Lauren

Delightful short book. I didn't realize until near the end that this was a commentary on a Lovecraft story, though I recognized the Elder Sign and some of the names.

I enjoyed Vellitt as a character and loved her cat companion. The world was interesting, whether it was the underground tunnels or the dreamlike boat ride or the characters in the supporting cast. The language of the story was engaging and I felt like I spent hardly any time in this world at all.

I liked this book. It helped that I went into it knowing that a lot of people were mad about it. The act of reading this book was like a meditation - just let it flow and enjoy being present in the activity. Nothing of consequence really happens, and you spend some time just in the world. There are six pages about Auri making soap. Maybe this book isn't for you, and that's okay. On the other hand, maybe, like Auri, you just need to set yourself right for a little while and this book might be a good vehicle for that.

I almost lemmed this book, which is a feat because it is less than 150 pages long. I stuck with it.

I had two problems with it:

#1: The language, which may have had a connection to the characterization of the demi-god Demane, just did not flow well. It flipped back and forth between a more standard style of speech-in-writing and a variety of vernaculars full of jargon. Each chunk of language was well done, but when they were put together, I was constantly pinged out of the story because I was reading French or Spanish or AAE or something approximating each of these. Not only that, but the actual language of the narrative of the story seemed like I must have been missing some formatting. The events of the completely uninteresting plot (more on that later) kept jumping around in ways that made me think that some italics or font styles must not have been rendered properly in my ebook. Once, I knew Demane was dreaming, but I had no idea when he came out of it. This similar thing kept happening, except I never knew when he was dreaming or fantasizing and when actual events that were supposed to be plot were happening.

#2: The plot, as I mentioned, was almost nonexistent. Okay, so this caravan is gathering to go into this place called the Wildeeps, except there's some monster that keeps eating people. Except the first 100 pages of the book have almost nothing to do with that plot. It's all random sparring between the members of the caravan, something about a waystation place before they go through the Wildeeps, and this other character “Captain” showing off his demigod-like-prowess and people talking about it. Then in the last part of the book, they finally go to the Wildeeps (which I almost missed because the actual text was so confusing, see above), and some people get randomly killed in gory displays and Demane and the Captain have some kind of demigod sex and then... something happens? They decide to hunt the monster? And in a series of action paragraphs which all bled together and didn't follow any wayposts that I could understand, they kill it but there's another one? And suddenly the book ends with Demane saying he'd come home and couldn't go back on the road in the Wildeeps, even to heal this one other member of the caravan who was dying but who wouldn't let Demane use his magic on him (and everybody knew that? so why were they asking again? like, what was the point of that last scene anyway?) and maybe there was a second tiger monster that had killed the Captain but Demane threw his spear at it anyway? I don't even know, because the book seemed to end mid-scene.

It seems like everybody else in the Goodreads review read a completely different book than I did. Maybe this particular brand of ‘challenging' book is just not for me, or maybe my ebook was missing some crucial component that could help readers make sense of it.

I don't know how to feel about this book.

First, I'll say that the narrative arc - the two lines told simultaneously, one telling the story of the journey to the alien planet and the other telling about the aftermath on the only survivor - was engaging and compelling. I did want to find out if my suspicions about what really happened were the whole story. I knew, as soon as the other priests started talking about what they thought Emilio had done, what the real story might be. It was pretty strongly telegraphed from his behaviors. It was not a sudden revelation; however, I'm not sure that it was supposed to be. I think it was the tension of getting him to actually admit it that made it compelling, rather than wanting to find out the real story. I think that this aspect of the story is going to stick with me, and it'll be one of the books that I recommend to a select few people.

I found the writing, once I got into it, to be similarly engaging. I found it easy to read, though I did sometimes find myself skipping paragraphs and had to go back to re-read.

I have a few issues that drop this book's rating. The first one is pretty personal to me, and that is that I missed a lot of the religious metaphors and imagery because, simply put, I don't know anything about religion. I had to look up who the Jesuits were after the second chapter, for example, because I had no idea about them. I could tell that there was a lot going on here that I just didn't follow because I have literally no background in religion, having been raised an atheist. That being said, I was able to follow Emilio's journey and his religious experience; that was well-explained, although I may be missing layers of meaning here. That's okay with me.

