Kribu
Enjoyed it a lot, all in all. I was not 100% convinced of the resolution - although, yes, the tiny little clue-bits were there, I suppose, but even so - but I enjoyed the writing and Ian Rutledge makes for a fascinating, excellent hero.
If I had any complaints other than the resolution / how the murder was solved, I'd say “it was a bit too slow” but since I generally don't mind slow pacing, I think it's just my current mood, really.
Definitely a series to read more of at some point.
I remember I was quite excited when I first heard about this book. I've enjoyed everything by Scott Westerfeld that I've read, and the concept for Afterworlds sounded ... different, and potentially very interesting indeed.
And then, when I had the book, I just... kept putting it off. It didn't feel right. I'm very much a mood reader, and I know myself well enough by now that if I'm in the wrong mood for a book, I'll end up not enjoying it in the least. So I kept putting it off, week after week.
Well. I've read it now. And it took... a lot longer than it should have.
Hence the three stars. Three and a half, I suppose - the last third or so, I liked quite a lot.
The very first bit, too.
It's that part in the middle that I had trouble with. It's still an interesting concept, as I had hoped, but somehow... I'm not sure, really. I loved the idea of a book that's half set in the YA publishing world, with bloggers and agents and editors and ARCs and signings and tours, and in the end, it worked well enough.
For quite some time though it was just... a bit too meta. A bit too fourth wall breaking. A bit too knowing, and nodding, to the real world. A bit too carefully constructed, for example not only with an eye on diversity but the way the issues of diversity and cultural appropriation were handled in the book.
At times, I felt like reading a social justice blog or tumblr. Not exactly a bad thing, and I applaud the idea, since these are issues that need to be discussed, but ... as I said, it felt too meta. It took me a long time to feel immersed in Afterworlds, both Darcy's story and Lizzie's story, and to stop feeling like I was reading blogs or articles instead.
In other words, I suddenly wasn't at all sure if the concept itself worked for me - and it didn't help that for quite some time, Lizzie's story - the book Afterworlds within Afterworlds - didn't engage me either. And then both Lizzie's story and Darcy's story became, for a while, too focused on all the various kissing, none of which appealed to me or interested me, because I didn't feel anything whatsoever for Yama and Imogen bored me as well.
It got better, though. I don't know when exactly, or how, but at some point, about two thirds into the book, it took on a life of its own, leaving the feeling of meta behind, and I finally felt interested in the protagonists of both stories. Their lives started feeling real, and I was intrigued at last. So in that sense, I suppose I should say it did, in the end, work for me.
It's definitely a book worth reading, especially for anyone who doesn't mind such a somewhat more experimental structure and concept, and it certainly gives some interesting insight into the world of publishing.
* ARC of this book was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review. Thanks!
My only real complaint about this short story is that it was, well, short. :D
I enjoyed Lights Out a lot - it's a really nice little self-contained story which fits right into the “three missing weeks” between Deep Breath and Into the Dalek in Series 8.
In other words, this is the story that shows us what happened after Clara sent the Doctor off to get coffee, in Glasgow, in the end of Deep Breath, and why and how the Doctor got so distracted he only turned up (with the coffee) three weeks later in London in the beginning of Into the Dalek.
Anyway. Yes. This is a story of the Doctor going to buy Clara her coffee (third best coffee in the universe, on some little space station famous for its coffee, because, well, it's Clara, and let's be honest, Twelve would do pretty much anything for Clara), but obviously he - as usual - also has an ulterior reason for choosing to visit that particular space station. A murder mystery gets solved, the Doctor gets to be the Doctor, and that's pretty much it.
I often have problems with the pacing in short stories, but with this one, I felt that was pretty much spot on - the introduction wasn't overly long, and the resolution wasn't crammed into a very short, rushed bit in the end. Also, even though it would appear this is the Doctor nearly immediately after his regeneration, he actually came across quite properly like the Twelfth Doctor we've come to know during S8 on the TV show, especially when the story briefly touched on issues of fear and morality, not just a generic Doctor with fierce grey eyebrows and a billowing coat.
