Daniel Vanzin

This book is one of those 101 on how to write. The scenes are immersive, described through the use of multiple senses. The characters are brought to life with plenty of details and introspective dialogs. They are fully fleshed out, with unique personalities, narrated in an accessible language.

The exposition is perfectly paced. The plot evolves evenly throughout the book. It is interesting enough and it makes sense. The characters make sense. The villain is somewhat of a cliché, the ‘well meaning but cruel bad guy' and so are some of the characters, but that doesn't diminish the quality of the story.

The setting captures perfectly the spirit of the beginning of 20th century. It blends magic organically into the world, without being something over the top or downplayed. Major events in history of mankind are slightly changed to take into account the discovery of magic. Hitler for instance was a powerful necromancer, that used the resurrected bodies of his soldiers to keep fighting until their bones are shattered to dust. Tesla was an exceptional ‘cog', a super scientist of sorts, individuals who excel in a field of knowledge. So was Browning, the famous firearms designer, who is also an important character of the book.

Magic by the way is also explained in a very sensible manner, even rational I would say. Most of the magical people have just some minor magical affinity, with only a few developing their powers to a significant amount.

The reason I don't rate this book higher is that the plot in not exceptional/aligned enough to my interests. It is somewhat tame in most aspects (weird, fantastic, intellectual), so much that I would recommend this book to ‘normal' readers. Normal being somewhat averse to fantasy.

What follows is a minor criticism in the grand scheme of things:

- Your enemy is the most powerful human being that ever lived. He is immortal, you tried bombs, electrocution, fire, drowning, decapitation with the sharpest magically enhanced blade. Nothing worked. He haven't even got a scratch, gasped or dropped a sweat. This guy then gets a hold of the most powerful weapon ever created. It is world reaching ray that can destroy the entire US East coast with one single use, seconds after it is activated. He is about to use it for that very same purpose, and following that, he will threat the rest of the world into submission.- One guy has an idea to defeat him. But in order for him to execute his plan he must break an oath of never disobeying his superiors. He goes even further, he kills one of them. But his plan is a success. The enemy is dead, right at the last second where the US would be vaporized. Millions would have died.- You find about about his plan. Well, because he told you. You then decide he is a traitor and kills him as a reward. Never mind that by doing so, you act as judge and executioner. You also just violated the same oath he has taken, which also somewhat includes "don't execute other members of the order whenever you see fit'.- Now, I would call that a very stupid logic reasoning, most people would call it justice. That's besides the point. It is OK for stories to have such divisive characters performing actions that makes us question about its ethics and argue among ourselves. What it is NOT OK is for it to have NO CONSEQUENCE WHATSOEVER! Did any of the characters asked if killing one to save many is the right thing to do? What about cold blooded killing the culprit for said murder?

- This was a lost opportunity for plot and character developing.

I did not find anything exceptional about the premise: a young woman with super powers is enlisted to be trained in the super villains league. If the ‘villains' here is suppose to be a twist, it is of no consequence. The villains have more rules and codes of moral conduct then the average do gooder hero. I found that to be a bit cringy, but overlookable.

Therefore, this is just a story of people with super powers and how they organize into a league of individuals with the same interest. The book deals with recruiting, training and rules to follow. Other than that, there is a handful of small stories about different super powered humans (and aliens, and AIs).

The mains characters, writing and dialogues are just OK, but the main plot is slowly exposed or non-existent. This is the killer for me. I suspect this books acts as an introduction to the other, possible more interesting, ones.

Read 6:02/26:58 22%

Barely readable, and only because it was a collection of short stories that I could listen to very sparsely.

The only redeemable story was the one with the Lich and the Dragons, and not because it was well written, but because it gives a taste of what kind of stores are possible to be told in the D&D world.

A collection of short stories and some poetry. I liked the Solomon Kane, but the others failed to convey any sort of horror, which is already a genre I'm not fond of. Some stories almost feel like Lovecraft. The poems I didn't care for at all.

