buy Jake Adelstein as an honest knight in shining armor.
This is a case where I am giving the book a rating (4 stars), but giving the series overall a different one (3 stars). Why?
This is the culmination of everything. Dina's decision on what she will be. Davin's chance to make things right and live with the consequences of the previous book. For Nico to face Dracan.
All those things sound brilliant, but nowhere near enough. There are so many things mentioned about the world, the characters, the different types of magic. There are dragons! And nothing is utilized to its full potential. We hardly get any answers, and while the story ends, it feels like just as many elements simply got forgotten. Hell, we have characters who show up, do things, then we just never hear of them ever again, even though they are important. It just kills a lot of your sense of danger when nobody actually goes the whole way with something devious they want to do.
It also introduces characters who are meant to have emotional significance. Yes, it introduces them halfway in the last book when they are already so short. Not gonna lie, I was rolling my eyes when I was expected to feel just as much for a character who showed up 5 minutes ago as the ones we learnt about for multiple books.
All in all, the whole series should have been more. It should have opened up the world more instead of just mentioning things, then going nowhere with them.
I am not going to talk on some political tangent about the topic of this book, but there is one thing.
NEVER listen to someone who demands you to not read a book, but instead accept their opinion on how it is harmful or this-ist or that-phobic. If you have any intellectual ambition, just go ahead and read it if you want to know. You don't have to agree, but never accept ANYONE's word on how you are not allowed to read something.
Here we go, my friends. I had this on my to-read list for years and I still avoided going for it because of multiple reason. One, it's long. It takes a considerable amount of time to just go through it. Two... damn, this thing is hyped. The best thing since sliced bread, it will make you cry and name your first child Kvothe regardless of gender. It will give you an identity crisis. Hurr durr. Three, Rothfuss did many things that just rub me the wrong way. If we met I would be polite, as I always am, but I doubt we would click. This shouldn't matter all that much, but it does, I guess. Dunno.
One reason I don't care about is it not being finished. I will say this, I don't think the series will ever be finished at this point and I don't care. I care about him not just being honest about it, but yeah.
Kvothe is perfect, so much so I started mentally calling him Inspirational Kvothe. Right now he is hiding as an innkeeper in some small village. Cozy, right? It is, he does innkeeper-y things and hangs out with his student and sole employee, a goat-legged dude, Bast, who is kind of dumb, but hey, he is supernatural.
Then one day... a Chronicler shows up, having heard the legends of Kvothe. So he decides to tell his true and unabridged or whatever story. Here we go.
He grew up in a travelling troupe, things happened, he went to magic university, met a chick. That's about this book. Thanks, bye.
So. I feel that for a first book this was fine. Yes, just fine. I won't call it brilliant or groundbreaking or even all that special, because it just isn't. The prose is often going into purple territory, the story itself is nowhere near as clever as it is intended to be. The characters.... oooooh, man. No, the characters are probably the weakest part of this thing.
All in all, I have zero clue how it managed to make people believe it's some sort of a marvel of fantasy literature. I guess some of the very end of the book explains it; if you fake it long enough eventually it will become truth or whatever. I don't know. I do know that it isn't brilliant, though. I don't want to say it disappointed me, because I had a feeling it wasn't going to become my absolute favourite, but still. I am not head over heals in love with this thing.
Damn, was it long. Everything that happened could have been written 30-50% shorter and we wouldn't have missed much.
Lets go back to Inspirational Kvothe. I personally don't find an inherent issue with power fantasies if they are somewhat balanced and if they don't try to seem more than what they are. In this case... it's rough. Kvothe is the type of character that somehow manages to fall upwards every single time, but also he is an idiot in the sense that he just can't freaking concentrate on any of the miraculous things he gets. He gets into magic school. Yay? Well, lets just waste time on chasing a girl who just can't be bothered to do anything, really. He has a special skill he can use to earn money (music), but he refuses to just work diligently and instead gets distracted every five minutes by some shit. Every single time I felt we were taking a step forward Kvothe's pigeon brain just went some other way, because lulz.
Talking about special skills. Inspiration Kvothe is good at everything and is so without much of an effort. He can miss YEARS of practising on his lute and with just a bit of the equivalent of sullenly playing Wonderwall he is back in shape and perfect. Because he feels it in his feeling place and you are not a musician, so you won't get it. No riding horses in years? Pfft, 60 miles in a day and he is only a bit stiff. Spent a couple months with some woodsman when he was like 8? In a dream all the info about surviving in the wild is back.
