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Boring. Meticulously researched with lots of detail about Egyptian culture and mythology I didn't know, but never makes up for the fact that not a lot actually happens. I'm also only loosely calling this historical fiction, because as I looked up later, there's no proof Neferura did a lot of what happens in this book.

Neferura is the daughter of the pharaoh Hatshepsut, with a half-brother, Thutmose, whom she shares control of the people with. I'm only half grasping this part of the story, but Neferura controls half of their region, while Thutmose controls the other half, and Thutmose was not content to hold onto just his half. What unfolds in the book is a (one-sided) power struggle, with Neferura trying to navigate family power struggles while coming out the other side not dead.

I'll start out by saying this book felt very YA in its writing style. Dialogue is very he said/she said, and while there are some adult situations involved (notably SA), they're only loosely touched on before retreating back into the day-in-the-life-of-a-power-struggle format of the book. Character development was basically nonexistent, and some of the characters started blending together for me near the end. Everything just felt a bit watered down and bland, like what you'd find in a book meant for a younger audience.

I also thought the ending was abrupt and unsatisfying. Ending spoilers here: Neferura is getting ready to have her child, she fades to black, and then we're in the epilogue where evidently she was secreted away by the wise woman and her death faked, but we never actually experience any of that. It just felt really unfulfilling after the buildup of the rest of the book.

Just not my cup of tea. I was bored through most of the second half, but was too committed to put it down.

Poaching is terrible, full stop. It’s one of those things you know (or, should know) instinctively is bad, but apparently we still need books and novellas like these to keep on telling people it’s bad, because it’s still happening. Humans keep being humans.

Mammoths have been brought back, but have forgotten how to be mammoths. There’s no other mammoths to teach them how to mammoth, and so their efforts up to this point have ended in failure. Now they’ve taken the mind/thoughts/personality of a human, the late Dr. Damira, expert in elephants, and implanted it into the mind of a mammoth. The idea is that she, with her inborn knowledge of elephants, will be able to guide mammoths accordingly, being similar animals and all. Instead of this intriguing premise, we follow along as a band of poachers targeting mammoths for their incredibly valuable ivory and the inevitable conflict between them and the mammoths.

I thought this was a really good story with flaws. I far and away loved Damira’s viewpoint the best, and would have appreciated a much longer book that took its time with a lot of the ideas and technologies introduced. As a novella you have to go into it expecting that a lot of what’s discussed and posed won’t be answered by the author in a satisfying way, leaving the reader to mull over the words themselves. I do like this aspect, but part of me also wonders if the book would have had more impact if given the space to expand a bit more. The poachers viewpoint was okay, but ultimately not compelling to me, despite the author’s attempts at characterizing and humanizing at least one of them. They’re still poachers at the end of the day, after all.

I also listened to the audiobook of this, and while the person doing Damira’s voice was fantastic, her male counterpart doing the poachers was kind of bad. Flat delivery of lines, delivered in a very low tone of voice that had me cranking my volume up for his portions every time. It doesn’t impact my rating of the actual book at all, but I’m noting it here in case anyone else is looking at the audiobook.

A valuable, worthwhile read, regardless.

So, of the mixed bag that is the mythology retelling genre, I think this was actually a pretty decent read.

I didn't know much about Atalanta going into this, aside from her golden apple experience, but from a cursory glance after finishing this book, it does a good job of retelling her experiences up to the infamous golden apple run. She's strong, she's fast, she's a crack shot with a bow, and she's out to prove that she has what it takes to hang with the men in Grecian legend. We start with her upbringing under Athena in the woods with the other nymphs, we then progress onto her stint aboard the Argo chasing the Golden Fleece with the rest, and then end the book with her trying to find her place as an ex-Argonaut.

The problem I have with this book is that the beginning and the ending are kind of weak points of the book. I think we spend overlong in the woods with her growing up under Athena, and then the last part of the book is her being all feminist-but-not-really about what to do now, and the dithering kind of grated on my nerves. Even the middle part, the quest for the Golden Fleece itself, was kind of boring, because we experience it as a ride-along character. Jason and the other Argonauts actually do everything, she experiences the quest watching what they do and talking about it. I also have a minor quibble about how Jason was portrayed in the book, but I get that the author was going for a feminist take on the whole thing, and so had to portray him as being more inept than I feel like he was.

