Ninefox Gambit

It could have been a solid 4-star read, especially due to the twists in the end.

But oh my freaking lord was it difficult to read! I understand the desire to cut on needles explanations and keep the mystery at some points. I do. At least I try to. I almost gave up a few times, and I probably would have if not for the VBC meeting on Saturday.

I would have really appreciated at least some information of basic notions like calendrical mechanics, invariant ice, composite writing, day-to-day belief parameters, calendrical rot and so on. It's like the author took common words, gave them some other meaning, but couldn't be bothered to give at least some points of reference, so that the readers would be able to understand what the hell is going on.

I felt like I went some 20 years back in time when I just started reading books in English and didn't understand about 15% of what was going on, so I had to guess from context or just ignore some parts. At tat time I at least had dictionary as an option. Here even Wiki site was useless, because it had little to none explanation and seemed long deserted.

Overall, instead of enjoying the book I felt annoyed and incompetent most of the time. Definitely not the kind of escapism that I'm looking for in my books. I'll need to be positively convinced to continue the series.