Daniel Vanzin

Another good entry in the series, in some parts even better then the previous ones. The author keeps the protagonist faithful to his personality, there are no cheap tricks just to get a kick out of the readers.

The immersive narrative is concise, only mentioning what is needed. It manages to stay fresh and interesting, even though it's the fourth book and a lot of the characters were already presented. The new Norse antagonists are interesting characters, the Saxon's Ealdormans are petty, stupid and power hungry. Yet they are Christians, and Uthred is not. This is the perfect environment for our hero to shine.

REVIEW

Very close to being good, but the author got too many details wrong. There were some red flags that could have been overlooked if everything else was better written. I stopped reading because the plot was too simple and slow paced. Also, this is a book about the characters, so there was very little time dedicated to developing the plot. And the characters were not that interesting.

- poor side characters
- weak plot
+ mostly a refreshing take on werewolves stories
+ well written first person narrative

SUMMARY

Elena is a werewolf living in Toronto. She had many hardships growing up, she lost her parents when she was young and had some bad experiences with her many foster parents. At college she met and fell in love with Clayton, the man who would later bite her, turning her into a werewolf against her will.

With her new found condition, she is unable to continue living among normal humans. She has violent urges and can't yet control her transformation. So she lives a life of isolation with the other pack members, the only other humans she is allowed to interact with.

In time she becomes a vital part of the pack. She is the one with the best nose for picking up scents, and so she becomes the pack's best tracker, and gets assigned the responsibility to keep tabs on the werewolves outside the pack, known as “muts”. Her job is to keep the pack safe from outsiders, and she monitors those muts to see if they are living without bringing attention from the outside world, killing humans and other things that would endanger the pack's continuing existence.

After a traumatic incident, she abandons the pack and goes out to live alone in the big city. There she meets a boyfriend and manages to get a decent life for herself. One year after her depart, her ex pack leader asks her to come back to the pack's home in a small and isolated town.

There she meets her old fiancee Clayton again. She hates him, but cannot resist their physical attraction. He betrayed her, condemning her to a life of horrors, but he is devout to her, and he has always been there for her in her whenever she needed him. He is still in love with her and a sort of relationship is rekindled by her returning home.

The reason for her return is that the pack, her former pack according to herself, is in trouble. A body has been found in their private property, a large patch of land that they pay a good amount of money to prevent outsiders from getting in. Investigations lead them to the culprit, a psychopath who was a serial killer when human. They kill him, but soon learn that he was not alone. There is a group of muts organizing order to destroy the pack, in order to gain their lands. There is some confrontations, the police gets involved, more bodies shows up, werewolves get killed on both sides.


ANALYSIS

The book starts with a prologue. I'm on the group of people who dislike prologues, but it was decent enough. Then we learn about our protagonist Elena, who lives in a constant state of victimhood: “Oh I'm a werewolf, one of only 30 in the whole world. I have superpowers that make me different from everyone else, and because of that I have no social skills, cannot get a boyfriend and live in constant pain. Poor me”.

In spite of her lack of social skills, she does get a boyfriend, nothing special about how that happened. She was there, he was there. He was insistent and that's it.

Elena behaves like an immature brat. That's fine if she is supposed to grow as a person by the end of the book and maybe overcome that, or become less “bratty”. One example, she accuses her ex fiancee, who may have many flaws, of lying to her, even though he has never lied to her about anything, as he points out. She is hostile to the pack leader, the man who took her in and treated her like a daughter. She betrays her boyfriend, and convinces herself that's alright. She delays helping out the pack and impose conditions for her help.

When she arrives at the pack headquarters, we get a major info dump in the form of a book of werewolves. The way to introduce characters is not to read them from a list of names and descriptions.

Becoming a werewolf is very cliche: you get bitten, you're it. I like the “revised” version much better, the one used by Patrica Briggs. It should be something brutal and rare. The easiness of contracting lycanthropy brings up too much inconsistencies and unneeded forced moments in the story.