We also have the thing where everyone who is not nice to him on day 1 turns out to be an evil person who will keep trying to ruin his life. Because you can detect assholes by seeing how they react to Kvothe.
Now we reached the point where we will talk about his love interest, Denna. Ohhhh, Denna.
I find it incredibly funny when people who claim to be such woman respecting feminists and so acutely aware of all the recent opinion about that write the Dennas of the world.
She is awful. Of course Denna is the single most perfect woman ever, she is so gorgeous and talented and smart and just everything. So everything. So much so men talk about her between themselves and STILL feel the need to white knight and M'lady her. Other women all hate her because she is just flawless and because of that she can literally do nothing in life, no job, no interests, nothing. Because she is perfect and that means she will have be basically a prostitute. I... not gonna lie, I physically facepalmed at this. Of course Kvothe has to point out that she is a bigger victim than him.
It gets even worse. She pushes him around, disappears when she feels like, just generally acts like a bitch. Of course to his face she is all “Ohhhh, you are wonderful and special”, but her deeds say the exact opposite. Then this idiot, when he sees her with other men just thinks “okay, you bang her, but I make her laugh, okay, I am better”. A bruh moment.
Something about this book makes me feel like every single character deserves what comes for them, because they are either pretty one note background people, or the self-sabotaging duo of Kvothe and Denna.
Some of the smaller ones are fun, though. Kvothe has this absolutely mental teacher, Elodin. He makes no sense and just wanders around being visibly crazy in a fun way. I like him. Or his other teacher, Kilvin, who is basically the Hagrid of this book. They are not particularly deep so far, but they are nice.
The thing about writing exceptional characters is that you need to be at least as smart as they are to sell it. You have to be at least as charming or sell it. There is nothing wrong with them lacking something, but if you go overpowered, then sell it to me.
Here it just didn't happen. Many of the conversations between Denna and Kvothe were useless, as their relationship didn't develop and it wasn't nearly as clever or entertaining as it was intended to be. The handful of good jokes in this giant book didn't make it worth the endless amounts of eye-rolling “witty” content.
Sometimes fantasy authors get this urge to include poems and songs in books. I blame Tolkien. I respect him and understand his cultural significance, but damn, do we have so many authors who are convinced they will also write poetry. And again, in this case as well as in others, the poems weren't great. To me they just break up the pace, they are kind of uncomfortable and jarring after me going through hundreds of pages of prose.
Not gonna lie, I am not a huge fan of poetry and especially not of poetry from not-poets. There is a reason why some people pick different forms to express themselves. To me it's like if an author suddenly decided to paint their own book covers. Maybe some could. But mostly it will just feel amateurish, especially in contrast with the “main attraction”. Of course less effort will go into it and less expertise.
Maybe I will get angry comments about this, but I don't really care. Ones that call me names or claim I am stupid for not liking this or that I shouldn't have an opinion (because it's not nice or because I'm not an author myself, etc.) will be deleted, I don't have time for that.
DNF at about one third of the way in.
Malorie and her kids have to escape the school for the blind and then they spend a good decade in a former summer camp doing not much, until one day a man shows up. He is supposedly a census man, leaves them a book with a bunch of information about other survivors and the things they tried to do to get an explanation to the creatures and to adjust to a new life. This makes the characters want to move, to get to the supposed new civilisation and to see what is going on there.
I don't like Malerman's writing. I didn't like The Bird Box and I don't like this thing. There is nothing satisfying about him going on and on about random things, about what Malorie feels again and again without a conclusion. Without anything every being found out. Just cluelessly wandering around, being scared and being volatile. It feels like this whole thing leads nowhere and we will have another meaningless chapter where the characters go to a freaking well for water and putting on protective gear.
It's trying to be very artistic. It says random things that are supposed to feel like you can connect to the characters and events intimately, while to me they were more like random, useless pieces of information that lead nowhere. Malorie and her sister snuck into an adult movie and her sister fell asleep. That's cool and all, but it says nothing that would add to the development of the story, just Malorie thinking of useless junk.
Tom is the only character who actually wants to be proactive, who wants to develop and do things and Malorie just tells him no. Again, I am sure this was meant to be poignant in some way, but to me it felt frustrating. I'm sure someone will come and explain to me I just don't understand the intricate, deep things about this. But to hell with that, I am not going to try and rationalise the supposed greatness of a book that annoys me and doesn't give me a pleasant reading experience.