Eh. Honestly, it physically pains me to give anything written by Derek Landy a meagre two stars (sorry, Derek!), but I just cannot really rate this any other way than what Goodreads suggests for “it was ok”.
I have a hard time liking short stories at the best of times. It's not always even a given than short stories set in a universe I love, with characters I already care about, work - sometimes even those don't really end up enjoyable for me. So, yeah, expecting to enjoy a short story with a character I'd never met before, and high fantasy / battlefield stuff to boot ... Well, I hoped it'd prove to be an exception to the rule, and it just wasn't, simple as that.
The idea in itself was kind of okay, and I think I might have rated it higher if it had been a longer story. As it is, I didn't have time to warm to Fleece or come to care about him. So, yeah.
I'd had this book on my Kindle for a couple of years but for some reason, I always skipped right past it whenever I needed a new book to read. Somehow, other than the initial curiosity that made me buy it in the first place, it just never really ... appealed.
I suspect it was really a case of, well, a book that had to wait for the right time, the right mood. In any case, I ended up enjoying it - a whole lot more than I'd expected to (because honestly, putting off reading a book for years, for no real reason other than a weird gut feeling, tends to leave me a little prejudiced once I actually do attempt to give it a go).
It's not the deepest book I've ever read, but I can't really even think of things to complain about; pretty much everything worked for me.
Once again I'm too tired to really even attempt a proper review.
Anyway, to keep it short: there are things I loved about this book, and things I didn't care for all that much. Overall, I think Omens was a stronger book - but on the other hand, when Omens was really all hints and suggestions and questions, Visions has started to give us answers, so that was something I really appreciated.
I also really like Olivia, and I love her relationship with Gabriel.
On the other hand, I could have made do without Ricky. Or less Ricky, anyway. At least I don't actually dislike him, and I see the point for him as a character, with all the hints about what/who he is, so there's that, but eh, all that steamy stuff with Ricky did absolutely nothing for me other than make me turn pages faster in order to get back to something actually interesting again.
The multiple underlying plots in this series are really cool, anyway, and I don't have a problem with the slow unfolding of mysteries, especially when I can see that the threads have been woven with care and it's obvious that the author has a good idea what she's doing and where she's going, even if I can't see it yet. I love intricate, interwoven plots, and although some things were getting quite obvious before their actual reveals, there is still plenty to keep me wondering, to keep me intrigued.
Feeling too blegh to attempt a real review now.
Rating: 2.5, I suppose. 3.5 stars for the Nico & Reyna chapters, 2 for all the Argo 2 crew ones.
I'm just glad this series is over at last. So much was just ... tired rehashing. Same jokes. Characters I loved when they first appeared (Leo) irritated me to no end. All the romance - FFS, do we really have to end a series with almost all of the almost entirely 14-16-year-old characters all paired up with their One True Love.
Blegh.
Nico and Reyna were the saving grace of this book for me. Sadly not even their chapters got me overly enthused.
Not a long review as typing on the iPad sucks, but anyway, overall I enjoyed this a lot - more than I expected to, really. It's only the lengthy bits of magical stuff that cause me to lower the 3.5 stars to 3 instead of rounding up to 4, as I found those really dreadfully boring.
Anyway, I will definitely want to read more (both in this series and more in this universe).
I should probably start with the obvious issue: similarities to Harry Potter. Because, yeah, like it or not, the blurb itself makes that question hard to ignore.
That was also nearly enough to put me off from reading it, but on the other hand, the blurb also sounded reasonably interesting, and I'm not actually the kind of reader to just stick labels of “rip-off of this-and-this” on books. A lot of books in the same genre share similarities, especially when it comes to premises and character archetypes and genre tropes; it's not so much what you've been inspired by but what you do with it, I think.