I find it hard to care for very short stories, unless they have something really brilliant to convey, what's the point? One of the more lengthy stories about a Werewolf was almost entertaining, but just not worth the effort to keep reading the other ones.

Read 5:14/23:39 22%

This is a short story. It is a sequel to the movie, which is mostly equal to the first book. The recap at the beginning gave me high hopes. It set the story on track as a real sequel, acknowledging all the events that has happened before.

But then I kept waiting to see a good story, and the book ended. There is the beginnings of some possibly interesting plots here, but that's it.

I like the idea of humans finding a way to thwarts hell's plans. But they are just useless bystanders, both here and in the Scarlet Gospels. The author say they are the chosen ones, they have spells and special abilities. They know the occult, they have previously faced the enemy and came out alive. But nothing of that comes to any fruition.

I went int this with VERY low expectations, and still was severely underwhelmed. This is a standard low effort fantasy, with nothing of “Diablo” to it. Not even the lore.

Three companions find a tomb, a cursed armor gets a hold of one of them, he starts murdering people. A necromancer is on his track, trying to stop him, and so is an evil general, who wants the armor for himself.

There is a demon guiding the general's sorceress who is trying to find the armor, and both of them have some hidden agenda.

People giving this 4 and 5 stars are crazy, CRAAAZYYY I say.

read 3:58 / 11:53 33%

I read until the part the boy had his dog friend sent away to prevent him from using his dog-speaking powers.

The book read as a diary of daily events, nothing caught my attention. The story developed too slow.

A six years old boy was dumped at the king's castle by his grandpa, who did not want to provide for him anymore. The boy is supposedly the bastard of prince Chivalry, which upon hearing about this, abdicates his claim as next in line to the throne.

The prince's most loyal servant, his beast master, is charged to look after Fitz since he cannot be legally recognized to have royal blood. Under his care, Fitz spent a lot of times among animals, and found out he could communicate somehow with them.

This strange power is considered dangerous because of how it was used on the past, and for his own safety, the boy must never use it, on the risk of being recognized for what he is and killed for the peril he represents.

OK, it is clear now that this “tetralogy” is going nowhere. As I have said in the previous book review, I only gave it two stars because of the beautiful prose and assuming it was split in four parts for an apparent unknown reason. But it was not a fluke, these series of books were intentionally written as they were in order to make a tetralogy. And so, I can say the previous book was awful, and this one does not seem to be doing any better.

The story starts ignoring the previous book. That's right, it begins nearly as a standalone reading. I was desperately hoping that the first chapter would redeem the non-ending of Shadow of the Torturer, but it quickly dismisses previous events as “So they got separated, and now Severian is alone again and continues on his journey.”. This is all it says about the previous book. The story does use one other character from the previous book, but as long as you know that someone has a reason for wanting Severian dead, you don't need any more context.

So, Severian now is hailed as some kind of hero, because wherever he goes his skills are needed. He is staying on an inn with his good friend Jonas (it doesn't matter who he is) and finds out that the man he is charged to execute is a friend of Vodalus, the leader of the rebels.

Severian had previously met Vodalus when he as a young teenager, and have since fantasied about joining him in order to take down the Autarch. Vodalus is also accompanied by his lover Thea, Thecla's sister, whom Severian had also met when he first saw Vodalus.

There have been some good amount of build up for those two characters. Severian is not exactly portrayed as the hero that will save the world the “evil” Autarch. Rather Vodalus is, and Thea is the first woman Severian had actually fallen in love with, and he also have spent a lot of time with her sister.

So you would expect something interesting to happen when they finally met. Maybe a psychological unraveling from one of the characters, a soul pouring dialog, a clever laid out plan to take over the Autarch, an explanation of why they want to take down him in the first place. But no, those characters are pretty much insignificant to the plot, and their encounter was very uneventful, plain and and boring.