The second issue is the complete and utter unbelievability of the assembled cast of characters. Like, these people just intercept a signal and happen to have or be able to gain quickly all of the necessary skills to make first contact with an alien culture? I appreciated that our main character was a linguist, to be fair, but come on now. Weren't there like, actual astronauts just waiting for a chance to do this? People who worked in the asteroid mines, maybe? Not just a bunch of weirdos from Puerto Rico? And - and! - they somehow managed to gain all of these skills but didn't bother with a protocol for first contact? They basically went to the planet like "we'll see what happens"???? I feel like the linguist should know better than this; however, maybe this is a parallel to the history of Catholic "first contact" types of interactions with other human cultures here on Earth.

The final thing that really marred this book for me was the very weak worldbuilding. Even Frederik Pohl's Heechees, which predate this book by a couple of decades, were more well-thought-out and they weren't even present in the book. So a sentient species domesticates another sentient species and uses them for food. That's basically like, you made cows sentient. OK. The two species on Rakhat fell flat to me, and it felt like everything there was rushed because if we focused in on the details we would find out that they weren't there.

That all said, I did enjoy reading the book. There were parts that I wished had been better. But I liked the arc and I liked the tension of the story. I may read the second one in the series.

This book is hard for me to rate.

It is a good read, enjoyable in its style and quick, and takes place in a setting that I have often found fascinating. There is a lot about religion in here, and much that I was unfamiliar with, which was fascinating. I found the protagonist to be annoying in the beginning, but as he grows up throughout the events of the book, I found him much more bearable.

The part of this book that bothered me was the sexism and the treatment of women in the story. There is one female supporting character who is always referred to as “the convert” and never by her name. The relationship between Dina and Alif is abusive in many ways, and Alif is definitely a stalker with the way he treats Intisar. Then I read a comment thread on Sword and Laser, which the author participated in, that revealed to me the difference between writing sexism into a story and writing a sexist story. The women were treated this way by the men in the books but found their own agency. Dina in particular is a badass, despite the way she is treated and talked down to by the men around her. This book is meant to take place in an unnamed country in the Middle East, and from my understanding from the comments, this kind of treatment of women is not uncommon. This makes it realistic for the setting, and helps this book fit into a “magical realism” kind of genre where the fantasy parts are happening around and within current society.
Without that other discussion from Sword and Laser, I would not have been able to parse this and may have rated this book much lower.

Boy, I just did not care about any of the characters. I had trouble following the story line, and perhaps that was because I did not have enough information about the world to understand what was going on. There seemed to be a lot of empty characterization happening, lots of love aimed through lust and unquestioned, and the ending wrapped up the story but not in a way that seemed to lead from any other part of the book. Not my cup of tea, perhaps.

Well, this one went much faster than the first one. Not sure if it's because I was already immersed in the story and the writing style or if the excitement of the plot kept me going, but I finished this in a third of the time it took me to read Too Like the Lightning.

This book is pretty much nonstop excitement, political, emotional, and action. The philosophy remains strong and the character introspection deep. Spoilers follow:



I was shocked by the actions of Sniper in this book. Them being the antagonist was not something I expected. I also missed all the signs pointing to who the Major was turning into, and it surprised me at the end. For a character who was dead at the start of Book 1, Apollo Mojave plays a huge part in this book. This book is about coming to understand him and his philosophy about the world, about humans, about war and progress.

I agree with another reviewer's observation that all the female presenting characters in this book come off as weak.

I'm still curious about what happened to Carlyle Foster.

This book was okay, but I'm mad about the ending of it. I am not a fan of books that end in the middle of a story without a sufficient resolution. This one did not have that. We are left with cliffhangers on all accounts.

The writing style was beautiful, but it put me to sleep. A mid-point review that I did of this book mentioned that after 20 pages my eyelids were inevitably drooping. This book took me longer to read than most, and the ending with its lack of resolution made it seem like I put in a lot of effort for little payoff. There's a whole second book - written in this same style that will take long to read and require many catnaps - to get to the resolution. This was unexpected.

