book reviews

[magicicada]

remember that whole project i had with reading books in order and posting reviews. no? well go read through my lj sometime in mid-dec. i have no time for fishing for the 'ol post, but it should be in there somewhere. i'm sure my loyal fans may have had some worry that i had abandoned the project, but i'm still reading. i have been slacking majorly on the reviews though so these are going to be quickies:

Darwin's Children by Greg Bear
Did not live up to the potential of the first novel. There was a long stretch in the middle that was horribly depressing for no good reason and did not add to the novel. It felt like it had been stretched to lead to a third novel, but was so boring and depressing I no longer have any interest in any sequels. All I wanted to know was what kind of powers/differences these new kids would have and that is not the direction the novel took.

At the Edge of Space, Two novels by CJ Cherryh
Brothers of Earth and Hunter of Worlds
Briefly, these are early novels and it shows. I did enjoy them somewhat but they weren't compelling. One problem is that she went overboard on the new vocab. Hunter of Worlds actually has a glossary in the back. I've read novels that had a lot of vocab, but the glossary was just for backup. In this novel, I never caught the meaning of a lot of the words. It was more a translation exercise than setting the mood. Don't get me wrong, the right new words can really set the tone of a novel, but this went a bit over the top.

Wild Magic by Jo Clayton
I generally enjoy Clayton's novels although they have a tendency to be uneven. I had abandoned this book at one point and found it much better than I had remembered when I picked it back up again. I'm not sure that I'd call it truly great, but it was an ok read. I found myself wishing that she would embellish the side stories as I enjoyed the minor characters more than the main character. In short, girl is born with powers, whisked away from her parents and raised by others. She is the 'plaything of the gods' because of these powers, has very little control of her life and is not happy about this.

Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett (yea, I know, it's a bit out of order)
Tasty. This is one of Pratchett's young adult novels so it did have a different feel than the discworld series, but it was still wonderful. The wee free men seemed a bit overblown to me, but eh it's a kid book. Most of my problems with the novel boil down to that. Also, I would have loved more 'coobeasties' and less 'ship' but that was kind of the point of the novel. I did fall in love with the chalk lands, but I am already quite entranced by that area. (side note: bexfiles: I am thinking the setting of this novel, All Creatures Great and Small and your new home are not terribly far apart, let me know how far off that is from reality.) In any case, I thoroughly enjoyed the novel, but put my nose back to the grindstone. I'm almost to the D's!

I'm currently reading Wild Fire the next novel in the Wild Magic series and Sahara by Clive Cussler. Reviews to follow.

That doesn't add up to much, but there was a long span in the middle there were I was feeling uninspired and reread a half dozen discworld novels to cheer myself up. I also went off the deep end one day and read Wee Free Men because I just couldn't stand it any more.

Comments

[bexfiles.livejournal.com]

Is Wee Free Men set in imaginary Scotland then? Scotland's about an hour north of us, Yorkshire (where All Creatures is set) is a couple of house south, I'd guess :-) So we'd be somewhere in the middle.

[gardenwaltz.livejournal.com]

i got the impression that it was supposed to be england. the area is referred to as 'the chalk'. i wasn't sure whether yorkshire was chalk or not.

[bexfiles.livejournal.com]

Not very chalk-y, as far as I know, but not really up on the quarries of England. I should try and find a copy and read it to see (or ask some Brit who's read it), I'm so not up-to-date with these things since we got poor :-)

[h-postmortemus.livejournal.com]

coobeasties!