jaina8851's reviews
543 reviews

This book, and series more generally, were so profoundly disappointing to me. It had so much promise that failed to deliver in so many different ways. I am extremely grateful that I read Amina al-Sirafi first, because I LOVED that book, and I doubt I would bother to read more from this author if I had read this (incredibly highly reviewed!) series first.

One of the things I liked the most about the first book in the series was that the characters were all complicated, with no one (even Ghassan) as a clear-cut villain or hero. With the re-introduction of Manizeh, that slowly fell by the wayside, and in this book, it felt like the characters became caricatures of who they used to be. Manizeh herself because a cartoonish villain, hell-bent on revenge at the expense of literally everything and everyone around her. Dara was effectively a cardboard cutout, one might even say... simply a tool, a weapon. Which really didn't leave me with any sympathy at all for him as a character. I think the author intended for us to just have three enormous novel lengths of pity for him and his being controlled by evil rather than being able to do what he wanted, but it became so tiresome, especially having so many POV chapters where he just moped around repeating the same things. This was true for Ali and Nahri as well, their internal monologues just got so repetitive and the books were SO LONG.

The biggest problem here for me was that the series was trying to do too much:

-  The first book set up a lot of interesting topics around oppression and who was considered worthy of citizenship and rights in Daevabad. All of that got swept to the side in this book in favor of the clan wars amongst the djinn who *checks notes* all basically believe in blood purity. 
- There was way too much of my least favorite fantasy writing style, where one character expounds at length to ostensibly teach another character about the world but it's really just a sloppy way of getting the information to the reader. I'm still not entirely clear what the past history of the Marid and the Ayaanles is and I read the relevant chapters twice. 
- And speaking of the Marid, they were so cool! But also adding so much about them into an already jam packed series just felt so cluttered. I had been waiting since book one for an answer to why water healed Ali before he fell into the lake, and when the answers finally came in this book, it was woven in with all this other lore that felt like trying to balance an increasingly tall layer cake on too tiny a platter.
- I literally said out loud "aha, here comes peri ex machina" when they finally showed up again.
- The pacing of this book in general was off, but the ending was an absolute abominable slog. The final climactic showdown happens and I looked down and there were still THREE HOURS of narration left in the book?! 😩 
- The final motivations for our mains and the way magic works also felt very inconsistent and muddled. I didn't leave the series feeling like I understood anything about how the new world was going to work. It was a bizarre combination of incredibly hand-wavey while also being a tedious bore of explanation.

Overall, I really expected to love this series, and I think with a lot of tightening and editing, it would have been great. I'm obviously in the minority here since these books each boast a 4+ ⭐ rating. But whew. What a lot of content for very little payoff. I am glad that the author's writing has matured with the new series focusing on adult characters, and I am excited to see how that series plays out, but I'm mostly just glad to have this one in the rear view.

A re-read of one of my favorite books of 2021, now firmly ensconced as one of my favorite ever books. Enough time had passed since my first read that I remembered some of the details but not most of them until they played out, and the things that I did remember early did not detract at all from my enjoyment. I still ended up absolutely weeping at the end because it's just so overwhelmingly beautiful. The way everything gets woven together, the playfulness of the prose even when handling heavy topics like suicide, grief, spouse and parental loss, and the titular anxiety, all of it is just so masterfully done. I am looking forward to making my way through the rest of Fredrik Backman's work, and I also look forward to reading this book again and again in the years to come, because it very much feels like a book that will continue to hit just a little bit differently as I age and move through different stages of my life.

This collection reminded me why I love Naomi Novik as an author. I adored basically every story in this book. I didn't really love the Scholomance series, and that story was the only one that I felt kind of meh about (which made me feel a little more self-validated, that even in a short story format, I just don't vibe with that universe). I had never read any Temeraire, but now I really want to, because both of those stories were a delight! I loved the standalones as well. My favorite aspect of this collection was that ALL of these stories felt very well scoped to me. They all hooked me in quick, and the length of the story felt appropriate for the way the story unfolded. For a few (including the one that was a sneak peek at her next work) I would have loved to spend more time in that world, but it didn't leave me feeling unsatisfied at the end of the story. Overall would highly recommend.

I really wanted to love this book. The main word that I would use to describe this book is "busy". For the first third of the book, you have chapters with up to three different character perspectives in them, all with a ton of characters that you don't know if they are going to be important or not, and you bounce between them so fast I felt like I was getting whiplash. This didn't really stop once the plot lines merged together. There was never a moment to breathe in this book, and I think it suffered a lot for it. There were a couple of brief flashback moments for Ocean and Haven, but they came so late in the book (for Haven especially) that I found it so incredibly frustrating to not have had the knowledge sooner. I also had a hard time with the amount of Korean words that were used without a lot of context for what they meant, and I didn't find the glossary until I had already finished the book. The worldbuilding of the universe was sloppily handled, I still don't understand what the Alliance is, how (or why) gas giants have people living on them, or why there are raiders and what their motivations are. How much of Earth is still livable? How did Korea end up as the space exploring Earth super power? What was the actual purpose of the original mission that Dae's crew did to some other planet? I have so many unanswered questions because the plot, such as it was, just whisked on by, and then ended abruptly with no resolution at all for any of the open threads.

I do think that this story and its world had a ton of potential so I feel disappointed and frustrated with not liking it. I think the story really would have been served better if it had been written for visual media first. I think the dizzying flashing between scenes featuring Haven, Ocean, and Teo in the beginning of the book would have been much easier to follow if I had been watching it on a screen, and I think that the parts of the world building that felt sloppy to me would have been easier to understand if there had been a visual backdrop for all of the scenes, and there would have been more space to quickly make the universe more tangible. I do not plan on reading the sequel for this and I'm bummed that I didn't love it as much as I had hoped to.

