Kyle Erickson
I enjoyed this book, but I did end up wanting a bit more from it. The worldbuilding was really cool and the set up of the story reminded me of a more fantastical Pirates of the Carribean (the second lead is basically Norrington, and the first lead is that mermaid played by Kaya Scodelario in the fourth one). The story is about Mary Firth, a stormsinger -someone who can control storms- is taken captive by a fearsome pirate and then released by Samuel, and the two try to A) defeat the pirate and B) maybe find Mary's mother, a famous stormsinger.
I thought the characters were decent but could have used some more fleshing out, but one thing I consistently liked about this book is the same thing I liked about Long's previous books: the atmosphere. I always felt like I was in the midst of a sea faring, swashbuckling adventure. Long has descriptive prose without overweighing the scene. She knows how to make her sentences economical.
I'll read book two but probably not at release.
7/10
So, this book was a disappointment to me. I don't think it's a bad book, in fact I think Baldree wrote a better plot to this book, and some of the descriptions and dialogue is better than L&L.
There are two main reasons this one didn't work for me as well. The first is the decision to make it a prequel. I'm not opposed to prequels, and perhaps the lower stakes of L&L made it seem like another low stakes story but earlier could be thought as a good idea. But low stakes books still HAVE stakes - L&L had plenty of stakes. It was just, “are these two characters going to get along”, “is Viv's coffeeshop going to work”, etc.
This one- we know Viv moves on from these characters and there is not really a fundamental shift in her character throughout this that makes her journey satisfying. She...learns to like reading, I guess? Beyond that, the stakes of this book are actually higher - there is danger and conspiracy in this book to a higher degree than in the original- but simultaneously lower, because we know everything is fine at the start of L&L. So I was mostly just letting events happen with no fanfare.
The second reason, I think, is more on me than the book, but I don't think a bookstore is as good of a setting, or maybe Baldree didn't write the book sections as interestingly. It felt like preaching to the choir, people reading this book obviously like books. So having a bookstore owner wax pontific about how reading is so fun just makes me go, “yeah, duh” more than Viv trying to convince people that coffee tastes good. None of the book talk is particularly inspiring, it's mostly like “wait, people read mystery novels? Whatever for?!?!?” “Well, because the ACT of READING a STORY is MAGIC, Viv!”
Finally, the epilogue is vexing to me. I don't understand why it's in this book. The epilogue is a flashforward to after the ending of Legends and Lattes. And it is exclusively designed for people who have read both books. It's utterly meaningless to this book and basically spoils the end of L&L, which being a prequel is fine, but some people will read chronologically. It's mostly to set up a third book, which could have been done a different way, I think.
6/10
This book was decent, some really good parts mixed with some not as good for me personally.
It follows four POVs, all co-mingled around Hulegu, a grandson of Genghis, and his quest to subdue the middle East. The twist here is that all the POVs (besides Hulegu's) are trying to prevent him, one way or another. I really liked three of the POVs, particularly Hulegu's which dealt with the political and cultural politics back in Mongolia with his brothers as well as his desire to fulfill his grandfather's wishes.
Kaivon's POV was also really good; a Persian general turned bodyguard for Hulegu who wishes to undermine him. Where this book fell apart for me is almost everything to do with the fourth POV; Temujin.
Temujin is one of Hulegu's sons and the one that everyone hates. My first issue is that people's views of Temujin felt a bit too modern or...not Mongolian enough? They hate him because he's fat. Okay. I am not an expert on Mongolia but Kublai Khan is in this book and a few decades later he is supposedly very large and it's not treated as a big problem. There's also a rumor that Subutai was fat, even if it's untrue the evidence suggests this wouldn't be a big issue with the Mongols. The second reason they hate him is because he's not a fighter. This again feels like someone trying to think of WHY a strong warrior would hate their son and not considering cultural context. If this was Genghis's generation or before, sure. But Genghis' whole thing was finding uses for people that suited their talents. His brother Temuge was not a good fighter, but was a highly trusted administrator and counsellor in the khanate. So everything to do with why Temujin was utterly rejected just fell flat for me.
Beyond that, I found his internal struggle to be not very compelling. He flips switches on his father on a dime and his sensibilities feel so modern that it's jarring. Finally, most of his story doesn't get started until near the very end; he basically spins his wheels until 80% into this book, and even then, he is basically just training. I'm sure there was a way to bring this forward or make his storyline more dynamic in this book. Kokachin's storyline also had a lot of training, but it has way more going on to keep it interesting. Temujin's just didn't do it for me. I will read the sequel though; the combat and political stuff in this book was good, and the set-up seems over.
Okay so with this memoir I can properly illustrate my defense against people who don't rate memoirs. I genuinely do not understand this trend even a little bit because every time the person in question says something like “it feels wrong to rate the struggles this person has gone through” as if there are no other considerations or factors that go into a well written, engaging, or moving piece of work. It doesn't reflect on you to rate a book lower if the author has had crazy, highly emotional, or damaging life.
Pageboy is a good book, and there's no question to me that Elliott Page has had a lot of trauma and bad things happen in his life. The journey is well written, emotional at times, disturbing at others, and I could tell the act of writing it was probably very cathartic. All good things.
However, the organization of this book is just straight up a mess. Chapters jump around with seemingly no rhyme or reason. There is no grouping of events or chapters in any contexts I could tell. Sometimes we are dealing with Page's childhood and then we cut to the next random chapter where it's 2022 and there's a transphobic incident and then suddenly we're filming Inception in 2010 and then the next chapter is the first kiss with a girl in high school. Especially considering there is a throughline of Page's journey of acceptance but we are not presented this journey in a linear fashion or given any context why these scattershot fragments are being presented in this way. It doesn't feel artsy, it feels amateurish.