The other subplot of notice was a re-encounter with Agia, which I did not care about appearing again. She coordinates an ambush in order to kill Sevarian but fails. When defeated, Severian motions his sword to execute her, but does not. Because he is in love with her. And Dorcas. And Thea. And Tecla. It is indicated that Agia would try that again, but he does not care. What could maybe be perceived as an attempt to make the character seem “psychologically interesting” just made for bad plotting in my opinion.

Also, no explication for how does she managed to pull that off. You could expect an account further on the book, but the author has proven that explaining things is not on his agenda. And also, WTF IS HER MOTIVATION? I hated the first time Agius said to Severian he was to blame for his death, since it was his fault to have money when he did not. And so he was justified to kill him. An now Agia carries off with this absurd vengeance. Severian is not that interesting to deserve such attention, nor is Agia deserving of an reappearance. This subplot should have died in the first book.


Read 3:46 of 11:27 33%

Like The Road, but not of the same quality. I just don't like this kind of bleak post-apocalyptic future, where every paragraph describes some kind of hardship the people are suffering from. Slavers, lack of water, food, mistrust of others, lost of family, etc.

Fans of The Road might actually like this, the writing seemed of high quality.

read 1:10 / 18:19 6%

Less moments of satire, still fun.

The following contains SPOILERS. It is a not very good summary of the story. I don't want to spend much time writing this.

The party were left jailed in cages floating over the empty air of a many miles high floating island known as the Moon of the Crescent Shadow. They manage to escape, but get separated in the process.

Cooper and Chad fall of the their cells into the desert. Ravenous, Julian's familiar, goes after them to make sure they are alright. They don't die, but are now stranded on their own. Luckily the desert grows food when the sand is stricken with water, and Cooper has the “flask of endless water”. They fight some Orcs, Cooper obtains an intelligent bloodthirsty axe, Naabi, which compels him to go back to her homeland and destroy the one who imprisioned her in the axe. Chad is useless, but he goes along and sometimes helps a little. They find that Naabi is a pixie queen, and the pixies she led them up to help them to defeat the dark lord, who they find after nearly dying in the hands of a group of assassin goblins. The dark lord was actually one of the avatars of Mordred, who nearly kills them as well, but they manage to capture him by putting a bag of shit in his head. See, they can't kill him, or else he will merge back with his other avatars and become even stronger. And the smell encourages him to leave this avatar's conscience, so he cannot use any spells.

The rest of the party is rescued. Dave and Captain Righteous follow up on a lead that a Wizard was selling the magical dice they need to go back home. They “convince” the wizard to help them, but Dave was infected by lycanthropy when he had eaten infected meat he found on the floor (he was 3 days without eating). Out of control, he turns on the Wizard and kill him. Maddened by the disease, he attack the rest of his friends from the Whore's Head Inn and flees when outnumbered. Lycanthropes are pariahs in the city, so he has to hide in the sewers, where he is capture by a group of other wererats.

Stacey and Julian go after the another lead on the dice. They start their search in the floating island, manage to get one after jerking off a dwarf in a flying bathtub. Then when they go for the other in the possession of another wizard, they are scammed of their own die, and ended up empty handed. They even need to flee from the island as guards are after them, so they jump off using an improvised bed sheet as a paraglider.

Tim is dead, and his sister Katheryn gather what is left of him, a pile of shit and some body parts (he was eaten by a baselisk), and asks for those who would follow her into a quest to resurrect him. Randy and Denise join her. That quest is a travel to the nearby temple in order to purchase a resurrect spell. Unfortunately that spell is hella expensive, and now they really do go out on a quest in order to obtain an artifact in the hands of a powerful sorceress, the Ice Queen. They risk their life fighting pirates in the sea, manage to acquire a boat for themselves, no small feat, and then through some disgusting cleverness and a little bit of luck, they kill the Ice Queen. The frozen island's ice now starts to melt and they quickly escape, returning back to the temple. However, the corpse in the pile of shit turns out it wasn't Tim at all.

The story ends when they realize Tim never died. They now need to find him and Dave, who has also gone rogue.

