altlovesbooks

I'll just go ahead and say up front that I didn't think this book was as strong as the others. I didn't feel all that connected with any of the humans our SecUnit was protecting this time around, because the story doesn't really set any of that up in the same way as the other two. We just kind of...end up with them along for the ride when Murderbot was there for other reasons entirely. The framework story also felt not as strong, and a bit fragmented and confusing in places.

I do like the slow transition the author is building from how Murderbot was in the first book (standoffish, aloof, more than a little terrified, wanting nothing to do with any human for any reason) to how it is now (mildly aggrieved, reluctantly protective, a bit curious). There's definitely a lot of character development packed into these small stories.

This book follows Lin Chong, a once-arms instructor for the Emperor, who gets branded a criminal based solely on the untrue word of a government official. She falls in with a group of bandits who have a code of justice to protect those less fortunate, and though they do many good deeds, they're all still criminals, traitors, and cutthroats, so Lin Chong struggles daily with reconciling her old life with her new one. This book also (in the middle stretch, at least) follows Lin Chong's friend li Junyi, who gets voluntold by the Empire to work on harnessing a weapon--manufactured Gods' Teeth. Chapters are dedicated to her viewpoint as she works through creating a small team to meet the demands, researching and testing the weapon, and finding out her best friend is working for the other side.

I very badly wanted to like this book, especially since it starts out really strong in my opinion, but the middle chunk of the book felt too oddly paced, and focused too much on Ii Junyi. The ending was strong, but I mentally struggled to keep my attention in the middle stretch of the book. I also feel like the cast of characters was entirely too large, and while Lu Da's character was necessary to be Lin Chong's other half (so to speak), I personally didn't really care for her personality.

The writing was really strong though, I just had a hard time with the actual story being told.

I'm starting to really like these ship-in-a-bottle mysteries that Turton pops out. I really enjoyed The Devil and the Dark Water (aside from some thematic quibbles near the end of the book), and this was (kind of) more of the same, just with an island instead of a ship. Island-in-a-bottle just doesn't sound as good though.

We have a small colony of people, marooned on an island and unable to leave due to a mysterious fog that's swept the world and killed everyone else on it. This island was the last refuge for scientists, who constructed a barrier that managed to keep the fog at bay and the people safe, but the lab that housed most of their technology and kept most of the people asleep in suspended animation had to be sealed up. Time passed. Survivors rebuilt their society as best they could. The three surviving scientists, enhanced to live long lives, shepherd their small colony of 122 villagers through their lives and their little society coexists together in a fragile balance of just enough villagers for just enough food. There's enough little oddities told about this village to keep you reading and make you wonder at what's actually beneath this little idyllic existence -- and then one of the scientists, beloved and revered, turns up dead. Suddenly there's a clock ticking where the murder must be solved before everyone is killed.

I really mostly enjoyed this book! There's enough strange things going on that's hinted at or glossed over by the POV characters as being something that just is to keep me wondering what actually was going on here. In fact, if the whole book was told with this as the framework, I'd probably be looking at a 5-star review here. My hangup is when things turn into murder investigation mode, because everything starts feeling a bit disconnected and frantic. The "detective" (in quotes, because she's not actually a detective with training) seems like she bounces from random location to random location in rapid succession with no real idea what she's doing. (ending spoilers here) Despite this, she manages to stumble on enough of the clues to lead her to a conclusion that was far-fetched at best. I certainly had a hard time following her train of thought, despite already arriving at the 'these people aren't people' conclusion before we got there. It feels like a book that begs for a re-read to really understand the ending.

Still, really interesting thoughts here, spun in a way that kept me reading to see how things wound up. I can't say I necessarily agree with the motive and the ending, but the journey was fun enough for me.

"Today the sun has set on airships and ... it is feared that it has set forever."

