Derek
Awful.
Far too wordy. He can't let the reader work out anything on his own: “as he eyed ... his HUD (heads up display)”, “Due to their stealth precautions, it was no surprise that the human force spotted their prey before they themselves were seen”. Honestly, if you think your audience is too stupid to figure out what a HUD is, don't ever use the acronym. Their “stealth precautions” (though you don't need both of those words, either) can be seen to be successful WHEN the “prey” doesn't notice them. And a “human force” is singular and spots ITS prey.
And who on earth convinced the author that it was a good idea to format the first paragraph of every chapter in a Serif font, and the rest in Sans Serif! TEXT SHOULD ALWAYS BE SERIF!
More wtf? than [b:Wetware 274005 Wetware (Ware #2) Rudy Rucker https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1390015769s/274005.jpg 2398086].Huge parts of this book are pornographic. Now, I don't have anything against pornography, per se, and I wouldn't even have considered this as such, except that Rucker is trying so hard to make you believe that Randy Tucker is a pervert.The problem with pornography is not (necessarily) that it's vile, but that it tends to be boring!I doubt I'll ever bring myself to read volume 4 ([b:Realware 274047 Realware (Ware #4) Rudy Rucker https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1173324942s/274047.jpg 265725]).
I'm not going to rate this book.
I read the first twenty or thirty books in the series (really? there weren't that many? it sure seemed like it.), and finally took a break because I hated waiting for the next volume to come out. Maybe I took too long a break, because when I picked this one up, first of all it seemed that I'd missed a volume (I'm still not sure if I did), and second - I realized I couldn't care less. I read about 4 pages and realized I no longer cared about any of the characters, what they did, and whether they ever made their world safe for Good.
The inside cover says it's “A Richard and Kahlan novel”. What a surprise! Until last month, there weren't any other kinds of Goodkind novel.
The library wanted it back and I just wasn't interested enough to finish it. I'll give it another try when the e-copy I have on hold at the library becomes available.
I read this as a follow-up to [b: Winter Tide 29939089 Winter Tide (The Innsmouth Legacy, #1) Ruthanna Emrys https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1463670456s/29939089.jpg 47306624] (which was, in turn, the second of Emrys' sequels to Lovecraft's story), and frankly Lovecraft isn't as good a writer as Ruthanna Emrys.
I tried to read this twice. It's just ponderously verbose.
For instance: “The detective looks like a hockey player. He has a penalty box chin and eyes that recede way up into the cheap seats, the greys, faint in a mist beneath his heavy brow. His tie flips across his chest...” What on earth does it even mean? Never mind that for much of the world “hockey” is a game played on grass—I get all the metaphors (I've even been known to sit in the greys), and it still doesn't have any semantic content.
The blurb says “It's the compelling, terrifying story of a devastating virus. You catch it through conversation, ...” and yet the first instance where we seem to see transmission there were not even any words spoken.
I just can't stand to continue!
Arrgggghhhh!
If your publisher can't get the grammar in your blurb correct, get another publisher.
If you self-publish, get another career.
“The video shows him wearing an ancient crown-like object, and acting so odd...“
No, No, NO! “odd” is an adverb: it should be “oddly”. Where the F*** are the editors?
I must confess, Jock was the father of a close friend, so my review is highly biased.Jock was a scientist by profession, and while I imagine he wrote for journals, he wasn't a writer for the popular press, nevertheless he was a story teller, and [b:Tangled Tongue 1576755 Tangled Tongue Living with a Stutter Jock A. Carlisle http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nocover/60x80.png 1569497] is his story of living with a stutter, and how he overcame it - and didn't. It's a fascinating story of what was known at the time about stuttering, and the many techniques — some successful, some not — that Jock and others have used to surmount their handicap.
A novel in blank verse.
I thought it sounded very interesting but found it physically unreadable.
This was nominated for a Hugo?
I've read and enjoyed some of Anders' short stories, but this is just unbearable. In a word, revolting.
The characters don't even deserve the name! They have no character!
I'm sure, given Anders background, all of the interpersonal relationships are things she's either suffered or has friends who have. That doesn't mean it makes for a good story.
I started this two weeks ago, and shelved it after chapter one. I simply couldn't imagine why I'd want to read a whole novel in which narcissistic parents and a psychopathic sister abuse their daughter/sister. They may not be the worst parents ever, but when your very young daughter disappears in the woods and tells you she got lost—and you've already assumed she was lost—then deciding she must have just been “acting out” puts you right up there.