Alright, the concept of a Dungeon Core is ridiculous. This is the second book that uses it and it is a complete disgrace.

This is another litRPG book that focuses on the computer/MMO aspect. ‘Farming' is a thing. If you're not familiarized with the concept, it consists of killing weaker monsters over and over again in order to gain more loot, sell it, gain levels, kill slightly stronger monsters, repeat.

The main character is the villain, and the author makes no effort to make him relatable.

read 0:30/13:19

It's not that I hated the book, it was just that it was just too average. Nothing stood out. I would say some of the commentaries I saw here disagree with me on this. They say the author tried to be funny and failed. I did not detect an attempt to be funny. If it was supposed to be funny, then yes, this is a bad book.

I kept reading waiting to find something that triggers me, but not even that happened.

So, the zombie apocalypse is happening, and the protagonist has spent his whole life preparing for a situation like this. Not that any of this comes trough as something overly clever or anything. It is just a fact about the protagonist, same as saying that he is middle aged and married with 3 grown children.

I stopped reading by the time the protagonist started to notice some weird behavior among the zombies, but not even that was interesting!

Read 4:35/10:29 44%

The same problems with the previous book, there is little effort of being funny, its just a bunch of actions strung together. These books were never a masterpiece of literature, but I read this for the nostalgic D&D feeling and the jokes. This book has none.

The characters personalities shine very dim, they pretty much feel the same. With the exception of Denise, that still adds a lot of color to the story with her hillbilly dirty mouth attitude.

I can't understand how other like this book so much. There is nothing that made the first few books especial in it, except for the idea of a D&D world turn alive and the familiar characters, and they are very boring in these later books.

Read 07:02/16:04 44%

There is more busy work here then satire. It is an adventure full of events, but not as fun as the previous ones. Katheryn is the only character who becomes a better person in this story. Cooper somehow too, because of his lawful good intelligent axe, Naabi. The others are still just a bunch of assholes.

The following contains SPOILERS. It is a not very good summary of the story. I don't want to spend much time writing this.

Tim turns out to be alive and well. He is the one who captures Dave, having turned into a wererat himself. He happens to have a master plan in order to defeat Mordred, but decides to leave his friends out of the loop because their a bunch of losers. The thing is, turning into wererats changes your alignment to evil, which is an explanation for why he and whoever gets lycanthropy becomes even more assholes themselves.

Dave having become a wererat himself can now potentially help him. Tim have became the leader of a gang of wererats, teleported into his home reality, although keeping his halfling body, and smuggled guns into the fictional world. His gangs betrays him, and he teleports back to his home reality, with Dave and a hostage from his former gang. He is confronted by a cop, take him as a hostage, and through him gets some information on the investigation of his disappearance some months ago. When other cops shows up, he is again forced to escape and teleports back to the fantasy world. He ditches Dave, is pursued by Cooper, who was also bit by a wererat. They ended up in a desert, both as wererats. Cooper leaves Nabbi behind.

Katheryn and the other members of the Whore's Head Inn, plus the dark Elf Tanner, decide to take the avatar of Mordred that Cooper had captured to a safe place. They go back to the (former) Frozen Island, now a tropical paradise. They plan to establish a new base of operations there. In the way she defeat more pirates. She finds a good place to stash Mordred. She comes through as a good leader, makes some though decisions but gives her friends a sleave of hope.

Chad and Julian go back to the Moon of the Crescent Shadow. Chad disguises himself as a musician and Julian his manager. He is very successful singing Neil Diamond songs. They find one of the die, but they attracted too much attention, and Mordred shows up to get it. A wizard they had befriended teleports them to safety. Then the wizard teleports then back to the Frozen Island at their request, after a signed contract that bound them as business partners.
him
Randy, Denise and Jake, a newly arrived character from their home world go to examine rumors of a poweful Bard in another continent. They acquire passage on a ship from and old acquaintance of theirs. Denise is pregnant with scorpion babies, Randy has a special paladin mount, his pet baselisk Bazel. They eventually use the Fozen Island as a bargaining chip, and in order to prove it is now habitable, the captain takes them there.