Case and point, the plot was about a group of muts trying to destroy the pack. They did that by creating new werewolves. So consider, I can bite hundreds of people and enlist them into my army to destroy a 5 werewolves pack, while they take the “high road” and keep the “curse” to themselves.

On the positive notes, we can see the inception of Patrica Brigg's Marrok idea, one werewolf alpha who controls all the others, more through cunning then brute force. The sex scenes were good as well, there was no self righteous prudishness and they were neither unnecessarily explicit.

I almost made it through the end, but the story got too boring to continue, and I wasn't in love with any of the characters. All I could think about is “not Mercy Thompson” when reading it.

Read 8:50 / 12:55 68%

This could have been just an ordinary book, a 2 star maybe because it was readable, not awful. But then came the ending. The last ~25% of the book (2 out of 8 hours) was a non story. The author was out of ideas on what to write and wrote exactly that, he sort of broke that fourth wall and said that he was out od ideas, and started to pseudo talk to his readers.

The story is as silly as it sounds, and as deep as you would expect. It is a parody with Star Trek's trope of killing of non essential characters, extra actors, in every episode just for drama effect.

The characters are uninteresting and shallow, and so is the story.

For the people giving this a 5 star, I'm sorry, but FU. The best possible scenario this is a 3 star. I wouldn't recommend this book for no one.

This was the first book I read that made laugh. The participation of Marvin, the depressed robot, is brief but very amusing. The story is very unconventional with many unpredictable moments. This book gave me many memorable moments that, like the computer built to give the answer of life, or the dolphings leaving the earth, the mice and their unexpected role in mankind.

In a post-apocalyptic world, some guy wants to die, because his wife went crazy and “killed herself” 3 years ago, and so he decides to do the same.

He is the sheriff of a fallout-like bunker, and dying means deciding to go outside. Everybody is afraid, because they want to know if when he goes outside to die, will he clean the lenses wit his wool. The guy is apathetic, and doesn't care one way or the other.

I found the writing to be unbearable. It is supposed to transmit a feeling of hopelessness, but it does so in detriment or character and plot. It is akin to a horror story for me. Give me content, not feelings.

So the main character wants to die. I hate suicidal characters. If means giving up reason and succumbing to emotions. His wife went hysterical, which means the same thing. Characters without intellect doesn't appeal to me.

This was an all drama experience, with nothing for me to hold on to.

Read 1:22/18:08 8%

The book started off very well, with the encounter of an ordinary human lawyer named Nick Carter met with two alien beings. They represented some sort of intergalactic council that have decided that earth's music made it worthy of notice to the rest of the universe, and now wanted to purchase the license to all of its music.

The story started to crumble in the very next scene, where the protagonist met up with his cousin in a restaurant where an alien controlled parrot started to ask him what the two other ones wanted with him. This scene was very confusing and unamusing. Sudenly it was a common thing for aliens to come to Earth.

The next scene has him go home and invite his hot neighbor over, because she has a surprise birthday present to him. Listening to the author to describe how infatuated Nick was with her felt a little cringy and cliché. Then she said she had a new man in her life, that turned out to be a cat. And the present was actually just a bottle of wine. And then an alien (another one!) shows up and Nick acts as that is just the most normal thing in the world.

Those sort of things resembles a lot like The Hichhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is fine, but it was played out SO much better in Douglas Adams's book. Plus I did not like any of the humor so for far, besides the opening scene.

Read 1:31 / 9:53 15%

Not a perfect book, the characters are not very deep, but it has one of those good enough kind of stories. Military space fights are definitely not my cup of tea, but the tale is well written.

The dialog is kind of forced sometimes, the main character is too much of a text book paladin. “I will treat them as according to the Laws of War”. The author clearly makes an effort to make him look more human, but this is still a very politically correct kind of book.

So, it is the future, and everybody became stupid. After 100 years of war, there is no more veteran soldiers to pass around good fighting tactics. So they all just rush head on into battle, the kill them all and take no prisoners kind of brutality you would expect from an unruly mob. Also, the military has become a democracy, and commanding officers take a vote to decide on the fate of the fleet. Which is always to attack the enemy, despite the odds.

