Sam Harrison

This book is very, very long. You'll read 100 pages about Fitz walking up a road. But if it hits you right, you'll love it.

Hobb's character work is beyond good. She is able to elicit tension, grief, jealousy and every other emotion under the sun with her writing. She also manages the first ever strong climax in this series, ending on a real high note.

I really struggled with either a 4 or 5 star rating here. While this is definitely a fantastic book I would recommend to anyone with the patience for it, I do feel it meandered a tiny bit more than Royal Assassin and that brought it down to 4 stars for me.

This is truly the Infinity War for Harry Dresden. A huge climactic battle that lasts an entire book. Love, loss and huge changes fill this book as much as do some of the best action I've read in fantasy. And all of it earned by the 16 preceding books.

What a world Jim Butcher has created. I cannot wait to see what happens to Harry next.

I think the shortness of these novellas and the similarity with the previous one is kind of rubbing the shine off of them. I still really like Murderbot themselves, and the adventure was fine this time around.

But while it's well written it is very samey to the previous novella. I'm hoping to see something new from Murderbot next time around.

One third of this book was one of the best things I read this year, one third was meandering and boring, one third was not very engaging until the very last bit.

Overall the great stuff in this book brings up the rest to a 3 star, but this would have been a 1 or 2 star of it was all the same quality.

My two biggest issues are that outside of a few key players all the characters sound like they are the same person. No mannerisms, no differences in their way of speaking. Also the science is too much, I don't need to know every micro detail of how unfolding protons works. Look at Hail Mary or Dark Matter for a way to have strong science but still keep the books fun.

See my full review here: https://youtu.be/g4EDbmKkwkQ?si=Pa9ecm0BnFmguPHN