In any case, beyond the glaringly obvious - orphan boy gets an invitation to a school of magic, teams up with another boy and a girl there, has an arch enemy in another house/group that he doesn't get along with, has some kind of a suspenseful, possibly dangerous connection to the Big Bad Dark Evil guy who murdered his mother - I'm sort of glad to say it didn't end up constantly reminding me of HP or drawing parallels all the time.
So if that's a concern, I'd say it's not one that will necessarily be a problem. (It probably will be for some readers, but on the whole, it felt different enough in the execution for me.)
Unfortunately, it also just didn't really manage to grip me. The first half of the story in particular was, to me, a real slog to get through: it did more or less hold my interest enough in that I didn't feel like giving up, but barely. Callum, to start with, wasn't a kid I particularly felt I would like or empathise with (actually he mostly irritated me). The descriptions, once they got to the Magisterium, felt like they were just going on and on and on, forever. I could feel my eyes just slide over lengthy paragraphs, because it was all so dull. Should descriptions of a magical school deep in glittering underground tunnels full of salamander-like creatures and magical crystals etc be dull? I'm not sure. ~yawns~
It did get more interesting in the second half, once the stage was set and there was both some action/adventure as well as actual character development.
I have to give a nod to the authors in not making the protagonist the Chosen One as in saviour, and giving that role to the "sidekick". On the other hand, the protagonist gets to be even more special. Maybe if I hadn't just finished Skulduggery Pleasant, I'd be more wowed by the idea of "kid protagonist is actually possibly someone destined to be the bad guy"; as it is, it didn't really come off that fresh and unusual and exciting. Still, that was a reasonably nice twist you don't see that often in children's books.
The characters were ... eh. Not unlikeable, but mostly very flat. Callum as the protagonist gets to be a bit more fleshed out, and the two sidekicks, Aaron and Tamara, aren't completely empty ciphers - and I expect we'll get to know them better - but on the whole, none of the trio really grabbed me. I also didn't feel particularly excited over the whole magical war plot.
... I'm actually struggling to write more about the book. The premise was okay enough, but I guess the execution just felt so... workmanlike? Plodding? Decent enough for the genre, and possibly exciting for the actual target group, i.e. kids (this is definitely middle-grade at least for this first book) but nothing about it wowed me or made me really care about what happens to any of the characters.
Two stars for the first half of the book, three for the second. I don't know yet if I'll want to read on. Possibly - I may have struggled my way through The Iron Trial, but there's just that tiny grain of curiosity that I might want to know what happens next, and with plenty of longer series (this seems to be planned as five books, one for each school year, I assume), the first book gets improved upon later on when there's less need to spend time on setting the stage.
* ARC of this book was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review. Thanks!
Eh. Not a bad book by any means, but without a doubt my least favourite in the series.
I just had a really hard time getting into it. Too much exposition, too much background - all of it necessary for the plot, and perhaps if the book had been twice as long, with something else actually happening rather than just a lot of talking about the political situation in Morocco in the early 1920s, I wouldn't have minded.
I mean, the politics & history lesson was interesting, but I'd have read a non-fiction history book if I'd really been in the mood for that...
Basically, too much history & politics, too little else of interest going on. And the solution just came off as rather too convoluted (and again, too much talking).
Of course there were things I did like - the writing, the bits where stuff was actually going on (the older I get, the more action I need in a book?), the setting and descriptions and the sense of location were marvellous, as usual. A few lovely moments between Russell, recovering from concussion-caused amnesia, and Holmes.
Last year, The Screaming Staircase was one of my most anticipated - with a certain amount of anxiety - books of the year. I didn't actually expect to love Lockwood & Co. as much as I'd loved Stroud's Bartimaeus series, but I hoped to love the book anyway.
And I did like it. I did. I just never really connected with it. Wanting to love it, so badly, probably didn't help - my expectations were so high that the book, which was, actually, really pretty good, ended up a little bit disappointing.