Then comes a hero from the past, a guy that has been idolatrized beyond measure by the contemporary citizens of the Alliance forces. He find himself surrounded by people who either sees him as a god or hate every single thing he do or say, seeing him as a menace to their plans... of dying charging mindlessly against the enemy.

I enjoyed the fight scenes because of the tactics employed and the kind of unique introduction of realism in the form of realistic distortion due to high speeds, and taking into account the time delay it takes to give orders to ships spread across the vastness of space.

Just like Matrix, the first one was great, and I could not see nothing that was lacking or could be improved in a continuation.

The writing is still great and the characters remain faithful to their personality. I stopped reading this book because I started to see some elements I don't like in stories, mostly VILLAIN recycling. If Paul defeated his enemies in the first book, why ALL of them (somewhat even the dead ones) are still a threat? For me this invalidates his greatness of the first book.

Maybe I'll be back to finish reading it (read just about 1/4), if I get some reassurance that it gets better, because I know by others opinions that the next book is awful.

*********
Continued to read the book. Very lame monotonous story, without a climax. You keep expecting something interesting to happen... it never does. The same prose is kept from the beginning to the end

Another one that I lowered my expectations as far as I could. This one is much larger then Narnia though.

I started with the TV series, got to a few minutes into the third episode. It took 4 hours into the book to reach that same point. It was dreadful repetitive, but I kept hoping after that It would payoff. It didn't.

The story is just too boring, the characters too plain, the world building doesn't inspire me. All is too.. juvenile, which is after all the book's target audience.

Read 4:33/10:33 ~43%

A book about the lives of some people in New Orleans. A lot of character building, no plot. The problem is the characters are mundane. There is nothing exceptional about them.

Imagine your aunt telling the history of her life, in painstakingly details. Where she went to school, for how long, her relationship with her father...

The first chapter was omniscient enough. I thought it was VERY slowly building up the witches plot, making some brief and vague mentions regarding the Mayfair family. But then came chapter two, “The Life of Walter”. He has some ESP abilities, such as seeing images by touching objects and even by just coming near them sometimes. You might think the chapter would be interesting. It was not. I trudged on, but then skipped it.

I should have stopped then, but I continued reading because Anne Rice has become my favorite author. The next chapter was about father Mathew. It soon became clear what kind of book this is.

Read 5:14 of 50:02 / 10%

Again a book with very little relation to the actual myth, in the sense that it is a story on its own. There is a good participation of known characters like Arthur (although still a boy), Merlin, Morgause and Uther. The attempts to represent fiction based on reality were well placed, and added a lot to the sense of foreshadowing. There are some subtle and some more overt references to Guinevere, Excalibur and Camelot.

The story picks up right at the end of the previous book, and it deals with Merlin trying to protect Uther's newborn son, through the use of some clever trickery and a little bit of clairvoyance (again magic is very much downplayed). He must find a way to convince the king and queen to allow him to take charge of the boy, then find a secure place to raise him, find the means to hide his travel to such a place, keep an eye on the boy even from afar, ensure he is raised properly by a good family and also educated in the way of kings.

After securing baby Arthur, Merlin travels the world in search of Caliburn, a sword he sees in his dreams as the sword of the one true king. After finding it, he inserts himself into Arthur's life and becomes a friend and a mentor to him. It is the start of the story everyone knows.

WHAT
A cheap erotic fantasy story where a innocent hot young girl meets an older dangerous hot guy, thrown in some vampires and sex addicted faes for some flavor. Her sister is dead and she wants to find the murderer by herself, never mind she can't kill a cockroach to save her life or have the capacity to go to the store to buy poison to kill it from a distance.

TLDR
+ readable
- unexciting plot
- foolish protagonist
- self spoiled narrative

SUMMARY
MacKayla Lane if a typical southern belle. She is in her early twenties, works as a bartender to pay the bills, spends her time by the sunbathing at the pool. She is very beautiful, curvy and innocent. Her world is turned upside down when her sister who is living in Ireland is brutally murdered.

