Zach
For a book ostensibly about Rani Lakshmibai and her rebellion, this book sure spent a lot of time on things that were utterly made up and not at all about Rani Lakshmibai.
I couldn't help but compare it to “The Moon In The Palace”, about similarly cool historical lady, Empress Wu. Bu where “The Moon In The Palace” was narrated by the Empress and slowly explored the palace intrigues and the people who made up her court, this book is narrated by an invented character about her invented family life and spent an inordinate amount of time showing us characters who had nothing to do with the Rani. The amount of the book taken up with “the Rani didn't call me into her chambers for a month, so I'm going to pine over this random love interest” was fucking ridiculous. If I wanted to read about court women who didn't get to do anything interesting, I would have picked up a romance. I started reading this book because I wanted to read about Rasni Lakshmibai! Hell, the rebellion that gave her the title used for the novel doesn't even appear until the last 10 percent of the book.
I enjoyed the first quarter, until I realized that the book relished all of the bullshit fictional characters way more than it gave a crap about providing me an enlightening view of a fascinating historical figure.
This would be a five-star book (I devoured it in less than a day, staying up until 2am to finish) except the treatment of mental illness bugged me a LOT.
There is no such thing as “Borderlines”– people with BPD have a range of symptoms and the narrative treats it like a monolithic experience that is Special and Unique. This wouldn't have been a problem if there had been other perspectives on mental illness (the consistent judgement of therapy and therapists as “mediocre” bugs me hugely as a mentally ill person who has found therapy exceedingly helpful). I hope this will be remedied in the next books– which I fully intend to read– but in THIS book, it's hard to escape the assumption that people with mental illness (or at least BPD) are some sort of weird monolith who all have the same symptoms with the same severity.
Also, the treatment of Gloria is super super shitty, yo.
2.5 stars
I like the concepts of this book way more than I enjoyed the execution. There were a lot of fascinating concepts left at the wayside. Eco-terrorism? Racism? Hyper-hierarchical societies? Lots of back-stabby politics? All of these were POSSIBLE and never exploited to their full extent. Several character were just... there and not explored at all (yeah, let's introduce a closeted, gay native american half-fairy terrorist son of a politician and not explore literally ANY of that.)
Somewhere around 85% of the way in Marr finally let Lily do things, at which point the politics snapped into focus and there were actual actions and plot points with relevance and consequences. But those plot points basically threw out the rest of the book– the not-really-love-triangle, the eco-terrorism, and really everything the Black Diamonds had done up until that point.
This was a really disappointing book.
Two point five stars.
Okay, I have definitely read better Seanan books.
The characters were interesting, except none of them got anywhere near enough characterization. The world-building was interesting, but way too shallow. The plot could have been interesting except there were so few character introduced and the pacing was so off that I pegged how the book would end halfway through.
This feels like half of a book, and I haven't read something from Seanan that was this poorly plotted since the first Toby Daye book (and that had much better characterization)– and at this point I'm grading on a curve. I expected more.
This was not what I was expecting. Let me tell you, if you're expecting something similar to her Split Worlds series, you are in for some culture shock, my friend.
Planetfall was shockingly intense on an emotional level. It uses the sense of being alone on a new planet to create a claustrophobic, paranoiac sensation, and it ends sharply right where most stories would pick up– I don't know if this is intended to be a series, but I sort of hope not, because the feelings of “but, wait, what about–?” feels very apropos for the emotional tone of the novel. The slow build-up of fear and despair as the novel progresses, culminating in Ren's final choices was gripping. I'm not much into the genre of science fiction exploring the mental problems of its protagonists, but I honestly couldn't stop reading.
Also, I'm a little startled at how little the sexual identity of the main character has been mentioned in other reviews. I mean, I love it. Renata, or Ren, Planetfall's point of view character, is clearly bisexual or lesbian, but it's treated the same way a heterosexual character would have been in the same situation. She was in love with the key person who sent them off to this world beyond earth, and she's had an (unfulfilling) sexual relationship with one of the doctors. But while the relationships affect her, and up the emotional ante of the plot, her identity is not treated as a plot point. This is a prime example of “write your characters as people first”.
The book wasn't perfect. I would have liked a little bit more detail about Ren's past relationships, and how they fed into the person she becomes at the beginning of the novel. She had a child who died, for example, but it's only touched on briefly, and we learn nothing about the child at all. Same with her relationship with her family, and, most damningly, her relationship with Suh. While this tendency to glance over her past relationships feeds into the sensations of dislocation from both past and future, it can make Ren a frustrating cipher at times, which is a problem in a first person POV novel.
I know everyone ‘s gushing over it but I. Didn't like it that much. The characters are interesting and the plot was cool, but I can't help but feel that there was plot development that was dropped (the man in the tan jacket running, most of anything with Josh, the flamingos, Old Woman Josie).
And their reliance on the “eggs, milk and squick” trope (normal thing, normal thing, absurd or creepy thing) just got really tiring after a while.
I think this is why half an hour every couple of weeks is all I can handle of night vale. It stops being comically creepy and begins to be boring after a while.
