A well done post-Apocalyptic novel with a unique take on the genre. As the climate crisis unfolds, societal organizations crumble and the effort to send a few colonists to another planet disintegrates. A small group of scientists pivot, working to send a pair of individuals 10,000 years into the future. While there are a few minor holes in the plot that surface occasionally but they do not detract from the overall impact. The story unfolds from two different perspectives. The first is a man that emerges in the far away future to a world that is an absolute wilderness, almost fully recovered from the damage human race has wrecked on the planet before their extinction. The second is of a group of scientists racing to find a female companion that will be joining him. As perspective shifts between the two, I found my emotions wavering between aching loneliness and longing, hope and desperation. Everything about this grabbed a hold of me and wouldn’t let go: the premise, the setting, the characters, and the plot. Don’t expect for everything to be tied up into a neat bow. This is messy and heartbreaking and achingly beautiful exposition of pain and loss and destruction that humans bring about on themselves. Considering I’ve read a few other Sci-Fi books that can be grouped into post-Apocalyptic or climate catastrophe themes, this is the best one so far.

An observant and brilliant octopus orchestrates a mending of broken hearts. A story of loss, grief, growing into adulthood, and aging on your own terms. This is a wholesome story that initially drags on until a major revelation by the octopus, Marcellus, 1/3 of the way through the book. This is a story that shows the complication of life, family, loss, and grief and yet manages to wrap everything up into a heart-melting ending. Not a perfect book by any means but still a great uplifting read.

The beginning of the book dragged on a bit as the readers are caught up to what the characters have been up to for four months since the ending of last book. Then the central plot point of a tournament of mages gets introduced and while the action and intrigue kept me reading it did get a little tropy and predictable. Lila started to become a bit more insufferable with toxic personality traits surfacing that female readers may find strong and defiant maybe, but I personally thought her to be selfish and self-destructive. Overall, not a bad follow up, just not quite as good as the entry title. Action and intrigue, even if it does feel a bit too Hollywood, kept me flipping the pages. While I do enjoy Schwab’s descriptive writing style, the were a few times I found myself thinking she’s overused “sharp” as an adjective.

While the story is intriguing, I felt like a foreigner dropped in a middle of a city not knowing the language or the customs. This should have been a full fledged novel but ended up somehow feeling like CliffsNotes. There was really not time to get invested in the characters or the plot because it was over so quickly. Overall, this is an ok novella, just left me wanting way more than it offered.

Looking back on history you can see the same patterns repeat themselves, with slight variation, but the same pattern all the same. Slavery is an abomination that human race needs to ensure doesn’t get repeated. Ever. Unfortunately, the human race is not great at studying history, which explains why history repeats itself. This is a heartbreaking story of a man seeking the rights that everyone in the United States would agree are owed to him. Education have given him knowledge and knowledge gives him power that what he desires is just and right. If you’ve read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, you will recognize the setting and the characters. It’s an incredible read that had me questioning my desire to laugh at the humor because of the tortuous subject matter. Easy to read, hard to put down, and impossible to not search within yourself and ask how society ever allowed the world to be like that.

As a child growing up, I remember reading and listening to fairy tales that had life lessons at the core of them. Lessons about being good, kind, and generous and warnings against jealousy and greed. This is one of those tales. The whimsical language is enchanting until you try to focus on the meaning and realize that some of what author writes means absolutely nothing. That was the biggest hurdle for me. A fairy tale for the adults that relies on the reader having an open mind and big imagination to really get the most out of the story. Maybe the decades of adulting dimmed some of those things in me and a result this didn’t resonate with me as much.

