Cinder – 3.5 stars (13 reviews, 4.23 avg) I’m going to start off by saying that I’m probably not the demographic for this novel. This book has an excellent rating on Goodreads, and has gotten great reviews here on CBR. My wife loved the book, and enthusiastically encouraged me to read it. I thought it was okay. But I’m not really a fan of fairy tales, and have struggled in the past both with the romance genre and young adult fiction. So, while I wasn’t […]
Better than the first one; still not as good as Hitchhiker
This is not really a sequel, as it has nothing at all to do with the first Dirk Gently book. This is a totally new adventure: one that makes slightly more sense than the first one, but still isn’t as good as the Hitchhiker series. That seems unfair, though – what could possibly be as good as Hitchhiker? Kate is an American living in London who becomes embroiled with a large blond man who claims to be Thor. Why Thor takes a shine to her […]
Save humanity and destroy humans
Dawn is the first book in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy, and like much of Butler’s work I’m going to go through them very slowly, both to savor them and let them filter through my head. Butler does not write easy science fiction, the contents of her novels challenge the reader and the ideas in them linger long after the last page is turned. Dawn starts with the awakening of Lilith Iyapo. Earth has just gone through a nuclear war and Lilith remembers the small, pitiful struggles […]
Never forget your humanity, or that of other people.
Kindred is a first-person narrative of a woman, Dana, and her husband, Kevin, being pulled back in time to save the life of her ancestor, Rufus, who seems perpetually prone to disaster. The catch is that she’s African American and Rufus is white, and lives in Antebellum Maryland. I loved this book so hard. The germ of this book occurred to Octavia Butler after she heard the anger of a young black consciousness activist targeting the subservience in older generations towards oppressive white culture. Paired […]
Ax brings the alien POV.
AX! This book was a lot more complicated than I remembered it being. Ax is so frequently the source of comic relief when the other Animorphs are the POV characters. (He was my FAVORITE when I was in middle school.) But here, in his own book for the first time, one of the first things that strikes you is how serious he is in his own mind. I wouldn’t say he’s *humorless*, but he’s very close. It’s the only thing that saves his ridiculous behavior […]
How to waste an unbelievably cool premise in execution.
I was realllly looking forward to this book. I mean, come on. An alternate history exploring what it would have been like if the Congo Free State (shudder) never existed due to the invention of steampunk-like technologies. Instead, and I’m gonna steal from the blurb here, “Fabian Socialists from Great Britain join forces with African-American missionaries to purchase land from the Belgian Congo’s ‘owner,’ King Leopold II. This land, named Everfair, is set aside as a safe haven, an imaginary Utopia for native populations of […]
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