Emma

Originally posted on bluchickenninja.com.

I felt that this was very similar to The Broken Kingdoms series by N. K. Jemisin. In both the gods are physical beings who walk the earth. Though in this the gods didn't really feel like gods. In this the gods made a city then spent 3000 years living in that city ruling over the humans and expecting to be waited on hand and foot. Apparently they rule over this world though they don't do much ruling. In fact they spend most of their time dressing in fancy clothes and going to parties. They do so little it makes you wonder if they are really gods.

This is also the first part of a duology so we might find out more in the next book. Though I don't think I will be reading it. This was a reasonably good high fantasy novel but it didn't have anything that made it stand out. It was just one of many reasonably good high fantasy novels.

*I received a copy of this book from Hodder & Stoughton in exchange for an honest review.

** I should also say that I much prefer The Broken Kingdoms to this and if you had to choose between the two you should read The Broken Kingdoms :)

Originally posted on bluchickenninja.com.

The first thing I think everyone should know about this book is that you don't need to be a fan of Amanda Palmer or her music to enjoy it. The book was advertised as a longer version of her TED talk however I felt it was more like an autobiography. The book tells the story of Amanda's life but it also shows the ways she has asked her fans and the online community for help, from finding somewhere to sleep to finding musicians to play on stage with her. Throughout the book Amanda shows that it is okay to ask for help, as she puts it “take the donut“. I genuinely believe that if you want your blog or any other artistic endeavour to become a full time job you should read this book.

Felt a little like a Star Trek episode. Probably wouldn't work as a movie, but still an enjoyable read.

This is an interesting one because it's basically The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry but from Queenie Hennessey's point of view. I have actually put off reading this book for so long because I loved Harold Fry and I was scared that this might ruin that book. Fortunately it did not and I really enjoyed it.

I want to live in this book.

Originally posted on bluchickenninja.com.

First of all I will say I got a copy of this book from Netgalley and I was only 25% through when I went out and bought a physical copy. I really enjoyed this book. It was a fascinating look at what could happen to religion if humans found life on another planet. But I have to admit I really liked the fact that you don't have to be religious in any way to enjoy this.

It brings up so many moral questions. Is it right to preach to these aliens when they barely understand human language. Is it right to give them medicine when its not clear if the aliens even understand what its for. I couldn't help but feel that these characters were breaking the Prime Directive in some way, even though its from Star Trek. One of the most interesting questions was brought up by one of the characters. Jesus died for our sins but did he die for these alien's sins as well.

Not only is this book a really interesting look at religion its a fantastic science-fiction novel too. The main character Peter is able to communicate with his wife back on Earth via a messaging system and we find out that all sorts of natural disasters have been occurring back on Earth. So we also see how Peter is torn between teaching the aliens about Christianity and worrying about his relationship with his wife and everything that is happening back on Earth.

I really enjoyed this book. The only problem I had was that the ending was very anti-climactic. I was left with more questions than answers about the situation back on Earth. But still a good read.

Originally posted on bluchickenninja.com

I have to thank Jess over at EverTheCrafter for recommending this book to me, which she did after I tried to read The Invisible Library and failed (it was a terrible book). Ink and Bone is sort of similar in that it's a book about books. But it is also so much more. In Ink and Bone, the Library of Alexandria still exists. But the Library has turned into an evil organisation that controls all the information in the world. It does this by keeping all genuine books locked away. Only allowing people to read copies of them through ancient Kindle-like technology.

Maybe it's just cause I do graphic design and have been learning about printing recently. But I love the fact that the most dangerous thing in this universe is a printing press. Copying or creating new books is banned. Johannes Gutenberg, the creator of the printing press, is in jail for his invention.

Jess comes from a family of smugglers who trade and sell original copies of books. But Jess doesn't want to join the family business. This is the point where I started getting Harry Potter flashbacks. Jess, along with other applicants get on a train to Alexandria. Where they hope to compete to get a position at the Library.

Another note, I don't mind books that have similarities to Harry Potter. What I object to is books where one of the major selling points is that it's like Harry Potter. Those books tend to never be as good as they claim.

Have I mentioned that I liked this book yet? It's a great YA adventure story. I love that one of the characters is a muslim. And that her character is more than just her religion. Two of the male characters are in a relationship and no one questions it. I love this book and am going to pretty much immediately start the second.

It took me a really long time to get into this book, I must have been a third of the way through before I started enjoying it. It was actually really good, think Contact set in China.

Originally posted on bluchickenninja.com.

Hatshepsut was born into a privileged position in the royal household, and she was expected to bear the sons who would legitimise the reign of her father's family. Her failure to produce a male heir was ultimately the twist of fate that paved the way for her improbable rule as a cross-dressing king.

