Tag: Book Review

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, Book Review

~ Veselin ~ 11 Comments

Gideon is a young and charming young woman, master swordsman. She happens to be raised in a world ruled by necromancers with many terrible risks associated with this craft. Death being a relatively small risk given that the necromancers around can imprison your soul, use your bones, or both.

The book has a logical magical system, and a grimdark atmosphere, horror-ish, which is in a stark contrast with Gideon’s positive and bubbly attitude. I loved both and have no objections.

However, there’s lots of death in the book and it’s sad, very sad. I didn’t like that part.

Overall, 5/5 but I do not recommend it because of the overall sadness.

The Girl With All the Gifts by M.R. Carey, Book Review

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

Zombies have wiped out humans, leaving scattered enclaves of survivors and rotting food supplies. A little girl is locked in a basement, protected from all the evils. It’s obvious that she’s extremely dangerous, and also maybe relatively ordinary. Like Pandora.

There’s a rule in nature—you can’t have your cake and eat it too. This rule is fundamentally broken in the book. What are the zombies doing to cause an apocalypse? Eating people or turning them into zombies? Pick one. Once a person is eaten, they cannot turn into a zombie because nothing is left. M.R. Carey doesn’t pick one and goes all-in, and then adds even more absurdity to the zombie mechanics. The final result looks like a movie script with scenes written to impress rather than to make sense.

The book is undeniably very engaging and interesting. Melanie is a highly likable main character. Easy 5*/5, and something you can read in one sitting. I’ve already bought the second part and plan to read it after a short break. The zombie mechanics, however, are so unconvincing that I took one star from the Goodreads review and ended with a fair 4*/5.

The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin, Book Review

~ Veselin ~ 10 Comments

In 2006, Liu Cixin became famous with his book The Three-Body Problem. An alien planet struggles with non-periodic but frequent mass extinctions due to the unstable planetary orbit. The Fifth Season is exactly that kind of extinction in the world of The Broken Earth. While the visible causes are usually volcanic in origin rather than solar, the results are similar. Endless civilizations, species, and empires have been wiped out—just like in The Three-Body Problem. Society’s main goal is to prepare for the next extinction, but of course, it is never the same as the previous one. How bad can an apocalypse be to countries which had tens of thousands of years to prepare and lots of experience? We’ll see.

Unlike The Three-Body Problem, N. K. Jemisin chooses to tell the story in a chaotic and confusing way. It is not always clear who exactly the main character is, where the story is headed, or what they are fighting for. The book is written as if I am the protagonist, similar to choose-your-own-adventure gamebooks. All this confusion is likely to make the reading experience more unique and to compensate for the similarity with The Three-Body Problem and the excessive superheroism.

Fantasy has a very limited number of clichés, and the trope of constantly dying and reborn civilizations is relatively new—perhaps inspired by science fiction stories about alien artifacts, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rama, The Expanse, Gateway, Alien, etc. While we’ve seen fragments of this book elsewhere, the combination is somewhat innovative. The magic felt fresh—bordering on science fiction. The closest system I can think of is the Midi-chlorians from Star Wars.

Despite the off-putting style, which reminds us a two-page Reddit post without new lines or punctuation, the book is interesting and overall great. I hope the sequel gets translated as well. Curious to see how Jemisin will solve the boringly overpowered superhero problem.

5*/5