But the writing was phenomenal, and there's definitely something here if you're still into the Greek mythology retelling genre after all this time.

"Lucky for us they don’t know we are that stupid."

Oooooof this was a rough book to read.

This one takes place between movies 5 (Empire Strikes Back) and 6 (Return of the Jedi), and covers Luke, Leia, & co. on a mission to retrieve Han who is at this point in the story frozen in carbonite but not yet turned over to Jabba. Prince Xizor features heavily in the story in this one, and was one of the reasons my husband said I should read it. Xizor and Vadar are butting heads behind the scenes, and in an attempt to out-alpha each other, Vadar is trying to capture Luke alive while Xizor is trying to kill him first.

The writing is clunky in this one, especially during action scenes where the author starts ending his lines in em dashes rather than punctuation, switching to another POV within the same fight, ending that line with an em dash, switching again, and on and on until the author finally lets the sentence (scene?) end. It made things a bit hard to follow and seemed unnecessary. The author also had a tendency to have multiple points of view in each chapter, some only a paragraph or two long, which was kinda grating. Finally, the whole Xizor/Leia section was a whole lot of ick.

Not my favorite of the OG legacy books.

"Run as far away as you’d like, the wall had told me. I will always be there."

Our dear Unnamed Protagonist has a bit of an identity issue. He met a girl when he was 17, had a brief, unrequited love, and then she vanished. During their time together, they played a game imagining a walled city together. This stuck with our Unnamed Protagonist long after she vanished, until circumstances bring him to the very city the two of them dreamed up when they were kids. Lo and behold, the 16 year old girl is there, acting as the Unnamed Protagonist’s assistant in dream reading. Things get along swimmingly (if a bit same-y, day after day after day after day after….), until the Unnamed Protagonist helps his own shadow leave the city, never to return. Suddenly we’re back in Japan, in Fukushima, with our Unnamed Protagonist acting as a librarian in a very remote town. Where did the walled city go? What does the dead-but-not old head librarian know about the walled city and how to get back? Who is the kid with the Yellow Submarine sweatshirt? All these questions and (so many) more are yours to explore by the end.

I won't get into my deeper thoughts on what I thought this book meant, because that's more for the reader to find. I will say I liked the themes here of (thematic spoilers here) duality, the perception of reality, and moving on from unrequited love, amongst other things.

Right off the bat I feel like this had some pacing issues in the middle. I enjoyed the young love setup in the beginning, and enjoyed the satisfying payoff as things start accelerating past the midpoint of the book, but the day-after-day sameness of the library in Fukushima felt a little thin. The detail is certainly there though, so if you love Murakami depicting everyday life (I do), you’ll get that itch scratched here. In true Murakami fashion, don’t go into this looking for definitive answers from the author, because the real answers are the ones you find (or, make up convincingly) along the way. I appreciated being able to revisit the town from Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and was pleasantly surprised that it didn’t feel like a rehash exactly, just another story layered over the same town. And finally, while there’s no sex in this book (Murakami bingo card holders with ‘weird sex’ as a square, I’m sorry), we do get some of that patent ogling of underage girls and dated-feeling thoughts about middle aged women here. If you can’t overlook those things and enjoy the story told here, I’d give the book a pass.

Just a pleasant read from one of my favorite authors.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an ecopy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This had all the markings of a book I'd really enjoy, but the end product came off kind of aggressively bland. I can't even really point to why, just that by the end I was actually kind of bored with the whole thing.

There was a war of conquest between the Vaalbaran Empire and the Ominirish Republic that ended in failure. The Vaalbaran Empire surrendered, but the societal divides between the two still exist. Enitan of the Ominirish Republic is just a scribe and lover of tea, fairly far removed from all the political machinations moving above her, but she gets unwillingly dragged into being a spy, a double agent, and political prisoner when her sibling is abducted by the Vaalbarans.

