Bookish Thoughts

Last year I was hearing a ton about Daniel Jose Older. Both this book and Half-Resurrection Blues  had just come out and they were receiving great reviews. I was excited to read both of them, but I got my hands on Half-Resurrection Blues  first. Sadly, that book was a bit of a let down. It wasn't horrible, just not as good as I'd been expecting. It wasn't enough to dampen my excitement for Shadowshaper , though. In fact, it may have been a good thing that Half-Resurrection Blues  lowered my expectations a bit. Or maybe it didn't need to. But at any rate, I loved this book. It was an excellent, magical, coming-of-age tale about a young girl in Brooklyn. Sierra has a family history of magic, but it's been hidden from her. And now that magic is dying, and it looks like it's going to be up to her to save it before her heritage dies out completely. It's a nice metaphor for the children of immigrants, struggling to find a way to honor their family history and ...

I started hearing about The Expanse months ago. And then I kept hearing about it. And the more I heard, the more it sounded like something I would like. But I couldn't figure out how to watch it. The final episodes were streaming with a cable password, but there was no way to watch the first few episodes. So I broke down and bought the book. It's actually the first in a series that will eventually have 9 books and a similar amount of novellas. The first season of the TV shows only appears to cover the first half of the first book. So I don't entirely know what's going to happen with that ultimately. But the good news is that the book is really good. So good that I went out and bought the first season of the TV show on Blu-Ray. The story takes place in the middle future. Humanity has managed to colonize the moon and Mars and is working to terraform them. There are mining operations and way-stations in the asteroid belt and some research outposts on the moons of Jupit...

By the time I got to the fourth and final Sharing Knife  book, I was used to the slow, meandering pace of these books. I was happy to just hang out in this world with these characters for a couple hundred pages until the excitement started. Bujold has created a fascinating world and populated it with a wealth of nice, interesting characters who I enjoyed spending time with. If there's a fault with this book (and series really), it's that Bujold can't quite bring herself to let anything all that bad happen to her characters. There's certainly something to be said for that. It's nice to read a book where you know everyone will be safe. Though it does drain a lot of suspense out of the action scenes. This is all to say that it took a while for this story to grow on me. It's slow and not much happens, which is different from a lot of stories you get. But I did end up coming around, and I ended up really liking this book and series. I can definitely see myself re...

The sixth volume of Saga takes a much-needed leap forward in time. While I've enjoyed the series a lot so far, I was starting to feel daunted by how long it was potentially going to last. If it was supposed to cover the life of Hazel and she spent the first 5 volumes as an infant (maybe she aged up to toddler? I can't remember), then the series would never end. But when the story picks back up, Hazel is school-aged, probably 6 or 7 years old. It's refreshing to have Hazel take a more active role in her own story. She makes new friends, pushes the plot forward, and is generally a lot more interesting than she was as an infant. It's nice that everyone else has been propelled into the future, too. It's allowed for some new normals to take hold, for characters to establish patterns and relationships rather than being in a constant state of upheaval. I'll admit that I was somewhat lost in parts of this volume. Even moreso than when I read volume 5, where I was ex...

I feel like Career of Evil needs to be reviewed two separate books. The first is the mystery, which is very good and had me guessing until the end (mostly because I missed something pretty obvious). The second is the interpersonal drama Robin and Cormoran are dealing with, which was a mixed bag. The mystery centers on someone who is out to get Cormoran. He starts by mailing the leg of a dead girl to the office. Cormoran immediately comes up with four suspects, because that's the line of work he's in, and most of the book is devoted to eliminating them, one by one, until the last one left is the guilty party. I became convinced early on that the true culprit was none of the men Cormoran identified. Somehow I landed on the theory that it was the son of one of them, even though the text really doesn't support this. Regardless, I got so wrapped up in it that I didn't even come close to actually solving the mystery. But that's okay. I liked that we got a bunch of sc...

The third book in Bujold's Sharing Knife  series is incredibly slow. It follows the first half of Dag and Fawn's honeymoon. Which is largely an idyllic time. Which is kind of boring. Most of the book chronicles their trip downriver on a boat. But it takes about 100 pages to get there. And since it's clear that that's where everything is leading, I was just impatient to get there. Instead Bujold spends a lot of time setting up new characters and potential conflicts and generally building up the world a bit. The climax does eventually kick in, and it's thrilling a satisfying. But I struggled with the rest of the book. What's interesting is that I'm finding I like it better in retrospect (and having finished the fourth book). Bujold ultimately convinced me that it was fun to just hang out in this world with these characters, and I'm remembering the book fondly. I'd probably enjoy it more on a re-read than I did the first time through.