Astrid Hawk

Book candy - a quick, easy read with a captivating story, action, and emotion. In terms of dystopian and societal reflection, it didn't go very deep... but then again, it didn't really need to.

Read this in English as a child and somehow never read the original version even in French class. Looking forward to experiencing it in the author's original prose. (Goodreads does a terrible job with managing multiple-language editions of the same book... hope I can make this work.)

Didn't like this one as much as the previous one - the crime solving part moved a lot slower. As is typical for Sanderson, there was a dramatic acceleration at the end, with a bit a gut-punching twist. Although I didn't enjoy Marasi's character development, and I found Wax a bit flat in this one, Wayne was even more entertaining, and I found that I'd missed TenSoon. I also enjoyed that Sanderson decided to challenge the goodness, or right-ness, of deities (even benevolent ones) in this book.

I wasn't thrilled with this book, but I didn't hate it either. Every now and again I'd find myself getting drawn in... only to be suddenly and rudely shut out by a shift in narrative perspective, or by the author's seeming unwillingness to maintain interest in any one plotline long enough to finish it with the respect it deserved.

I read several other reviews that called out the choppy pacing as the main detriment to their enjoyment. To be perfect honest, I'm not really sure that I understand what choppy pacing is if this book is supposed to exemplify it. I actually thought the pacing was consistent enough to be predictable - action scenes went quickly, and they were interspersed with chapters of “set up” - mostly private meetings between characters in which the next phase of the plot was revealed piece by piece through each character's eyes. I thought that part was fine - there's no reason that a book, even a fantasy novel, needs to start off slow and uniformly accelerate to the final climax. In fact, having the brief periods of action throughout the book actually gave me something to look forward to each time I got bored. I found the pacing too predictable to be “choppy”.

But a lot of the book didn't work for me. As I began thinking about how to write this review, I thought about how I'd summarize the book. And that was where I realized the major flaw: there's no way to summarize the book concretely without giving away the entire story. The book tackles too many aspects of the fantasy world - magic of all types, political intrigue, feudal war, class war, abuse, poverty, excess, religion, legend, etc - without giving any one aspect its proper due. The end result is that the world feels incomplete; the reader is left with very little sense of the history that seems like it should be important, and the political structure is very muddled so that when the big upheaval does come, it's hard to remember who is siding with who and what various factions' motivations are supposed to be. Similarly, little information is given about what magic can do, so each new trick that shows up is a surprise to the reader and seems like the author made it up on the fly to get a character out of a particular jam. A little more information up front about common magical items and capabilities would add more credibility to the magic users in the story - it's far more interesting to see characters use tools like magic in creative ways rather than just see new tools invented on the spot.

The back of the book says just about everything it can say - it begins with the somewhat trite “A good killer has no friends” and then goes on to explain that Azoth has no choice but to abandon his old life and become the apprentice to the greatest assassin in the world. The book does start out centered around Azoth/Kylar, but as it evolves, most of the action and the weighty themes have little to do with him and his little coming-of-age tribulations. It feels as if he's thrust into the middle of major events in a completely unbelievable fashion, as if the author is grasping at straws to make sure the hero of the book is somehow involved in all the major events. To me, that made everything seem ill-thought-out - like the author had some master plan for the boy and the plot (and in fact he clearly did), but didn't know how to make it remarkable or dramatic enough without big exaggerated battles.

Many other minor things bothered me as well, though it took me awhile to understand what they were as I read. One was the constant shifting perspective. While I recognize that this was necessary to make the plot come together, since there was no way Azoth/Kylar could see everything, I've seen it executed much better (GRRM's technique of separating chapters comes to mind). In this book, perspective, setting, and plot thread can switch mid-chapter with no more warning than an extra line break between perspectives. What was more infuriating, though, was the seemingly random injection of new perspectives by minor characters - people who had never even been named in the book before and wouldn't take much part again. This is a technique often used in movies when introducing a villain - the crime the villain is committing is seen through the eyes of someone (usually a security guard of some kind) who is about to become a victim. It bothers me in movies, but I can see the use there. In books, it doesn't work at all, particularly if the character is not about to become a victim at all, but is just loaning his eyes and thoughts temporarily for the author to fill some pages.

Finally (and this is a minor point to be sure), the language of the book fell short for me. The style frequently slipped between neutral prose to contemporary slang, which seemed very jarringly juxtaposed with the medieval setting.

I feel a bit hypocritical writing what is without a doubt my most scathing review to date, for I'm sure I wouldn't have done any better trying to write a fantasy novel (or any kind of novel for that matter). It's so easy to find flaws in others' work that is by virtue of being on paper infinitely better than any work I've never written. But still, this book really disappointed me, and I felt the need to quantify and justify that feeling.

Recommended for all nerds, people who fancy themselves nerds, and people who want to understand fantasy without taking on GRRM or Robert Jordan. This was just a fun read, period. That said, though, I'm definitely in the first class I mentioned above, so this book was basically written for me.

I was born a bit late to really understand all the copious 80s references throughout the book, but I spent enough time on emulators and friends' old consoles to have sufficient perspective to enjoy the nuances of the story. It helps to understand what vector graphics look like, what crude haptics (e.g. “force feedback”) feel like, and how Dungeons and Dragons (or similar role-playing games) basically worked. But there were certainly enough contemporary references, like Pern, Firefly, etc to ground me.

I loved this book for so many reasons that I can't possibly list them all here. The book answers some burning questions, some you might not have known you had (but I've definitely asked them all at some point):
- In an immersive virtual reality, how do you go to school? how do you conduct business?
- Do you feel pain when someone hits you? Is a blow converted to actual physical damage?
- If your online presence is an alternate you, what are the ramifications of death?
- How do you police a virtual civilization? (Note - the author answers this question by avoiding the issue entirely. There are no laws in the OASIS. He does not get into why there is not rampant needless destruction, though there could be possible explanations.)

Don't look for anything too deep in this book - there is no mind-blowing ending (in fact it's quite predictable), and no existentialist agenda or some other philosophical analog. It's just pure fun with a happy ending that makes it even more fun. About halfway through the book, when the main character's avatar starts getting more advanced, the OASIS leaves the realm of a believable online system to a complete orgy of fantasy. At times it feels that the author makes up the system parameters as he goes along, but as wild and imaginative as he gets, he does manage to adhere to the basic parameters he establishes. Sometimes it feels like the kind of story you'd tell as a child, getting more and more hard to control, but for every grounding answer an adult asks, the child comes up with some reason the story would work. Some things are easy to imagine as a possible future of gaming, but others (like codes for producing odors, for example, and the sheer volume of data that is apparently sent instantaneously over fiber-optic connections for another) are clearly just fantasy. It doesn't really matter, though, because nerds want that stuff to exist, and we're willing to overlook the impossibilities in order to imagine this as a reality. Plus, the story moves along pretty fast, so there's no time to waste considering these things.

Normally I'd only give a book a 5 if I enjoyed it so much that I think I'd want to read it again. I'm not sure this book really has that much re-read value - it's not very complex, and the story and characters are simple but memorable. It's possible that on a re-read I'd understand more of the nostalgia references... but not much else. However, it's rare that I call up friends I haven't spoken to in awhile just to recommend a book - and I did that with this book. I think that in itself is enough to push the rating to 5 stars.