This book hits the imperialism/colonialism tropes hard, as one might expect from a story in the aftermath of a war of conquest. I struggled to really get into this great world the author built, because once Enitan ends up in Vaalbara, it feels like she entirely forgets her mission to save her sibling for a large chunk of the middle book while she hosts tea ceremonies as a cover for spying for the Ominirish Republic. Every tea ceremony had an incident involving in-world racism, classism, colonialism, cultural appropriation, or some other tangentially related social issue worked in somehow, which made it feel a bit heavy-handed and same-y after a while. I have no problems with social issues being worked into the books I read, but I also hate feeling like I'm being beat over the head with the same message over and over again. I got it the first couple times, I promise.

Even after the plot starts moving again, I felt like it was too little, too late. Enitan, despite being the main character, didn't really have a lot fleshing her out. She makes good tea, she's devoted to her sibling, and she wants respect for her people. That's essentially the extent of her character as shown in the book. Her supporting characters get even less treatment, which is a shame considering I thought Menkhet had the most potential to be a great character.

It's fine as a book, but kind of a letdown from the premise.

"The rules don’t fuck around. "

What a hard book to rate.

We have a narrator, a ride-along character, who stumbles upon a mysterious radio program while driving late one night. A mystery man, Buck Hensley, comes on the air with a short radio segment entitled "Rules of the Road", where he delivers a strange ultimatum to our driver. If he sees a single solitary shoe on the side of the road, he has to stop and put a sock inside it. If he doesn't, something bad will happen. Sure enough, not long after hearing this (and after the absurdity of it has lodged itself deep inside our man's brain), he sees a shoe alongside the road. Of course he stops. And what happens after he does so sends our man on a spiraling journey to connect with other people who have experienced this same strange radio broadcast, who know about Buck Hensley, and what their particular Rule of the Road might have been. Some did as instructed. Some didn't.

The bulk of this book is taken up by the stories that our main character compiles into a website, and forms the narrative structure. 12 stories from different people about their encounter with the broadcast are included here, as well as a final story from our main character that explains some things about Buck Hensley, and an epilogue about how things end up. The short stories are a mixed bag, there's lots of author commentary here in some stories about cell phone usage (people being obsessed with their phones), some political viewpoint commentary, and immigration issues. The stories themselves are supposed to be unsettling and creepy, but of all of them I think only three were standouts for me ("What's Your Name", "Landslide", and "Left of the Dial"). The others came off boring or preachy or repetitive. Chapter 13, the Buck Hensley backstory, felt tacked on, and while I appreciated the info to fill in the gaps (including the origins for the "Rules of the Road"), it felt too... I don't know... different from what the rest of the book was supposed to be. I did end up feeling things for (ending/plot spoilers) Buck and Carla as their story was told, and I did like how the author turned each of her road trip superstitions/habits into its own story, I just wish it felt more put-together.

Still, I did feel compelled to finish this, and it did make me feel things, so there's something here. It's just a bit hard to get through to the interesting bits.

After a weak few books, I'm glad to see I'm enjoying this series again. We're back in the Three Pines, we're well-fed off Gabri's food, and the neighbors are (mostly) just as delightful as they used to be. Things do feel a tad...messy, however.

I don't want to get too far into the plot of this book since it is a mystery after all, but I do feel like it's noteworthy to mention that two real life events are referenced in this book, and play a role in the mystery: a graduation honoring the (real life) tragedy of the École Polytechnique massacre, and a giant reproduction of (the real life) The Paston Treasure being found in an walled off attic space in the Three Pines. The mystery revolves around how the painting got there, why this particular painting was given modern touches in its reproduction, and what role two siblings play in both the murder of their mother when they were children and the current events happening in Three Pines.

There's a lot going on in this one. I think that the author should have chosen to focus on either (major plot spoilers here) Fiona and Sam as the killer(s), or John Fleming as the mastermind, but not both. I feel like the siblings are just in the story to serve as misdirections to conceal the true plot, but they don't even really have much of an impact that way either. It just felt unnecessary to have both, and muddied the case even more than it already was. A lot relied on coincidence and timing too, which drove me up a wall. My brain kept feeding me reasons why this whole thing would have fallen apart if Gamache or anyone else at all had done even one thing differently, which took me out of the story a bit.

Still, this kept me reading to the end, as a good story will. I just feel like these books are getting messier and messier.

