Three Mini-Reviews

 

A couple of short reviews to bring my reading adventures up to date. I have one book in the pipeline, but I'm a bit discouraged. And I'm writing again, slowly, so I'm not as interested in reading books.

My grading system:

A – Great (Very rare)

B – Good (Recommendable)

C – Okay (Average to so-so, but good enough to read to the end.)

DNF – Did not finish. I don’t bother reading books that I would grade either D or F

The reviewer’s bias: I prefer stories with well developed, pleasant characters. I like writing that is clever and witty – entertaining in itself. I prefer first person narratives, or close third person narratives. I dislike thinly disguised fanfic and stories with gaping plot holes.

A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers – DNF 14%

This one surprised me. A space opera without war (at least as far as I got) with lots of pleasant characters and a focus on them. I figured this would be a book that I would enjoy. But it just seemed to drag, even though it jumped between different POV characters. I didn’t need a menu for every meal… I got to the point were there looked to be several pages of info dumping on what the ship did – punching holes through sub-space, and I just lost heart. I was only 14% into the book and I couldn’t wait for it to finish, so I did.

The Lies of Locke Lamora (The Gentleman Bastards #1) by Scott Lynch – B-

What’s this, I’ve read and enjoyed a fantasy book? Will wonders ever cease? It has great world building, a likable Robin Hood main character with sidekicks, and interesting story with not a lot of magic. I did not care for all the blood and gore – I get it, these are bad guys – but I can just skip over those parts, and I did. I’m not crazy about the dual timeline thing, I always suspect things like that a gimmick, but in this case it was basically telling two stories that would probably not have fit together all that well if told in chronological order. All that said, I won’t be reading the other three volumes. Though the star ratings don’t fall, the reviews I read suggest that the follow ups aren’t anywhere as good. Once is enough.

Polaris by Jack McDevitt – DNF  20%

This is the second book in the Alex Benedict series. It is set some years after the incidents described in A Talent for War. This is another book I should’ve liked, but didn’t. McDevitt writes in an easy to read, first person narrative style, i.e. right up my alley. But… He is very verbose, and the Marie Celeste mystery story he created – a space ship with its crew gone without a trace – did not really interest me for some reason. Couple that with the fact that the story had gotten nowhere in the first 20% of the book, so my interest waned. Plus, this is another of those SF stories where travel between planets is a mere taxi cab ride – anywhere in the galaxy in hours. If you are going to write about space, I believe that you should make it as vast as it really is. Make it grand. If you need to move from locale to locale within hours, set the story on a planet. You don’t need whole planets for a stage setting. Real planets, not Star Wars planets, have a great variety of climates, and people as well. Well, off my soap box. I got to the 20% point in the story, and started to skim read. And at that point, why go on? I didn’t.