I'm admittedly not the hugest horror fan. What I like is building pressure and some sort of a catharsis at the end when either a satisfying conclusion happens or... shit just goes off the rails completely. These books have nothing like that, it just feels like it's slow and dragging and then by the end I want it to end, not because I care all that much, but because I still hope something will be resolved, when it doesn't happen.
It's frustrating, more than anything.
I personally wouldn't recommend these books. I have no clue why they became such hyped things, because I don't find the ideas unique, nor was the way they were handled. I guess they are short and easy to read? I don't know, I don't care at this point.
Doubtful that I will ever feel like reading anything other than this from the author, he is just not to my taste.
In this one someone from the mother's past shows up and threatens the peace the family managed to find in the Highlands. After this point the description of the plot part of the review will be one big spoiler. You learn real fast who this stranger is, but I know some of you are super sensitive to such things.
So Dina's dad is finally with us, yay. Now up until this point we ave been introduced to some small mentions and such of magic. Of course dragons too. But we weren't told about whole different branches of it. Now of course I had a feeling Dina's dad was going to be someone, as they never even mentioned him, really and it was quite obvious. Here he turns out to be a Blackmaster, someone who is able to create illusions, to make people see things not there, to bring them dreams with his magical flute. It's made obvious his whole family is something big and important and in their own field they are big ones, though we never get to meet them. Something I find interesting is that... I feel there is a bit of an issue with how Mellussina sees him and how he behaves. Not sure if this is an intentional artistic choice by the author, but it never gets properly explained. Meanwhile the family gets in trouble and Nice and Davin even end up in prison. Now this was so far the most dark thing in the books. I still think it's perfectly appropriate for children and I would even recommend it to them, but yeah. Some messed up shit happens.
Here is the thing with this series. I like the books. Duh. I like the individual stories. But this is book 3 in a 4 book series. You know when people say something is greater than the sum of its parts? I think in this case it's the exact opposite.
I am having a blast every single time I am reading a new book of this. But. I think the series as a whole could do much more with its interesting concepts. There is just so many questions and so much left to discover. It's almost like these small stories are just picked out little bits of a huge, epic saga.
Jim Butcher keeps talking about how he is going to write a YA companion series to his Dresden Files with Maggie, a child character and her dog being the protagonists. This series feels like that. Like there is something, big things going on outside the limited bubble of Dina's immediate circle and I would kill to be able to read that one as well. Now it's possible I'm just old. But even for a children's book, there could have been much more... I guess, opening up the world.
I'm still giving it a high rating, because the book itself if really nice. It's well-written, it's fun, the characters are good, the concepts are stellar. Maybe if there more book, maybe if the individual volumes were longer.
I don't feel the author treats the reader as stupid (Which is an issue with some children's books), more like we are only scratching the surface.
I would still recommend this to kids or adults who enjoy middle grade. I am definitely going to read the last book ,but I will forever wish it was more than this.
25% in and I can't stand this.
Joyeaux Charmand is the main character and even her name sounds like the author is desperately trying to convince you she is cool and you will love her. I didn't. Basically she is some sort of a warrior type, raised on a mountain (or Mountain, as they call it, wow) in some monastery. In this place everyone is welcome, except Christians, because religious differences that are part of history and even today are nothing, just Everyone Good VS Christians Bad. The creativity! The originality! The daring! I'm not even religious at all, but even to me this was laughable.
So at Monastery Diverse they are raising people to hunt scary scary magical creatures who started showing up because of some magical catastrophe, I think very creatively caused by Christians.
But now Joy needs to go to the capitol, which is very Hunger Games, because her influential uncle called her there. Apparently hunters are celebrities there? Dunno.
This book is very teenage girl in the worst sense of it. It's immature and lacks a feeling of depth, like nothing going on is serving a real purpose in a plausible society. Of course teenage characters are super mega competent and trusted with things. Like who the fuck would assign a teen bodyguard to do something important? Would you trust a kid with your life like that?
Joy's personality makes just as little sense. She constantly has to narrate her own feelings, saying how a real hunter should be. She is ... I will be real, she is a whiny child. Why is she simultaneously presented as this hyper competent hero and also completely useless and annoying? Even her inner monologue made me cringe. She called two characters she just met “yummy strangers”. Now some of you will probably say hey, she is just layered. But no, her personality is not built up, it's just cliche and lame, whining and being a baby, but I am told she is very badass. I have Throne of Glass flashbacks.