I think calling this a retelling of Hansel and Gretel is a bit misleading, but not in a bad way. For one, this is more of a continuation of Gretel (Greta) and Hansel (Hans)'s stories, as this book takes place well after being imprisoned by the witch as kids. For another, the author weaves in other Brothers' Grimm stories (most notably Snow White/Rose Red, and some references to Rumpelstiltskin) to tell something that's entirely new and unique and fun. Lumping all this under a simple tag like "retelling" seems reductive and does this a disservice, actually.

Greta has been doing her best to make ends meet for her and her brother Hans by selling gingerbread in their local village, but she's never been considered one of them. Lots of whispers about her being a witch and cursed in some way abound, so she's never really fit in anywhere. And with her brother racking up debt after debt, she has to find a way to keep him safe that doesn't involve her becoming a domestic servant, or worse. She encounters Mathias in the woods, a stranger with a mysterious secret that draws her in more than pushes her away, and it's through this encounter that she starts realizing there's much more to her childhood story than a simple witch.

The telling of this story was beautiful, but I will say it has a bit of a slow start. It took maybe 15-20% before I started getting invested in what was going on, but it ended up being a satisfying wait. There's romance here as well, and while I get a bit impatient at romance scenes in books (just not my thing, not judging), I actually thought Mathias and Greta seem sweet together. I do think the ending came a bit fast and abrupt, but I'm willing to forgive it because the rest of the story was so well done.

Also a trigger warning heads up: Chapter 25 is pretty brutal, if animal cruelty gets to you I'd probably skip it. It's not required to understand the story if you've been paying attention up to that point.

I enjoyed this, but I think the summary does this book a disservice. It's not really about hope, it's more one man's struggle to provide adequate healthcare in a system designed to fight you the entire way. Unless you find bureaucracy hopeful, I guess.

There's not really much to summarize here. Henry Marsh was a neurosurgeon within the NHS, and while I'm not familiar with the name, I gather he was a pretty good one too. This book is him looking back on his career, highlighting some of the more notable cases along the way, while also providing insight and philosophizing about the many rules and regulations set up ostensibly to improve care, but really were just to cut costs and make things more difficult. He does quite a bit of ruminating on the cases that didn't go so well, and it's refreshing to see someone confront and admit their mistakes, especially when they're as impactful as these were. Nobody's perfect.

I guess the only thing that bothered me a little about this book is that it hops around so much, even within chapters. It isn't told sequentially/chronologically, but rather case-by-case, and even within the case he sometimes goes back and forth in time discussing various related points/stories. I didn't mind so much because I enjoyed what he had to say on whatever he was talking about, but someone else who better appreciates a linear story might have problems.

All in all, a very readable, enjoyable book.

"Snowy mountain, why do you not weep? Is your heart too cold?

Snowy mountain, why do you weep? Is your heart too sore?"

This was a really moving tale about a woman who spends thirty years(!!!) in Tibet looking for her husband she had been married to for less than a month after he went missing during his time in the military. Everyone told her he was presumed dead, but she refused to believe them and went to go find him for herself. If that’s not dedication, I’m not sure what is.

I’ve come to realize during the many translated books I’ve read that translations come in two varieties: ones that attempt to capture not just the individual words but also the feeling of the phrases that may not carry over, and ones that take the shortest route between two points and just translate the words without regard for emotional impact. This book falls into the latter category, with everything feeling dry, emotionless, and clinical, which made it a struggle to get through despite its short length. I didn’t get a huge sense about what sort of person Wen was beyond her loyalty to her husband because of the emotionless writing (translating?), which was a bit of a letdown in something billed as a love story.

Which is another thing: there’s very little person-to-person love in this love story. While their marriage is the driving factor for Wen being in Tibet in the first place, it’s actually not brought up all that much. We get a staggering amount of really interesting information about Tibet, but this is more of a travelogue than a quest to be reunited with her husband (ending spoiler alert: they don’t get reunited anyway, and if you're aware of what a Sky Burial is before reading this, you'll probably have guessed that).

Another point I should mention is that while this is billed as a memoir/nonfiction story, the copyright page labels this as historical fiction, which I think is closer to the truth. A lot of fantastical things happens to Wen, and it’s hard for me to believe all of it was true.

A quick read, and one I learned a lot about Tibet from, but kind of a thin/weak story overall.

