Sophie
Bad showing from Starclan, takes over half the book to get the guiding prophecy fulfilled and even then it’s just a vague comet in the sky the cats spot. Then after Spottedleaf (why) shows up like 7 times when she could’ve helped earlier.
Upside is the traveling portion was way faster less chapters of them hobbling through rocks and more cross clan relations and meeting the tribe again. Crowfeather naming and stormfur leaving were beautiful, v enjoyable book
Some drawn out travel chapters, but has a good mix of new focuses and narrators. Ending is sick as hell and the leafpaw/squirrel paw telepathically communicating herbs for medicine through sensory transmission was an interesting setup for the second series which is starting with a ton of 2 sibling duos (leafpaw/squirellpaw, stormfur/feathertail, Brambleclaw/tawnypelt, mothwing/hawkfrost)
Contains spoilers
Psychotic, but I love it. Intertwining hobbyist game dev principles with the transition of three completely different trans woman and the evolution over different decades is beautiful. Great amount of unanswered questions from the final chapters. The only time the three chatting together is shown is through online group chats in the early prologue setup of the book and I really believed they would get back together and something great would happen with their game, but its just a mess of intersecting parts and parsing out feelings relating to decades ago. I will say that while I wanted the happy ending it felt unrealistic from the setup. Atleast thinking back to how my teen hobbyist gamedev projects went. The ending felt perfect for what the opposite would be, a complete mess if only relating back to those teenage years even if when thats when you truly discovered yourself. So much unanswered, this one certainly will be re-read.
Also beautiful language throughout. This book had more new vocab then all other books I've read so far this year combined: Inveterate, sordid, involution, ashlar, redolent, portentous, reveries, chitin, porous, rachis, venal, phylactery, epigram, jouncing, irascible, sqaulor, rakish, koan, dessicated, sluicing, and derelict.
Not Thurstons best work
The book easily should have been restructured. It starts off in technical detail describing the slow process of a certain theory in boilers explosions before, but not 50 pages in does it switch to the main theme of explosions being mainly a case of bad management or construction. After proposing that second theory it’s a bit of a slog as it explains all the different boiler parts that could be mismanaged, but the last 50 pages or so just being analysis of historical explosions relating to the likely causes brings it back from the deep theoretical cases it was mentioning before. I do like the setup of the book in that it was a response to a letter from the US Secretary of Treasury asking Thurston how to reduce boiler explosion incidents and the final page being a 9 step list of all reasons and actions you should take to prevent explosions in the future
Definitely not a book I would recommend, but one with a couple interesting chapters for those studying older scientific research processes
Re-read of a book I loved in highschool, holds up pretty well especially for a 2008 book. Has a bunch of interesting cybersecurity concepts relating to the 9/11 attacks and the Patriot Act.
There were some parts that felt unnecessary. It has throwaway sentences talking about random peoples on the streets outfits and how it relates to pop culture. That could be construed as connected, but other times Cory Doctorow just described the lore of a street in San Francisco for multiple pages longer then needed. Still it jumps back to its core dilemna quite often and is a pretty good piece on a more technical side of protesting