The alternative world presented in Smoke is a fascinating idea, and a mix of ideas I was thrilled to be spending time with. In Vyleta’s altered Victorian England sinful thoughts and feelings are manifested as smoke that rises from your skin and leaves a unwashable soot behind. Breathing in the smoke of another can spread their feelings into you, and breed more and darker thoughts. The cleanest of people, who happen also to be the wealthiest, are seen as morally better people, and spend their lives learning […]
“Color our world blackened”
My honest rating would be more like 3.5 but since I liked the book enough to read the next one in the series, I bumped it up to 4. Brandon Sanderson does a lot of things really well. He spins a hell of an epic yarn and he writes great fight and battle scenes. However I often find his characters fall a little flat for me, which I’ll address later in the review. Overall, the first book in the Mistborn series was engaging and fun […]
The sort of book I would have liked more had I read it 20 years ago
I’m giving this book 3 stars, and I feel guilty about it. I feel guilty because I know it’s a classic, because it’s 50 years old and still going strong, because the writing is really beautiful, and because I KNOW that if I had read this 15-20 years ago, I would have adored it. 8-13 year old me, who reread books about Narnia and Prydain and various retellings of King Arthur legends year after year (and read a crapload of mediocre Catholic historical fiction in the […]
Mentally casting the film in my head.
There’s something deeply satisfying about finishing the first in a book series and loving it. A lot of smart people whose opinions I respect love the Gentleman Bastards series. Still, I am a persnickety reader and started it with some trepidation after a much needed bread from all the horror and true crime I’d been reading for the month of October. Lies of Locke Lamora does not disappoint. It’s good enough to be a stand alone novel but still leaves potential for more stories (of […]
This is not my first apocalypse
As a fan of post-apocalypse fiction who cut her literary teeth on Stephen King, it was nearly impossible for me not to compare this book to The Stand. Both tell the story of a worldwide global Armageddon and its aftermath. Both follow the forces of good and evil as they converge for a final confrontation. Despite those very big similarities, they are very different books. In fact, I could probably write a short essay comparing the two. But since this review is supposed to […]
This series is officially the most batshit thing I’ve ever read.
Temple of the Winds (The Sword of Truth, #4) by Terry Goodkind
Definitely the worst of these books yet. I almost one-starred it, but the main thing that was making me want to do that was semi-addressed by the end, so I don’t think this series has quite reached the point of untenable badness just yet. (And I want to save the one star, because I’m pretty sure there is much worse to come.) Lately I’ve been forcing myself to write reviews immediately after finishing books, but I made an exception with this one because a) I needed […]