thekarpuk's reviews
619 reviews

 I was in a bit of a rut in November when it came to my reading, finding it hard to continue on with the huge stack of books I already have that I need reading, sort of feeling like they all sort of continued one or another trend I'd followed in reading since my teen years.

So I found a list of the top Goodreads books of October and decided to give on a try, and this was that book. This is not a book usually aimed at my demographic, and I don't have a ton of experience with graphic novels, but I figured, hey, I like Jane Austen adaptations, I enjoy romantic comedies, why shouldn't I give this a try?

And I get why this book is popular. While I was reading it, I saw a much classier edition at the airport. (My edition has the eBook version of the cover, which Storygraph very tastefully does not use, which is a giant picture of a shirtless man giving a smoldering look to someone to the left of us. My Kindle shows the cover of whatever I'm reading, and I'm far too lazy to dig through menus and turn that off, so I just had to live with a few awkward moments when I got ready to read.) It has a breezy pace, fairly likable characters, and a plot that, at least in the broad strokes, is solid if not inventive. If you can get through the first chapter, you'll probably be fine reading the whole thing.

One of the main reasons it gets fewer stars, and it's something I'm oddly not particularly mad about, is that Ana Huang appears to do barely any research on literally anything this book is about. That would be fine if the book was about growing up with immigrant parents, as her bios suggest, but this is about a world-famous, sports car racing, British soccer player falling in love with a ballerina. While it's clearly not a dealbreaker, since I finished the book, it does give some scenes an oddly vague quality because it's avoiding referencing too many geographical features of London, or of soccer culture, or British culture, or dance culture.

There's plot contrivance that fills out the third act, but to discuss that, I must employ the spoiler tag!

Since most of the tension in this story comes from Asher dating the sister of his main rival on the team, one would think the third act would have a lot to do with Lance and Asher sorting out their difference due to Asher's love of Scarlett. But in practice, this takes maybe a handful of pages to sort out and then they're fine. It's almost like the author got to this point and then realized that they had no gas for actually getting into the interpersonal conflicts between these two men, which is possibly because the author did no research on the clashes of powerful men in sports, a thing that's, frankly, been documented more than some American wars. I have a sneaking suspicion the street racing, which barely factors into anything outside of a few scenes, was backwards-engineered into the story to provide something that Asher could promise to do, then fail at, so the couple could temporarily break up giving us that low point that Hero's Journey enthusiasts just love to insist must be included in all narratives. I would have loved it if the big final conflict had been something more germane to either of the character's actual personalities. 

 

The last issue, and this may just be my lack of experience with the genre, but the writing in the book kind of whiplashes every time there's a sex scene. It goes from a sort of quippy YA vibe that seems like it could come from a precocious National Merit Scholar straight into the horniest, most dry-humpingest descriptions possible. I'm not a prude or anything, it just seems like the writing adjacent to it doesn't really set all that sexy vibe, or all that mature a vibe for that matter, so it almost feels like the romantic scenes were written by someone else.

But beyond all that, I couldn't possibly go lower than 3 stars because I hold a great value on a book not boring me, and it did just fine by that merit. If you're at an airport, and you happen to see this book next to the James Patterson shelves, it's probably worth grabbing. 

There's horror where the supernatural force is almost constantly popping up to reassert itself. There's fiction where a constant tension exists between whether or not anything is happening at all. But the most common category I see is things that try to keep that tension but sort of give up in the third act.

Between Two Fires strikes a sort of balance that I don't find often in horror or fantasy, where the supernatural elements are present, but are deeply upsetting and only really poke through occasionally during intense moments. The only other series in the fantasy space I can think of that does this is the Song of Ice and Fire series, and it's been a minute since that was actively happening.

What I really admire through out this book, and it's a rarity in both historical fantasy and in horror, is the author's capacity to show restraint without withholding the exciting parts. This book is so clearly inspired by either From Software games, or Miyazaki's chief inspiration, Berserk, without really cribbing any of the particulars from either. The chief thing it holds on to is that you're provided only the details about the plot that are absolutely germane to what's happening immediately in the story. There's no big exposition dumps, no omniscient narrator giving you long explanation about this history of this place, everything maintains a consistent lean approach.

The only authors I can really think of who do this are Cormac McCarthy and Ishiguro Kazuo, which is just a reminder that people often treat this approach as "challenging", a description which I think overstates the difficulties

And there's a bravery in that. Look at any sort of airport fiction you've ever read. The only thing that stops the frantic pace of those stories is the time they take to stop and make sure you're absolutely clear on who is doing what and why they're doing it. There's absolutely no faith given that you can infer anything, or even retain an understanding of the context. I have a lot of memories of college writing and English classes where there were always a few students, some of them even fairly bright, who would have trouble following fiction if it didn't do this. 

Fiction that assumes that you're an adult is exceedingly rare, and horror or fantasy that does so is doubly rare. This book was captivating in a way that I don't see very often, and shows a level of confidence by the author that I find really compelling. I look forward to what he does in the future.

 I was probably going to like this book no matter what. I've yet to dislike a Murderbot book. I've enjoyed this books enough to give her fantasy series a try. But this book definitely started out on the wrong foot with me.