Never mind, I told myself: it was only the first book, setting the stage. The second book is what really counts.
Now that I've read The Whispering Skull, I have to admit I rather ended up with the same problem: once again I'd got my expectations, although more tempered this time, high enough that the reality just couldn't quite meet them.
It's a beautifully written series, it really is. Stroud's a fabulous writer - children's books these may be, but the writing is competent, skilled, never coming off as “writing down for the kids”. The plot's solid, the characters, Lucy in particular, likeable. And yet again, it just didn't really “click”. That connection, that thing one can't really describe but that elevates a “very good” book into the category of “I'd have this book's babies if I could” - that's still missing.
For most of The Whispering Skull, my rating would have been three stars. It was good. Stuff happened. Lucy's showing progress (also in using her Talent - listening to / hearing the voices of ghosts, or Visitors), Lockwood's pleasant but mysterious, there is some (not entirely friendly) rivalry going on with a team from one of the largest agencies, some people die - everything was there.
It was also all quite ... slow. While I actually enjoy a leisurely pace often enough, for the first three quarters of the book, I completely lacked any sense of urgency. And I think I should have: dangerous artefact on the loose, people dying and being killed over it, what not.
The action did, however, pick up considerably in the last quarter of the book, and that's when I finally started getting into it. If I can't feel scared (hey, it's a spooky ghost story, shouldn't I feel at least a tiny bit anxious?), I at least want to feel excited, and the last quarter, for me, delivered on that front.
The book also ends with a revelation that, I think, is going to play a rather interesting role in the next book, and uncovers a tiny bit of Lockwood's mystery. I'm glad about that as so far, Lockwood himself has really come off rather ... flat. We're told (repeatedly) that he's got a mysterious past, that he doesn't like to talk about himself, but the way it comes off has made Lockwood a little bland for me so far. I know Lucy likes him (probably even likes him, although any hints at a possible future romance have been extremely downplayed so far in the series), but other than “he's handsome and doesn't lack courage”, I've yet to get a good idea about him.
I think that now I've moderated my expectations for this series, I'm probably going to end up quite happy with it. There are also some possible deeper plot points afoot, regarding the entire nature of “the Problem” (i.e. the Visitors/ghosts popping up everywhere, killing people and all that), and I'm genuinely curious about whether we'll find out some more of the theory behind that in future books.
* ARC of this book was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review. Thanks!
Actual rating: not four stars in the way I gave, for example, The Luminaries four stars. And possibly more like 3.5, mostly for reasons of characterisation falling a bit flat.
And in general, this was pretty much a run-of-the-mill Doctor Who story, with all the elements one would expect - but then again, that's what one generally wants from a Doctor Who story, so marking it down for providing exactly what it is expected to would be a bit naff, wouldn't it?
Anyway, yeah, I actually enjoyed The Crawling Terror quite a lot. As said above, it offered pretty much everything one can want from a regular series tie-in: a familiar setting (in this case, a good old picture-perfect English countryside village) taken over by alien monsters, with the Doctor strolling in, getting himself and his companion involved and putting them in some danger and in the end saving the day with some clever technobabble and bravery.
If this makes it sound as if the story was unoriginal - then no, not really! I liked the plot and it felt fresh enough, especially with the way the time-travel aspect was weaved in. Several secondary characters were also rather nicely fleshed out.
The only issue I really had, and I wouldn't blame the author for this - I suspect this is something all three books in this first batch of Twelfth Doctor tie-in novels will have in common - is that the characterisation of the leads, the Doctor in particular, felt a bit flat. Other than a couple of moments, I didn't get at all a sense of this being the Twelfth Doctor in particular, as seen in (what is, at the point of writing this review) the first four episodes of his first season. I can only assume that the material the tie-in authors had to work with was rather restricted, possibly limited to character overviews and scripts, which wouldn't give a good idea of Peter Capaldi's on-screen performance of the Doctor or the on-screen chemistry in his Doctor's relationship with Clara.
