cdonegan's reviews
125 reviews

Felt like a bit of a step back stakes-wise from the previous books, but I still enjoyed it. I feel like the other books are kind of Murderbot in action + Murderbot dealing with emotions, while this one is really just Murderbot in action. Not a bad thing, I just like when there’s more of an emotional beat to the story!

I haven’t written actual full-length reviews for the previous books, but considering this is the first full-length novel in the series… time for my first real review!

The Murderbot Diaries hits the perfect balance of humorous and emotional for me. I absolutely adore the narration, the story, the characters… everything about the series! The relationships (not that kind, ew) between SecUnit and ART, its humans, ART’s humans, are all so incredibly written. The scene with targetControlSys was absolutely haunting.

Miki my beloved 😭

ART my beloved

Murderbot is such a great narrator, as with the first book! can’t wait to read more

Honestly didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would. I didn’t feel super attached to any of the characters (Rambo and Nurse Ratched kind of just annoyed me more than anything else). It was a nice read but I didn’t love it. This was my first read by TJ Klune, and I think I just don’t love his writing style, although perhaps his other books are different — I like more humorous writing from time to time, but this one was a bit less serious than I would have liked.

I did love the asexual representation, as an ace person myself who rarely sees ace characters.

I feel like the best way to describe how I feel about this book is that I enjoyed what it was, but I still wish it was more. It’s YA, it’s romantasy, neither of which I generally enjoy reading (not anymore at least, in YA’s case), but I did really enjoy this one. I thought it was cute how Roman kind of seemed to fall in love with Iris instantly, while she still thought he was a prick nearly until the moment they got married. (In general I think I liked Roman slightly more than Iris, but I definitely did like both protagonists.)

I wish the book had gone more deeply into aspects outside the relationship between the two, but that is kind of to be expected with this genre. I would have liked to have known more about the side characters like Attie and Marisol. All in all an enjoyable read, there wasn’t really anything I disliked but it did leave me wanting a lot more with some aspects.

Cool additional context for the show, nothing all that new but I loved Peg and Peggy’s story!