Ashok, Thera and the Sons are going to the secret hideout with their new members, Devedas is out to get them, while Omand is still a fucking psycho. So basically this series is still fun, still full of adventure and action.
I liked the first two books on the first read, but to get to this I had to go through them again. Man, was that a great decision, it's even better this way. Something about the way the story is progressing makes it impossible to me to see what's happening next and that still stands in this book. Some of the archetypes and character motivations are by themselves not that different, but what Mr. Correia does with them is unpredictable and completely different.
On another note, I assumed this was a trilogy. Nope. There will be at least one more book. Keep that in mind, it may change how you see the pacing. For some time I was surprised by how things are not getting resolved. Lol, because they are not meant to be!
I gave this another try. Someone online basically screamed at me for disliking this and wrote whole essays about why it's literally the most intelligent and best book EVAH.
Which... it isn't. But now I will wrote a slightly longer, proper review. So there we go.
Magical kids attract monsters. Their semi-controlled energy is a feast and they can't put up a fight equal to a fully trained magical adult. So the kids get sent to the Scholomance, a school where kids are locked up for 4 whole years, where survival is the hardest. Food gets poisoned, monsters lurk, you can't even go to the bathroom without looking over your shoulder.
Galadriel, aka El is... not popular. She is gloomy and weird and unfriendly, so she is not really allied to anyone, which is viatl in a hostile enviroment, until... a kid from an influential family, Orion Lake, suddenly starts following her around because he has a crush on her. After that, everyone suddenly cares about El.
I still feel what I felt during my first attempt; El is a bitch. She is rude to everyone, constantly judges, has issues with everyone. We have to root for her, because this is a YA book and she is a female main character, therefore her toxic behaviour is not only accepted, but glorified. She had a bad childhood! A huge part of it is because of her annoying, tree-hugging hippy mother, who is super powerful in healing, but is just too much of a spineless granola to actually DO THINGS to make her child not absolutely miserable. There are always excuses, because wizard groups called enclaves are douchey, and also she doesn't charge money for her skills, and BLAH BLAH BLAH.
It's just shitty parenting.
But all in all, El becomes an asshole. She meets Orion, this heroic, but socially inept boy... and she goes on abusing him. She calls him names, yells at him, lets him know she fucking hates his existence.
Then she also does the same with the people who try to “suck up to him”. The whole thing is excused with “well, it's better because you just want to use him and I don't, I treat him like everyone else”. This annoys me so much.
PSA for everyone reading: just because people treat you weirdly doesn't mean you have to accept constant verbal abuse and making you feel like you're a burden from someone else. NO, that is absolutely abuser behaviour.
Some things are fun about this. A bunch of the stuff going on at school can be interesting, but at the same time... why? Magic exists and people don't even really try protecting their kids, they just send them to a murder factory? Yes, the book tries to explain it away, but danger to their kids is literally one of the biggest things that motivates people.
It's just all too convenient for making it cool and edgy and violent. The whacky things didn't seem to have a good enough reason. You get some, sure, just not strong enough ones to not make me doubt the whole thing.
I did enjoy Orion Lake (stupidest, most Wattpad name ever), he was determined and he did so much good, while being a social zero. It just saddens me he is so stuck to someone who absolutely does not treat him right. It's the gender-swapped version of “he is a dickhead, but it's just because he had a hard childhood, love will change him”.
If Novik plays this straight, or just blames it on conveniently inconvenient magic, I will scream.
All in all, superficially cool idea get bogged down by unpleasantness and “yeah right” edgetastic explanations and rules. It's extremely sellable to a target audience that feels asshole young women are STRONG and INDEPENDENT. It works if you think not treating others like maggots is just internalised patriarchy or whatever.
I will go on with the series to see what half-baked excuse will explain away all this, but... yeah. This is yet another unpleasant YA read.
——————————————————————————
This did not work for me whatsoever. When I say it's basically needlessly edgy Mean Girls and annoying high school drama it probably explains it all.
The protagonist is yet another asshole teenage girl we are supposed to think is all that and so witty, but to me she came off as a bad person. Of course she gets the attention of this super influential and important, rich, connected guy and what does she do? Constantly acts like the biggest bitch to him, which he takes like he enjoys being kicked around.
It was very juvenile, very annoying, very unpleasant.
I was so excited about this and now I'm incredibly disappointed.
