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.
"How do you stage a mutiny when you're only awake one day in a million? …
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.
From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History …
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.
The ending was a bit rushed, and had a bit too much of the "gunfight at the OK corral" feel to it, but I enjoyed the book, and the worldbuilding was excellent.
Finding out that there was a sequel to Wanderers got me really curious; it's an interesting post-apocalypse.
There's no question it's a novel of the period in which it was written; white nationalism, populist insurrections, and anti-maskers figure prominently.
So far I'm about 10% into this one, and my main criticism is that I JUST WANT THE CHARACTERS TO FUCKING TALK TO EACH OTHER.
The ending of this was a fair amount more optimistic than I expected, although there was a twist that -- honestly -- I saw coming, but still really appreciated. There's a sequel, surprisingly, and I'm looking forward to seeing where Wendig takes the story.
I read about 80% of this on a flight back to Seattle from Detroit and ... hoo boy, what a MOOD. It's a pretty grim pandemic book. I like it, I want to see how it ends, but I am not finding joy in reading it, that's for damn sure.