I am still not 100% sure what is happening in this book. It's political SF with lots of characters and a very different world. The worldbuilding is excellent. There are no more nation-states, just ‘hives', groups of likeminded people scattered across the world. Travel is almost instantaneous. A small group of powers leads the world as leaders of their separate hives, and something called the 7-10 List is causing quite a stir. I'm still not sure what the 7-10 List is or why it's important after reading this book. It's a list of names, but who cares about lists? I understood that everybody was very invested in it, but I am still not sure what the big deal is. Meanwhile, there's a kid named Bridger who can make things come to life with a touch, and he's got a group of protectors who are working against those hive leaders (sometimes actively with them). These protectors are trying to keep people from finding Bridger and experimenting on him or something. Meanwhile those protectors in a bash' (kind of like a clan or family house) control all of the cars in the world, and there's something SUPER SINISTER revealed in the last pages of the book going on that would draw all of the attention their way.

Oh, and the story is told from the philosophical POV of a mass murderer turned slave of the society. The details of the grisly murders are revealed gradually throughout the book. They are violent and horrible.

I'm not sure I'll read the second book of this series, even though I've invested a lot of time. I'm just not sure it's worth it.

I liked the premise of this story and the setting. I enjoyed the urban fantasy nature of it, and the fact that it wasn't urban at all (it was set in a rural town). The nature of the magic - being song-based, being able to hide things that don't want to be seen - was very fitting for this setting. I liked that much of the magic seemed to happen at a barn dance!

The writing style kind of threw me off. The main character, Bronwyn, was one of these rebel-to-the-core types who comes home and clashes with everyone around her. She was eminently unlikeable. Everything she did had made little sense in the grand scheme of things - only that she didn't want to do what anyone expected of her (except everyone expected it of her, somehow?). I wasn't sure how I felt about her being classified as a slut, harlot, etc. for the entire book and treated as such. I just wished that everybody could get over it?

The big reveal is pretty neat. Having seen some depictions of actual Faeries in the Isle of Man, I can imagine how they would look like the Tufa folks. I like that the history is depicted in a painting as well; it fits in with the role of art in their lives.

Overall, it was a neat setting, but the writing felt clunky and there was a lot of off-handed shortcut stereotyping based on sex / sexual behavior.

This book was good. Just good. It didn't blow my mind, it didn't change my worldview. I also didn't hate any part of it. I think that makes it a solid 3-star experience.

Some parts I liked:
-Neat progressing disaster/doomsday scenario involving climate change.
-Awkward junior high kids that grow into adults who do not save the world.
-Occasionally light-hearted tone with pithy comments.

Some parts I didn't like so much:
-This is a pretty solid character study but the path of the characters was very predictable throughout the book.
-Throwaway magic system that seemed to be tacked on to give the one character an excuse to become all-powerful.

The ending left me a bit curious about what would happen next, but not absolutely salivating for the next book. Overall, it was an enjoyable, pleasant read, but not particularly stunning in any way.

Well, this is it. The end of one of the most epic and all-encompassing tales in the genre, told by a master storyteller.

I will not give any spoilers in this review, even hidden behind a tag, because I do not want anybody to miss out on the joy of this book. I can say this: do not read this book unless you have read all of them - not just the FitzChivalry and the Fool books, but also the Liveship Traders and Rain Wild Chronicles. Much of the plot here is centered on those books and the characters in them, and you will be missing out on a lot if you don't have those under your belt.

This book follows Bee through a harrowing series of attempted escapes from her kidnappers as they take her to Clerres, and throughout the book it also follows FitzChivalry as he makes the journey with his group of followers to try to exact revenge upon Clerres and its inhabitants. Fitz believes that Bee is dead. The Fool believes that she is alive. The reader knows very much that she is alive.