A dark and twisted holiday treat of a story featuring Krampus in West Virginia hill country. The story oscillates between grim, depressing, farcical, bloody, violent, and sometimes touching and sorrowful. If you’re prone to Christian righteous outrage over blasphemy and desecration of the one true god, this is not a novel for you. If, on the other hand, you’re intrigued by fairytale with roots spreading into Norse mythology, early European paganism, with a bit of Christianity set in the hills of West Virginia featuring gods, flying goats, meth ring gang in cahoots with a dirty murderous lawman…well this is right up your alley. While it was most certainly an entertaining read, it did start to drag on in the second half. The interactions between the normal people and Krampus and his band were a bit off and not as polished as the rest of the material. Still, this is a pretty unique Christmas tale that scratched an itch I didn’t realize I had.

My god what a juvenile novel that is trying extremely hard to be be cool and edgy. The writing is so overly dramatic over mundane things that reading this feels like watching anime, yet the descriptions are vague, unclear, and many times confusing so it feels like you’re watching anime with your eyes closed. The writing is wildly erratic with a 20 year-old acting like a 13 year-old brat while a 14 year-old is acting like a ruler in his forties. The chapter introducing all the main characters is so cliched with stereotypes and the main character’s heart dropping into his arse or leaping in to his throat and the author forgetting to keep the details straight with the room full of important people in one paragraph and only 12 people in a different one. Not sure if this type of writing is the norm with Young Adult books these days but I’m finding it unreadable. I used to have a rule that if I didn’t finish a book I wouldn’t rate it but this book changed my mind on that.

The premise is interesting but the delivery ultimately made me give up, despite how much I disliked abandoning a book half-way in. This reads like a cookie cutter fantasy, taking all the well-worn tropes and popular themes over the last couple of decades and jumbling them together around a plot that seems artificial, almost like it exists for the sake of having a novel. Class system? Check. Dragons? Check. Love interest that main protagonist initially can’t stand but falls for? Check. Different factions and skills for different characters? Obligatory social event where everyone dresses up and a bit of scandal erupts? Best friends that have become enemies and are destined to reconcile? Check. Check. Check. It reads all formulaic and unoriginal, the plot is thin, and the main character is tortured by something she did in the past. She repeatedly whines about all the “many terrible, unforgivable things” she’s done in the past when in reality it’s just one selfish choice that resulted in terrible consequences for her friend. Even though I was a bit more than halfway through the book before I abandoned it, the author still had yet to reveal what she did but I’m sure it is something boring and benign and not worth continuing the torture of reading to find out. I’ve found myself almost arguing with the author who describes some plot points as if they’re of grave importance when they actually seemed pretty trivial. This added to the feeling of inauthenticity, almost like the plot was created for the sake of the plot. The group of young adults are introduced as misfits that no one wants to associate with, yet a short time later there’s a gala thrown where they dress up and mingle with important people that came to meet them? The cliches and tropes are so numerous that even the author has a hard time keeping them straight, pilling them up one after another. I get it, this is a Young Adult novel and if you haven’t read before this may seem like a great book. If you’re an avid reader though, I’d recommend you skip this one and pick up something with more substance.

I really wanted to give this the benefit of the doubt, I mean it’s a Pulitzer Prize winning novel after all. Who ever awarded that prize must have read a different version of the book, translated to a different language. This is a burdensome book to read, and not in a way that can be spun into a positive. I have never read such poorly written slop in my life. Run on sentences, fragments, sentences constantly beginning with “And” and many other literary failures that I am appalled this garbage was published. There are constant asides as the author piles on disparate thoughts into a single sentence with such frequency that I almost felt like I was drowning, coming up for a gulp of air before going back under. It is so bad I found a sentence that had 2 different asides in it and frequently there would be single sentences that would have an aside composed of MULTIPLE sentences. Don’t even get me started on constant sentences with multiple semicolons and even colons AND semicolons. The descriptions careen between vivid and absolute drivel. This was such a painful read first chapter in I decided to read some reviews, which I normally don’t do, hoping the writing improves. According to the reviews I’ve read, it does not so throwing this turd into DNF pile, complete trash, and unreadable in my opinion. Hope the author has a day job.

