Lori

After reading Speaker for the Dead, I thought this book would be just as captivating. It was not. It just went on for too long and over analyzed everything. I just kept waiting for the point in the book where it would take me in. The story was pulled in so many different directions that each part wasn’t given the attention it deserved. Interesting ethical debates are still apart of this book but it not enough.

Characters I had cared about before, I didn’t fee that same connection with. The emotional pull of the previous book was missing from this one. Most were unlikable and I don’t feel like that was intentional. Bad characters with no emotional gravity are what hurt the book.

I can’t stop thinking about this book. I had read Ender's Game in high school and enjoyed it ever since. Now I needed a book starting with an X for a challenge and will read Xenocide after this. Although I picked this up just to get to the next book in the series, I am happy I did.

It is beyond different from Ender's Game (which I still enjoy). This one was more mature, deeper, and thought-provoking. The story took me in, and I could not put it down. The discussion of how we study other societies and the “Piggys” as a people was engaging.

The stories of the Piggys and the people researching them were captivating and emotional. I almost felt like crying as the Piggys understood what happened with Pipo and Libo. Human (a Piggy) was such a great character!

This is a must-read for anyone.

This is a good children’s book that is still enjoyable to read as an adult. It is dark (but not too dark) for a kid’s book and that is what makes it good. Kids don’t always need to read books that shoot rainbows at them. The dark material would have captivated me as a kid.

I had watched the film before reading the book, so I have Keith David’s voice in mind whenever the Cat talks. Which I am 100% ok with as I love David’s voice acting. I did constantly compare the book to the film even when I tried not to. If I had read the book first, I wild have like it more, but I enjoy the film too much. The film is a good companion that gets the feeling of being a child and wanting to explore that the book does well.

What a weird story, I loved it.

The book gripped me from start to finish. The way it's written as if someone is telling the story of the main characters life fits this odd story. It is both very detailed about the making of perfumes and engaging in the character’s views. Each part felt necessary to the whole of the story as it built up. The main character's ability is almost God like and reading about the reckoning of others that use/fight against him brought up questions of divine nature/work.

The ending is certainly odd but still enjoyable. That’s really how I felt about the whole book. I would recommend this book to others but not everyone. I think it's a little bit of an unserious book.

It's worth a read and the film is pretty good as well.

This was an odd book, and I don’t quite know what to think of it. There were parts that were great in either energy or storytelling and other parts that were dragging and distortedly written. I don’t have too much experience with Straub’s works, only Ghost Story, which gave me a high expectation for this collaboration.

And collaborated they did as you can’t tell who wrote what part and with only some classic King style in there that’s all his own. This book blended great in some parts that made this feel like an effort of great companionship by both authors. On the other hand, the parts where it doesn’t blend so well are what make this book feel off.

The whole story built up a magical other world that we don’t get to see enough of. We spend so much time on the Real/regular world with the main character getting stopped at numerous pits of despair. I just want the story to go on. The book was part childhood loss and random torture. Some trials the main character/hero is put through were unnecessarily long. Other characters like Wolf and Richard could be a little annoying and only added to the trials of the MC.

All this is not to say this is a completely bad book. Although I maybe a sucker for King’s works since I have loved so much of his other novels. The feel of the book is part fairy tale but mostly dark fantasy and dark it does well. The evil and just mean for fun characters were done well and parts of the trials were good to read. It just should have been shorter and worked more with the magic of the Territories.

I am hoping that the next book fixes some of these issues as that would turn this into a great collaboration.