Buddy Levy's arctic expedition books continue to not disappoint. I've read both Labyrinth of Ice and Empire of Ice and Stone, and rated both of those an enthusiastic 5 stars. This one, with its inclusion of the history of airship travel and the arctic, was no different, to no surprise of mine. There's just something incredibly compelling about these explorers who endure so much in the name of planting a flag.

This book's three parts tell the reader about a different airship attempt in each part. We first are introduced to Walter Wellman and the Chicago Record-Herald Polar Expedition, whose struggles to get airborne set the stage for what comes after. The second part brings in Roald Amundsen (a familiar name for anyone who's read about polar expeditions in the past) and his journey on the Norge, where both him and Umberto Nobile become rivals and enemies at the conclusion. Finally, part three involves the Italia, Nobile's attempt to cross the north pole, funded by Italy and Mussolini, that ends rather poorly. It turns out quite a lot can go wrong with giant bags of gas in a cold environment.

As usual, each part is well researched and well written, with footnotes included, as well as an extensive bibilography at the end. I evidently really need to read Amundsen's biography The Last Viking, because his inclusion (history spoilers(?) here) and conclusion was a huge surprise for me. I wasn't a huge fan of Nobile as a historical figure, but I sort of felt bad for the guy on his return.

Just a fun, informative, tense book all around. The only reason it took me so long to make it through this one is because life happened and I didn't get much time to read until now. I binged the last 50% in two days, it was that good.

Like a gritty post-apocalyptic jaunt through a lawless West, but your main character is a Buddhist monk who avoids hurting/killing people, when people want to kill him. Will is a courier for a potential cure for a plague that ravaged the world, but the man trying to stop him is actually the least of his worries. The remains of society, the lawlessness, the unchecked wilderness is doing a pretty good job of it on its own. Will reflects on this a lot during his journey, and his additional traveling companions, a cat named Cass, a raven named Peau, provide him with additional food for thought and perspectives throughout.

I appreciated the extensive inclusion of Buddhism/Buddhist principles throughout the book, as this is more meant to be an introspective journey than it is a gritty wall-to-wall dystopian adventure. I really felt a part of the world the author was crafting here, and I think I enjoyed the quiet moments of the journey and his interactions/troubleshooting along the way, more than the scenes involving actual action. I like how the author handles Cass and Peau's "talking", equal parts magical realism and plain understanding of animal vocalizations. I like the story told here as well, with the backstory of the Mayhems sprinkled in alongside the journey to get the cure to California.

I'm not quite as in love with how the book ends up though, which prevented me from giving it the 5 stars I was riding on the rest of the book. (ending spoilers here)I'm not sure I love the idea of Eva not being dead, or the way she was woken up. I know I praised the inclusion of the elements of Buddhism above, but her being conveniently able to keep herself asleep for 14 years using some hard-to-achieve Buddhist principle while not really being a practicing Buddhist herself seemed a bit hard to swallow.

But the rest of the book? Fantastic. Enjoyed every minute of it.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a free ecopy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Boring. Meticulously researched with lots of detail about Egyptian culture and mythology I didn't know, but never makes up for the fact that not a lot actually happens. I'm also only loosely calling this historical fiction, because as I looked up later, there's no proof Neferura did a lot of what happens in this book.

Neferura is the daughter of the pharaoh Hatshepsut, with a half-brother, Thutmose, whom she shares control of the people with. I'm only half grasping this part of the story, but Neferura controls half of their region, while Thutmose controls the other half, and Thutmose was not content to hold onto just his half. What unfolds in the book is a (one-sided) power struggle, with Neferura trying to navigate family power struggles while coming out the other side not dead.

I'll start out by saying this book felt very YA in its writing style. Dialogue is very he said/she said, and while there are some adult situations involved (notably SA), they're only loosely touched on before retreating back into the day-in-the-life-of-a-power-struggle format of the book. Character development was basically nonexistent, and some of the characters started blending together for me near the end. Everything just felt a bit watered down and bland, like what you'd find in a book meant for a younger audience.