Calling it 135 pages in. Growing up on the Black Sea the setting at the beginning had me intrigued but nothing ever materialized into an engaging narrative. The characters were simple and seemed to overreact dramatically to simple things. There was clear hostility to the instructor for no apparent reason to the point where I was starting to think I was missing something. Unfortunately not. The characters are caricatures of overworked students who are partying and drinking and missing classes and complain about some small mental exercises. I kept reading and hoping for a big revelation or meaning to surface but after what felt like 400 pages when it’s been only 135, I’ve had it.

The first four chapters reading there is something off about the writing that I couldn't shake. The world building is very detailed and comprehensive, there's a lot of detailed descriptions that are unnecessary to the plot, the different shifts in perspective, the exaggerated reactions to seemingly mundane events or stimulus, and a few others that had me feeling the writing is a bit off. Then I hit chapter 5 and almost immediately you get a numbered list for no reason and a ton of em dashes all of a sudden. Everything clicked then and made me realize what that nagging feeling I had about the writing. This is written using AI. While this make be a good enough writing, this is the example of how AI writing differs from an actual author. It reads like it's supposed but the nuance is just not there. The emotions feel off, the actions and feeling of characters are not completely believable. While I can appreciate the novelty of what AI can achieve, I am not fooled into consuming a cookie cutter fantasy AI slop trying to be passed off as original work. Shame on the author and Orbit for trying to pull one over on the readers.

Extremely clunky writing, very detailed but lacks coherent structure. Hadrian goes into detail about his vast education earlier and describes a lot of things in minutiae, but in Chapter 3 when talking about the wrought iron gates he says “Strange things, those doors—weighty things of poured iron, raw and treated with some dull resin to guard against rust.” For some reason he has no idea what is used to treat the gates to prevent rust? Why even bring it up and mention it? What is the point of all the detail? It gives the feeling that the level of detail is presented not to bring the reader into the world but to pad the page count. Later on the author has the main character make the following observation: “She was beautiful in the way all palatine women are beautiful.” What a statement, as if there no plain or ugly royals in this universe. Just when things get interesting and the writing seems to improve, I come across sentences and descriptions that frustrate me: “carved from brass whale ivory”. WTF is that? It sounds like it could a real thing but it’s completely made up and no explanation. This is terrible world building, throwing out descriptions that are meaningless to the reader with no explanation. The interactions between characters are formal yet just when I think I almost understand the formalities things happen that makes me realize that my understanding and assumptions are not correct and the author breezes by like nothing happened. I can’t comprehend why anyone would enjoy this sloppy writing. A bit into Chapter 7 I finally was done with this. The author writes “There was a Nipponese man there who rolled fish with rice in a corner store…” So earth is destroyed millennia ago and the main character somehow finds a Japanese person on this far distant planet?! Between recycling of Grecian and Byzantine ranks and terms, introducing new terms without explanation, clearly lifting parts of Dune and poor attempt to mimic The Name of the Wind narrative style, the author seems to be flailing. The world depicted is somehow in the future where civilization is so advanced that they travel thousands of light years and colonized thousands of solar systems but they reverted back to using swords and knives for combat? It’s like the author decided to co-opt everything he thought would be “cool” and interesting and put them in the book without thinking if it makes actual sense. To think this drivel spans 6 more books is a travesty.

Sometimes rating books can be hard and complicated. Is the highest rating reserved for only the perfect book? Maybe. Is The Princess Bride a perfect book? Most definitely not. But it was a fun and enjoyable read, full of adventure, ludicrous scenarios, campy romps and dialogue, and humor that will appeal to kids and adults. The author’s preface and and asides in my opinion were the worst parts as they got long winded for no reason. The movie is a cult classic for a reason. The book is even better. The problematic sexism, chauvinistic, and patriarchal themes in the book actually work because everything is over the top and exaggerated and campy to the point where being triggered or outraged is not necessary, you know it’s a fairy tale that is so flawed and full of holes so that the only thing left is to chuckle and laugh out loud at the absurdity of what you’re reading. It is one of the rare books that gets top marks for being so enjoyable to read despite its flaws.