Florian
I really wanted to love this. I'll take any chance to jump into a tale where scent is magic. I would have loved to learn more about this world and how the magic shapes it.
Unfortunately we learn very little about it. We also learn little about the protagonist who is always on the hunt for some dangerous magic ingredient or other. But we never really learn why. What does he need those ingredients for? What is he trying to make? We get some small hints of what his motivation might be only more than halfway through the book. So sadly the story feels a bit disjointed. On top of that the protagonist is insufferable and cruel and I could overlook that if at least he were interesting in any way. Unfortunately I never got a chance to connect to Marcel. I feel some of this could have been remedied with more critical editing of the story. I hope if this tale is ever continued in a sequel some more care will go into developing the plot so we can empathize in some way with the main character and follow him on a journey that actually leads somewhere. In this first book we unfortunately didn't get that chance.
This is a difficult read. A world seen through a lense of pain where it is hard to feel any emotional connection to any of the unnamed characters.
The plot seemingly repeats itself in tighter winding circles, waves incessantly crashing on the same shore.
The reward are some sentences of true imaginative beauty. A book like a fever dream, nothing is real, except the cruelty that is hinted at.
It took me a while to get around to reading this book but I am very glad I did.
I enjoyed the strength of the writing and the emotional depth of the characters. Patroclus is a wonderful narrator that is easy to identify with, bringing a human scale to an epic of heroic proportions. Sometimes it is hard to love Achilles but seeing him through Patroclus eyes he is at the same time the hero and the anti-hero that we need him to be. And while the story was always fated to end in tragedy there is a bit of grace at the end of it that did not fail to move me.
I wish I had read it sooner.
This was a worthy sequel to “Semiosis” further developing the story of the inter species society living in Rainbow City on Pax. It was good to learn more about the ecology and the different species however it was not quite as strong as the first book.
I still thoroughly enjoyed reading it and would actually enjoy a third part to the story (which as far as I know is not planned).
There are different types of sci-fi books, some focus on technology, some focus on military struggles, some are epic sagas and some explore new ideas. This book is one of the latter with a focus on an alien ecology it explores how humans would interact with it and what the mind of someone who is not like us would look like.
I absolutely love these types of stories. I was fascinated by the ecology on Pax and the type of society humans create there. If you expect a story that is intensely focused on what happens to one main character then this is not for you but if you enjoy dreaming up worlds that are familiar yet foreign then you might enjoy this as I have.
Bei Christina Plaka sitzt wirklich jeder Federstrich. Ihr Zeichenstil ist so ausdrucksstark, dass die Bilder die Geschichte tragen. Manchmal braucht es wenig Worte, ein Blick, Körpersprache, das alles fängt sie mit ihrer Feder ein. Nike ist nie sympathische Heldin deren Gefühlsverwicklungen man leicht nachvollziehen kann. Wäre ich mit ihr befreundet, ich wüsste nicht, was ich ihr raten soll.
Ich freue mich darauf im nächsten Band mehr übe Nike und ihre Freunde zu erfahren.
Der einzige Wehmutstropfen: voraussichtlich wird die Serie mit dem zweiten Band abgeschlossen werden.