But, I'm voting for the Hugos and this has had so many rave reviews. So I went back, and got through 13 more chapters, and it gets worse and worse. Unlike Nancy's family, the psychopaths who don't care about her, Laurence's family are just incapable of understanding a child. So they hand him over to psychopaths instead.
Give me a break. The story has lots of promise, and the humour is great, but none of the characters—including the protagonists—are remotely two-dimensional.
Honestly, this sounds like a win for the Sad Puppies
Arghh! Lose the redundant apostrophe!
How can anyone take an author seriously who can't get the title grammatically correct.
What sort of sleazy marketing is this? I read this book 30 years ago, and it was published 43 years ago, at least, as an Ace Double with [b:Lord of the Trees & The Mad Goblin 987993 Lord of the Trees & The Mad Goblin Philip José Farmer http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348451468s/987993.jpg 973487]
Probably my favorite book about the use of English. Fowler/Gowers explain English usage in ways that would make my high school teachers squirm, and validate many of my own biases!
Who would read a book whose author can't even write a blurb without three grammatical errors in the first sentence...
There was just so much wrong with this book that I not only couldn't finish it, I barely got started.First, the science is horrible. As I like to say, I'm not a biologist, I only play one on the Internet, but I've been working with Taxonomists for over a decade, and I just can't believe that a new discovery on an alien planet would be described as:Kingdom: Plantae or Animalia, maybePhylum: Spermatophyta???Class: Don't knowOrder: Can't tellFamily: Have no notion whatsoeverGenus: FragoarborSpecies: Fragoarbor Type ASo let's start at the bottom. Species would never be Fragoarbor Type A: it's fragoarbor (no capital), and if they found a “Type B”, it would have a different species name—or else both would be fragoarbor and they'd have subspecies names. Class/Order/Family would never be “unknown”. They'd be assigned, and then taxonomists would argue for decades over whether the original assignments were valid. The Kingdom Plantae doesn't actually have phyla, it has Subkingdoms and Divisions, but that's pretty irrelevant as life found on other worlds would be assigned to completely different Kingdoms, unless it was proved that somehow they really were related to our own lifeforms. I don't expect every author to be a scientific genius, but it's a matter of a few minutes to find this stuff out.Then there's the language:“...drenched, as sheets of humidity splashed upwards from the undergrowth...” I'm sorry, humidity doesn't come in sheets.and“So Tonii repented his rage,...” That was appropriate in the King James Bible, but seems pretty odd in Science Fiction.This expedition has lost 13 soldiers in two years to phenomenally dangerous lifeforms, but the scientists still treat them (that is, the lifeforms and the soldiers) practically with contempt. There's simply nothing believable about this story.The cover blurb says “Philip Palmer turns science fiction on its head in this breathtaking thrill ride through alien jungles filled with terrifying monsters and killer robots.” I'm not sure how he can turn SF on its head with something that's been done so many times before (the one's I've read most recently Weber & Ringo's [b:March Upcountry 25320 March Upcountry (Empire of Man, #1) David Weber https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1348340176s/25320.jpg 26063] and [b:Redliners 714616 Redliners David Drake https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1290067181s/714616.jpg 700871] by [a:David Drake 19472 David Drake https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1207164263p2/19472.jpg]), but if you really want such a breathtaking thrill ride, read [b:Redliners 714616 Redliners David Drake https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1290067181s/714616.jpg 700871].
Utterly, eye-crossingly, boring. I got 100 pages in, and still all we've done is talked about the boring lives of his privileged mother, grand-parents and great-grand-parents.
I give up. I find myself liking the characters less and less, and like Jordan he seems incapable of finding the conclusion to this quest.
Whose idea was this? Awful schlock.
Bored me to tears in the first dozen pages. I kept trying, but it got no better.
I loved [b:Underwater Dogs 13614362 Underwater Dogs Seth Casteel https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1390877290s/13614362.jpg 19214758] & [b:Underwater Puppies 20694175 Underwater Puppies Seth Casteel https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1394566697s/20694175.jpg 40013805], but clearly this is not going to stop until somebody drowns...
“Her and her partner, the massive brute William Teller, are new-age knights sworn to defend the kingdom of New Perth.”
Okay, we have two authors here, and neither of them understands the proper use of pronouns? This bodes poorly for the book.
This could be a great story: I just can't stand the thought of reading something that all the blurbs make clear is a a blatant rip-off ofhomage to [b:The Lies of Locke Lamora 127455 The Lies of Locke Lamora (Gentleman Bastard, #1) Scott Lynch https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1386924569s/127455.jpg 2116675]