This is how you do a novella, people. I bought this on release day, actually, and I’m not sure why I waited to read it. I loved Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy, and even now after reading this, I still want more from this world. But I just finished The Fifth Season over the weekend, and then I had a bad experience with another novella read for the Hugos, and this was just the perfect antidote to both of those. The Fifth Season was wonderful, but so, […]
If You Throw Away the First 3/4ths, You Might Have an Okay Book Left
I’ll never admit that I’m a bright person; it took me until half way through the second book in this series to realize it was just Star Wars, but with dragons instead of the Force and lightsabers. Which probably explains why I still love the first book, Eragon. (See that? That’s “dragon”, but with one letter changed. That’s the level of cleverness we are working with here.) So this is the last book in the series, so we know Not Luke Skywalker is going to […]
The first half of this book is a joke, the second half is pretty okay, actually.
This book is an unholy mess of contradictions and swirling tide pools of unnecessary words. So, there are one of two ways this review could go: 1) I think of every single criticism I can that bothered me while reading this book and I write them all down until the review balloons up to the size of a small baby elephant (which is a pretty big size for a review), also including the things I think it did right as well; or 2) I take the […]
Holding a mirror to the South’s racist past
I don’t remember being tremendously impressed with Grisham’s more recent novels, but have always enjoyed his writing ability and his willingness to take on painful subjects, and so was excited to hear that he had done a sort of follow-up to A Time to Kill, one of his best. And while it did not disappoint, I have to admit that it lacked the high-octane appeal of earlier novels like The Pelican Brief and The Firm. But who says an author has to offer thrills and chills […]