Better than the last book, though there were some annoying dangling ends (like the rest of the cu sidhe wtf).
So, Toby is fairie Jesus at this point, she and Tybalt are irritatingly codependent, Seanan really likes shelving May for books at a time. Thank thank you for the queer characters now can we work on some characters of color who have plot relevance and show up for more than a line or two?
But an interesting, and fairly tight plot that kept me up reading so it's still a good story despite my irritation at the number of miracles Toby can pull off.
3.5 Stars.
Definitely better than the most recent Dresden books, that's for sure. Starts out as a fairly bog-standard steampunk, with at least one character that made me pause and go “oh, I see you saw someone's Steampunk Lolita outfit”. Still, the characters grow on you, and the plot is strong once you get past the “lol aristocratic assholes in school” bit.
You can definitely see Butcher's character preferences, though– Despite the POV sections for Gwen, Bridget and Folly (and to a lesser extent, Rowl), Captain Grimm is the Main Character in what appears to be a pirate-y war steampunk book, despite all of the above being way more interesting than him and his drama.
Let me heal your rape with my magic elf dick, okay.
Basically, the world-building was interesting and a bunch of the characters were interesting but no one got nearly enough development (especially not Tenzin or Matthew or Nestor or Sinistrus, all of whom had the possibility of being wildly more fascinating than our pretty boy protagonists). The more interesting plot points were glossed over. I wanted this to be an urban fantasy with queer characters instead of pretty elf boning while the world nearly dies in the background.
Three stars, for much mourned potential.
Definitely NOT my favorite of the Charlie Parker books.
It's, as always, tightly plotted and well written, with some little hints dropped about the greater universe, but... it's also a book about Nazis written by a non-Jewish, non-Rromani author, and that's always a crapshoot. There were no Jewish POV characters, just a bunch of dead Jewish bodies. OTOH the Nazis got some definite sympathetic “well I've been NOT a Nazi for 70 years, doesn't that count for something?” POV bits. The revelation at the end (which, honestly, I was waiting for) just added that one last twist of the ‘the Jews don't actually matter in the grand scheme of this story ostensibly about Jews' knife.
I would have been much happier if Connolly had done for Rabbi Epstein in this book what he did for Louis in The Reapers– give him a book about his community, and his night horrors. Connolly's done some very sensitive writing on US race relations (for a white Irish man writing a horror thriller series), but none of that sensitivity was evident in this book, and that was a shame.
With all the fairytale rewritings around, it's nice to see someone breaking the Cinderella/Sleeping Beauty/Beauty and the Beast mould. Based on a fairy tale known various as “The Six Swans,” “The Twelve Brothers” and “Udea and Her Seven Brothers”, Spinning Starlight takes on a fairly challenging tale in a fascinating way.
In the traditional story, the brothers are turned into swans– and the only way to break the spell is for their sister to spin each one a shirt out of nettles and stay silent for seven years. For Liddi Jantzen, our heroine, this means that her brtoehrs are stuck in a strange transdimensional tube, while she herself is implanted with a chip that will kill them if she speaks.
Over the course of the book, Liddi grows from a frightened young girl with doubts about her own abilities to a strong young woman, who has learned to communicate despite the obstacles, with the original story woven into the fabric of the novel in some surprising ways. Despite some minor flaws in pacing and worldbuilding (I'm a librarian– it's hard for me to suspend disbelief about nearly seven worlds of humans abandoning writing systems), the novel is solid, and engrossing enough the put off going to bed in order to finish it.
Not really the best collection I've seen from Tanith Lee. Some of the stories were fairly mediocre and knowing Lee's penchant for certain plot twists, I knew the ending of some before I got there.
At her best, the stories in this volume are haunting and powerful, but at their worst they are meandering and try too hard to be evocative, so they just end up being obvious and kind of frustrating (I'm looking at you “Anna Medea” and “Cain”).
I read it when is was younger (15? 16?) and definitely enjoyed it. It's aged somewhat, not in a bad way but in a way that I can definitely date it to an earlier era of sci-fi– the treatment of gender specifically felt a little odd, strangely dated as to the treatment of matriarchy vs patriarchy, and the treatment of the mers as bodies to be acted upon and never acting themselves caught my eye as something that I wasn't aware enough to notice when I first read it, as well as something that is slightly less common in SFF now.
It took me several sittings to finally get through, but in the end the characters were solid and mostly sympathetic, the pacing was strong, it's a GOOD BOOK, even if not always to my taste in SFF styles anymore.
Definitely an enjoyable read and, despite the slightly intimidating name, a fairly smooth read. I have to give props to the editor for the diversity in topics– it's not often that books on race in sci-fi consider more than Black and Latin@ US concerns (although some non-American continental writing would not have been out of place).
The essays were, almost across the board, insightful and fascinating. Specifically, Grace Dillon, M. Elizabeth Ginway and Matthew Goodwin's pieces explored topics that I haven't seen much of, and did it in an accessible way.