The last book contained ART. If you haven't read this series, even the meaning of that acronym is a rude joke, and it's very fitting for the series. ART was in one of the novellas that started this series, and quite clearly became a fan favorite. ART came back in the last book, and a lot of the plot centered around the relationship between Murderbot and ART.

This book has no ART. This book takes place before the last book. Which is a confusing thing some writers do with continuity that leads to their fans clarifying the matter for years to come, as CS Lewis fans are well aware of.

And while the lack of ART was disappointing, the fact that this is basically a murder mystery helped me through the reading a great deal. As I've stated in other reviews of this series, one of my favorite types of characters in fantasy and sci fi is the protagonist that doesn't really want to be in the narrative. Murderbot wants the intrigue and mystery to be dealt with so that it can get back to watching television and protecting the people it cares about.

So while this book doesn't really do much for the overarching narrative of the series, it's clearly a fun side story that Martha Wells felt compelled to tell, and having read it, I get why. It's a fun thing to have a Murderbot do. 

 You know all that stuff from the first book that Wayward Son kind of didn't address because that book was mostly about characters moving around without making much actual progress? It's all here, in this book, Any Way the Wind Blows. Plus, this book has its own actual new plot developments. It's like someone took a kink out of a hose and now everything is blasting out.

This book's characters have a level of vulnerability that's genuinely uncommon in fantasy as a genre. Rowell has a better understanding of emotions and relationships, especially young relationships, than most people who play in this space. It's showing through here and in her excellent run on Runaways.

And all the main characters have a separate arc that genuinely feels satisfying to follow. It's all well set up and paid off properly.

This might be one of the better books that Rowell has put out, and I'm curious to see where she goes if she continues writing fantasy. 

 This book did something I rarely encounter in fiction: I was able to come back to it multiple times without finding myself particularly annoyed about it.

This novel has an odd sort of rhythm to it. For about 2/3rds of its length it doesn't really have a lot of dramatic dynamics to it. Everything has about the same level of heat, the same level of emotion. But Arkady Martine is such a confident writer, with such a clear sense of how to define characters and how to set a scene that I didn't mind.

Every time I came back to this book I still remembered roughly where the main character, Mahit, had been when I left off, and what relationships she had with other characters. So much of the vibe of this book stuck with me even though it took me forever to finish the damn thing.

Martine focuses on the sort of things I like in books like the Dune series and Game of Thrones, but it's a quality you can't exactly set a filter for on an Amazon search: deep interpersonal relationships that are often political. There's often a lot of nuance to any given conversation, and sometimes it just effects the way to characters feel about each other, and sometimes it can impact the entire empire. That weird sort of energy will keep me enthralled across a lot of pages.

And it doesn't hurt that the third act picks up to an intense degree. It reminds me a bit of the book Invisible Library, where the first book almost feels like a pilot for a series, a test chamber where the main characters are sorted out and the rhythm going forward it defined. I finished both books after some struggle but found myself interested in picking up the next. There are definitely certain series that reward the patient. 

 Terry Pratchett had a joke in more than one of his books about how it took horses longer to get going because they had more legs to sort out. Some novels can have that vibe.

And it may have something to do with this being a second book in a series that may or may not have been planned, but it certainly gives off the energy of a series that wasn't considered from the outset.

The full first third of this books seems like the author fishing for conflicts and situations that would actually present enough narrative interest to the two main characters. You can almost feel the narrative lens meandering about looking for connections to put together later.

And the "later' part also presents some issues, because the ramshackle nature of the plotting means a lot of characters end up colliding due to coincidences.

Y'all, this book is riddle with convenient timing and coincidences. Very little in this story seems to occur because of any of the protagonists' own agency, but because they had something they sort of vaguely needed and ran across one of the other main characters at the right time under the right circumstances.

So why did I still give this a decent rating? Because I just like reading Helen Wecker's work. It just had a pleasant flow, and the characters are likable. So even while they spend what feels like half the damn book stumbling in the dark, I still didn't mind joining them, even if it did take me much longer to get through the first half to the point where the conflicts really started to gel.

Good writing is like good conversation, and this holds true even when the speaker may have lost track of where they were going with the story. 

I sometimes imagine what gaming would look like without the Nintendo. There's an alternate timeline where Atari crashed the market from bad practices and gaming for the masses was written off as a fad that had passed it times. Arcades would remain as a novelty for getting kids money and computer gaming would serve as an interest mostly for rich kids and indulgent suburbanites.

But Nintendo put a useless robot and a barely useful zap gun in a box with their video game system and tricked American retailers into carrying something that was considered nonviable by convincing them it was more of a toy than the next Atari. 

I'm a big fan of video game history, and my main issue with this book is that Iwata doesn't seem to appreciate how interested people are in the aspects of that industry he witnessed firsthand.

This book certainly has some fun anecdotes, like Nintendo asking his team at HAL to put more work in on Kirby to make it the icon it is today. But a huge chunk of these essays are more like seminars are how to manage employees. By many accounts Iwata was a compassionate boss and a decent person to work for, but I don't think that's necessarily the information people came to a book written by him looking for. Advice on how to manage people and run a business has its own section at the bookstore. This is well-worn territory at this point. 

Iwata is sitting on a gold mine, but he'd rather tell us about how he interviews his employees regularly. I am not the audience for this. It's less that this is badly written and more that it feels like a wasted opportunity.