Katherine

Overall, I liked this book. There are some great character moments towards the end, the motivations for each POV make sense, and it does work well as this tale of human-made climate disaster in a fantasy world. I liked the characters, they were all interesting to read to me and distinct. The world-building is pretty cool! And the ending was the strongest part of the book.

I do have some issues with it. - I wish some of the politicking had been explained a bit more. I felt confused more than once about why certain things were happening from a political POV.

- It felt a bit bloated and repetitive at certain parts, especially the beginning. I feel like less time could’ve been spent on each POV retreading similar ground with their thoughts and a bit more on the political situation and what the heck is going on with the calor. I also think the plot takes a bit too long to really get moving, but it doesn’t explain a ton about the world in that time either, which makes it feel slower than it should.

- I don’t think the personal big reveal needed to be revealed that late- by the time the book got there, the reader knew what had happened. The reveal could happen to the POVs then, but I always found it odd how two of them would constantly think about something that happened in their past, but then not say what it was. It felt more disconnected than mysterious for them. It works for the other POV character, but not for those two.

- I really wanted more explanation for the world-building. It’s vital to the story, but there are chunks of it that I still don’t understand. Hati does well explaining *most* of it, but some is very vague and confusing because the main characters simply ignored all of the calor science taught to them at some point. That was a bit annoying- I don’t need an expert POV character, but I could’ve used a lot more from the expert character that WAS there.

Like I said, I liked this book overall. I think Hati has a lot of promise as an author! Once the plot really got moving, the ending was great and the character growth was natural and made a lot of sense. I just wish some of the details had been filled in and the plot had picked up sooner.

I picked this collection of short stories up on a whim when at a local bookstore in Michigan- I saw it on a shelf of local authors and thought, why not? Well, I can say I definitely enjoyed it more than I expected. The entire collection has a framing story, where the narrator of the first story catches lightning and that gives him this amazing burst of inspiration. He wrote down hundreds of stories, and these are some of them.

While some of them I didn’t really understand or get (unfortunately, some I found confusing because of the way it was told or too short to make its point), the majority were enjoyable. The prose is simple, but works well. There were a few typos here and there, but given this is a self-published book I was impressed with the overall quality.

This collection has everything from dragon-based technology that replaced regular electronics, to horror-adjacent stories about small Midwestern towns, to brief retellings of different folklore (Hawaiian and Native American), to a new person taking up the mantle of Death, to the planet Saturn consuming the solar system. The ideas were generally SO creative, and the tone of each story varied wildly. I enjoyed the drier sense of humor and the many references made in some of the stories (I caught potentially a Joe Abercrombie reference, Star Trek, Star Wars, Dragonlance, and more).

If you want a relatively short read with some interesting stories, I’d recommend picking this up somewhere. I’d love to read some of this author’s longer works! I liked the longer stories more overall, and I’d love to see some of this creativity fleshed out into a novella or novel.

I picked this collection of short stories up on a whim when at a local bookstore in Michigan- I saw it on a shelf of local authors and thought, why not? Well, I can say I definitely enjoyed it more than I expected. The entire collection has a framing story, where the narrator of the first story catches lightning and that gives him this amazing burst of inspiration. He wrote down hundreds of stories, and these are some of them.

While some of them I didn’t really understand or get (unfortunately, some I found confusing because of the way it was told or too short to make its point), the majority were enjoyable. The prose is simple, but works well. There were a few typos here and there, but given this is a self-published book I was impressed with the overall quality.

This collection has everything from dragon-based technology that replaced regular electronics, to horror-adjacent stories about small Midwestern towns, to brief retellings of different folklore (Hawaiian and Native American), to a new person taking up the mantle of Death, to the planet Saturn consuming the solar system. The ideas were generally SO creative, and the tone of each story varied wildly. I enjoyed the drier sense of humor and the many references made in some of the stories (I caught potentially a Joe Abercrombie reference, Star Trek, Star Wars, Dragonlance, and more).

If you want a relatively short read with some interesting stories, I’d recommend picking this up somewhere. I’d love to read some of this author’s longer works! I liked the longer stories more overall, and I’d love to see some of this creativity fleshed out into a novella or novel.