I also thought the ending was abrupt and unsatisfying. Ending spoilers here: Neferura is getting ready to have her child, she fades to black, and then we're in the epilogue where evidently she was secreted away by the wise woman and her death faked, but we never actually experience any of that. It just felt really unfulfilling after the buildup of the rest of the book.

Just not my cup of tea. I was bored through most of the second half, but was too committed to put it down.

Poaching is terrible, full stop. It’s one of those things you know (or, should know) instinctively is bad, but apparently we still need books and novellas like these to keep on telling people it’s bad, because it’s still happening. Humans keep being humans.

Mammoths have been brought back, but have forgotten how to be mammoths. There’s no other mammoths to teach them how to mammoth, and so their efforts up to this point have ended in failure. Now they’ve taken the mind/thoughts/personality of a human, the late Dr. Damira, expert in elephants, and implanted it into the mind of a mammoth. The idea is that she, with her inborn knowledge of elephants, will be able to guide mammoths accordingly, being similar animals and all. Instead of this intriguing premise, we follow along as a band of poachers targeting mammoths for their incredibly valuable ivory and the inevitable conflict between them and the mammoths.

I thought this was a really good story with flaws. I far and away loved Damira’s viewpoint the best, and would have appreciated a much longer book that took its time with a lot of the ideas and technologies introduced. As a novella you have to go into it expecting that a lot of what’s discussed and posed won’t be answered by the author in a satisfying way, leaving the reader to mull over the words themselves. I do like this aspect, but part of me also wonders if the book would have had more impact if given the space to expand a bit more. The poachers viewpoint was okay, but ultimately not compelling to me, despite the author’s attempts at characterizing and humanizing at least one of them. They’re still poachers at the end of the day, after all.

I also listened to the audiobook of this, and while the person doing Damira’s voice was fantastic, her male counterpart doing the poachers was kind of bad. Flat delivery of lines, delivered in a very low tone of voice that had me cranking my volume up for his portions every time. It doesn’t impact my rating of the actual book at all, but I’m noting it here in case anyone else is looking at the audiobook.

A valuable, worthwhile read, regardless.

"Lucky for us they don’t know we are that stupid."

Oooooof this was a rough book to read.

This one takes place between movies 5 (Empire Strikes Back) and 6 (Return of the Jedi), and covers Luke, Leia, & co. on a mission to retrieve Han who is at this point in the story frozen in carbonite but not yet turned over to Jabba. Prince Xizor features heavily in the story in this one, and was one of the reasons my husband said I should read it. Xizor and Vadar are butting heads behind the scenes, and in an attempt to out-alpha each other, Vadar is trying to capture Luke alive while Xizor is trying to kill him first.

The writing is clunky in this one, especially during action scenes where the author starts ending his lines in em dashes rather than punctuation, switching to another POV within the same fight, ending that line with an em dash, switching again, and on and on until the author finally lets the sentence (scene?) end. It made things a bit hard to follow and seemed unnecessary. The author also had a tendency to have multiple points of view in each chapter, some only a paragraph or two long, which was kinda grating. Finally, the whole Xizor/Leia section was a whole lot of ick.

Not my favorite of the OG legacy books.

"Run as far away as you’d like, the wall had told me. I will always be there."

Our dear Unnamed Protagonist has a bit of an identity issue. He met a girl when he was 17, had a brief, unrequited love, and then she vanished. During their time together, they played a game imagining a walled city together. This stuck with our Unnamed Protagonist long after she vanished, until circumstances bring him to the very city the two of them dreamed up when they were kids. Lo and behold, the 16 year old girl is there, acting as the Unnamed Protagonist’s assistant in dream reading. Things get along swimmingly (if a bit same-y, day after day after day after day after….), until the Unnamed Protagonist helps his own shadow leave the city, never to return. Suddenly we’re back in Japan, in Fukushima, with our Unnamed Protagonist acting as a librarian in a very remote town. Where did the walled city go? What does the dead-but-not old head librarian know about the walled city and how to get back? Who is the kid with the Yellow Submarine sweatshirt? All these questions and (so many) more are yours to explore by the end.

