Reviews and Comments

Well, I flat out devoured this one.

This was, as expected, a fun, cozy read. There were no surprises here, but it was enjoyable.

I was not really impressed with this one. The setting -- a Seattle full of fictional coffee shops and real interstate exits, in what seems to be a near future where nanotechnology is a novel treatment, but not world-changing? -- is okay, I guess, but the characters left me cold. The protagonist was a pretty good teenager, in the sense that they whipped from mood to mood without rhyme or reason, but they weren't a lot of fun to read.

I don't foresee reading the sequel.

Sloooow going, here. I think I'm struggling with the tropes a bit.

I picked this up for a re-read after a conversation with a friend who's a huge fan of the series. I'd read it... gods, years ago. Decades, even. I remember liking it, but finding it frustrating how the only "good people" were queer.

And, I mean, that's just not the case. I'm fascinated by how wrong my recollection of the book was. The only thing I was right about was that I enjoyed it.

I found myself both hooked on this book and entirely disappointed in it; it basically listed every trope of the YA dark romance and hit them all, one after the other.

It's like an extremely horny Harry Potter.

I blew through this start to finish on a flight from LA to Portland; it's a fast and easy read.

It was kind of a Bioshock on the surface, and I enjoyed it.

This was a good read, even if the ending got a bit ... "less".

I found the first two thirds to be the stronger part of the book. The way the world was talked around, papered over, and suppressed made for some powerful and occasionally hilarious moments.

The back third, cathartic as some of it was, didn't excite me as much. I wonder how much of that is because of who I am and because the book wasn't really written with me as the audience, and how much of it might be due to the book.

In any case, I still recommend this book unreservedly; it's a fantastic read.

This was a fantastic bit of writing; a novella that I devoured a little bit TOO fast. It's all first-person, the narrator is probably reliable, and I have SO MANY QUESTIONS about the worldbuilding.

I really appreciated the author's postscript about having a lot less scientific rigor in it given the concept. There's also a neat easter egg if you read it in colour.

I enjoyed this book way more than I expected to based on the premise. A bartender asked me what the book was about, and the best description I could come up with was "Imagine gamers that are trying to, and succeeding at, saving the world, in a corpo-fascist shithole future" and that never changed.

It's interesting to have a viewpoint first person character that is not particularly likeable and yet still manages to be a real protagonist; the last time I ran into this was in the Hunger Games series, and this book has a bit of a YA-bent to it too, albeit with several tropes absent.

I enjoyed it; I found myself wanting more, although I think the next book would be a lot harder to write well.

I gotta say, I would NOT mind it if Saga would stop with the gut punches.

This was a bite-sized fun book that sadly didn't dig into the world as much as I'd have liked. I enjoyed what I got, but wanted more.

In the end this book was unsatisfying, despite the individual parts being enjoyable. The ending felt rushed and in some senses unearned. I wanted more agency from the protagonist... up until he got agency and then it was hard to understand the suddenness of the change.