The only flaws in the book were Isiah Lavender's own essay– which neglected intersectional and historical concerns in favor of a straight-forward racial reading of “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” (I would have appreciated consideration of the treatment of disabled Black men and women, especially given that the story was written just after the height of the AIDs epidemic), and Robin Anne Reid's “The Wild Unicorn Herd Check-In”. Reid's piece was interesting, but suffered from being quantitative analysis taken from a large thesis, and so fell a little flat.
All in all, a satisfying collection.
All this book really did was making me want to read Seanan McGuire's Toby Daye books again. That or play Changeling:The Dreaming. Both of those at least tell me what the setting is and why I should care.
So our main character is bratty high school student who acts like every 20-30 year old urban fantasy protagonist with a snotty attitude, only with the occasional pause to wail about how he's not going to graduate HIGH SCHOOL, I'M A HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT DID YOU GET THAT, HUH. Turns out he's half fairy/trickster/demigod/something or other that's never explained. He finds out because his dad's apparently dead (and his mom goes into fugue states about which our main character can angst, but which does nothing to help the reader give a fuck about her.) His 50-some odd “uncle”, who is NOT blood related, but WAS daddy since dad took a powder, shows up to tell him all about how, hey, magic exists, and I'm magic and your magic EVERYBODY GETS A NEW MAGIC, oh and yeah, you need to go speak at your divorced and absentee father's funeral.
Blah blah blah AND THEN 50 YEAR OLD UNCLE FIGURE WANTS TO BONE 18 YEAR OLD HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT. WHO HE HELPED RAISE. This raises no eyebrows. Even to mom who, out of her fugue state walks in on our main character and his APPARENTLY HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS OLD “UNCLE” FUCKING IN THE TUB.
There are a handful of characters in the book who are actually interesting in any way (the more important of whom ended up the brunt of pretty egregious transmisogyny on the writer's part). Those characters do not include the protagonist or his boyfriend. And they definitely don't include the bad guy, who is literally the most boring thing in the book. We know so much about her, and all of it should have added character and world building but I was left more confused about the world and caring less about her every time. The half-dead, relationship-devouring vampire-sorceress who is obsessed with resurrecting her Sorcerer King child SHOULD NOT BE BORING.
The pacing was totally effed the hell up. The plot that was in the last third of the book should have been earlier than halfway through the book. But instead we get extraneous sex scenes that prove the main character and HIS UNCLE FIGURE are, like, sex-bonded to each other forever. Ffffffff.
And lets not get into how shoddy the world building is. Like, there's an entire fairy court, not just phoukas? Wear are they? Are satyrs members? Coyote's a god, and apparently so's Bacchus, are all the magical creatures descended from a god? And what's this bullshit with the fates existing. So there are gods of the gods, or... Seriously, every time I think I'm going to get to learn something, the chance is yanked from my fingers.
And then there's the culturally appropriative racist stuff. Kitsune? Nipponese? They're perfectionists! They can do magic! There's a really pretty boy who passes for a girl? This is neckbeard-level exoticizing, and also if I never see another gay romance fantasy that uses Japanese shit as background decoration, it with be TOO SOON. And COYOTE. I WOULD CHEW MY ARM OFF FOR AN URBAN FANTASY ABOUT COYOTE TO BE ABOUT ACTUAL NATIVE PEOPLE. And don't give me that “well maybe the coyotes other than the main character are native”. Yeah, maybe! But see about re: shoddy worldbuilding. Are there other native magic types? What the actual fuck even if going on. You don't get to have Coyote say a few native words and magically it's a decent depiction of native religons.
Also, that bullshit with Shiko at the end! No, you DON'T get to pull the “surprise, this character you thought was female the entire book has A DICK!” and then not even let her answer the main characters question about which pronouns SHE wants him to use. “What pronouns do you want? Nevermind, I'll just use she.” is NOT cool.
UGHHHHHHHH. Two stars, for Shiko and your mourned potential's sake.
I'm torn about this. It's well-written, it's interesting, but I can't help but feel that I've read it all before. A middle-aged middle-class family man suddenly feels like nothing around him is real, and there are women trying to seduce him, and men cross-dressing, and they all appear to be a handful of people taking on different roles. It's not bad– it's a competent story that raises salient questions about reality. On the other hand, it's been written before and it's been written better.
I can't pan it across the board, but I also can't think of anyone I'd recommend it to.
This is probably not going to take the world by storm– but there will be mid-grade or preteen readers who read it and connect with it and it will be their quiet favorite even into adulthood.
The blurb compares it to The Hunger Games but this more Lord of the Flies– if Lord of the Flies was about a multicultural, multi gendered group of amnesiac kids. (And I have to note that the Aztec cultural nods gave a note of world building in a book that is mostly bereft of in-universe cultural touchstones).
There was repetition and a few plot holes that caught my attention, but this is a book for someone less than half my age and I can see 12 year old me loving it to pieces.
This is such a terrible book. No plot, no characterization, no worldbuilding. The only redeeming parts are that Maxon is surprisingly endearing for a cardboard cut out and I like trashy reality TV sometimes.
But if you're looking for something that actually tells you anything about the world, or any of the characters besides the shallow as a teaspoon protagonist or has any actual drama then skip it.