We encounter characters again from all of the other books. Kettricken, Chade, Thick, Dutiful, Verity, Rapskal, Malta, Reyn, Althea, Brashen, Leftrin, Alise, Paragon... the list goes on. The beloved characters that you knew are back in this book. I am impressed by the tie-ins and the threads woven together from all of the other stories to make this one. When I had read the other series, I had thought that I was satisfied with the ends. Not until reading this book was I truly satisfied with all the stories and all that was to come. Yet, not everything is over (how can it be?) - there are many lines and tales that could be told yet. What happens to the Liveship Traders after the events that unfold in this book? Does Kelsingra grow and flourish with its new connections? What about the survivors at Clerres - do they make something good in the future?

The book has a moment of closure that I didn't believe for one second, and I was right. There is a second ending to this book that surprised me, and yet I knew it was going to happen all along. I wonder - when Hobb started writing all those years ago, did she know it would come to this ending? Did she have it in mind the whole time? The scope seems incredible to me, but I don't know how it could be done without careful planning.

Cheers to you, Robin Hobb. This is a satisfying end, but (perhaps selfishly) I hope you are not done with this world and we will see many more stories to come.

This book was just too bizarre for me; I could not follow the increasingly random events, I had no sympathy for any of the characters, and when I sat through many excruciating pages about a chess game inside of a house that moves only to have it be promptly forgotten, I had to put it down. I simply did not enjoy it, and I lemmed it at about 50% of the way through in favor of reading some more enjoyable books on my list.

It was good, I guess? The travel guide parts were an interesting frame. I really enjoyed the snippets of the world that we got, but a lot of time was spent on exposition about the rules of the lapidary that just felt like overkill for a story that is so short (just 40 pages in my nook version). The storytelling and the point of view never felt solid to me, not like other stories by Wilde (e.g. Updraft). I had a hard time telling the difference between Lin and Sima sometimes and couldn't keep them straight. The aqua regia part was pretty clever, though.

So I'd rate this book at about 3.5 stars, but I rounded up because INTERDIMENSIONAL SPY LIBRARIANS.

It was, overall, a fun read. I really enjoyed it. The prose was smooth and I really enjoyed the premise of this book - a covert organization of librarians who acquire books from parallel dimensions in order to preserve the balance of the universe. There's a mystery, an assortment of characters, vampires and fae and werewolves and mechanical creatures, oh and this fantastic scene involving alligators.

I really liked Irene, the main character, who was sensitive but a bit of a badass. I liked how she seemed to get tangled in her feelings about her duty as a Librarian, her allegiance to her senior staff, her resentment towards a bad coworker, and the new friends that she was making out in the world. I also liked that their power was knowledge of a secret language that unlocked the capabilities of objects. That was quite a genius magic system, and it was explained in a way that made it easy to grasp.

There's plenty of action in this book - sometimes too much, like the fantastic scene involving alligators, while it was fantastic it was a bit over the top. There's a lot of world building that seems disconnected to the rest of the book (e.g. the Fae and their influence on zeppelin building), but which may come back to be relevant in the rest of the series. Sometimes the book's ease of reading made me skip over parts that were probably important as I searched for the meaty bits, and sometimes it made a particular complex plot point difficult to comprehend and, therefore, repeated several times. These are minor complaints.

Overall a very good book, fun premise, entertaining characters, and an easy read that may be a bit too easy at times.

I really enjoyed this book. As some others have said, it has a certain disjointed feeling to it, which ends up with the book feeling like a series of episodes. However, while the book jumps around, each section teaches the reader something about the universe and the characters we are following. Each chapter seems to be a character study in a way, which made the book a fun adventure beyond the actual plot.

I also enjoyed the many kinds of identity and affiliation explored in this book. It's nice to have aliens and post-alien-contact-humans who are fundamentally different from the humans of now but recognizable. In other words, the crew wasn't just a bunch of white straight dudes with a token woman and alien; the identities were delightful and different, with love and friendship and identity occurring in all kinds of combinations. Outstanding characters and relationships and background are the real joy of this book, not the plot or the sci-fi constructions of space.

This book was an entirely different worldview. The subject material is difficult; the main character, Onye, is a child of rape and was inspired by a news story by Emily Wax about “weaponized rape” in Sudan. The book is magical realism, set in post-apocalyptic Sudan where technology of various sorts abounds but the people live off of a religious “Great Book” that states that the light-skinned people are the saviors and the dark-skinned people are the slaves. There are lots of hints about what survived the apocalypse here, like computers stashed in a cave and bits of technology (like what seem to be walkie-talkies used in a market).