Hatshepsut successfully negotiated a path from the royal nursery to the very pinnacle of authority, and her reign saw one of Ancient Egypt's most prolific building periods. Scholars have long speculated as to why her monuments were destroyed within a few decades of her death, all but erasing evidence of her unprecedented rule. The Woman Who Would Be King traces the unconventional life of an almost-forgotten pharaoh and explores our complicated reactions to women in power.

This book is fascinating but it is also extremely frustrating. The author concedes that we do not have much information about Hatshepust. We know very little about her personality, her political manoeuvring and her relationships with her father, Thutmose I, her brother and husband, Thutmose II, and her nephew and co-regent, Thutmose III. The author makes liberal use of words like “perhaps” and “maybe”, she poses numerous questions asking what Hatshepust might have thought or how she felt. But of course we can't know the answers to these questions as the records simply do not exist. So the author makes assumptions of what the thoughts and feelings of Hatshepsut may have been.

I think it is important to learn about Hatshepsut. As the author puts it:

The challenges Hatshepsut faced and the sacrifices she made are familiar to powerful women of the twenty-first century: balancing the personal and the political, overcoming stereotypes of hysterical and unbalanced femininity, and making compromises never asked of powerful men. For Hatshepsut, her unprecedented success was rewarded with a short memory, while the failures of other female leaders from antiquity will be forever immortalised in our cultural consciousness.

However with all the speculation and guessing in this book I can't help but feel there may be a better way of learning about Hatshepsut.

It was good. But it also ended just as it started to get interesting.

Originally posted on bluchickenninja.com

I was really disappointed with this book. It was slow, boring and I didn't care for the characters. It felt like it would have worked better as a novella rather than a full length story. However, the final 30 pages were fantastic. Like classic terrifying Stephen King. I was told that the ending was very H. P. Lovecraft however I haven't read any of his work so cannot confirm this. But this ending gave me a lot of trouble in trying to rate the book. While the end is brilliant it still does not – in my opinion – make paying full price for this book worthwhile.

Originally posted on bluchickenninja.com.

I wouldn't say I was disappointed with The Fifth Season. It just wasn't as good as what I have come to expect from NK Jemisin. I mean, I did enjoy it, and I will definitely buy the sequel. It just didn't have that spark that made me love The Killing Moon and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.

But I did enjoy this. I like the diversity of the characters in Jemisin's books. I like the way she explores sexuality, she is one of the very few authors I've read that has more than just straight pairings. I liked the powers these characters had – basically the ability to control thermal, kinetic and other forms of energy (like earthquakes). I thought it was really interesting how these characters were treated because of their powers.

But the writing style threw me off. Part of the story is narrated from a second-person point of view. I guessed the link between the three main characters before it was revealed which was slightly annoying. There also seemed to be a number of strange grammatical errors. At one point a character talks about catching pregnancy. Look, it was good, I did enjoy it and I can't wait for the sequel. It just wasn't quite as good as Jemisin's other books.

DNF'ed. Liked the idea but could have been about 100 pages shorter. Got bored of reading it.

Originally posted on bluchickenninja.com.

I was really surprised by this. It's a very good alien invasion type book. Despite being YA and having some romance in it, it doesn't focus on the romance (something that has annoyed me in other books (I'm talking about you Across The Universe grumble grumble)). Also it has a bunch of references to Star Wars and Star Trek which was nice. For example: “And there was his face against the smudged glass and his smile as he rocketed across a galaxy far, far away in his yellow X-wing starfighter, jumping to warp speed, until the dusty yellow space-ship was swallowed by dust.”

Originally posted on bluchickenninja.com.

I think I should start this review by mentioning the cover of this book which is so pretty I took one look at it and immediately decided I needed to read this book. It wasn't even the cover of the first book I saw (this whole series has super pretty covers), all I knew is it was science-fiction, it was written by Stephen Baxter and it had to be mine. Now I know many people will say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover (even though we all do) and I am very pleased to say that this book is as good as it's cover.

I think the best way to describe this book is to compare it to Interstellar. Both start out on Earth and are about scientists who find a thing in space and so decide to send people out to take a closer look at the thing in space. But this is where it starts to get weird. Because the closest thing to an antagonist in this book is a bunch of smart squid. Yes, smart squid. And it's not even like the squid are really evil, they are just hanging out in space doing their thing which just so happens to prevent the scientists from doing their thing.

But there is a chapter that gets really weird which involves a squid being sent into the future. I don't mean a few thousand years, I mean trillions and trillions of years into the future, basically to the end of the universe. And that chapter is pretty terrifying if I'm going to be honest, because it shows a very bleak outlook for the human race. You basically get to see a race of people trying to survive by mining black holes for energy. And it's pointed out that even this won't be enough, at some point there won't be any more black holes and no matter how much this race of future beings tries to avoid it everything is going to turn to dust in the end. I think the even scarier thing is that most of the science behind this is real, seriously, if you want to terrify yourself go google the heat death of the universe. It might just ruin your day.