Upset because the police has given up finding her murderer after a few weeks, she decides to fly there in order to convince them to continue the investigation. Alone in a strange country where she can barely understand what the people are saying, she is unable to talk to the police inspector assigned to the case of her sister's murder right away. So, she decides to investigate it herself.

Some weird things start to happen around her, as she slowly finds out there is more to this world then the eyes can see, and she is uniquely capable to see them.

Out of her depth, with no especial skills that can help her to defend against natural or supernatural threats, she is forced to rely on the help of a mysterious stranger, a handsome older and wiser man, with chiseled chin and... you get the drill.

This emotionally unavailable, chauvinistic bad boy, father figure, decides that he can use her for his purposes, and so their partnership forged. Now MacKayla must avoid the dangers of sex to the death with faes, vampires and whatnots, who have supernatural abilities that makes them drop panties irresistible to women.

ANALYSIS
Well, it was pretty clear where I was getting myself into right from the start:
- the book is called called Dark Fever
- it has a cover showing a naked hot, naked male and female upper torsos
- its written by Karen “Moning”
- took quite a while to find a male reviewer on Good Reads
- the first few lines mention that there are two kinds of faes: the ones who kill you on sight and the others who use you for sex

Exposition through describing future events was kind of annoying. I would rather discover about faes and the protagonist's powers together with her, along the development of the story. Instead that is described in the prologue. This artifice is also used sparsely through out the book, ruining the “surprises” it could have presented.

“I would later find out that he was lying but at this point I believed him

faes

This is the kind of book that reads like a textbook. It is a detailed account of humankind first meeting with an object build by an alien race.

The story takes place in a near future, where other planets have already been colonized and we have probes stationed in space to monitor asteroids, to predict whether they will collide on populated areas.

One of this probes picks up a strange piece of rock in space, that turns out to be made by a long extinct, more technological advanced race.

I stopped reading as the the first chapters all detailed how this perfect spherical rock, that seems to be an artificial made planet, looks on the inside.

Read: 19%, 1:41/9:01 hours

Started out well enough, a lost memory story. I rarely find these, as well known of a trope it might be. The writing is good, the protagonist witty, intelligent, likeable. But after the introduction the pacing becomes too slow. It feels like a 24 episode season TV series, where most episodes are just filler. Some of the “episodes” in the book are too boring and some even annoying.

Up to the moment there is a mystery regarding who the traitor is it was a good story. But then we are presented with:
- a needless action scene
- a straightforward sequence of events, kind of like the author is describing in details the steps to tying your shoe
- a caricature villain, “oh look at me, I'm so evil”
- the politically correct main character engaging in torture, in one of the most repeated tropes of torture/interrogation in writing history:

“Tell me what I want or we will torture you, even though I think torture is abominable”
“Do your worst, I don't care”
Oh, I think he is pretty though, I'll have to be creative
“Oh really? Then I'll do this to you!”
“Wait what? No no, please no! Okay, I'll talk!”

PLOT

The book didn't start awful. Descent protagonists and writing, promising plot.

A couple of thieves are framed for the murder of the king. While arrested in the dungeon, awaiting their execution, they are visited by the Prince, who describes how he plans to torture them to death. After that, their visited by the Princess, who makes a deal with them: their freedom for the promise of taking her brother north, in order to keep him safe from the ones who murdered the king and also to talk to someone special.

With their new unexpected companion always bickering, they travel to find to find the secret prison which harbors this mysterious man their supost to meet. In the way they stop to rest in a monastery. A monk takes them in and shows them a room for the night. When morning comes they find out that the monastery had been burned out, and the monk is somewhat of a savant, and is oblivious to the fact that he would dir of starvation if he choose to remain there.

The monk provides some clues to their quest, and join them in the adventure. Arriving at the place, we get a LotR rip off mountain door scene, and after a while, they meet the wizard they were send to find, one who has been imprisoned and kep alive though magic for nearly a thousand years.

