Really amusing. Hey, it's DEATH vs a philosopher, you know you'll like it. I even added a quote here. It's really short though, so be prepared for a sudden ending.
It's a Gaiman fairytale, about a wonderful boy among the vikings and their gods, and that's all you need to know.
This is very much a book by Jasper Fforde, and if you've read other books by him, you'll recognise his humour, his phrasing, and his worldbuilding. Which is why I liked the book well enough, but not more than that.
The protagonist is well written. I liked her as a person and a character. I appreciated that he gender was in no way important to the story - this is rarely done well and very refreshing.
The story was a bit boring and dragged on (or didn't catch my interest), but, as always, Fforde compensates with excellent, tongue-in-cheek worldbuilding, which I enjoyed a lot. As always, political and corporate structures make an awesome weird sort of sense.
Overall, a nice book, but nothing special.
We see Kvothe travelling here: he meets the Maer and navigates his court, hunts bandits in the woods, gets tangled up with Felurian, and finally learns the arts (Ketan) of the Adem before returning to the University.
I liked that Kvothe seems to learn from his story and his mistakes. While some of his capabilities are still a bit Mary-Sue-ish for my tastes, he's by no means perfect and both the storytelling and the story itself reflect this. I liked the different culture of the Adem and its discussion. I'm intrigued by Elodin. I'm irritated by the female cast and can't put my finger on the reason - but it's nothing like a delegation to useless or sexy roles!
While I felt that the evolution of Kvothe's character was a bit smooth and seamless (the book seems to favor action over character evolution), I enjoyed that he is in a much better place in the end of the book with no cheap hook to make the reader gasp for the last book. (I mean, we do! But not because of some cheap plot device - we want more because of the worldbuilding and storytelling involved.)
Yeah, I like these books a lot. I love the world built (both implicitly and a lot of it explicitly), I love many of the characters, even if I'm torn on the protagonist.
The Family Trade introduces the Merchant Princess worlds (all three of them) and takes us along with Miriam in discovering the mechanics (mostly economical mechanics) of those worlds. Solid world building, this is probably hard economic science fiction. Not my main area of interest but apart from some passages on trading that became too in-detail for me, I enjoyed the book.
I'm just not sold on economical science fiction. And I think this might be why I didn't particularly like following this book's story line. We get a third world, we get a dramatic showdown with a character sacrifice thrown in in the end, and that's … it. Other than that it's slow, tiring movement of goods and ideas between three worlds. Didn't work for me, might work for an economy major.
Miriam has to fight against everything: the family pressured by the secret services, her grief over Roland, the looming marriage … and nothing happens. Miriam spends most of the book locked in the second world, unable to do anything, and events unfold painfully slow (save for the last pages). Didn't really know what to do with this book.
I truly loved this book. The characters work well and stayed with me, the world is consistent and required no effort or conscious suspension of disbelief on my part, and the pacing and storytelling in general was absolutely well-done and enjoyable. I'm really looking forward to the other parts of the series. Also, yay for books with several POV characters.
I loved the diverse characters - strong female characters (with and without sexual relationships, that is!), but also weak female characters, and the same went for male chars.
I loved Arlen because he's so headstrong, and his strength, and stupidity, and his growth. I loved Rojer, not only because he contrasts Arlen so well, but also because he is a guy who is not a typical image of masculinity, and (apart from a few scenes casting him as a coward) he stands on his own, even while contrasting Arlen. And of course, Leesha. Nothing really to say there.
I'm very much not impressed by this bood.
While I enjoy reading plays, and I enjoy the Harry Potter universe, to me this book failed to capture the tone of the original works, provided a story consisting of plot-holes and cheap tricks, and then added inconsistencies - all in all it read like mediocre fanfiction (except for the format).
While the inconsistencies (brewing polyjuice to-go? Where is Teddy Lupin? Why are James and Lily out and about while fearing for their lives?) may sound nitpicky, they made suspension of disbelief that much harder. I liked some of the new characters, Scorpius in particular, but to my (very biased) eye and brain, there was a lot of queerbaiting going on, and that was just horribly disappointing. (Yay for consistent characterization of McGonagall, I guess.)
I also had an intense dislike for the time travelling. Not for breaking in-universe rules, but for being lazy, and old, and done over and over in better ways. The writers also seemed to have a weird focus on Cedric. What's up with that?
And "Voldemort's Daughter" sealed the "bad fanfiction" deal. Seriously.
This Laundry novel features Alex as the protagonist, going up against elvish aliens and his family's expectations... He's not the most lovable character we've seen so far, but he works out as a fairly generic protagonist.
More notably, Stross gives us much more background, backstory and explanations than usually, which took some getting used to. It's not exactly bad, but you'll need to think less for yourself than in the average Laundry novel.
This one is short and nice (well, no. Not nice, but if you know Punch and Judy shows, you'll enjoy it). Available online for free on lspace: http://www.lspace.org/books/toc/toc-english.html#fn1.
Read more Pratchett, yo.