I won't get into my deeper thoughts on what I thought this book meant, because that's more for the reader to find. I will say I liked the themes here of (thematic spoilers here) duality, the perception of reality, and moving on from unrequited love, amongst other things.

Right off the bat I feel like this had some pacing issues in the middle. I enjoyed the young love setup in the beginning, and enjoyed the satisfying payoff as things start accelerating past the midpoint of the book, but the day-after-day sameness of the library in Fukushima felt a little thin. The detail is certainly there though, so if you love Murakami depicting everyday life (I do), you’ll get that itch scratched here. In true Murakami fashion, don’t go into this looking for definitive answers from the author, because the real answers are the ones you find (or, make up convincingly) along the way. I appreciated being able to revisit the town from Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and was pleasantly surprised that it didn’t feel like a rehash exactly, just another story layered over the same town. And finally, while there’s no sex in this book (Murakami bingo card holders with ‘weird sex’ as a square, I’m sorry), we do get some of that patent ogling of underage girls and dated-feeling thoughts about middle aged women here. If you can’t overlook those things and enjoy the story told here, I’d give the book a pass.

Just a pleasant read from one of my favorite authors.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an ecopy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

After a weak few books, I'm glad to see I'm enjoying this series again. We're back in the Three Pines, we're well-fed off Gabri's food, and the neighbors are (mostly) just as delightful as they used to be. Things do feel a tad...messy, however.

I don't want to get too far into the plot of this book since it is a mystery after all, but I do feel like it's noteworthy to mention that two real life events are referenced in this book, and play a role in the mystery: a graduation honoring the (real life) tragedy of the École Polytechnique massacre, and a giant reproduction of (the real life) The Paston Treasure being found in an walled off attic space in the Three Pines. The mystery revolves around how the painting got there, why this particular painting was given modern touches in its reproduction, and what role two siblings play in both the murder of their mother when they were children and the current events happening in Three Pines.

There's a lot going on in this one. I think that the author should have chosen to focus on either (major plot spoilers here) Fiona and Sam as the killer(s), or John Fleming as the mastermind, but not both. I feel like the siblings are just in the story to serve as misdirections to conceal the true plot, but they don't even really have much of an impact that way either. It just felt unnecessary to have both, and muddied the case even more than it already was. A lot relied on coincidence and timing too, which drove me up a wall. My brain kept feeding me reasons why this whole thing would have fallen apart if Gamache or anyone else at all had done even one thing differently, which took me out of the story a bit.

Still, this kept me reading to the end, as a good story will. I just feel like these books are getting messier and messier.

I think calling this a retelling of Hansel and Gretel is a bit misleading, but not in a bad way. For one, this is more of a continuation of Gretel (Greta) and Hansel (Hans)'s stories, as this book takes place well after being imprisoned by the witch as kids. For another, the author weaves in other Brothers' Grimm stories (most notably Snow White/Rose Red, and some references to Rumpelstiltskin) to tell something that's entirely new and unique and fun. Lumping all this under a simple tag like "retelling" seems reductive and does this a disservice, actually.

Greta has been doing her best to make ends meet for her and her brother Hans by selling gingerbread in their local village, but she's never been considered one of them. Lots of whispers about her being a witch and cursed in some way abound, so she's never really fit in anywhere. And with her brother racking up debt after debt, she has to find a way to keep him safe that doesn't involve her becoming a domestic servant, or worse. She encounters Mathias in the woods, a stranger with a mysterious secret that draws her in more than pushes her away, and it's through this encounter that she starts realizing there's much more to her childhood story than a simple witch.

The telling of this story was beautiful, but I will say it has a bit of a slow start. It took maybe 15-20% before I started getting invested in what was going on, but it ended up being a satisfying wait. There's romance here as well, and while I get a bit impatient at romance scenes in books (just not my thing, not judging), I actually thought Mathias and Greta seem sweet together. I do think the ending came a bit fast and abrupt, but I'm willing to forgive it because the rest of the story was so well done.