The man has his demands before agreeing to provide them with the information they seek. They agree to help the man, who was arrested for having supposedly destroyed the realm 900 years.

With the information they need to restore order in the realm, clear their names and get a handsome reward, they go back to the king's castle. But in the way, the Prince finds out his uncle is to blame, and is trying to kill him as well. So they decide to ask for the help of someone who was loyal to the dead King, and know would help them with his army.

And now the come the part I stopped reading. The story wasn't that great, but passable so far. And then the conspirators who murdered the King get together and start spitting out their agenda. At this point the exposition goes out the window, and I couldn't bare it anymore. The plot felt too common, and nothing else (interesting characters, promise of great events to happen, intelligent deeds, etc) made it worth to keep reading.

At best this was just too vanilla for me.

Read 8:23/22:38 37%

I see a pattern here. Another unjustly treated child. Again without consequences. The author spend a lot of time describing the abuses Jane has suffered as a child for no end other then to establish that she lived in an unfair environment. Unless there is some cunning element at play or something that latter will play a major role in the story, I don't care.

Also, while I almost felt sympathy for the character, the story is just a romance. Poor girl meets rich guy. They're both ugly. Rich guy seems to like her, but he is eccentric, so she cannot know for sure his feelings.

Read 7:02/19:15 37%

I did not like either the story or the writing style. Too much military jargon and sci-fi talk relating to spaceships and interstellar travel that has put me off continuing to read the book.

The plot seemed to revolve around the first contact of mankind with alien life. There was this spaceship that came out of an area in space known of god's face. The area received this name because due to the way some astral objects are positioned, when viewed from a distance, it looks lake a face.

This unknown spaceship attacked the spaceship of the protagonist for no apparent reason. He retaliates and succeeds in killing the aggressor. When the remainings of the spaceship are collected, they found out the body of the pilot is of an anatomy completely different from humans.

This books reads as an excuse for relieving the golden age of the 80s. It's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just not my thing.

The year is 2044, and the creator of the Word of Warcraft equivalent died and left his fortune for whomever finds an Easter egg inside the virtual world he created.

Life is shitty in the future, and pretty much everyone uses it this virtual world to escape reality. Its popularity is so great that it even replaces a proper education in physical schools (which are pretty much gone from underfunding).

Anyway, in order to find the easter egg, people have to find clues in the pop culture of the 80s era. So people just start talking and dressing like the 80s. They watch 80s sitcoms, play 80s Atari games, etc. The person with most knowledge of the 80s culture will most likely be able to find the clues to discover the prize.

Read 1:50 / 15:41 12%

WHAT
Asimov looses himself in his love for science, making this book too cold and devoid of emotions. Characters relations feels forced, inorganic, like he had to include them for sake of literary purposes. This book have a feel of classic old poorly written science fiction.

TLDR: too science fiction, not enough human, bad writing.

PLOT
A world with six suns is about to experience a prolonged period of darkness for the very first time. Experiments have proved that people experience severe trauma and even death when exposed deprived of light for a period of 15 minutes. A group of religious fanatics have predicted this moment as the end of the world, and just now the scientists are finding proofs that they may be right.

ANALYSIS
The plot seemed interesting, but I stopped reading when it became clear the literary quality wasn't going to improve, and too much noise was added to the main plot. The idea was to bring life to a few characters by developing a subplot for each one of them until finally they meet and everything made sense.

Also, too much time is spent explaining the “science” aspect. I did not find that interesting by itself, and besides that, for the story being told, it was completely unnecessary.

The original short story is better because it is more concise, but still it's just an okay tale.

Read 3:53/11:54 33%

Hard Sci-fi

Quoting this reviewer

“Clever idea, but too much science and not enough fiction. The whole reason why I read sci-fi is to escape beyond the constraints of the laws of physics. Changing the laws of physics and seeing how this plays out probably will appeal to some people, but to me it felt too much like a physics homework assignment.”