That said, while the Doctor appeared to be more of a generic Doctor than Twelve, nothing in particular jumped out at me as wrong either. And being a Three fan, I appreciated the occasional little throwaway reference to him (“reversing the polarity” of various things in particular, but not only that!). In fact, the entire book had a strong feel of what a modern interpretation of Three's era (and UNIT) might feel like, and since I really love that particular period in the show's history, I'm not complaining about that at all!
* ARC of this book was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review. Thanks!
Eh. It took me 13 days to get through this book (this is more than four times what a genre book this size would usually take), and it's not just because I was off travelling and had less time.
I could have made the time to read. I just .... had a hard time making myself go into the effort. And whenever I did, I inevitably got bored or sleepy after a chapter or two.
I don't even know. I've had problems with the writing in all the books in this series (and this one was no exception), but at least the fun factor has won out so far. The previous book was my favourite so far, so I assumed the high would continue. And yet basically nothing in this one clicked.
I was just... bored. It all felt repetitive and whiny and dull. Every single plot point (was there even a plot in this one?) was rehashed and repeated multiple times. I appreciate that some advances were finally made, with the solving of Kisten's murder and with some stuff with Ivy, but I'm just so tired of the whole Ivy thing and I wish the solving of Kisten's murder, stretched out over several books as it was, had never been necessary in the first place. All it meant was endless rehashing of Rachel not having any memory of that night and Jenks being sorry and Ivy being a vampire and... whatever.
Also, I couldn't stand Pierce.
The whole banshee and aura stuff didn't work for me either. Banshee stuff because I really felt uneasy about how everyone, especially any of the Inderlanders, seemed to sorta excuse the killing of humans because eh, it's what banshees do and they gotta eat and whatever (or if not excuse, then taking it far too lightly), and the aura stuff because, again, it was repetitive ad nauseam.
Anyway, I really hope it picks up for me again in the next book, but I think I might want to take a longer break from the series for now.
When I requested the ARC of Itchcraft on NetGalley, I had no idea that it was the third book in a series. When I noticed this, I immediately went and bought the first book - I'm one of those people who hates jumping into something mid-series.
I'm glad I did. Itch, the first book, was great fun; so was Itch Rocks, the second book (bought and read right after the first one). It also turned out to be the right choice in the sense that these are not really standalone books: each of the books is its own adventure, one that more or less gets resolved in that book, but they're all part of an overall storyline and the events in Itchcraft are very closely tied to those in the first two books. There is a short recap, but I suspect anyone jumping in at this point might end up more than a little confused.
As said above, I enjoyed the first two books in the series a great deal. The basic plot of the first two books as well as Itchcraft is relatively straightforward: Itchingham Lofte (the eponymous “Itch”), a schoolboy interested in science and element-hunting, and his younger sister Chloe, cousin Jack and friend Lucy come across a handful of rocks that turn up to be a hitherto-unknown, highly radioactive, very valuable element.
Needless to say, bad guys get involved - the element is one that would do well for nuclear reactors as well as nuclear bombs.
While the first two books focus more on the rocks themselves - the attempts of the crooks, led by Itch & co's former science teacher and ex-oilman Nathaniel Flowerdew, to get hold of the valuable find, with the kids having to fight hard to keep the rocks from falling into the wrong hands - this part of the storyline has been dealt with by Itchcraft, so the focus of the first book is Flowerdew's attempt at getting revenge on anyone who has thwarted him.
I am not sure if it was the absence of the rocks themselves that caused this, but for the longest time, I was sure I'd rate this book a mere three stars (well, “mere” - it'd still mean “I liked it”). There was something off about the pacing that I can't quite put my finger on - the way the slower parts intermingled with action just somehow didn't quite work as well as it did in the first two books, at least for me. The first half of the book also just felt a little... forced, somehow, and while I had a hard time suspending disbelief in parts of the first two adventures, in this one (especially the part where Itch and Lucy are dragged along to visit the top-security mint in Madrid) it was nearly impossible at times.