Well, I liked the premise! Who wouldn't want literal superpowers bestowed on you through a book, right? The problem was that this book suffered some major pacing/development issues that prevented me from thoroughly enjoying myself, and it also requires the attentive reader to entirely turn off the part of the brain responsible for thinking logically about time travel implications. It was these two things that prevented me from rating the book higher, but I do have to say that I did mostly enjoy the story told. There was just a lot of telling.

Cassie works at a bookstore when an elderly regular of hers, Mr. Webber, stops by one snowy evening, exchanges some banter about world travel and The Count of Monte Cristo, and then passes away right there in the shop. In front of him, Cassie finds a mysterious book with an equally mysterious message for her right inside the cover. This was her introduction to The Book of Doors, which lets her travel anywhere (and anywhen) just by opening a door. There's other books out there with other strange and mysterious powers, and just as many people trying to get their hands on them. Cassie finds herself sucked into a power struggle she never knew existed, armed only with a book to keep her and her friends safe.

The cast of characters in this book is rather large, but don't worry, only a very few of them are actually relevant to the plot. There's an equally huge number of different books of different powers out there as well, but again, don't worry, as our heroes really only make use of two or three regularly. The author does a lot of handwaving of these other books (evidently a whole library's worth?), which was a little disappointing. The plot also moves incredibly slow in the beginning while everything's being set up, and then after it falls over the tipping point things start moving incredibly fast, which was a little problematic. It took so long for the plot to start moving, and then when it does, interesting plot points are handwaved away in a "we'll think about this later" off scene sort of way as the author barrels through their plot points to get to the end. After all the time setting things up, I expected a bit more care to be taken with the end.

And then don't get me started on all the time travel shenanigans that aren't adequately explained. DO NOT click this spoiler/read this spoiler if you're at all interested in this book (I'm not joking) (HEAVY ending spoilers here): So ultimately it was Cassie who made the books, right? But we don't actually ever talk about that and what that means or how it happens. She just saw Izzy die (but not actually), freak out, go through a door to nothing, and then.....hangs out there for months, sheds her emotions into books, and then somehow they're distributed out before everything started hundreds of years ago for everyone to fight over. She was the origin of the books, but everytime afterward that Cassie starts to think about it she waves it away as being too large to think about. Girl, you're right, but also the readers want to know wtf that was all about so we need to have a moment together, I think. It just smacked of the author having a cool idea but not really knowing how to adequately/satisfactorily explain it at the end, so we'll just have the main character not talk about it at all okay?

But if you're able to turn your brain off and want an original book superpower-themed thriller, give this one a try.

"The fact that someone was now paying for us to complete our adventure and that the story was starting to be picked up by major newspapers and TV stations showed that we were doing something remarkable, even if it was really just an excuse to go travelling and party on an overextended road trip with our best buddies."

I said this in one of my Goodreads updates while reading this, but this book is like if 90s Ashton Kutcher wrote a factual account of traveling the world. That either does it for you, or it doesn't, there isn't a whole lot of inbetween. I fell on the "doesn't" part of the spectrum, but there were some redeeming qualities about these guys' trip that kept me reading.

The back-of-the-book summary is what's inside - three friends, in an attempt to put off being an adult post-college decide to take a London cab on a worldwide tour to break a Guinness world record and circumnavigate the world. Along the way they meet a host of friendly people, make their way through miles of bureaucracy, become expert roadside mechanics, and just overall have a good time with their buds.

They really do just party their way through the first part of the book, to get it out of the way early. Lots of drinking, partying, and couchsurfing, before waking up, driving all day, and doing it again in another location. I'm not a huge drinker or partyer, so they do come off as being a bit insufferable in the beginning to me.

But you can see a tonal change right around when they start trekking through the Middle East. I feel like we get a bit more introspection out of them about the world they're just now starting to see and about the people around them. There's less about how they're drinking their way to liver failure, and more about the scenery, the journey itself, and how much of a struggle it is to keep their cab running on a day-to-day basis. It's these little nuggets of introspection that were the most interesting to me.

But I mean, at the end of the day they do come off as being insufferable dudes who haven't really grown up yet circumnavigating the world on someone else's dime to put off having to make adult decisions. Which, fair, they're up front about that in multiple places in the book, but it's still a little tedious to read about.

