Apollo

I love this series of books and enjoyed being taken along on another journey with Chih, a journey back to their home. Fun to learn more about the neixin and some of the backstory to the relationships amongst the clerics. I wish there had been more dialogue involvement with the mammoth riders/Cleric Thien's granddaughters and this book felt a little less engaging than the others. I also wish the spooky/mysterious aspects around Cleric Thien post mortum had been played up a bit more. I still really enjoyed it though and looking forward to the next one.

The HP books aren't good enough to live up to all the praise and fandom they receive, but more importantly JKR has done immense harm to the trans community and is not anti-racist my any stretch of the means. She only retro-actively has been inclusive of POC via background inclusion/for PR purposes/tokenism. We all have participated in problematic faves and whatnot, but I will not support someone who we can see so clearly has and continues to do things that are extremely harmful. There's like a billion other fantasy books out there that are way better anywho. Expand your worldview and leave a bigot behind.

I wanted to like this more than I did. I love the character diversity but often felt like there were big gaps/jarring transitions in character motivations, world building, and character conversations. Maybe the writing style wasn't for me shrug ... I did like story on the surface but was missing a lot of detail and needed more consistency in story progression.

Absolutely loved this followup to Parable of the Sower. Octavia Butler has essentially predicted the future in many ways (unfortunately), but doesn't leave you filled with despair. She writes about hard topics but doesn't leave you horribly traumatized from reading it in the process. This book criticizes and helps you challenge the patriarchal, capitalist, and christian structures that dominate and create so many hardships in the world. It may be a fiction world, but I think it has done more to help me grow as a person than any self-help, non-fiction, philisophical, or really any other genre has done. Butler is someone I wish I could have known as friend. Sorry this review doesn't speak much to the story in the book, but if you want that then read the book's blurb.

I liked the bits about Ojibwe language and hunting culture sprinkled throughout the book. I wish there had been more of it. The book was very repetitive with the hunting stories. Some of them were very enjoyable but many sounded like the same story again and again with only a tiny amount of variation. I still am glad I read it but it took determination to finish it.

This book has some fun facts and insights into the science and forestry of trees. Unfortunately the author over does it with the anthropomorphism. He often tries to force parallels between humans and trees that just aren't there or even worse sort of offensive. He has a chapter labeled “immigrants” referring to “foreigners” as dangerous in the context of trees which isn't too hard to see how that's not good to parallel back to human culture. I don't need to see everything through human perspective to understand. Tell me about how trees experience the world not how trees might experience it if they were humans! Additionally the author contradicts himself repeatedly in the book giving me pause on some of the things he states as fact. I would recommend reading the book “Tending the Wild” over this one even though it does not solely focus on trees you will be much more rewarded by that book. While I do not dislike the book totally I would recommend reading it with a critical eye.

I liked this book a lot! It is one of those stories that has a narrator with their own plot going on in addition to the story they are telling. I liked the characters a lot, and learned some new things that aren't native to North America like the Hoophoe bird even though it is a fantasy story. Also nice to have a character that uses they/them pronouns. They are a cleric and their gender isn't like the focus of the story or anything. I want to read this one in paperback as I read it on an Ereader. Some stories benefit from the feel of paper and ink. Going to get the next one from my library.

This book was ok. It's aimed at a younger audience and I can imagine a younger audience liking it. The king Arthurian legend stuff and adventures are fun. For me the “forces of good and evil” in the story were narrow and very binary. The “evil” characters were evil without any explanation. There was fantastical/magicalness extremely subtly implied but never clarified. Too ambiguous and not in a rewarding way. At least not til the end of the book where it's mostly used as a cliffhanger to make you want to read the next book. I enjoyed Susan Cooper's prose and the characters were fun to get to know. My other complaint is that “natives” were referenced in the book in a tropy negative way and often evil characters were described having dark skin and the good characters light skinned. Not great but probably reflective of when it was written. Wouldn't read again but was a fine enough book.

Has a classic fantasy setup with a group of travelers (who primarily don't know one another) meet in a bar and decide to set out on some journey together. The main character Chih is a historian/story collector. They end up on an adventure of some kind in each book (3 books total in this series currently) recording stories from the people they meet. I really enjoyed the stories being told within the story that was happening around the story tellers. Really fun, fast read.

wanted to like this one as I really liked H is for Hawk, the wunderkammer intro was my favorite part and then it just didn't really hold my interest much after that. Some of the stories were well written and many just meandered a bunch and weren't very interesting. The politics were wishy washy liberalism, and I wanted her to have a stronger stance with more meat on how to fight for a better world. If this helps someone begin their journey towards caring about the world around them then that's great it's just not a fit for me personally.