Ben Saufley
Not terribly written, but the structure, the eventual resolution of the mystery, were all underwhelming. Another mystery where I spent much of the book generally enjoying it yet as it wrapped up it kind of felt like a waste. The clues and red herrings put out there were not well-used and certain Chekhov's guns never went off; which I suppose is fine, and maybe even good in a literary novel, but in a mystery, when you reflect on your experience, those things just feel cheap and meaningless.
Contains spoilers
I really enjoyed this book, but I liked the first half a lot more than the second. There is a major, and kind of disorienting, pivot at that point and it goes from having a clear arc to a kind of listlessness with the kind of aftermath of the first half of the book. I was certain Pierce and Ellie were both alive, in part because of how quickly their death came and went; I was half-right, but the way that was revealed felt like an afterthought instead of what I assumed would bring the book around to a satisfying conclusion.
Liu is a very intelligent writer who writes compelling characters and creates an interesting image of the near future. One thing I kept thinking about was how some of the tech he introduced read, to me, as his bets on what current early-stage tech survives and thrives. And it's not necessarily what I'd have guessed. I think the major suspension of disbelief for me was in the idea of a personal AI that didn't live in or process via the cloud. We have a lot of leaps before something like what we're seeing now is available in a form that is both fast and local.
It also seemed rosier about the future of AI—even with the many dystopian angles—than I might have expected.
I enjoyed returning to these characters but the plot lacked a strong arc. I think this is often a problem with middle books in a series. I think it also got a little fractured in the last third, and didn't cleanly handle the way in which the characters appear to be kind of pairing up. It felt like some of their conversations were almost déjà vu—entendu, I guess.
This was a very satisfying thriller/mystery. I liked the linguistic angle and for the most part I think it was convincing – I'm not a linguist but I do think there are times when one reads a book and the writer's actual lack of expertise is apparent, and I don't think that was the case here. The payoff, the resolution, was certainly spectacular, but it didn't feel unearned or out of left field. I really enjoyed it, start to finish.
It wasn't bad, had me interested in what was going on, how it all played out—but the concept that it was a book-within-a-book, introduced at the very start, was confusing until it was resolved, and its resolution was unsatisfying. I can applaud the attempt, because it's an interesting idea, but it was a bit too much to work, for me.
This book just won the Hugo, so I had to know what the buzz was about. The premise definitely seemed interesting, but as the book got going I wasn't convinced of its hype-worthiness. In the end, though, yes, absolutely loved this book. It builds on a whole bunch of comfortable formulas and tropes to create something new, entertaining, and really satisfying in the end. I'm not always looking for a message in the books I read, although it can be hard not to notice the harmful ones (think: copaganda, or the myriad thrillers that hinge on a woman lying about abuse or assault) – but this book has some really interesting things to say about government and power, without hammering you over the head with it (ok, there's a _small_ amount of hammering at the end). You don't have to get those themes to enjoy the book, but I definitely felt a deeper appreciation for the book as those themes (and themes of neurodivergence) revealed themselves. Highly recommend this novel and I've already picked up the next in the series.
This book purports to be about first contact, but mostly deals with a hyper-capitalist future and how humankind might react to the _possibility_ of first contact. It may be a minor spoiler, but "contact" barely occurs in this book. I did think it was interesting, and for a while I thought the cynical angle of such a hyper-capitalist future added something interesting to the story, but at the end it became clear that that _was_ the story and I was left unsatisfied. If Dixon intends to write a sequel, it would make sense, but I don't see any indication of that at this point. Which leaves a big chunk of the _focus_ of the book more-or-less unresolved.
I highly, highly recommend this book. Something about the title, presentation, subject matter made me expect it to be a bit less accessible than it was – and I think for some, its "accessibility" will be a knock. It reads like genre fiction, IMO, not literary fiction, but I think that's a point in its favor – stuff like this doesn't have to be dense or intimidating. It's really really smart and comes at the subject matter from what was, in my eyes, a unique way that is both hopeful and not, and I think its main characters represent the kind of "two wolves" inside many of us in the modern world: the impulse to fight tooth and nail and the impulse to try to make a life and carve out some joy are both valid. Loved this book.
I enjoyed most of this book but the resolution was pretty deeply unsatisfying and left a lot of loose ends—any thriller/mystery that's any good will employ red herrings, but most of the red herrings at play here seem very forced in retrospect. Beyond that, the over-explanation at the end was at a certain point kind of silly. I'm all for making it clear what happened but it was made clear a few times over and then the characters internal-monologued their justifications on top of that.
