I started reading this book about 9:30 this morning. Intended to take an hour, ended up finally finishing it around 12:05.
I feel like crying. I just want to sit for the rest of the day and not do or say or think anything, but just cry a little. It's a feeling like you've been punched in the chest for no good reason except that you believed the world was an okay place but it's really not, and I could say a bunch of self-indulgent pretentious things here, but what good would it do?
I mean, I like reading things that make me feel, but I think I got a bit more than I bargained for here. And it's not like a fullness of feeling, it's like a sheer empty wasteland of feeling. It takes your feels out in the desert and guns them down in cold blood then comes back and kicks you in the teeth for having feels in the first place, how dare you.
I need to go hug some puppies or something. On a side note, the movie was an incredibly good adaptation.
Not sure what else to say. Just kinda feel like I've lost something I didn't even know I had.
A fitting end to the Lunar Chronicles, all things considered.
BY way of criticism, this book is a lot longer and more complex than any of the others. More than once I felt the scope and number of threads weighing down the narrative. The unabashedly happy ending, while earned, is more than a little improbable and dare I say contrived. I feel like the depictions of future tech, geopolitics, and bloody combat are thin at best, requiring a fair suspension of disbelief (see below for my sidebar rant on guns)
Perhaps I wanted this series to be hard sci-fi for adults when realistically it's a space opera fairy tale for teens.
But it is an unabashed fairy tale after all, and the DNA of that genre flows well in the veins of this book. More-so than any of the others in my opinion. Where the expected callbacks to the source stories have at times been heavy-handed and clumsy (Particularly in Cinder), in this they seemed to “fit” better and didn't feel as obvious. Very minor spoiler, the literal poisoned apple was probably my favorite. It made perfect sense for Levana and was pulled off perfectly. The world-building finally gets a chance to shine; I liked the depiction of Luna as a alien society in so many ways (including the details required to make it work with the limited resources of the moon).
And while I complain about it above, the happy ending really is welcome. This series grew on me over time, and I'm glad the characters made it out okay. I would recommend this to anyone who likes YA sci-fantasy and isn't afraid of suspending disbelief a little.
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Rant spoilered because it's just me blowing off steam and doesn't have much bearing on the review as a whole.
The handling of guns in this series confounds me. It's idiotic. None of the characters use them in ways that make any sense. No one uses them from ranges closer than point-blank. Only once does someone snipe at a thaumaturge from a distant concealed position (you'd think this would be an obvious tactic considering how they and the queen routinely wander, smug and self assured, into wide-open killzones). Multiple times characters call their shots, giving Lunar opponents ample opportunity to counteract the bullet with mind control or a meatshield. The mechanics of the guns are inconsistent too; sometimes they seem to work like modern (semi)automatic firearms, other times they're more like 18th-century flintlocks. It's almost never clear whether a character is using a rifle, carbine, or pistol, even when that kind of detail should have a bearing on how they move and approach a situation.As a moderate gun nut, this kind of thing makes me twitch. Just once, I would have liked to see someone handle a firearm with anything approaching military efficiency. Considering how many characters explictly have that kind of training, it's mind-boggling that none of them make use of it. Honestly this series would have been better off without firearms entirely, because as-is they're barely more effective than slingshots, throwing knives, or squirtguns.
I haven't written many reviews here, but I feel this one is necessary to balance out the glut of “love it or hate it” I'm seeing here. More of the former than the latter, because in all honesty this is a perfectly serviceable book. It's functionally well-written, there aren't any glaring errors or problems, the author has a vision, and they execute it well. Unlike the numerous one-stars, overall I'd say I enjoyed it (as opposed to just tolerating it).
However, there seems to be a dearth of middle of the road reviews, which is more applicable to my experience. It's decent but not really my cup of tea. This is a middling, somewhat shallow approach to a good idea. It's a problem somewhat endemic to this kind of YA genre story. I couldn't really sink my teeth in, so to speak, and most of the book was rather heavy-handed with telling instead of showing, when a touch of subtlety would have gone miles to improve the experience.
A recurring sort of turn-off came from the repeated insistence on trying to impress the reader with “cool” technological stuff. The only thing I found well integrated was Cinder's lie detector, because it became an instinctual, human+ kind of function, unlike the focus on clinical countdowns and decimal-precison. If the focus of your story isn't on a character's stuggle to maintain their humanity (which, despite lip-service, this story is not), then cybernetics should serve to alter the character's abilities in a natural fashion, not overload them with terminal printouts and raw source code which would be pretty much useless to all of us.
I'm hoping things get a little better in the next books as the author gains some experience. Like it or not, I'm committed and curious to see where the story goes.
I think I went into this book not knowing what to expect. I've finished it, and I'm still not quite sure what I read. It's one of those books that makes me either think I'm too shallow to get the point, or perhaps I get the point but I'm too jaded (or emotionally guarded) to feel it. Perhaps I actually expected too much or too less than what the book was willing to give, and in some form of ironic justice I'm inexplicably disappointed that I didn't get whatever I expected.
All I know is that this book moved me in some way. I cannot say what way it was. Maybe I need to read it again. Maybe it'll come to me in an hour or a day or a week. I'm not sure I want it to, because there's something incredibly powerful there. It's a little frightening.
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