So basically Time is like Interstellar but better and with more science and smart jellyfish and even though it gets a little weird at the end nothing can compare to how weird the ending of Interstellar was.

** I received a copy of this book from the publisher.

I really wanted to enjoy Emily Eternal because the premise sounded really interesting. An artificial consciousness trauma counsellor trying to figure out their purpose during the end of the world. But there was so much I didn't like about the book which overshadowed it.

Firstly Emily's characterisation which was downright weird. It felt like I was seeing the story through the eyes of a teenager. This came across as a serious story written (I'm guessing) for adults. Then you have Emily with all sorts of interesting quotes like “I've felt no return to my expanded (and totes goddess-of-information-like) abilities”.

If you like YA romance books I guess you'll like this because thats basically what it is. Emily isn't like other girls (literally). And she gets her totally hot boyfriend. The whole intimacy thing between Emily and ?? (I'm going to say Kevin) was really weird. Emily doesn't physically exists, she's like a hologram projected onto the character's brain. But they manage to have sex. I'm not going to ask how.

I think the most annoying part of the plot was how it set up the rules for how the world works and then proceeds to break them. Even though Emily is a trauma counsellor she can manipulate cells and DNA. But apparently curing cancer is a step too far. In the space of two chapters she also taught herself how to swim and fight. Don't even ask me how the story ends because I read the ending three times and I still couldn't tell you.

The world just didn't seem believable. Too many science things were explained away with its basically just magic. I've literally read stories about moving an entire planet which felt more believable than this because it was grounded in science.

Basically its like Seveneves. If Seveneves was a YA fantasy book rather than hard science fiction.

Originally posted on bluchickenninja.com.

I think this might possibly be one of the most interesting books I have ever read. It gives a detailed account of the US-Israeli effort to sabotage Iran's nuclear enrichment program through a cyber-attack on the computers controlling the centrifuges. It has interviews with the specialists who originally found the virus and their efforts to slowly pick apart its code, the book then goes on to show how this virus affected the machinery at the nuclear plant. I found this fascinating, its incredible to see how a few thousand lines of code could have such devastating real world consequences. It really makes you think about the future now that computers are such a huge part of our daily life.

The book does however assume that the reader has some knowledge of computers. If you think viruses are those things you go to the doctor for and worms are found at the bottom of the garden you may want to give this one a miss.

I have read a lot of books about aliens. I have also read a lot of books about social media. But I think Hank Green is the only person who could write a book about social media AND aliens. The whole book is basically about a graphic designer who makes first contact so it's an instant win for me.

bluchickenninja.com

Imagine a book which starts out like Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson. The middle is a little like the start of Red Rising by Pierce Brown. The end is somewhere between Children of Time and The Freeze-Frame Revolution. That is sort of where Noumenon lies.

I wouldn't say I loved Noumenon. But it also wasn't terrible. The premise is that a scientist finds a star, and humans decide to send a fleet of ships to investigate this star. Its a story set on a generational ship, so there are going to be some predictable elements. The strange thing is that this book features all the plot points you would expect from a book like this.

Losing contact with earth, revolutionaries trying to take over the ship, reaching the goal of the mission, mechanical problems, then getting back to earth. It almost felt like the author had a list of items which needed to be featured in the story. But the result was it felt like they had been shoehorned in.

What made it harder to enjoy the book was the characters. The story is told through a series of short stories. All told from the point of view of different characters on the fleet. With a good amount of time between these stories. The result was that it was hard to feel for the characters. Because you're only with them for a short while.

But the fleet is staffed by clones, so you have different generations of the same clone appearing. It's almost like you're to think of the character is the same, though they are on a different version of the clone. But that doesn't work because a huge plot point of the book is showing how clones are different, even though their DNA is the same.

It probably didn't help that I read Noumenon immediately after Record of A Spaceborn Few so it was hard to no compare the two. Both are about a fleet of generational ships, on a journey for one reason or other. But where the Becky Chambers book excelled is that it's a little story, with the setting in the background. Yes, it's on a ship travelling somewhere, but it's not about that.

Originally posted on bluchickenninja.com.

The first thing I'm going to say is part of the reason why I was so surprised by this book is that I picked it entirely based on the cover. I had not heard of Ready Player One, I was just in Waterstones looking for something to read on a long train journey. Ready Player One just happened to be in the ‘buy one get one free' section, like literally the only reason I bought this book was because I would get it half price. I'm sure everyone knows that picking a book based on its cover is very hit or miss so I was amazed that not only was it better than I expected, it was about all the things I love.

