But Who'll Sarah Fee?
It occurred to me yesterday that my favorite thing to do - read a book while I'm eating - is just a combination of reading and eating. Bo-ring. I'm boring.
I just imported my stuff from Goodreads and a lot of my books have become Die Therapie PSHYCHOTHRILLER exklusiv.
I've read some reviews complaining that they were lost and confused because they hadn't played the game, but I thought it was very clear. And fabulous. Infinity Blade #1 ended magnificently, and the sequel has a great climax. I'd forgotten that Sanderson can really end a book well.
Would you sit down and listen to a stranger telling you about the year he spent teaching English in Turkey? Only if he were a really good storyteller, or if you were interested in Turkey, right?Kevin Revolinski isn't a master talespinner, but he isn't a bad one, either. Just an average person telling you about his time abroad. I wish he'd have expanded on his trip to Egypt - all we got was that he'd gone - like he did on his trips to Cyprus and Syria.
The book ends much more powerfully than any other part in it, with a graduation and fireworks and sentimentality.
When The Testing isn't busy infodumping all over your new brain-carpet, it occupies itself by imitating The Hunger Games - not just the big picture, either. We've got a crazyass government and kids from the smallest area as our heroine and her boyfriend. There's even a government official whose red jumpsuit "clashes with her bright orange hair."Now I don't know if The Hunger Games, in turn, hasn't been stealing its ideas, but I do know that The Testing has.
If I'd bought this book, I would have pushed myself to finish it... but I don't think it would have been too hard.
A 200 page story told in 400 pages. It starts out promising... But the pace is excruciatingly slow, and the characters aren't as fleshed out as you'd like. There are so many things that could have happened here, but all we did was... cruise. Was there even an ending? Was there even a middle?I unknowingly bought the sequel before this one, so I'll probably end up reading it eventually, although I wouldn't consider it otherwise.
The way this book is written is really great. The whole thing is told to me, a buff American soldier, by a bearded Pakistani man who sits at my table uninvited and unwanted.I don't get to read my own lines, of course. Just his reactions to them. Which is a lot of fun. But the man's life story is a little too much I love Erica for me, and I'm not crazy about the ambiguous ending - and I normally love crazy endings.
Interesting story hindered by awfully boring storytelling. You probably have better things to do.
Boy, is Robin Hobb good at fanservice! The good kind, not the gratuitous female nudity kind.Although it drags in parts, a lot of this book -mostly the second half- is just filled with squee. Even the ending, if you ship that way. (I don't. WTH.) There was a pleasant revist after revisit of old friends, and tying up those loose ends. (bends. lends. rends.)
This is probably the best of the Tawny Man part of this story. (I refuse to think of them as separate trilogies.) For Fans of Fitz.
It's fascinating how exactly the same 13 year old girls in the '40s and '90s are... em, "were"?Before Hitler's anti-Jewish acts have their effect on her, Anne Frank's diary starts exactly like every teenage diary ever - I assume. I mean, I only have mine to go by. Okay, every empty-headed but super fun* teenage girl's diary. *yes, I'm flattering myself.
She starts out hilariously:
I'll begin from the moment I got you, the moment I saw you lying on the table among my other birthday presents. (I went along when you were bought, but that doesn't count.)
... but understandably loses some of her humor later on.
Although Watson refers to his roommate as "fellow-lodger" -in and of itself a reason to love it- I'm afraid Sherlock Holmes is not for me.
In no way can this book be considered the beginning of a standalone series. It borrows locations from the Liveship Traders trilogy, which is fine, but it also relies heavily on the events of the Farseer books, and I don't think you'd enjoy this if you hadn't enjoyed that.The page count seemed oddly high for such a direct, unconvoluted little chase-story, but the pages flew by quickly - it felt small in scope as there's only one POV.
The narration of this book is perfect. Right from the start, she pulled me in with her interesting story and infuriatingly, wonderfully mysterious way of telling it. And then it stops being PG in the weirdest way, and that keeps happening. The story kind of loses its fire. It keeps the mysterious narration, but even that loses (some of) its greatness. (Still at a nice level of great, though.)
The first 29% of this story is pure bliss.
Can I say 3 stars for most of the story and then 4 when it really picks up, at the end?I think this book could have been a lot more satisfying had it been trimmed down a little more, been tighter and faster. If I could tear out all the pages of lesser [or un-]importance, Talion: Revenant could have been a 5 star short story! The way it is, though, I can only give it 3.5 stars, rounded up because the ending deserves at least that.
Not that the pages I'd tear out were bad, mind you. They were just too far from the plot and lessened its impact significantly.
Currently reading
The Last Stormlord
The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com
Dune (Dune Chronicles, #1)