Basically, I think my problem was that ... I can really only “buy” so much at a time, and some of the events in this book kept crossing that line. There was just too much going on, too many things happening with these kids.
I have to say, though, that the final part picked up again - I thoroughly enjoyed the action in the last quarter of the book, and especially the parts involving the diving crew were exciting as well as well-paced. The actual ending of the book (which feels like a good conclusion for the trilogy as well as leaving enough open for potentially more Itch books) also felt fitting.
While, as said above, I did have my problems with the books, I really ended up enjoying the series. I'm a bit old to be in the target group but these are the kinds of books I'd have gobbled up with great enthusiasm at 11-14 or so - the combination of action, adventure and science (there is plenty of fun chemistry tidbits scattered along with the story) is something that would have appealed to me tremendously at that age. Another thing I appreciate - as an adult reader - is that the kids' rash actions put them into very real peril, and those actions do have consequences, long-lasting ones at that.
* ARC of this book was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review. Thanks!
ETA: Still mulling over a Goodreads review, but in the meantime, here is my Amazon review (as spoiler-free as possible).
—
I am done. Finished. Read it.
I'm not even going to try coherence right now, and I really don't want to give anything away at this point, where most people haven't had the chance to read it yet - anything at all, not even in spoiler tags - so right now, I'm just going to leave this here with WHOAH.
Yeah.
This was a fitting ending to my favourite series ever.
An actual review to follow at some point. Right now I've done eight straight hours of reading and it's 2 AM and I need sleep.
Hmm. I liked some things better than in the first book and some things less, and the need for suspension of disbelief was extreme here in places, but eh, I don't really even feel like over-analysing or griping about all the things I could gripe about.
It was still an exciting read. With lots of gore. And deaths.
Although now I'm actually curious about whether the next book will have a “new” plot or still a continuation of the same one... hmm.
A couple of days ago I had no idea this series existed. I only found out about it when I saw Itchcraft by Simon Mayo on NetGalley recently, requested a review copy as it sounded interesting, and upon being accepted, realised that it was, in fact, the third book in the series.
So I sighed and went and bought a copy of the first one. (I should also say right away that I'll be buying the second one, too, and reading it.) And ... yeah, really glad that I did.
I should say right away that - as is the case with most kids' fantasy/action/thriller type stories (this isn't fantasy, just to make it clear, although it deals with some things that don't actually exist) - one should be prepared to suspend disbelief and just... go with the flow. This isn't something one needs to tell to the target group; since I'm quite a bit older, I need to remind myself of that more and more often these days.
That said, by and large the kids in this book, especially our 14-year-old protagonist Itch (or Itchingham Lofte, as his full name goes) and his cousin Jack (Jacqueline), struck me as rather realistic. Even when I shook my head in frustration, ready to yell “god, kids, just take this stuff to the police!”, I still - vaguely - remember that back when I was fourteen, the actually most sensible way of acting did not always strike me or my peers as the right thing to do. And on the other hand, I appreciated that the kids here decided to share at least some of the information, at times, with grown-ups.
The plot itself was rather exciting, at least to me - going from a kid coming across some mysterious rocks to being kidnapped, nearly dying, and all that cool thriller stuff. :D At the same time, I liked that the risks felt real and there were actual, serious consequences to their actions.
The villains ... well. I could have made do without them being quite so... villainish. In a really exaggerated way. The only thing missing was moustache-twirling, although I'm sure that if Flowerdew had a moustache, he would have twirled it at some point. Also, and this was my biggest suspension of disbelief gripe, I found it really hard to believe that the people transferring a very dangerous criminal to another prison would just let him go if a woman with a gun shows up and threatens to shoot at them. Uh.
