Goal
87/100 booksRead 100 books by Dec 31, 2024. You're 5 books ahead of schedule. 🙌
Boils down to five short stories that follow each other over the span of hundreds of years. I enjoyed the overarching threat of a 30,000 year-long dark age which has been predicted to begin roughly 300 years from the start of the book, and the attempts to stop it. Fun what-if/butterfly effect ideas are teased - are the characters preventing the disaster in their decisions, laying the groundwork for it, or even speeding up the collapse of the Empire? Unfortunately, it's a lot less exciting than it sounds! The scope is massive, spanning galaxies and there are two sequels included in the hard copy I own, so I'm hoping things develop further in a way that is not so dry and pointed, and the speed picks up. For only 200 pages, this one took me a long time to muster the courage to complete it.
If you're looking for more of the wonderful tongue-in-cheek humor from the Series of Unfortunate Events books, you're better off re-reading that series. Snicket's first book in his new series leaves much to be desired, and leaves an after-taste of trying too hard. Unfortunate, indeed.
Wasn't for me. Will try it out again sometime, maybe I just wasn't in the right mindset for this?
Bought this based on the eerie synopsis and cover art with the ominous stairs... did not realize this was beginner YA reading, and realized after just a few sentences that this was going to be a rough one. Full of one-dimensional characters, with barely any semblance of growth or evolution throughout any of it. There's a constant cruel emphasis on a female characters weight, and the descriptions used at every moment are so out of place, as no other character has the same done to them. Very tacky. Ends with a totally ridiculous epilogue that serves as a way to provide cheap answers to the grand mystery, but ultimately tarnishes the book even further (if that's actually possible). Huge mess from start to finish, and a complete waste of time.