The world is a place with all sorts of magical creatures, but then suddenly magic disappears and so everyone is struggling. Except humans, who are becoming more and more dominant as a species when before they were the lowest of low. Fetch is a detective in Sunder City, where recently both an old vampire and a young sired disappeared.
On paper this sounds like a good read and something fun I would enjoy, but the painful one-sided nature of the story bothers me more than I can say, along with the attitude of the protagonist.
So here is the thing. This won't be a spoiler because they keep repeating this from like page 10, but basically magic didn't disappear because of some happenstance, but because humans were jealous of everyone else and wanted to steal magic, damaging the source of it in the process. Because humans are assholes. The shittest of all creatures, but also fuck them for wanting to change that. It's evil to dislike that they are looked down on, it's evil when they want to change it and it's even evil when they form isolated cities when they can live by their own rules without treated like scum.
Fetch keeps repeating these things. No matter what human do, they are the bad guys. No matter what they try to make a place for themselves, fuck humans. The funny thing? Fetch is human. The One Good Human, look at him, he HATES himself ans is ashamed of being human as he also keeps saying. So he must be a good guy, right? Because he hates himself! That's the only good way.
Every human character is an asshole, except wonderful, self-hating, self-pitying Fetch, who drinks to deal with the fact he is the same species as those nasty, disgusting humans.
Man, is this tiresome, the whole phenomena of virtue signalling through hating your own people and loudly declaring that you all are shit. Yes, I find it pathetic and stupid in real life (hello, Twitter, look at me being a good INSERT IDENTITY HERE unlike all the others). Why would I read this?
I don't even care about the mystery when the character and his thoughts annoy me so damn much. I quit it halfway in because I won't torture myself. Nah.
The prose is extremely weird as well. Most of the time it's straight forward gritty crime writing style, which is fine, but then these random, weird things are thrown in about the devil smiling in the moonlight and such. Why? It all feels like it happens without a reason, just to sound cool.
I really couldn't love this book all that much. Somehow the story itself felt like some half-baked urban legend you could read on Facebook, shared by people who don't think stuff through before deciding it's absolutely true. To explain why I think that, I will hide a lot of this review behind a spoiler tag. I am sure that makes my review a lot less valuable to people who have not read this yet, but I think that's absolutely necessary to really explain why I gave it such a low rating.
Before that, some non-spoiler things, though.
One of the big, defining characteristics of the protagonist, Jules is the fact she is alone. She has nobody and she kind has to rely on only herself. That's a fact, she is used to it and still, somehow relationships with his new neighbours and even some characters outside the building just come to her. She has very personal conversations with people about traumatic events and their big life problems without knowing each other.
I find it unrealistic. Sure, some people in some situations can overshare. Happens. But to have that happen so many times with so many different people just feels like kind of lazy storytelling. The story plays out in a few days and I guess that was the author's self-imposed hardship, because to me it made a lot of conversations so damn unrealistic.
But now, for the mystery and why it just doesn't work for me .
Rich people have this big apartment building where they go when sick. Unsuspecting poor people are employed to occupy empty units, but in reality their organs are stolen to give to the sick, rich people. This is a big, posh operation, right? Well, why would they only have a handful of "donors" at a time? Why would they only use a few organs? If I was running such a thing, I would find a fuckton of rich people and use up every single organ of every single "donor". Dylan's heart was given away... but not the rest? Why? They are willing to do this, but they also throw away two kidneys, a liver, corneas, pancreas, lungs, a whole lot of things that can earn good money for the operators. Why would it matter if Jules cut her throat? They have a whole hospital to keep her organs until they can quickly plop them into the people already lined up. Why do the rich people have to live in the building? It's not like they can't just go to some private luxury property to discretely heal. How do they know if someone will be a good donor? Poor people are generally not super up on their regular health checkups (hell, even non-poor people aren't, because humans) and I'm pretty sure organ donors need a bit more than your yearly "how are we feeling?" type stuff. What if I move in and it turns out I have a hidden health condition or I don't match any of the people there?
All in all, I feel the story wasn't nearly as smart and well-thought-out as it tried to be and that kind of killed it for me. Especially because not even the pressure was that much. It just wasn't scary and I don't feel the mood was as built up as it should have been. Really, I just didn't like this one very much. Easy read, though, so there is that, but I would not bring this up as a recommendation.
I have wanted to read this series for something like 6 years now and now seemed to be a good time to go ahead with it. One thing that pissed me off endlessly, though, was the fact that the UK and US releases not only have a different title for the series, but even the individual books go by different titles. Looking anything up online is confusing, because hey, two series in the same universe? No? Which book is this? Which number?