I felt a lot of this book was new to me, which was the reason I read it. The language used for names, places, and magical constructs was a mash-up of several languages of Africa, it seemed. The magic system was a combination of hedge-witch style “juju” and scholarly, practiced sorcery. The frank, overt talk of rape, sex, pregnancy, and racism was difficult to get used to, at first, but made the messages of the book easy to read and digest. It was a quick read, a page-turner that I could go through easily. I liked the framing device of the interviewer with the laptop that sneaks into the book.

The all-powerful heroine who waltzes in and saves the day everywhere without really knowing what she was doing was a bit of a let-down. I also expected the book's ending to be more complex than it was. It seemed a bit hand-wavy at the end, as though the confrontation was the solution, not the road to the solution. The climax of the book was short and confusing, and then more things happen afterwards that seem like an attempt to prolong the climax. I'm still really not sure what happened at the end.

However, for its issues with the ending, this book was a window into an entirely different world for me, and though it was difficult at times, I did enjoy the process of reading this book.

I really enjoyed this book, and it made me think of my recent travels to Bucharest, which is a city that by its architecture and history seems to be two cities in one (minus the psychological “unseeing” that exists in this book). As I went through this book, I kept thinking about those evenings wandering the streets of Bucharest, turning a corner and seeing a beautiful Art Nouveau-style church hidden away behind Soviet styled apartment buildings, and then seeing Brancovan and Neo-Romanian style apartments literally sharing a wall with the austere, square Communist offices. It was with this experience in mind that I read The City & the City, even if Miéville may not have been thinking of Bucharest when writing this book (though the Eastern Europe setting sure reminded me of it).

The premise of this book is a murder that crosses the boundaries of the two cities, which are overlapped on each other - not separated by any wall or border, but rather meshed into each other with the residents of each city meticulously unseeing the other city for fear of invoking an entity known at “Breach”. The girl is murdered in one city and dumped in another, and Detective Tyador Borlú is assigned to investigate. Along the way, we see the politics of this strange setup of two-cities-in-one, with unificationists and nationalists acting as informants for the investigation and the detective having to cross the boundaries and act under new rules in the other city. At the heart of the investigation is the murder victim's obsession with a mysterious third city, Orciny, that ostensibly exists between the two cities, in places that each city thinks belongs to the other.

The storytelling is sparse, giving this book a feel of a noir novel, and I could just imagine Borlú narrating the action in that stereotypical detective voice. The details are few, leaving much to the imagination, which is where my experience in Bucharest filled in many of the gaps for me, personally. The book started off slowly for me as I acclimated to the setting, but by the end I was reading a few pages whenever I could, eager to learn more of the story and find where it goes.

This book is memorable, and is definitely one of those books that I will think of for years to come and recommend to many.

A good read for someone with no librarianship training under their belts (e.g. me!) but who finds themselves working as a librarian. Introduces and interrogates the ethos and ethics of librarianship with a focus on the person and the community rather than the institution. Lists skills to investigate for competency, and a few inspiring action ideas at the end. Really helps to contextualize my work in the field.

This book is a rare Hugo and Nebula award winner, and I have to wonder about the quality of the other books published that year...

Like many others, this book started off a lot higher on the star scale and ended up with me wanting to put it down as quickly as possible. I got excited to find out about the mysterious alien race, the Heechee, and the discoveries that the humans were making using their starships. It was even kind of exciting to go through the torturous psychotherapy sessions because I thought there was some deep alien mystery there.

But no, the only mystery is why no one punched Bob (the main character) in the junk and then let him out the hatch to die in space.

Seriously, the main character is a self-absorbed, psychotic, violent, homophobic abuser who spends the Gateway part of the book being a chickenshit and then spends the psychotherapy part of the book abusing a robot in order to have a power trip and avoid having to even admit that he might like men a little bit. When the main character beats his lover about 2/3 of the way through the book and then she comes back to him, I wanted to put the book down.