This book, to me, is literal perfection. This is my second time through this book, having read it with my eyes the first time. Robin Miles does an absolutely phenomenal job narrating this and it really adds to the experience of the story. All three story lines grab me like a hook through the chest and are so engaging I just can't look away. I've heard other people say that this book has a lot of worldbuilding to get through, but it didn't feel that way to me either time I read it. I felt like the worldbuilding was seamlessly integrated with the plot and gave you the information you needed at exactly the right moment. The book definitely picks up speed as it goes and once you're about 2/3 of the way in, buckle up because you're not going to want to take a break until you're done. Usually when I listen to audiobooks, I feel like I am much more prone to missing details of the story, but in this rare case, I feel like I actually caught *more* details this time around because I didn't have the opportunity for my eyes to skim over anything in a rush to find out what happens next, and I was hanging on every word of the narration. The highest of recommendations, 6/5 ⭐, remains one of my favorite ever books.

Wow, wow, wow, I loved this book so much on a re-read. 

First of all, there is nothing at all about this book that is standalone. One of the things that I love *most* about this book is the way it pulls in so many threads from all of the books that came before it, both in terms of characters that we've seen before, but also references to things Murderbot experienced and learned from past adventures. I don't see how you could possibly read this without having read the rest of the series first, so it is strange to me that it was ever pitched as a standalone.

Beyond that though, I loved the novel format of this book SO much. I was a little bit nervous about digging into this because I expected it to just be a longer version of one of the novella romps, but it wasn't that AT ALL. The bigger format gave space for so much more, with flashbacks to build context, richer relationship building, and a more intricate story that had all of the elements that I love best in this series. Murderbot grappling with its emotions as it contemplates its relationships with bots and humans alike just pulls right at my heartstrings and I full on cried at the end, a thing I exceptionally rarely do while reading.

My previous opinion on this book after having read the audiobook version was "it was good but I don't understand why it won the Hugo in 2021 against so many other good books" but after re-reading it with my eyes, I'm like "okay Piranesi still would have edged this book out for me personally, but indeed it is either the first or close second best book on that list of excellent books." Five stars all around, loved this so much.

The tone and pacing of this book got off to a rough start for me, especially right on the heels of Network Effect. The novel length for that book gave it so much more space to have intertwining threads and deeper relationship building amongst the characters, and this returned to the more breezy "down to business" style of the earlier novellas, but at the same time felt draggy, somehow. Once the action really started to pick up, though, I was totally hooked in because this brought out my favorite elements of the series: ART and Murderbot's relationship, Murderbot grappling with the conflict between its robot side and its begrudging human aspects, and Murderbot's prickly and unexpected emotional relationships with its humans. The last 25% had me at the edge of my seat, even though I read this book as an audiobook less than a year ago! I do hope that new books in this series tread some new ground, which I think there are plenty of avenues that have been opened up with the way this book closes. SO glad that I re-read this whole series, and also read it in chronological order rather than publishing order this time around.

I just wasn't vibing with this. I figured this was going to be more literary/character based, but I didn't expect it to be basically *all* that and no sci fi at all. Came for the Voyager and science stuff, left because the story was just moving too slow.

High highs and low lows. This collection was a really mixed bag. I felt like a lot of the stories were poorly suited to such a short story format: not enough detail in some cases for me to care about what was happening or an interesting hook that felt like with more space it would have been more rewarding. The experience of reading it also just felt like a slog with this many very short stories. I had read nine of them and wasn't even halfway through the book. Highlights for me were Dark Home by Nnedi Okorafor, Your Happy Place by Terence Taylor, and Hide and Seek by P. Djèlí Clarke.

I needed to let this book simmer for several days in my mind after finishing it before I wrote up a review. I re-read Huck Finn immediately prior to reading this book for the first time since high school, and I'm really glad that I did that. I barely remembered anything about Huck Finn beyond "Huck and Jim escape down the river on a raft", and having the full context of the plot and themes of that book in mind made reading James much richer for me. It absolutely can be read and appreciated on its own, but I really enjoyed the added texture of having both in mind.

I thought at the beginning that this book would be similar to Demon Copperhead and follow the beats of the original story exactly, so I was pleasantly surprised when it took a pretty strong deviation. I think that is part of what I really needed to rotate in my mind about how brilliant this book is: the ways that it takes not only the classic book of Huck Finn and turns it on its head but also so many of the things that we think we know about that time period.

At first I was a little thrown by the decision to make Huck James' son, but the more I thought about it, the more it felt like such a brilliant choice. How does one get a mixed baby in the 1850s? Almost universally by a white enslaver raping a Black woman. To have Huck be the child of a white mother and Black man who have known each other their whole lives is such an unexpected turn of events, and for Huck to grapple with what it means for *he himself* to be mixed race instead of slowly recognizing that Jim is a human being in the original text is so much more interesting. I also had to reckon with my own biases in that I wanted to see *more* of Huck's grappling and found myself disappointed that this reveal came so close to the end and so briefly. But this isn't Huck's story! It's James'! We saw exactly the right amount of this and we can fill in our own projected gaps if we want.

I've never read any of Percival Everett's other work (though I did see American Fiction and really enjoyed how nuanced and layered that story was) but I definitely want to read more after reading this book. It's definitely the type of work that makes you feel one way when you first consume it and then as it percolates through your brain, you appreciate just how many layers there are to analyze.