John

Great book, read it in less than 24 hours. Couldn't put it down! It's a modern fairytale with strong female leads. And there is enough story in here for an entire trilogy of books, but it's masterfully pared down to just the good parts - no filler in sight. Excellent writing and storytelling, can't recommend it enough.

Fantastic! Science fiction the way I love it: mind-expanding and focused on the effects of this different world on the emotions and relationships of the people who live there. It's really well fleshed-out and the main characters are very sympathetic.

An interesting idea presented here is that the “evil emperor” has her (all pronouns are feminine in this society, whether male or female) consciousness shared across millions of clones, which means that she just walks around by herself with no guards or anything, because if she loses one body who cares, and she seems to have a really informal relationship with everyone. It's great! Love this book, can't wait for the next one to come out.

Enjoyed this one! It's really a rare treat to have such a human story about space faring scientists discovering life on other planets. Well worth the couple hours or so to finish the 160 pages. 4 1/2 stars

So this guy lives in an infinite marble house that has a ton of random statues in it as well as the ocean randomly flooding it. He goes around exploring it in a very scientific way. He's always lived there, or so he thinks.

It's so hard to do a good unreliable narrator mystery. You've got to drop clues as to what's actually going on, but too obvious and readers will want to strangle the narrator for being an idiot. And if the clues are too subtle you run the risk of people completely missing the hidden, more interesting secondary plot for most of the book.

This book keeps it subtle, and this did not work well for most of my book club, because for the first half it was just this random guy talking about living in this weird place.

This is my review, though, and for me the clues were tantalizing and just right. They hooked me and pulled me through the narrative the entire way.

I think it helped the insanity of the location that the main character is an exceedingly thorough and well organized person. It brought the book out of the realm of poetry into the realm of science fiction, which is where I'm most comfortable.

Loved it. Let's see if I go back and read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell some day!

The ending was absolute deus ex machina trash, making everything that came before it pointless. I highly suggest pretending this book and it's sequel “Children of the Mind” never existed.