I tell you though, I think that this book may have a satisfying ending if you rethink Bob's telling of the end. I think Bob actually didn't get out of the black hole. I think he was the one left behind, and all these psychotherapy sessions are just him being taken to a parallel universe or something similar, with time stretching out further and further as he contemplates what a horrific asshole he is. I do not think that Pohl intended this to be the actual ending of the book, but I think I like it much better that way.

The comparisons between this book and Ancillary Justice are apt; both throw you into a completely alien society and take off without waiting for the reader to catch up.

I had no idea what was really going on for most of this book, but what I gathered was that the society exists on a foundation of behavior and numerology, fashioned into a calendar of rituals and celebrations that everybody has to obey, or else the society will collapse. It seems that military formations and magic-seeming effects depend on this “calendar”, and anyone who opposes it is exterminated.

Cheris, the heroine of the book, is paired with a madman in the form of undead traitor general Ninefox Shuos Jedao who murdered over a million of his own people. Cheris relies on his tactical strategy to overcome a nest of these calendrical heretics, but has to worry the whole time about betrayal and what Jedao is doing to her in the process.

Overall, I liked the book, but I didn't love it. Cheris is a great character with deep development and a fascinating backstory. Jedao is fascinating as a sort of anti-hero. The world is interesting if difficult to comprehend, and though I reached the synthesis point where I understood enough to realize the story and want to see it through, I never quite felt immersed; I always felt as though I was still figuring things out. A good workout for the brain.

I'd recommend this book to people who like space operas with a twist of incomprehensible world building.

Like many other reviewers have said, there is a LOT going on in this book. You follow the story of a spirit of a goddess as she follows the stories of very different black women in different parts of the world and in very different circumstances. There is a lot of history in this book and a lot of mythology and a good bit of religion.

And sex of many and varied types.

A lot about this book frankly shocked me in its straightforward portrayals of events, not because the events themselves were shocking – two girls divining their futures by looking into a full chamberpot may be a bit jarring in other contexts, but not when accompanied by the poetry of the writing of this book. I loved the feel of the writing in this book and the way the voices of the characters came alive, tied together by the narrative and the style. It was really, really good, AND I now have the urge to learn about the historical events and figures who were mentioned in this book. I don't know if that was an intended outcome, but I've already downloaded a podcast to learn about the Haitian Revolution, so there you have it. And now I want to find out who all the deities were who were mentioned in the book in various places.

If you'd like to travel through history from Haiti to Egypt to Paris and catch glimpses into the lives of historical black women while reading about sex and love in myriad forms, this book will no doubt be a delight.

“There is no Darkness” by Joe Haldeman (author of “The Forever War” and many other science fiction books) and his brother Jack Haldeman (a scientist and a writer) follows the story of Carl Bok, a student from the planet Springworld, as he makes friends and has adventures during a sort of interplanetary study abroad experience.

The worldbuilding in this novel gives tastes of the fascinating. Our protagonist Carl, for example, is much taller and heavier than normal humans because of the conditions on the planet where he was born. He is a giant among others and stands out immediately. There are fascinating hints about the spread of language throughout this galaxy, including the fact that English is a dying language spoken on one planet (Springworld, helpfully) and some places on Earth. The students visit many planets as part of this program, one of which is Earth, which has turned into a socialist society with heavy taxes and endless social support (including fascinating medicine). Another planet that they visit, Hell, is a military training and battleground.

The plot of the story is what left me a little bit wanting. Carl continually misbehaves and breaks the rules of his program, getting into gladiator fights on Earth to pay an entrance tax (which was an annoying premise and made me want to just punch him in the gut until he stopped being so stupid and getting people killed) and somehow getting kidnapped and conscripted into a war on Hell. Yet somehow they manage to wind up in a very privileged position by the end of the book in a turn that seems incredibly unexpected and like it was just a good way to wrap things up by having these troublemakers become near-omniscient beings with psychic communication powers thanks to getting in trouble with some lobster-aliens. I really just found the ending to be unfortunate; the troublemakers are rewarded with great knowledge and power, and they just got some poor unfortunate bystanders killed along the way.

