David

Alternates between chapters that get increasingly scary and chapters that get increasingly devastating. Very effective combo + I cried :(

Incredibly cruel, mean, depressing and upsetting, which is its biggest strength! The attempts at being profound and zeitgeist-y didn't really work for me but I can see the appeal

I feel like I literally spent my entire life reading this book. I got a chest infection as I read the first part where a virus kills everyone on the planet - would recommend that experience for the immersion. The second part is very slow going but the ending is brilliant in typical Stephen King fashion. Anyone who says this is their favourite King book is not to be trusted though! The best scene is like only 200 pages in!

Oof! Not exactly a fun breezy read but very very good, incredibly cold and dark and sinister. It's hard to imagine any other book that does what this book does - a zombie apocalypse post capitalist satire of the American immigrant experience - and it does all of those elements really well. Iconic

NOSYYYYY

Once you get over how this is written,
(Every sentence.
Split up into tiny emphatic pieces.
Tiny pieces, separated by line breaks.
Line breaks just like this.
Every single one.)
then this becomes very fun. A great concept that I'm surprised isn't a movie yet!

Felt very humiliated by this book and the fact that it confused me so much that I had to use SparkNotes to understand the plot ❤️

Has a really interesting concept but I ended up struggling through the second half of this. Her writing and characters come across as pretty flat to me :(

First non-5 star of the series...oh Brandon what have you done!

PROS:
- Act V is amazing, as per usual - it shouldn't be entirely surprising as the Sanderson formula is to spend about 80% of the book really really slowly building up to an astonishing set-piece
- Kaladin's arc is great! And new side characters like The Sibling and The Pursuer and Raboniel are great too!

CONS:
- Kaladin is probably the only main POV character who isn't an issue here - Shallan was previously my favourite character but she's kind of wasted, Adolin and Dalinar feel a little non-existent, Navani has a great arc but the actual chapters are often a slog to get through and the Venli/Eshonai flashback chapters rehash the events of the first two books without telling you much of interest at all.
- The world-building here is out of control and feels like the stuff that should be consigned to a fan wiki rather than the actual book itself. Not only do a huge amount of concepts and characters now have new names to remember (including the word for aluminium??), Navani's chapters about experimenting with the emulsification of light and music theory and shit are really pushing it in terms of acceptability
- I thought Lift was gonna die but she didn't. Oh well there's always next time

I can't in good conscience give this a bad score and the last act had me seriously considering just 5 starring this anyway, similarly to the last book in this series. But if Wind And Truth is like this as well I might go crazy

While I did not cry, I came very close to it so I'm counting that as a success

Emily St. John Mandel the genius that you are!!! Oh my God!!! I will never recover!!!
Even though this book is relentlessly grim and depressing it still lowkey made me want to be part of an armed group of post apocalyptic theatre kids and that's powerful

Evidently a real work of genius but ultimately just not really for me - it's quite slow moving and rich with detail but I could never really get my teeth into it. Some incredibly creative moments notwithstanding I unfortunately had to DNF

Has any man in history ever needed a therapist more than Fyodor Dostoevsky

Very messy overall but ties up quite nicely. The first story is the obvious highlight despite its clunky tie-in to the Stephen King multiverse (KCU?) and aspects of the other three work very well but each have problems - ‘Hearts in Atlantis' is a jumble of themes and the central horror conceit is more dull than scary, ‘Blind Willie' has a beyond absurd premise and the depiction of war in ‘Why We're in Vietnam' is not working with King's strong suit. But Carol Gerber binds each of these stories together in a very compelling way and there's a strong emotional core to this book that feels equally nihilist and hopeful. It's just definitely far from the best thing King has ever done

The exploration of language, race, class and the immigrant experience here is really interesting - but that twist sucked so bad sorry

Can't write a negative review cause I now know rf kuang definitely checks her own Goodreads page

DNFd at page 204 - some very funny scenes and incredibly impressive sentences and vignettes but fundamentally feels needlessly provocative and there's the uneasy feeling that the ‘ironic/satirical' sexism/racism/homophobia/transphobia/ableism/fatphobia/SA/violence might not be coming from a good place and it made it significantly harder to get through

Clive you will never see the gates of heaven!!!

Trying to not get too mad about this

What the hell is going on in this book

This WILL become my personality going forward

So gorgeous, the perfect encapsulation of turbulent teenage friendships and identity crises. Plus they have outDONE themselves with the art here!! The tamakis always bring the quality (also I got a cute extra drawing with my copy of the book which I will treasure forever)

I will stop giving stormlight archive books five stars as soon as they stop serving this hard

Probably the most interesting and creative thing I've read from King, but it's intangibly surreal plot and setting make it hard to sink into. Maybe I will continue the series one day but ehhhh

An enjoyable middle section full of academic drama and tensions and a profoundly beautiful ending make this worth trudging through the first 100 or so pages where not much happens other than a hit parade of minor tragedies. I think the sadness of this book is a little overstated by some but it is undoubtedly amazingly well written!