Anyway. Not a perfect book, but it worked for me (and, as I usually try to gauge with books aimed at younger readers how I'd have felt about it when younger myself, I'd have enjoyed it also as a kid). I'm really rather looking forward to seeing how things develop in the next two books.
Another solid book in the Chicagoland Vampires series.
I tend to worry with series that go on for this long that they'll lose the oomph at some point and just start meandering around, but other than the sixth book, Biting Cold, which felt weaker to me, this continues to be a really enjoyable series - one of the few that I consistently preorder, even. And one where I'm glad I persisted with it, in spite of the first two books occasionally infuriating me.
Anyway, as usual, I liked the plot parts - both the murder mystery and (although to a lesser point) the vampire politics subplot, which has been going on through multiple books now and came to a ... well, not conclusion, but a definite twist/turning point in Blood Games. And as usual, I liked Merit and her friendships with the others around her.
And equally as usual, the part I cared for the least was the romance - I know a lot of readers love Ethan, and I can see why he'd be appealing, but he's simply not my taste, neither in looks nor in behaviour/attitude. But at least the Merit/Ethan relationship is integral to the plot in a way that it doesn't feel superfluous, so there's that.
An awesome ending to one of my absolute favourite new series/trilogies of the last couple of years.
It's funny, because I don't usually care for books with a ... message. One so heavy and obvious it keeps hitting you on the head, over and over again. There's no subtlety about the messages in the Earth Girl series, none at all. It's not even pretending to.
And yet, with this series, I somehow just don't mind. Everything clicked for me. I loved the plots. I loved the characters. I didn't mind the unsubtle message (hey, at least they're good ones!). I didn't even mind the romance between Jarra and Fian (and thankfully Fian, who was rather flat in the first book, ended up with some personality over the series). I didn't even mind the immense amount of disbelief I had to suspend, over the way one single girl gets promoted over and over again and pretty much single-handedly changes the way things work in this universe.
All these are things I'd snark about or sneer at in some other books. Here, they worked. I liked those characters. I cheered for them. I wanted them to succeed. And I liked how Jarra herself, in spite of all those things happening to her, remained a... well, somewhat realistic, if very capable girl with just the right experiences and knowledge for doing whatever she had to do.
Heartily recommended, if you don't mind a somewhat slow pace (less of an “issue” in this book than the first two, since there was, almost sadly, practically no dig site routine work, which I really enjoyed in the first two books), unsubtle but positive messages about racism and equality, and a single girl - with the help of her friends - changing the way an entire system of Earth colonies works. Or, well, even if you do mind those things, since you might be positively surprised anyway. :D
If this review occasionally sounds like sarcasm, or faint praise, it's not meant to be. In spite of occasionally shaking my head in confused amusement, I've genuinely loved and enjoyed those books (so much so that I've been getting the paperbacks in addition to reading the Kindle books, which isn't something I do lightly these days), and I'm actually rather sad the trilogy is now over. I gather there are some short stories around, so I'll probably look for those soon.
Hmm. 3.5 stars, but unlike the first book, closer to “I liked it” than “I really liked it”, so rounded down to three.
I think I need to let my thoughts on it settle for a bit, but ... a solid, good mystery, but it just didn't blow me away, and I actually sort of had to remind myself to get back to reading. Still really liking the series though and I think both Cormoran and Robin are interesting, well-rounded characters - it'll be fun to see how they develop, both individually and as working partners.
Enjoyed this quite a bit - my only real complaint is that it was too short!
Then again there wasn't a lot of plot (since it's the first book in a series, I'd assume the next ones might have a little more plot and a little less world-building / introduction / setting), so the shortness means it never felt padded or over-written, which is also not a bad thing.
Enola Holmes (the much younger sister to Mycroft and Sherlock) is a great character - sensible, daring and with a good narrative voice. Definitely planning to read more.
I enjoyed the previous books in the Geek Girl and this third one was no exception.