Overall, it was a fun read at times and annoying at others. The universe gives glimpses of intriguing details but never dives in too far. The plot is lacking in depth or nuance. I'd recommend this book for someone wanting a light sci-fi read that they don't have to think too hard about.

This book was enjoyable. The basic plot follows Zinzi December, a girl with a sort of spirit animal that follows her around. She's not unique - many people have these animals, and they are segregated by society as wrongdoers as though the animals are a manifestation of their guilt. Terrifyingly, a phenomenon known as “the Undertow” comes for people with animals, and the source of it is unknown but its effect is frightening: a black mist that engulfs a person utterly.

And that's just in the worldbuilding.

The plot is where this one falls a bit short, for me. Zinzi is a “finder” of lost things, and she is hired to find a lost girl - one half of a pop duo managed by an aging superstar of the record business. Zinzi is pressured into this after she is circumstantially tied to a murder of an old woman. These two storylines diverge as Zinzi does some investigative reporting, posing as a journalist to get exclusive access, and then must confront the murder again near the end of the book.

The storylines did get convoluted, and the direction was hard to follow in places. I definitely had to re-read things. However, reading the prose of this book was a pleasure all its own. I enjoyed Beukes's turns of phrase and the tone in her writing, and I definitely loved the worldbuilding. I also loved learning about the geography of South Africa a little bit, and some Afrikaans words - I speak a little Dutch, so the Afrikaans was a delight to encounter and I could almost understand some of it! Considering that most of my reading of books set anywhere on the African continent usually involves white people coming in unwanted, it was nice to really be embedded narratively in the city of Johannesburg - even a fictionalized version of the city - written from the perspective of someone who is from the area.

With a tighter plot and a few more roadsigns for the reader, this book would have been outstanding for its tone, flow, and innovative world. The plot was just a bit too convoluted and jumpy for me to really get into. However, I definitely think this is a book worth reading.

This book has a fun premise. It's a meshing of science fiction and fantasy in which a bunch of fantasy races and classes eventually band together to deal with a very science fiction event.

That event is, you guessed it, the asteroid made of dragons.

Because of the title of the book, you know the whole time what is coming. The weird prophecy of Zero? Totally an asteroid that is made of dragons, in fact. There is no question, and that's actually a pretty fun little device. The title basically makes the reader into an omniscient being as they read the narrative.

My major complaint about this fun book was that it was not very tight and there was a bunch of handwaving going on. There were a lot of loose ends and a lot of seemingly convenient resolutions. For instance, when it comes time to fit five people onto a two-seater flying motorcycle, one of the riders suddenly and helpfully reveals that he can turn into a bat. And it's made all cutesy, like it's an embarrassing secret, but it is very convenient to hide some hand-waving about how many people could fit on this object. This comes to a head at the climax of the action, when the scholar must figure out a way to turn the asteroid around, and just basically chooses a bunch of random buttons to push and they work. And the key to unlock the mechanism just happens to be this weird song that has been inserted into the narrative in a bunch of awkward places. This lack of tightness in the narrative and plot basically let a ton of air out of what was otherwise a cool setup and a fun premise.

This was a fun follow-up to The Rook, and I enjoyed this one almost as much as the other.

I did like seeing the ‘enemies' from their point of view and the way that O'Malley set them up as factions with fundamental differences that could easily make the others look totally evil and horrible. Both sides were sympathetic. The only unnerving thing was all of the surgery and other body-maiming type of behaviors that the Grafters engaged in; this was purely a personal dispreference, and if that kind of thing does not gross you out a little bit, it probably won't be a problem.

I enjoyed the use of Dutch (again) in this book and the humorous translations in the footnotes. I liked the main character, Odette, who reminded me of Myfanwy in the first book to a large extent. I also liked Felicity and the relationship that developed between her and Odette (and I really loved the huge amount of female characters in this book).

This book was not as tight as the other one, in my opinion. I had trouble following the long history of the Grafters and the events at the end felt a little bit Deus Ex Machina (though that would be appropriate, given the Grafters are practically moving towards that themselves). But overall, it was an enjoyable read and a fun extra excursion into this world.