I'm trying not to just give everything a 3 simply because I still mostly enjoyed it. So, this gets 2.5.
Another book that gets the "I'm clearly too dumb to fully appreciate this" bump. It took me a long time to get through, even on audio. I set it aside a lot. The writing is very poetic and often abstract, and it jumps between times, places, and perspectives regularly. On audio, at least, some of these jumps are very disorienting and hard to follow. I think it's a very artful book, but I can't say I _enjoyed_ it.
The novel has a fascinating premise and it's very well-written but I feel like for a book dedicated to Christine Blaisey Ford, choosing to set this in the fifties really hamstrings the message. I know there are people who yearn for those days, but those people aren't reading this book. The misery of a much more overt and unashamed patriarchy (which has not gone away, but has found ways to rebrand into something more subtle and insidious) in the fifties is, it seems to me, pretty widely acknowledged. So much of the book hinges on that premise and I think it undercuts any timeliness, for me.
This is by no means a bad book. It's a good book—by some more artistic measure, it's certainly better than the rating I've given. But for me, a personal rating also accounts for impact and while I can see it hit a lot of people the right way, and I'm happy about that, it fell short for me.
Contains spoilers
I had kind of forgotten how the first one resolved so it took me a bit to catch up to events. Fun thriller. The twists and turns were fun, kept me guessing, and didn't usually feel cheap once revealed. I hope—expect?—there will be a third book that wraps up Sarah's arc. If I'm supposed to be satisfied that she just keeps getting away with it… I'm not. It's not that her adversaries are good, but she's, you know, also not good.
Pretty far outside my wheelhouse and the "spicy" scenes were prolonged and graphic, which I don't judge it's simply not what I read books for, but the relationship was absolutely charming and as a soccer fan I had a lot of fun with the setting—it's also clear the author is immersed in the woso world for a bunch of reasons, and that added to the authenticity. Very fun read.
I think this book has a lot of interesting things to say, some interesting insights about trying to be a person, and a leader, without losing your soul. A lot of it isn't actually specific to the younger generations, except insofar as older generations were not, I guess, raised with the idea or expectation that their job, and their selves at their job, should be some kind of reflection of their own values and priorities. There are certainly parts of the book that feel a little cold, stereotypically capitalist—arguably still hanging onto an older way of doing things—but I think a lot of that is at least a valid perspective to be considered, even if I sometimes felt that I wanted to push back, and the intent behind even those sections was one of trying to survive or thrive in a the world that we all live in.
A pretty well-constructed thriller. Lots of tropes, and I had a few major points figured out long before they were revealed, but not everything, so when it all came together it was still a satisfying conclusion—satisfying in terms of a thriller's construction, of course, not in terms of the kind of dark content.
As an aside, the protagonist felt very much like a character who might be played by the author, to me. I don't think that's a bad thing at all; just interesting.
Boy, people like to make fun of fantasy books for their emphasis on world-building but that's basically all that happened here. A simple scenario plays out with endless flashbacks explaining the life stories of everyone involved. Very literary, and certainly not _bad_ but it's funny to think about how this world-building is received in comparison to that of genre novels.
Contains spoilers
This was a fun duology. The scope of this one broadened significantly and I think with a lot of books and movies that take a similar route, I find myself checking out—but I enjoyed all the twists and turns, for the most part, and I never lost sight of the characters at the center, which kept me invested. The epilogue was silly, though: she admirably swore off war… and then immediately un-swore it off in a scene that felt like the last scene of The Incredibles.
I didn't realize what I'd gotten myself into when I started this book, but honestly I thoroughly enjoyed it. I think the "spicy" parts, which I don't tend to read books for, flowed perfectly well from the non-spicy parts (unlike Iron Flame), and I found the plot engaging, the world interesting, the romance (again, not really my primary motivator to read a book) compelling-enough. The writing is fine, not excellent – a few phrases stick out and start to get annoying, but it's ok. I'll pick up the second at some point.
The first characters we're introduced to seem like the most obvious and ham-fisted "enemies to lovers" I've ever seen and I wondered what I was in for, but as the book goes on it gets stranger, less predictable, and frankly the writing gets better (and also stranger, at times). I would not have guessed, starting out, that I'd like this book any more than so much "is it YA, or isn't it?" fantasy I've read over the years. But by the end, I really liked it. Will pick up the sequel soon.