Everyone in the island, except Tim and Cooper who are in the desert, Mordred escapes. A big fight ensues, with some pirates who came to take revenge, rising a water elemental. Katheryn metamorphed into a shark and kills Mordred.

An action-packed adventure book right until near the end, when the climax failed to deliver. The author kept raising the stakes, and at one point it became clear he put himself in a corner. I did not like the final revelation at all, the villain was a let down for me. The protagonists never had a chance.

The protagonist dies, she kills herself. Then she is taken to a limbo-like place where you can live your life again, starting from any point way want, and making different decisions.

There are infinite possibilities, the book makes it very clear the ~6(?) ones it will focus on.

I could comment on the merits of the idea, the wisdom of the author in reflecting the paths she choose and the consequences. I already know how this will play out, because it is a standard kind of plot. The protagonist will make every possible decision and in the end she will realize that no matter what she does, her her original life was the better one.

But regardless of that, this is just a very boring book. It's like a “Groundhog Day” time loop, except the base “day” for the loop is a boring story, and every other variation is boring as well.

Of course by boring I mean there isn't anything I like. No brainiac moves, no fantasy, no cool science fiction. Its just a woman, talking about her life. Her love affairs, her family, her work.

Read 3:28 / 8:50 28%

My first foray into the vampire/paranormal romance genre. I set my expectations as low as possible, and they were well met. I was hoping to find a gem in this genre I knew I couldn't possible like. I had a few nice surprises before, like with Outlander, which turned out to be one of my favorite books of all time. I also hoped at last for a glimpse of something like Mercy Thompson, one of my favorite series of books.

So what did I expect? Well, when you check the reviews and you see the first 100 or so are all women gushing over the mere mention of the word “vampire”, and praising the kick ass girl power heroine who takes no shift from anyone, you get an idea.

But it doesn't stop there. The characters are blend, the story is simple and straightforward. There is nothing in the prose for me to hold on to. This seem to be the most popular book in the genre. It doesn't mean it's the best, but it should count as a good representative.

This feels much like a poor man's True Blood. I tried 2 other books in the genre (Magic Bites, The Hollows), they were also disappointments.

Brief summary

Anita Blake is an Animator, someone who can bring the dead to life for a a little while. Her intimate knowledge of the dead turns her into the go for person a perfect fit for a consultant for the law enforcement agencies when dealing with vampires.

In the first scene, she is invited by a friend of her best friend, who she doesn't know, to participate in a bachelorette party in a vampire strip club. She really doesn't want to go, because she is not that kind of person, but it is for her best friend, so she must endure it. Vampires are out in the world, and society pretty much accepts them as they are, as long as they don't kill anyone.

In the club, she is assaulted at every moment by vampires trying to “hipnoseduce” her. If she looks into their eyes, she is their forever (apparently this is totally legal). She is approached by BillJean Claude, a beautiful and seductive vampire who she isn't supposed to like, but he is so nice, for a vampire. He asks her to help the vampires in a murder investigation. She refuses, he threats her friend. She agrees.

She is taken to see their vampire lord, there she meets Erick a good looking and seductive vampire who is a bad boy, and his progeny, a female vampire who enjoys tormenting humans.

Read 1:51 / 9:19 20%

Being a horror book is already a no no for me, but this book received very good reviews so I decided to try it out.

Not only the exposition was too slow for me, some other things in the brief content I listened to tested my patience. The overly description of every detail and strange thing the protagonist experienced in his new apartment made me think that he author was going nowhere with that particular thread of story. It turned out I was right as the the review I refer to bellow says, ‘mystery for the sake of mystery'.

Also, what is so frightening about a ridiculously cheap apartment where the previous owner was uncomfortable living in and the neighbors are not so keen on their own apartments as well?

I agree with this review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/425855639?book_show_action=true. The things this guys rants about are all the thing makes me mad in a story as well.

Read 42:54 / 12:34 6%