The Day of The Dissonance by Alan Dean Foster (1984, 292 pages) – This fantasy adventure has a lot going for it. First of all, it’s written by one of the best. Alan Dean Foster, whether writing great science fiction (“Nor Crystal Tears” is autographed and on my Read Forever shelf or a film adaptation (I think his “Abyss” is much better than the movie), is a master when it comes to grabbing you by the lapels and yanking you into whatever world he’s writing […]
In which I introduce the incredible notion that women are people.
“Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.” Emily Coates Wise Man’s fear would be the perfect book if Patrick Rothfuss could just stop being in love with his main character, Kvothe. Rothfuss is a skilled writer and proficient in building words, but everything in this book is about how awesome Kvothe is – when, in reality, he’s a 16 year old boy who sort of bumbles around. Mistakes do not happen to Kvothe, but if they do some crazy happenstance will […]
Shut up, Juliette
Shatter Me is a silly, overblown book that reads like the literary journal the kids in your 1990’s middle school published out of the public library and distributed in front of a local Hot Topic. I’m not going into a lot of plot detail here, because if you’ve read any dystopian YA novel in the past five years, you’ve read this one. I’m also going to be mildly spoiling the book, so, you know, beware. Juliette has been locked up in a solitary psych ward […]
Someone’s got a secret…
…but I’LL never tell. Xoxo Annwyl the Bloody has problems. She can’t decide if her terrible name or her homicidal half-brother is a bigger pain in the ass. I’m leaning toward the former, if only because it sounds like she has serious problems with her cycle. In actuality, it’s probably her brother since he and his men are always trying to kill her. In fact, that’s the true source of “the Bloody” portion of her name – more often than not she’s got the blood […]