Oh, if I wanted to find faults with it, I could. And this time, more than before, I wanted to headdesk Harriet for being so .. so .. well, teen girl, I suppose. But quite frankly while some of her antics made me wince this time, there are plenty of teenagers who do stupid, spur-of-the-moment decisions and need to make some mistakes before learning from them, so I can't really say it's unrealistic.
Picture Perfect has a heavier focus on romance than the first two books, but while I don't generally care for that (and while I'm not the world's biggest fan of Nick, although he finally started to grow on me a little in this book), I didn't mind it here: the book is, really, all about Harriet finding herself and coming to terms with what's important, and it does rather make sense that to a 16-year-old girl, her first boyfriend is one of those things.
Basically, for some reason, this series has just struck a chord in me. It's not my usual sort of fare at all, and the cynical part of me isn't necessarily thrilled with the uplifting endings, but then there's that (usually well-hidden) idealist part of me that ... doesn't really mind.
Meh. Rating's probably more like 2.5, but I can't really quite make it into an “I liked it”, so “it was OK” it will be.
Well... I liked bits of it. And it's certainly wildly imaginative. There were amusing moments and stuff, but then there were long parts I ended up skimming, after staring at a page for five minutes and realising I was not taking in anything it said. There just wasn't enough in the plot to keep me constantly interested, and the writing veered from amusing to overdone.
Also, I suspect I'm just really not cut out for the “wildly imaginative” kind of fantasy. Anything where wildly imaginative world-building and consciously clever use of language appears to be more important than the plot and characters just ends up boring me, it seems (see also my not-keenness on China Mieville or Neil Gaiman). Pity, as I'd like to like this kind of thing.
I've heard opinions that the earliest few Discworld books aren't the best, and since I already have the first five and didn't exactly hate this one - it didn't really manage to hold my interest in any consistent way but the characters were entertaining enough - I'll probably try some more some day.
4.5 stars. Really enjoyed this.
The concept of “children take it upon themselves to solve a murder” is of course hardly original, nor is the historical boarding school setting, but as with every genre story, it's all in the handling - and Murder Most Unladylike was, for me, handled with just the right mixture of clever plotting, amusing writing and a hint of serious issues (bullying, racism) being touched on just enough to keep the reader aware but without turning into a moralising lecture.
As with most first person books, a lot depends on the narrator's voice, and it's here that this book shined for me: the 13-year-old Hazel Wong, the Hong Kong born heroine and semi-reluctant detective, was wonderful. She felt real to me, her account of the goings-on at the boarding school both wry and mature in the sort of way that a mature 13-year-old is, capable of almost adult seriousness and awareness at times while still maintaining a youthful voice.
I loved the little touches about her past and her first year experiences at Deepdean school, illustrating how a 1930s boarding school in England wasn't necessarily always a paradise (not the least to a foreign girl), but never making it sound too depressing, either.
The friendship between Hazel and Daisy Wells, the blonde and blue-eyed darling of the school and President of the Detective Society (a society of two, Hazel and Daisy), also rang true to me: they're not always equal partners (if only because Daisy certainly considers herself superior - but not so much that it would have made me dislike her), but it felt a realistic description of a genuine friendship between two girls, even if one is far more popular - and a natural leader - than the other.
The plot wasn't too shabby either: it's a children's book (or, I suppose, children's / the younger end of YA) so the mystery is relatively simple, but it came with enough twists and while I could work out some of what happened, I certainly didn't see everything coming - so for me, the balance was just right.
As is often the case in children's books, some of the adults came off a little flat as well as caricature-ish at first, but I was glad to see several of them become rather more rounded by the end - and equally, I liked that the adults weren't depicted as utterly useless, clueless people who refuse to listen to whatever children have to say.
Anyway, I don't often find children's mysteries I can enjoy fully, but I'm really looking forward to more cases for Hazel and Daisy to solve!
* ARC of this book was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review. Thanks!