Also a trigger warning heads up: Chapter 25 is pretty brutal, if animal cruelty gets to you I'd probably skip it. It's not required to understand the story if you've been paying attention up to that point.

Another enjoyable entry in the Murderbot Diaries series! I actually enjoyed the first book just a bit more than this one, but I loved that our Murderbot friend is doing things of his own volition and looking for answers to the big questions he has about his past. It almost feels a bit like a footnote in this book though, as most of the plot centers around Murderbot's interaction with a group of down-on-their-luck workers trying to get their IP back.

There's a lot going on in this book, and while it's all fun to read about, in novella form everything feels like it happens so quick. That's really my only minor hangup about this one, but it's still an entertaining read regardless.

I actually really enjoyed this book. It's very much a noir mystery, in that there's large swaths of the book where we get a lot of introspective thought trips through our protagonist's history, views, and character insights. Normally that sort of unfiltered thought dialogue drives me up a wall, but I thought it worked well for this setting and didn't entirely bog me down in detail.

Our protagonist (whose name we never find out) is an aging police detective, who hears that an old client of his during his head of security days, the scientist-cum-savior-of-the-world Akira Kimura is fearing for her life, so he drops in to see what he can do. And finds her dead.

That's basically it for the plot, as is tradition for a lot of detective noir stories. Where I thought this book shined was in the rich detail of the world. It's a far future Earth where we have underwater sea houses, AI personal assistants, and a whole host of cultural issues associated with climate change and classism. I really loved that we got to know this Earth so well through the eyes and thoughts of our nameless protagonist.

There's also a bit of (thematic/character spoilers here) unreliable narrator aspect to this that I appreciated, where our protagonist maybe isn't as upstanding as we're led to believe. And hanging over the entire book is the was-there-wasn't-there aspect of the Sessho-seki Comet that was a nice touch.

This one gave me brain food, and I like it for that. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but if an introspective sci-fi-themed detective noir story gets you interested, give this a shot.

What a weirdly unremarkable book. I listened to the audiobook and experienced the weird feeling of totally forgetting each chapter I finished as I finished them.

This is a historical fiction mystery where the detective is actually a lady doctor in a period where ladies just aren't doctors. She's a teacher at a school for other ladies who wish to become doctors, and we get many scenes about her teaching/doctoring, and the ridicule/disparagement she faces doing so. A friend of hers goes missing and she takes it upon herself to determine why, so while she's teaching/doctoring, she's also being a detective. She gets up to a lot in the 1800s.

I thought the ending was fine, I thought the writing was fine, I thought our main character was a bit too much "good at everything" to be believable, but I know a lot of people don't mind that. Just nothing about this book stuck with me though, and I can't put my finger on why. It did feel a bit slow in the beginning, where most of the book is spent introducing us to our main character and spending a lot of time in her classes teaching students.

I guess if the premise sounds interesting give it a try? Lots of people seem to enjoy this book, but I thought it was bland and kind of forgettable.

"As far as interplanetary warfare was concerned, this was up close and personal."

Holy hell this took me forever to get through. I'm not sure why, the series is actually pretty great, but somewhere after the first third I just stopped reading it for the longest time.

In any case, this book was the galactic conclusion to the trilogy, where everyone we've met along the way comes together to have a final showdown against the curators. Like the other two books, this one's split amongst the different POV characters we've been following the entire time, and we follow their perspectives as we ride the buildup and climax of the entire trilogy. There's some subverted deaths, some actual deaths, and plenty of character development and romance(!) along the way.

I actually felt like this final book had too much character development, as it sort of took away from any sort of final battle I was expecting. While I love the care and dedication to these characters, their personal stories basically took the spotlight and the actual curator fight/confrontation was just a footnote at the end of the whole thing. Kind of disappointing after the buildup to this point.