I actually finished this several days ago, but wanted to let it percolate a bit in my brain before deciding on a rating. This was not a bad book by any means (in fact, quite good actually), but it is a complex book with a lot of science-y type stuff thrown at you fairly quickly.

It's a tough book to summarize because of the necessary mess that is time travel. Essentially, a device is invented that allows the user to go back into their memories. Originally developed by the creator, Helena, to help Alzheimer's patients, the idea gets snapped up and quietly co-opted by her source of funding into something simultaneously more advanced and more sinister. Being able to literally go back in time to a previous point and re-live a life has predictably messy results on the future, and despite wanting to keep access limited, the word eventually gets out and Helena and her husband/future-husband/ex-husband Barry struggle to undo all the damage done to save the world from itself.

Right off the bat, I'm going to let you know that this is a very science-heavy book involving time travel. While I wasn't confused along the way necessarily, there's definitely parts of the book that you really shouldn't think too closely about or try to understand. Actually the reason I gave it 4 stars and not 5 is because it felt like rather large plot holes were hidden under these science-y parts, where as long as you don't look too closely at the seams everything looks flawless. There's also some rather jarring time skips (understandably) where a reader might be confused if they aren't reading closely, and a definite tonal shift as the book progresses and the late game kicks in and things start feeling more frantic.

But at its core it's a character-driven story about time travel. I loved that we spent time with Helena and Barry across different iterations of their life/lives together, and got to experience the different events that changed them subtly in each one. Additionally, we also get to see the changes in each of them as they experience these lives, with Helena (late book spoilers) getting increasingly disenfranchised with all their attempts at trying to undo the chair's creation. Rather like when you make a copy of a copy, each iteration of herself makes her more fragile than the last. It's a very human reaction/interaction, and I liked that a large part of the late book plot involved it.

Just a really good book, I'm surprised I didn't read it sooner.

Another enjoyable entry in the Murderbot Diaries series! I actually enjoyed the first book just a bit more than this one, but I loved that our Murderbot friend is doing things of his own volition and looking for answers to the big questions he has about his past. It almost feels a bit like a footnote in this book though, as most of the plot centers around Murderbot's interaction with a group of down-on-their-luck workers trying to get their IP back.

There's a lot going on in this book, and while it's all fun to read about, in novella form everything feels like it happens so quick. That's really my only minor hangup about this one, but it's still an entertaining read regardless.

I slogged through this book so you don't have to.

I've had this one on my to-read list since its publication I think, and as luck would have it, one of my regular library patrons had just finished reading it and was dropping it off at our swap shelf. I asked if they liked it, and they hedged a bit and finally committed to a half-hearted "....yeah?" And with that rounding endorsement, I decided to give it a go.

It's a mess. First off, the story is told through letters the main character sends to his niece. Highly, highly detailed letters he manages to pen with exact dialogue, scene movement, and adult topics to his kid (at the time) niece, between highly dangerous/incredibly wild scenes climbing a dangerous mountain. That took me right out of it, as I couldn't suspend belief enough to accept it.

Second, while the actual mountain climbing story starts out intriguing, it's really only for the first third or half or so before things start getting crazy weird and hard to follow. Even now, having just finished the book, I'm not really sure about that ending. There's actually a neat idea in here, if the author could've stuck with it and didn't lay so hard on the monsters on the mountain plot.

Third, and I'm putting this in spoilers, (character/plot spoilers here) the guy's name being a reverse of "i am alien"? Really? My eyes rolled super hard at that one. Why would an alien bother?

Dunno, definitely not my cup of tea. I gave it a star for the intriguing premise and interesting beginning, but it falls hard on its face not far in.

I actually really enjoyed this book. It's very much a noir mystery, in that there's large swaths of the book where we get a lot of introspective thought trips through our protagonist's history, views, and character insights. Normally that sort of unfiltered thought dialogue drives me up a wall, but I thought it worked well for this setting and didn't entirely bog me down in detail.

Our protagonist (whose name we never find out) is an aging police detective, who hears that an old client of his during his head of security days, the scientist-cum-savior-of-the-world Akira Kimura is fearing for her life, so he drops in to see what he can do. And finds her dead.