So there you have it:
Elliot Page - unrated
The life Elliot Page has lived - unrated
Pageboy, the book written by an adult and forced to go through editors and publishers and beta readers and many other people who could offer notes and opinions on how to shape this experience - four stars
Thanks for attending my TED talk on rating memoirs.
For like 70% of this book, I didn't understand what people were seeing in it. It was good. The writing was excellent, there was a lot of intrigue, but it just wasn't clicking. I thought I was going to go the unpopular route and say this was my least favorite Lawrence book I had read.
But it's my favorite Mark Lawrence book.
The last 30% of this book really ties everything together and is just absolutely exceptional. I honestly already want to reread it.
This book was a fun follow up to Thrice! I think I liked it more. There's a group of people out to get Leaf due to his magic which gives this book a bit more urgency. The character dynamics continue to be good and I really like the central relationship. I do wish these were longer, another 50-75 pages would really let it all breathe in my opinion.
Also the audiobook was really good, except for the sound effects on some people's dialogue being distracting.
I think the audio file I listened to was cuckoo for cocoa Puffs because the middle of this book was somehow utterly incomprehensible to me and I don't see why it should have been; I think some chapters were out of order. And then seemingly 25% of the book is a single fight with a lion. And then just when the ending of the book is good, the audiobook just....finishes....and the book isn't over. It was the middle of the final fight!! So weird.
Anyway the book was fine
I probably should not have continued with this series, as I found book two to be pretty bad, and I didn't love book one. However, I was really determined to figure out why this wasn't clicking, because on paper I should like this series. It just wasn't working.
And I had a random thought while reading this book, and then I searched the book for a phrase. And once I did, it allowed my issues with this series to coalesce. Bear with me here: this book says the phrase “The Shardless Few” 307 times.
The Shardless Few is the name of the organization/rebellion trying to overthrow the government. And their name is said CONSTANTLY. Why is this the problem? It's not. It's a symptom of the problem. My issue with this series is that none of it feels believable, none of the characters act like real people, none of the political stakes feel like real stakes. Everything is extraordinarily hollow to me.
I first realized this because we are presented this story through five POV characters from various backgrounds, and each of them interacts with many others, and every single one of these characters say “The Shardless Few X. The Shardless Few Y. We can't ignore the Shardless Few. The Shardless Few are here. Whose here? The Shardless Few.” and I just don't think everyone would always talk like this. That's a long phrase and especially people who have to interact with the group daily would shorten it. The Shardless. The Few. The SFs, dammit. Can you imagine if every single time a person in the FBI referred to the FBI, they said “Federal Bureau of Investigation”? They would sound absurd. Their vocal cords would rebel. People just don't do this.
And that's a silly nitpick, that was just taking me out of it a little. But once I realized that, I was aware of how every character felt like that. They talked as if they were being written. The scheming was written as if they were being told to pretend to scheme, like an acting workshop without the instructor's presence. The political aspects were like if a child just said “hey in my story, these are the bad guys. Why? They do bad stuff I guess.” Most of the high stakes drama boils down to someone being like:
“We must stop the abuse! The Shardless Few want to stop the abuse! We will not ignore The Shardless Fee's desires. We agree with the Shardless Few.”
“Okay I will work with the Shardless Few, because I also don't like abuse and stuff.”
“Thank you for helping the Shardless Few! The Shardless Few will appreciate it! The Shardless Few will fill help the children. With the orphanages and stuff.”
“The children? Oh yeah, children. Orphanages. Yes, this is a big problem. I will help the Shardless Few with the orphanages”
Like what is this series even about? Why do any of these people do the things they do? There are all these islands and we are supposed to care about rebellions on each island and various injustices on these islands but each island's personality is “island”. There's “island X” and “Island Y” and everyone has the same thoughts and opinions; they want the children to be taken care of and for the abuses to stop. Down with the emperor! Long live the Shardless Few!
K.
I will also say that the audiobook narrators were mostly really good, and got me through this entire series.
This book is a very good comprehensive guide to the modern psych field. Basically all major schools of psychology are explained in a competent and easy to digest manner and are applied in a way that the average person can get some use out of them. It also makes sure to explain where the field is more locked in and where certain theories are hotly contested, and Bloom does a great job adding his own voice without being biased from the overall goal.
The only time I think Bloom gets too in the weeds is during how children learn languages, which he randomly just devotes a chunk of the book to very specific information about language learning. Regardless, my go to recommendation for people to learn some shit about psychology and stop annoying me with all the dumb stuff they don't know about
DNF @ 45%
A jumbled, sterile mess. It was told in a very convoluted way but didn't earn it's convolution; I couldn't be bothered to care about anything going on or when in the timeline we were or why any things were happening. All the characters were boring and the demons were sometimes different names depending on who they were inside...just dial it down, Martha.
This book is incredible, and the only negative I have is that it's not a complete story really. It does have more of a natural stopping point than I expected, but there's a lot of followup that can be done in Lord of Emperors. Everyone says LoE is much better and to that I say: I am not ready. This is probably my favorite of Kay's prose so far, but I liked Lions more for being a complete standalone. Regardless, this book was exactly what I was craving and if I wasn't in the middle of several other books, I would start Lord of Emperors this second.
9.5/10
The Low Men In Yellow Coats is 50% of this book and it's excellent. King at his best.
The next story was kinda boring but I think King being the narrator just put me to sleep. The third story was I think the shortest and I skipped it because King was again the narrator. The fourth story was incredibly average.
So I'm not sure what an appropriate rating is for this. I'll give it 7/10 because the first half was fantastic.