Still, this was a really entertaining series, with obvious parallels to Mass Effect (the waystations, the curators), Star Wars (the Idran Var and a number of other things), and a few other sci-fi tropes along the way. Highly recommend if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Cute, but ultimately forgettable. Kind of a tale about how a small lie can quickly balloon into something unmanageable, but I don't think the execution was all that great. A lot of common sense reactions from the humans in the story (shock, horror, fear) were absent in favor of the underlying message of acceptance and making the lie right in the end.

The artwork was also kind of weirdly unsettling to me. Like a comic strip, but even more basic? I don't know, I just didn't connect much with the art or the layout.

Fine for a cute story, not much else.

"Fearlessness, as Logen Ninefingers had once observed, is a fool's boast."

Look, okay guys? Okay? I finished this series! And now I can (honestly) say that I've already read it when someone says I should read it. So you can stop recommending it to me!

My full thoughts about the full series was that book 2 was the best, both story-wise and pacing-wise. This book is better than book 1 to me in basically every way, but it lacks a certain something that makes it better placed than book 2 in my mind.

This book specifically had some really awesome chapters. I loved that this book shrugged off its one-character-per-chapter POV structure for certain huge events, giving us multiple perspectives of a single event within a single chapter. This allowed you to check in briefly with all your favorites to make sure everything is (more or less) okay with them and see how they fit into the larger event being told. It's a nice touch, and employed wonderfully in this book.

I have some minor hangups about a few of the minor characters in this book/series, but maybe they're addressed in the followup books or a short story. I haven't really checked. One specific example of this is (character/plot spoilers here) Queen Terez. Her attitude is a neat twist on the married to the king trope, but it didn't seem worked in very well. We get a few chapters involving it, and a conclusion (more or less) involving Glokta, and that's basically it. It didn't seem all that important to include, and while it doesn't really take away from the story, it doesn't really add anything either. Again, maybe this is addressed in later books/stories, I obviously haven't gotten that far. There's one or two other minor characters that would fit this as well.

But overall, a really enjoyable read once the series really got rolling. Glokta remains my favorite.

"We are those who resist."

I'm still really enjoying this series, but I felt like things dragged near the middle of this book a bit. My attention wandered in a few chapters, and one of the points of view I really liked from the first book seemed utterly different in this one.

Book two picks up where book one left off, with the waystations starting to pop off with mysterious signals, and each of the main players from the first book off on their own little adventures. We follow these different characters on their stories, with Kojan trying to come to terms with his impending death-by-implant-malfunction, Rivus butting heads with Tarvan over whether they should secure a friendship with the enemy-of-my-mysterious-enemy and create a united front, Niole trying to figure out if she's Idran-Var or a legionnaire, and Ridley waxing hot and cold over Halressan (mostly hot) and supposedly doing stuff plot-related, but not a lot actually happens with her.

If you couldn't tell from that, Ridley's POV was my least favorite in this book. (character/plot spoilers here) She's nowhere near the scrappy human-dumped-into-an-alien-underworld she was in the first book. Now she's attached at the hip to Halressan, who spends most of this book ignoring her. I also don't really know what she contributed to the overall plot beyond jetting out to some remote corner of the galaxy and waking up an old siolean goddess-but-not-really. In the first book she moved a lot of plot, had a lot of spunk, and was pretty badass. Now she's kinda moony and can't seem to decide what she wants to do for herself anymore. I don't know, not my thing. But beyond that, the rest of the book was pretty great. Without having to take time to do as much worldbuilding and story setup, this book was very much wall-to-wall action. Lots of flashy things happen to keep you interested, and I particularly liked Rivus's POV in this one. The angst he feels over his best friend is fantastic.

Just an overall really interesting, fun sci-fi book. Absolutely picking up book 3.

I actually thought this was really good! I'm not the hugest DC fan outside of Batman, but I appreciated the different take on the Superman origin story where the Els have set up a whole kingdom, Bruce is a bastard son, and there's a rival kingdom wanting to bring the whole thing down. There's some really great art here as well, hats off to the artist.