That's basically it for the plot, as is tradition for a lot of detective noir stories. Where I thought this book shined was in the rich detail of the world. It's a far future Earth where we have underwater sea houses, AI personal assistants, and a whole host of cultural issues associated with climate change and classism. I really loved that we got to know this Earth so well through the eyes and thoughts of our nameless protagonist.

There's also a bit of (thematic/character spoilers here) unreliable narrator aspect to this that I appreciated, where our protagonist maybe isn't as upstanding as we're led to believe. And hanging over the entire book is the was-there-wasn't-there aspect of the Sessho-seki Comet that was a nice touch.

This one gave me brain food, and I like it for that. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but if an introspective sci-fi-themed detective noir story gets you interested, give this a shot.

What a weirdly unremarkable book. I listened to the audiobook and experienced the weird feeling of totally forgetting each chapter I finished as I finished them.

This is a historical fiction mystery where the detective is actually a lady doctor in a period where ladies just aren't doctors. She's a teacher at a school for other ladies who wish to become doctors, and we get many scenes about her teaching/doctoring, and the ridicule/disparagement she faces doing so. A friend of hers goes missing and she takes it upon herself to determine why, so while she's teaching/doctoring, she's also being a detective. She gets up to a lot in the 1800s.

I thought the ending was fine, I thought the writing was fine, I thought our main character was a bit too much "good at everything" to be believable, but I know a lot of people don't mind that. Just nothing about this book stuck with me though, and I can't put my finger on why. It did feel a bit slow in the beginning, where most of the book is spent introducing us to our main character and spending a lot of time in her classes teaching students.

I guess if the premise sounds interesting give it a try? Lots of people seem to enjoy this book, but I thought it was bland and kind of forgettable.

DNF @ 10% - Just isn't holding my attention like I thought it would. Maybe I'm just not in the right mindset right now? Maybe it's because I'm listening to the audiobook? I'll put it down for now and maybe pick it up again in the future.

"As far as interplanetary warfare was concerned, this was up close and personal."

Holy hell this took me forever to get through. I'm not sure why, the series is actually pretty great, but somewhere after the first third I just stopped reading it for the longest time.

In any case, this book was the galactic conclusion to the trilogy, where everyone we've met along the way comes together to have a final showdown against the curators. Like the other two books, this one's split amongst the different POV characters we've been following the entire time, and we follow their perspectives as we ride the buildup and climax of the entire trilogy. There's some subverted deaths, some actual deaths, and plenty of character development and romance(!) along the way.

I actually felt like this final book had too much character development, as it sort of took away from any sort of final battle I was expecting. While I love the care and dedication to these characters, their personal stories basically took the spotlight and the actual curator fight/confrontation was just a footnote at the end of the whole thing. Kind of disappointing after the buildup to this point.

Still, this was a really entertaining series, with obvious parallels to Mass Effect (the waystations, the curators), Star Wars (the Idran Var and a number of other things), and a few other sci-fi tropes along the way. Highly recommend if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Cute, but ultimately forgettable. Kind of a tale about how a small lie can quickly balloon into something unmanageable, but I don't think the execution was all that great. A lot of common sense reactions from the humans in the story (shock, horror, fear) were absent in favor of the underlying message of acceptance and making the lie right in the end.

The artwork was also kind of weirdly unsettling to me. Like a comic strip, but even more basic? I don't know, I just didn't connect much with the art or the layout.

Fine for a cute story, not much else.

"The dose makes the poison."

As I write this, my husband is giving me the side eye after listening to me go on about how awesome this book about poisons and the people who used them was. I can't imagine why, because we both know I lack the attention span required to cook up a poison or two.

But in all seriousness, this was a fantastic book about several different natural and synthetic compounds that were used to commit crimes. Each chapter features a different poison, centers around a major case (and sometimes a minor one as well) where the poison featured prominently, and discusses medically what happens when the poison is administered and other neat (read: morbid) facts about efficacy, cures, and how the poison was made or discovered. My favorite chapter was the chapter on ricin, if only for the morbidly amusing story about an elderly woman in Vermont who cooked up poisons in her assisted living kitchen. The chapter on polonium was also fascinating.

