All her life Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of …
Content warning
Spooooooooilers
Oh WOW did I like this book.
It takes a lot to take an unlikable protagonist, put you right inside their thoughts, show you them being a bigot and an asshole, and still make you root for them. The story is a hell of a trip, and inverts the rebel-against-the-empire trope really, really well.
So far, of the three Hugo finalists I've read, this is my fave.
The unmissable follow-up to the highly acclaimed Children of Time and Children of Ruin.
Earth …
As always I'm amazed at Tchaikovsky's ability to take a grim and somewhat disturbing scenario and find the essential grain of Humanity at its core, finding the optimism and kindness in even the most alien of characters. A fantastic book.
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.
Arrows of the Queen is the first book in the Heralds of Valdemar Trilogy.
Chosen …
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.
Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among …
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 thirty years from now. We’re making progress, mitigating climate change, slowly but surely. But …
I finished this book on the plane yesterday, on my way, ironically, to Burbank (or close enough to it).
First up, I enjoyed it, overall. The story was tightly told, the stakes were more or less clear, and the near-future setting had enough connections to the present to feel very plausible.
I had a bit of a hard time with the viewpoint character, who kept giving off vibes of "clueless post-millennial kid" in how they approached problems; I think the scene that gelled it for me was when something viscerally upsetting happened, and their response was along the lines of "I knew what I had to do; I had to go and bear witness". That sentiment pervades the whole book, this sense of "dunking on people on social media will change the world" and I think I have a hard time believing that, given the way the world has …
I finished this book on the plane yesterday, on my way, ironically, to Burbank (or close enough to it).
First up, I enjoyed it, overall. The story was tightly told, the stakes were more or less clear, and the near-future setting had enough connections to the present to feel very plausible.
I had a bit of a hard time with the viewpoint character, who kept giving off vibes of "clueless post-millennial kid" in how they approached problems; I think the scene that gelled it for me was when something viscerally upsetting happened, and their response was along the lines of "I knew what I had to do; I had to go and bear witness". That sentiment pervades the whole book, this sense of "dunking on people on social media will change the world" and I think I have a hard time believing that, given the way the world has moved in the past decade. If this book had been released in the year of the Arab Spring, maybe I would have been more convinced, but it's a hard sell a decade later when it's clear that the Arab Spring didn't generate meaningful long term change, other than to teach governments that clamping down on dissent over social media is important, and ensuring they have the tools to do it.
It's a very optimistic book, despite its setting, and I'm not sure I feel the same optimism.
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.
