aimiller's Reviews (689)

Is this book for everyone? No it is not. Does it have a very specific tone that might be very off-putting to some readers? Yes it does. Is there way too much boat jargon in it? Depends on your perspective but imho, yes it does. Is it still fun and full of fun and interesting characters? Yes, which was its saving grace for me since that’s what I signed up for. 

Also SO MUCH HAPPENED in this book, it was wild. I saw the movie first, and thought that had too many things going on, and this had all of those things AND MORE. It does mean the pacing is bonkers—sometimes those big events that happen seen to just fly by and then you’ve got like forty pages of them sort of just going along on boats, keeping an eye out for other ships. And that may be intentional, to like reflect what life is like on the boat, but I can definitely see it being a Problem for other readers. 

But I did like it? I had a fun time; like I said, the characters are fun even if I can’t keep track of all of them, and there were especially cute moments with Stephen. And I’m going to read the next one so consider me sucked in!

A really intense, deeply sad and enraging look at the neglect of capitalism, the radium industry, and the way that corporations resist responsibility for harms done on the job. Moore does a great job of humanizing the women who were poisoned by radium, especially in making sure that the extreme pain and decay they lived with never got sort of normalized within the text—each new tooth lost, each sarcoma growth, each limp, had such a significance behind it, and that significance was never lost. It was also written with such obvious care for the women and their families. 

Strongly, strongly recommend for people who haven’t gotten to it yet (I’d been sitting on my copy for like three or four years now, oops,) it’s clearly so well written and such a powerful story that will make you SO MAD but also think more seriously about the impacts of industry. 

I received a copy of this book through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program, and I am grateful for the opportunity to read this book. 

This was a compelling coming of age story—it managed to tell it without “feeling” young adult (and I don’t think it is young adult, despite the age of the narrator) which is not me trying to knock YA books, but there is definitely a vibe going on and some of the content is more adult. 

Some of the pacing towards the end felt like it picked up so quickly, and

I don’t love a time jump epilogue

but I think the sort of cascading struggles that Moon faces really does a great job of sort of mirroring life in a really good interesting way. Definitely a compelling and interesting examination of identity development in so many ways. 

An interesting alternate history take with a fun, fascinating premise. It felt like the story was much, much bigger than the space given here, so I was left feeling like the pace was uneven—it took so much to introduce each member of the party and then after that things had to go high octane immediately. It just all sort of felt like too much, like wearing ill-fitting clothes or something. 

This is a nitpick aside, but in a world where we have recognized androgynous nonbinary characters, to the point where even the villain can somehow recognize that he should use they/them pronouns without anyone saying anything, why is there shock and awe that a character might dress occasionally in masculine clothing (and was I supposed to read that character’s comments as an indication she is genderfluid?) I just think consistency in the gender/sexuality politics is more interesting than like a Reveal. 

Overall, it was okay, and I think people might really enjoy it. It just didn’t click fully for me. 

This was fast-paced with a fun magic system. I think there was so much plot it really felt like it pushed out some other things, but I still had a good time reading it, and maybe the things I felt like it was lacking in are fleshed out more later in the series. I think it would be great for a kid looking for an urban fantasy read, and would definitely recommend it for that! 

Just an excellent, accessible read. I feel like I needed this book years ago, and learned so much from it despite it being so short—the chapter on character I think in particular managed to draw together ways of reading that hold a text’s original context alongside reading it with our own perspectives in a way I found really helpful, and the chapter on narrative did very similar, useful things. Plus Eagleton is funny—I was laughing out loud reading some of this, like, often. Eagleton just has this incredible way of breaking open topics and arguments that make things make perfect sense to me, and I appreciate it so much. 

This was a fun book, though I will say it felt a little disconnected from the larger timeline of Murderbot books—like I wasn’t sure where it took place, if it was supposed to be before or after the events of Network Effect, which raised more questions for me than maybe it should have. 

But this had all the hallmarks of a good Murderbot book, with tight and effective action sequences and lots of fun Murderbot internal monologuing. It just felt a little less grounded than the other books, which I think posed a challenge for some of the greater questions that the series has been asking up until this point. But definitely lots of fun!

What a culmination of this trilogy—I kept avoiding this book as I was reading it because it was so tense and I didn’t want to see my good friends the Alphabet Squadron get hurt or make Bad Choices. But it was so good, even if it was so tense I wanted to throw the book across the room.

But god, Freed really dives into the most interesting—and tense, fraught!—questions about a post-Empire world and what it means in material terms to try to build a new political structure on the other side of that. It also asked some really interesting questions about how we might go about repairing from massive harm (though I don’t know that it answered them in hugely satisfactory ways—this book greatest weakness in my opinion is the epilogue, because it left some things feeling too neat after three whole books of deep messiness, but it might serve more of a “and this is the End of the Trilogy” mode, instead of leaving things open.) Especially watching Quell develop her own answers to the problem that Keize seems repeatedly stuck on was very powerful, as what seemed to be a fairly reasonable stance instead became one that looked more and more deranged over time, which I think is a really difficult needle to thread narratively. 

Overall, I think this was just a great end to a powerful trilogy, and they might be my favorite books of new canon. 

This was a pretty beautifully written book, at least in translation; Tadjo manages to move from point of view to point of view in ways that explore the humanity or non-humanity of her narrators yet also feels cohesive and holistic in their tone. The chapter from the virus itself was I think the most powerful to me as we live through a pandemic and think about our relationship to viruses. Just a beautiful book with a lot to chew on. 

This was a fairly solid introduction to at least the ethical core of socialism, and I think could be effective for especially folks who see themselves as compassionate but resistant to leftism or are married to liberalism. I’m not sure it would be as effective in people who outright do not care for others, or at least is not a good starting point if that’s not where you’re starting from, but I’ve certainly considered sending it to family members. 

I think also that Robinson’s writing has a very specific Tone that would work well on some people and not well on others—I occasionally found it grating, and I to some extent speak his language as like a white graduate student socialist. There are also some things in here that come off awkward given the author’s recent meltdown over leadership at the publication of which he is the head, as well as the political shifting by certain other writers or content creators who he cites as important. (I also do feel compelled to note that I support worker co-ops always!) 

Again, I think if you’ve got the right audience here it could be a compelling introduction, but I think the right audience component is not as broad as maybe we would like. But all tools can be useful in the right hands!