It's not a very long book and the poisons discussed were all ones I had at least heard of, if not knew the details about. It's not a comprehensive book about all poisons ever, but what it does talk about is well fleshed out and entertaining to read about. Just a great, interesting read all around.

Maybe pick your audience carefully before discussing this book, though.

This was more of a memoir/tongue-in-cheek nonfiction about the reasons the author reads, with some bonus advice about how we can use her experiences to improve our own reading. It's basically a series of essays about various topics related to reading--everything from the author's early experiences in a library to how to read horror if you're a scared reader to teaching a classroom of students how to appreciate Lincoln in the Bardo to a lot more diverse topics.

Not a lot connects one essay to the next except the author's life and reading, but it was an interesting listen none-the-less. It was a great audiobook for me to listen to, as I feel like if I were reading it I would start getting bored of the meandering-ness of the book. I did get some things out of it, and really liked her approach to working in poetry that I might consider doing, but not a lot will stick with me now that it's done.

I do think the author has a great sense of humor and outlook on life though. It was an amusing book to listen to, if nothing else.

"Fearlessness, as Logen Ninefingers had once observed, is a fool's boast."

Look, okay guys? Okay? I finished this series! And now I can (honestly) say that I've already read it when someone says I should read it. So you can stop recommending it to me!

My full thoughts about the full series was that book 2 was the best, both story-wise and pacing-wise. This book is better than book 1 to me in basically every way, but it lacks a certain something that makes it better placed than book 2 in my mind.

This book specifically had some really awesome chapters. I loved that this book shrugged off its one-character-per-chapter POV structure for certain huge events, giving us multiple perspectives of a single event within a single chapter. This allowed you to check in briefly with all your favorites to make sure everything is (more or less) okay with them and see how they fit into the larger event being told. It's a nice touch, and employed wonderfully in this book.

I have some minor hangups about a few of the minor characters in this book/series, but maybe they're addressed in the followup books or a short story. I haven't really checked. One specific example of this is (character/plot spoilers here) Queen Terez. Her attitude is a neat twist on the married to the king trope, but it didn't seem worked in very well. We get a few chapters involving it, and a conclusion (more or less) involving Glokta, and that's basically it. It didn't seem all that important to include, and while it doesn't really take away from the story, it doesn't really add anything either. Again, maybe this is addressed in later books/stories, I obviously haven't gotten that far. There's one or two other minor characters that would fit this as well.

But overall, a really enjoyable read once the series really got rolling. Glokta remains my favorite.

"We are those who resist."

I'm still really enjoying this series, but I felt like things dragged near the middle of this book a bit. My attention wandered in a few chapters, and one of the points of view I really liked from the first book seemed utterly different in this one.

Book two picks up where book one left off, with the waystations starting to pop off with mysterious signals, and each of the main players from the first book off on their own little adventures. We follow these different characters on their stories, with Kojan trying to come to terms with his impending death-by-implant-malfunction, Rivus butting heads with Tarvan over whether they should secure a friendship with the enemy-of-my-mysterious-enemy and create a united front, Niole trying to figure out if she's Idran-Var or a legionnaire, and Ridley waxing hot and cold over Halressan (mostly hot) and supposedly doing stuff plot-related, but not a lot actually happens with her.

If you couldn't tell from that, Ridley's POV was my least favorite in this book. (character/plot spoilers here) She's nowhere near the scrappy human-dumped-into-an-alien-underworld she was in the first book. Now she's attached at the hip to Halressan, who spends most of this book ignoring her. I also don't really know what she contributed to the overall plot beyond jetting out to some remote corner of the galaxy and waking up an old siolean goddess-but-not-really. In the first book she moved a lot of plot, had a lot of spunk, and was pretty badass. Now she's kinda moony and can't seem to decide what she wants to do for herself anymore. I don't know, not my thing. But beyond that, the rest of the book was pretty great. Without having to take time to do as much worldbuilding and story setup, this book was very much wall-to-wall action. Lots of flashy things happen to keep you interested, and I particularly liked Rivus's POV in this one. The angst he feels over his best friend is fantastic.

Just an overall really interesting, fun sci-fi book. Absolutely picking up book 3.