I will fully admit that this is one of my all time favourite books, but it's really not the greatest story. Large parts of it are based on other games and movies, there is even a chapter when Wade (our main character) plays Matthew Broderick's role in Wargames. This is also a part of the reason why I think a movie adaption could be extremely difficult to make.

But I don't think it's good enough to say I like this book because it mentions nerdy stuff, I already liked that and would still like it if I hadn't read this book. I think I like the fact that it acknowledges nerd culture and acknowledges the fact that nerd culture is becoming mainstream. I mean it's now cool to like Star Trek and Doctor Who. I love the fact that people don't have to hide that part of themselves and this book celebrates it. Being a nerd and knowing lots of stuff about movies and games makes you cool.

I love the fact that a huge part of this is set in an MMO and even mentions some of the downsides of being a gamer (weight gain and living in your parents basement). Though I am not a child of the 80s and sometimes didn't know what Wade was referencing I still enjoyed those parts. I also really love how it comments on data privacy. Look if you're a nerd and you like science-fiction, gaming and the 80s you will probably like it.

I'm not sure if it was just the translation that made this book feel strange but it felt more like a stream of consciousness rather than a proper story. This is the type of book you need to put aside time for and read in one sitting. It's set over a period of 24 hours and you see how a boy dies in a car crash and you follow the story of his heart as it's transplanted into another person. But it was pretty interesting, not the best, but I'm still glad I read it.

Originally posted on bluchickenninja.com.

This was a very strange story. I literally finished it and went “Wait what?” because it is that weird. At the start you think Bjorn is just a regular guy but as the story goes on we find out that he is rude, narcissistic and just not a nice guy. You can't help but wonder if he is just mean or if he doesn't understand what he is doing wrong. Sort of a Sheldon Cooper type character.

I can't say I liked this book. Parts of it were quite boring but I can't help but feel that emphasises the boredom that comes from working in an office. Fortunately this book was very short at only 128 pages. Though it does end quite abruptly, it never explains what really happened leaving you wondering if the room is real or not.

Originally posted on bluchickenninja.com

I think the best way to describe Artemis is it's a heist story. Artemis is an established base on the Moon. Our main character Jasmine (Jazz for short) is a porter, basically a futuristic version of the DPD guy. Jazz is also a smuggler on the side and is asked to interfere with Artemis' oxygen supply so that another company can take over the contract to supply it.

Of course it wouldn't be a Andy Weir book without a heavy emphasis on actual science. Obviously I have no idea if it's accurate or not but he goes into quite extensive detail about chemical reactions and how airlocks work. It's actually very clever what he has managed to achieve by doing that.By basing this world in our reality as much as possible, by using real science and chemistry he has made the world feel real. You could almost believe this is what a base on the Moon would be like.

The most noticeable thing about this book is how diverse it is. Science fiction has definitely got better when it comes to diversity but it still has a long way to go. The main character, Jazz, is from Saudi Arabia, she states that she isn't religious though her father is. There is a little note about the problems of facing towards Mecca to pray while not on the same planet as it which I really liked.

The other characters come from a number of different parts of the world. It also features a number of LGBT characters and we see one person with a disability who actually chose to live on the Moon as it allowed her to be more mobile. I think the only thing I would have liked was to see Jazz with some female friends. Also there is nothing about the problems of having periods while wearing a spacesuit. Which I thought might get a mention considering the plot.

Originally posted on bluchickenninja.com :)

Stiletto by Daniel o'Malley is the long awaited sequel to The Rook (which you should totally read if you haven't already) and the only way I can really describe these books is it's the british version of Men In Black but with more fantastical creatures and British humor. In fact I think the very very British humor in this was the thing that stood out the most to me. This book is very very silly, it doesn't take itself too seriously and that makes for a very enjoyable read.

However that doesn't necessarily make this a good read. I liked it but it wasn't great. It seemed to drag on forever in parts. There was quite a lot of unnecessary exposition especially around the history of the Grafters. The Rook was written entirely from Myfanwy's point of view so I was thrown off quite bad when I found this was written from a number of different pov's. The end part takes place in Scotland and I couldn't enjoy it because it seemed that o'Malley hadn't consulted a map at all before writing distances. I realise there are parts of Scotland that are totally uninhabited for miles and miles but it would have taken all of 5 minutes for him to learn that everything is very close together in central Scotland. Okay mini rant over. But I have to say though it wasn't very good, I still enjoyed it. Maybe even if you don't read this give The Rook a try because it works very well as a standalone novel.

I don't normally cry at the end of books but I cried at the end of this one. Would recommend.