GrumpyMonday

Good read, not meandering like too many fantasy books tend to be. When you think it might start to hit a slump something interesting happens to pull you along.

Occasionally brutal with terrible antagonists. Against some other reviewers I sympathized with the protagonist's devastating backdrop and felt that's the reason he didn't necessarily want to talk too much of his past with his wife.

Overall an enjoyable read.

Enjoyable read. The prose and the plot flowed very nicely from different PoV to another. Liked that the story spanned decades and centuries for some of the characters. The characters were interesting with complexity. The last few chapters lost me a bit. I got what Simon was going for but I think what he was building to took a bit too long and didn't grab me enough. Still the ending was good.

GGK has not yet convinced me. I had to drop the first book in Fionavar Tapestry. A Brightness Long Ago was great. This was ok. The first 400 pages were ok. Meandering here and there. I didn't really connect with the characters. Few typical of GGK scenes were great every once in a while. The last 100 or so pages were great and pulled everything together beautifully. But I want to enjoy the whole ride, so therefore an OK/ good rating.

Big book, maybe a bit too big. It has interesting layers and lots of good scenes. Multiple interesting characters. Even though I do feel that it was too long, the overall plot was something I was interested in seeing through to the end. Horror aspects come from various violent, even disgusting and quite horrific scenes, which don't appear too often.

There were areas of slow burn and scenes with a faster pace. It was quite unbalanced from that point of view. Too much slow sections with not a lot of pull. It took me surprisingly long to finish. Still overall ok. Like said, they could've edited it for much more balanced package.

It has an interesting premise and intriguing characters. I was keen to see where it goes. Unfortunately, nothing is resolved, no revelations, no interesting plot movements. I guess you could be very interested in this if you try to look for some allegories or comparisons to different themes. Unfortunately I'm not about that and therefore I did not ultimately like this. Boring, melancholic piece of work that will definitely interest people who are pulled to these types of novels.

I'm not sure how to interpret everything. But the atmosphere is good and I enjoyed and hated some of the characters, which is always a good sign. Also the layered plot left me wondering quite many things as I closed the book. I think this needs a reread, like many have done. But in conclusion think I'll need to read some more of Mr. Ishiguro's books after this.

This was an interesting look at McKinsey. Few thoughts on it bulleted below. I don't think we can blame everything on McKinsey, even though the book feels like projecting that view. There are faults on both sides of aisle.

1. Ethics: a company will need to decide whether it values its ethics and values and has the want and courage to uphold them. Book's message is that McKinsey does not respect those internally on a consistent basis. The company has a lot of conflicting positions and grey areas.

2. Buyers responsibility: Governments and companies need to understand what they are buying. The book has classic cases where consultants recommend something they've been asked to recommend. It could stop there. However, companies go to great lengths in implementing, many times poorly, suggestions done on slide decks that are on theoretical level. Practical implementation is a few degrees off from PowerPoint visualizations. Also in this day and age many issues mentioned in the book would be avoided if the buyer would also have strong ethics values in the buying process and follow strictly ESG screening when buying these types of services. Sure, idealistic thinking, however if we want to stand for something both sides would need to improve a lot.

Based on the first 200 pages 3/5. After a specific scene at abt page 202 it changes the whole plot and it either pulls you in or it doesn't. Until that moment I was about to drop the book as somewhat boring. But for me after that it got quite enjoyable and I wanted to know what happens in the story.

And from that scene until the end I think it's a nice 4/5 with interesting moments and plot moving forward with rather captivating scenes. I wasn't a fan of all the interludes, but they were workable.

Overall I think the package is still 3/5, despite being good book from that specific scene onwards. Needs editing, the bloat factor is fairly high which brings the overall rank down.

I think it was good. Catriona Ward must have used some ideas from this book and transformed them into her excellent book "The Last House on Needless Street".

Several things I liked here, weird vibes of the characters, the obscure mystery in the background, odd narrator. I'm struggling between putting this as Good or Very Good.

You will likely enjoy reading this through if you enjoy creepy atmosphere in stories.

Whoa this is a difficult book to rate. I thought I would really enjoy it due to the Mass Effect vibes it gives off. But in summary unfortunately I didn't really like it. I really struggled to get through this and had to pretty much skim the last pages to finish it off.

Positives:

Some interesting themes, and technologies and alien races.

Criticism/ negatives:

- Unnecessarily long - cut at least 200 pages of it to make it 3/5. In this format it's wastes readers time, a lot! I kept looking at the bottom of the page to see what page i was on, disappointed by the progress.

- Massive info and character dumps in the beginning of the book. Poor first impressions

- Core mystery is not given enough intrigue to make me want to enjoy the journey.

- Core characters are not given...character to enjoy the journey with them

- Something is off with the writing, I wasn't really caring about anything happening in the book and had to re-read a lot of pages as attention kept drifting.

Why did I read it then? Good question, I guess there was still something in the main mystery I was hoping that would pay off in the end. But no, and would not recommend this to scifi fans either. Unfortunately will not continue with this series.

2 or 3 out of 5. It was ok, I may end up with 3/5 after thinking about it more, but let's see. A big portion of the book was somewhat boring for me. I think at around 60-70% it got more interesting. If you enjoy romance you will probably enjoy it. Romance genre is perhaps not for me, therefore that impacts my rating for Yumi as well.

Good pacing, even though generally you could point to some pacing issues but it was never dull. I really liked that whenever you got a feeling that, now we are going into a slow descriptive wordbuilding chunks or enter into a bunch of side quests there was a surprise, or another interesting story or character twist that kept you along. Normally humour in books doesn't really work for me and early on I was a bit annoyed at it, but by the end I enjoyed it and had a chuckle or a smile in many places. Overall an interesting book and a bit different take on the genre with wild world building and characters.

Sorry, this was not for me. 72 pages in I dropped. Nothing interesting happening that would make me want to continue to read. No plot or characters that would be interesting. Also laborious descriptions about exotic environments that don't really give me a reason to pick up the book once I put it down.

It was ok. I couldn't really connect fully with the characters. The pace was a bit uneven, with some interesting and good scenes that had faster pace or something else interesting that held my interest. I think could be edited for a more tighter package. Unfortunately, I seem to have middling reactions to books with huge hype behind them. Personally as an overall package it's a solid 3 out of 5.

Coming off reading Yumi and Nightmare painter may color the rating somewhat as they are pretty much totally opposite in terms of mood and other aspects.. However, there was still something I enjoyed here quite a bit.

I've read Koontz before with middling feelings but here I think the characters and the plot were good. Even the despicable antagonist was interesting in its sick depiction. Also the main character and their background and struggles were interesting to me. It got very claustrophobic at times with varying degrees of stakes on the line.

Something about the flow of his writing here also worked for me.

The overall package was quite tight. Few somewhat overly descriptive scenes but nothing to bring it down too much.