Thank you, publishers, you played us all. It sucks. I mean the situation, not the book itself, don't get me wrong.
Kids eventually reach the age when Harry Potter is not that scary for them. Some of them even like spooky things and monsters and such, but I would rather not drop them from middle grade right into Stephen King. Not just because of the horror, but Mr. King is a bit fucked up in many ways (we are not going to talk about the orgy in IT, no sir).
So what is a horror-loving child to do? Well, for one there is Darren Shan who is a master of gory and creepy and horrible and I love the fact that this corner of the market is used. Just like Rick Yancey's Monstrumologist books (except the last, that was just WTF). Or this! Though I would say this was lighter than Shan's Demonata, but there was still plenty of creepy stuff in it, with witches and blood and a boy who has to learn how to fight the supernatural creatures plaguing the normal people.
Thomas is the seventh son of a seventh son, thus he is perfect to battle all the evil creatures. When it's time to find out what occupation is right for him it's obvious he will become the apprentice of the Spook of the County; the man who keeps them safe from everything unnatural, though such a job is not only very scary and dangerous, but lonely as well. While him and his new master are there to help, people don't trust them and even fear them.
Thomas thinks his life will be spent alone, until he meets a girl, Alice, who seems to be more knowledgeable about the supernatural than he is and really, more than any child should be. But things are not so easy when everyone wants to get their way and a powerful creature is about to escape.
It was short, fast, a fun read. The series is MUCH longer and I am going to go ahead with it for sure.
What have I just read? What was this?? A weird child is going through pseudo-Asia. He has the mission given by a Shinigami of killing an evil Emperor. Now a small child needs to have some relevant skills to make it so, yeah? Ein can take dead people, bring them back to life and make them help him through this. They are all notable, great fighters, special for some reason and if they manage to do this they will be fully alive again. Not much to lose, right? Getting into this short little book took me much longer than I expected, mostly because a huge chunk of the book is basically the characters going around, finding the next member of the group, making them join the mission, then going on. It makes it easier to remember the characters as they are not dumped at your face all at once and I appreciate that, but also it didn't feel all that exciting. In a way I would say it wasn't. It was fine, it was okay, the writing is good, but it did not feel much more like than your average wacky character heist story. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's not particularly exciting either. The buildup was good, though, by the end I was made to care about these assholes. Because yes, they are not really nice people and Ein is creepy as all hell. But still, I started rooting for them because after everything it only felt right for them to get their way, partially because this wasn't a complicated book and that just seems like the just thing for the characters. They weren't bad enough to not deserve it, damn it. The end, though. Without the end this would have been a one book deal, not even a long one at that. Then things got much more complicated than that. Was it too late to make this an amazing book? I don't know. I couldn't give it a full 5 stars and I needed some time to think about what just happened. At this point I don't know where we are going for the sequel either. Part of me feels a bit salty about the fact we are left at this point of the story. It was a setup. We were made to read something that could have justifiably been half a book. This was the exact opposite of what happened with [b:The Ember Blade 34673711 The Ember Blade (The Darkwater Legacy #1) Chris Wooding https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1490348335l/34673711.SY75.jpg 55844744] and I am not 100% sold on either being the better way to divide a story into volumes. This was definitely interesting and creative, but also a very frustrating read. Short, though. I would recommend it because even if you are not on board with what is happening and how... it doesn't take too much effort. It's accessible and short and I think worth at least a look.
Generally speaking, I am not really into short stories. Even with series that I love already based on the novels... I almost always just skip the short story collections and such. Something about the format doesn't work well with me.
Now this book is somewhere between a novel and a short story collection. Still the same universe as Monster Hunter International, though a different city, a different team and a whole new protagonist, namely Oliver Chadwick Gardenier, previously a Marine, now monster hunter.
I would absolutely not recommend to read this before MHI and by that time I think you already know what sort of a thing to expect. It's fun, it's fast, it talks about the different, more important cases during the early career of Chad, what he did before hunting, how he got into it, how he was doing at first.
Let me tell you, he is good at everything. Chad is a.... chad, really. But there is something hilariously fun about the way they just absolutely demolish things that come to mess with the humans in their area. It's perfect to just relax, have a fun time and let it go.
Not everyone will like it. We know that much. But man, if you like this kind of stuff, you will most likely have an absolute blast with it.