I think my favorite part about this entire thing is Harley's role as an advisor of sorts to Bruce. She's still unmistakably Harley, but there's an undercurrent of actual wisdom and concern to her advice that I appreciated as being different and special.

Just a fun Elseworlds medieval tale, highly recommend.

"You'd have to be a bold man to bet your life on what I'd dare. How bold are you?"

Now we're talking.

Despite having some issues with the first book being slow, the cast feeling a bit huge, and having no real idea where things were headed until the last third of the book, I still came away from it mostly enjoying the experience. I went into book two with some cautious optimism as a result, and I have to say this exceeded my expectations nicely.

Things pick up where the first book left off, with all the same character POVs, plot lines, and motivations intact. Because the first book spent so much time setting up the world, this is all flash and no filler. We have city sieges, an epic world-spanning journey, personal journeys of self discovery and realization, a budding romance(?), and more character defining moments than you can shake a Shanka at. I love that the author manages to make this book simultaneously dark and humorous, without it becoming too forced. Everything has a point and a purpose, and it took until book two for me to see that.

Just an excellent second book overall. I've already started on the third.

Well I thought this was absolutely delightful.

It’s a fairly straightforward retelling of the Inch High Samurai folktale from Japan, but where this one shines best is in its artwork and in its dialogue. The art is rather one-note (kind of like an old samurai film), but also beautiful at the same time. There’s some full page spreads that are incredibly striking and emotional at the same time. The dialogue too was something special, rather like if this traditional folktale were being told by the creators of Avatar: The Last Airbender where he banters with his friends in one scene, bookended with serious dialogue about his purpose in life with his father and his teacher that really stirs the emotions in another.

I think this was a really well done telling of this particular tale. Give it a go if you’re interested in Japanese folklore, because you won’t be disappointed.

Hmm.... I think I wanted to like this book more than I did, so I think this warranted 3.5 stars more than 4 stars. I loved the kinda-retro-kinda-not art style, and the cover was especially striking. There's lots of playing with panel layouts, particularly later in the book, which I like to see.

Where it kind of fell a little flat for me was in the story. It's a fairly straightforward haves-exploiting-the-have-nots tale, with the narrative twist being that they're literal children being exploited to maintain the way of life for the adults who built the ship. They're forever dangling the 'when we get to Eden, everything will be paradise' carrot in front of the workers who maintain the ship, glossing over the fact that the graduates are never seen again and that they never seem to get to Eden. I thought the pacing of the story was a bit weak, things take a while to get going, and then towards the end some of the important plot points get glossed over or downplayed. One example of this specifically (story spoilers here) is when Effie and friends break their way into where the graduates are, and we're treated to the horror that they're being impregnated to bear the children to continue the cycle, and all we really get is a window scene looking in on them and some vague threatening dialogue and that's it. I feel like that moment could've been expounded on a bit more to make it hit home a bit harder. There are other smaller examples of reveals and such that I feel like would've had a bit more emotional impact if they were expanded out a bit more.

It's still a decent read, just one I expected to get more out of in the end.

"That’s what the book’s about, right? The pleasure of finding your people?"

This book is about Artie, a man in New York trying to make it as a writer writing his first book, hanging out with his friends at a local bar, dealing with complex relationship issues, and just generally living life as a gay 20-something in a big city. This book is also about Artie, an approaching-elderly man 30 years later, trying to make the best of things without his close friends and lovers, attempting to make himself useful by volunteering at GALS, the local LGBTQ senior center and falling (literally) into a new group of friends he has to navigate now. We bounce between these two time periods as Artie’s story is fleshed out, following him through high and low points, and just generally getting to know this man’s life story.

I’m not even in the demographic this book is about, and I thought this book was delightful. There’s something about following a person through their life that really gets to me sometimes, and I thought the author did an incredibly good job of making me feel invested in Artie, both in the past 90s period and the current 2022 period. There’s occasional dark moments in Artie’s life, but the author does a good job of making even these low points seem worthwhile and meaningful in his life. The 90s period especially brings up a lot of tough topics surrounding the AIDS crisis and the impact it has on their community, but I thought it was very respectfully done.

Just a book about a guy and his found family, delightful and heartwarming.

I won a free copy of this ARC from Goodreads Giveaways.

This book is probably a master class in how to write a character who’s neurodivergent (named Sunday) and the struggles she goes through in trying to understand her daughter. A new couple moves in next door to them, and the over-the-top personality of the wife, Vita, entrances Sunday. The two seem to hit it off, but after one rewarding summer for Sunday, she slowly comes to realize that the couple next door isn’t what they appear and her entire carefully constructed life slowly starts unraveling.

I really was incredibly interested in seeing how Sunday navigates her world. Certain colors of foods and things bother her, so that her meals generally all have to be of a certain color for her to eat them. She views life and human courtesies through the lens of an old etiquette book for ladies, and dispenses pearls of wisdom out of a book about Sicilian folklore. She approaches conversations tonally, and habitually taps out speech patterns and imitates the speaker’s lilt in her head. I liked seeing how she tried to adapt to Vita’s unconventional ways, making an effort to get to know her despite being so foreign in mannerisms. It was enlightening getting inside Sunday’s head and seeing how she sees the world.

Unfortunately this only took up half the book. The other half, after the summer Sunday spent with Vita and her husband Rollo, when the wheels start falling off Sunday’s ordered life, wasn’t nearly as interesting to me. Things felt a little repetitive as the same thoughts, ideas, and plot points are reiterated and retread. The buildup to an ending I suspected was coming felt slow, and the payoff at the end felt a little weak. A lot of Sunday’s quirks felt like they were put by the wayside in favor of the plot involving her daughter, not that they stopped existing, but they stopped mattering in the story as much. I don’t know, the second half just didn’t click with me as much as the first half.

But there’s lots here for people to like! I highly recommend giving it a try if the premise still appeals to you, because it may hit you differently than it hit me.

I picked this one up because it reminded me of the premise to another series I read ages ago (The Acts of Caine by Matthew Woodring Stover, highly highly suggest it), and I wanted to see another take on the idea. Essentially, there’s a world within a world—a destination where anyone (with money) can live out the story of their dreams in a fantasy world crewed by employees of a mega corp. Stella takes a PI job offered by Jericho, CEO of this company, in order to pay her family’s bills, and gets sent on a trip through all four quarters of this fantasy world chasing down a fugitive who is there for his own reasons. She gets caught up in the investigation, discovers there’s way more going on here than she anticipated, and gets stuck having to play both sides of the story in order to bring the real criminals to justice.

The story setting is unique and is mostly successful at what it sets out to do. Each quarter of this fantasy world has a different setting, to provide varied stories and backdrops for paying customers. I felt like the first two were depicted the best, but towards the end the story started feeling a little rushed and immersive detail started to be left behind. I do feel like it didn't seem very sci-fi despite the year being far into the future, which was a bit of a disappointment.

The cast of characters is unique and fairly well fleshed out, though again in the later parts of the book some of the late-introduced characters felt a little flat. Stella also felt a bit inconsistent in how she approached/reacted to situations. She’s clearly meant to be a badass female lead, but several scenes had her seem pretty helpless and reliant on the men around her.

I was aso a bit skeeved out by the choice of love interest(s?) for the main character. Relationship/story spoilers here: Corso’s constant Honey-ing (with a capital H in my ebook) grated on my nerves, and there was vague harem-esque tones here with how Henry was set up in the beginning, and Jericho’s introduction as well. Idk, maybe I’m reading too much into it.

It was fine, but I’m not sure I’ll read book two. Seriously though, if the idea of a world created just for entertainment value appeals to you, give The Acts of Caine by Matthew Woodring Stover a go. Much (much much) darker, but very satisfying.