aimiller's Reviews (689)

Oh boy what a wonderful, rich, refreshing read! I'm sad I didn't encounter this book as a kid--I really think it would have blown me away. As it was, I was sucked into the world almost immediately, and really enjoyed spending time in it- the magic was just this like delightful thing that wraps you up and really makes you feel like comfortable or uncomfortable, depending on what is happening. And the way that Duane makes tone happen is a really delightful part of this book--like I said, I was so sucked in and so delighted by the world and the characters, and I'm looking forward to reading more in this series!

This was a fun, creative urban fantasy! Krueger's use of the Chicago landscape was really great, and the characters were super fun. All the magic as well was very creative and fun, and I think that's what I enjoyed most about this book--it was really fun, even if I felt like some of the messages about growing up felt a little bit heavy-handed. If you're looking for a really fun book with a very creative (if underexplained, which is not a thing that really bothers me but I know is big for others) magic system, then I strongly recommend this!

So this book is a really, really delightful read- I knew I loved it within the first few pages, which is pretty rare for me, as it usually takes me a hot second to warm up to a book. But a book about baseball, the Midwest, and a small liberal arts college--that's three of my favorite things!

That being said, there are definitely parts of this book that made me pretty deeply uncomfortable, not necessarily with what was done itself but the way that these things were left sort of basically unquestioned, and I do think that in a lot of ways it's very much a piece of Literary Fiction that could definitely turn off a lot of readers, and upon reflection makes me sort of uncomfortable.

But I do think it's an incredibly tightly-woven novel that does an incredible job of juggling all the characters and their Issues, and at the end of the day was still this sort of soft love story that I really appreciated reading. If you like baseball especially, I think you'll like this book!

This book was super super fun! The writing managed to make it really believable that we were seeing the world through a child's eyes (well, an 11-year-old) and it was still really an intriguing, wonderful book. It also felt very self-contained, though I am intending to go off and read the other two. It was clear that Nancy Farmer did a lot of research, but not in an info-dump way that makes it clear that's what she was doing. The book was exciting and an easy read--I finished it in about two days, if that says anything, though it does clock in at around 450 pages. Overall, I though this book was super fun and I was glad to have read it!

Okay first of all: holy shit the roller coaster this book takes you on! And part of that is why I'm not giving it a full five stars the way I did with Six of Crows--it felt like there was too much packed into this book, from the Deeper Explorations of Everyone's Trauma to the 10,000 plots and plans they go through over the course of the book. I still really really liked it! If 4.5 stars was an option, I would probably have given it that, because I really just enjoy being in this world and learning about the Adventures of My Emo Children Who Do Things For the Aesthetic, but I do think this book was less tightly-woven than Six of Crows was.

Also I literally was yelling when The Death happened, I'm still sort of in shock, but I still love all my babies a lot and I want more of them.

I was all ready to like this book--and for the most part, I really did! It did, for the most part, exactly what I wanted it to do, and was a beautiful fluffy read that didn't mean very much but was interesting and short (you'll note I blew through it in two days, and one of those days I was on the road.) But what bumped it down from three stars to two was the ending; I just can't get behind the 'sudden twist' ending where everything about the criminal's motives are revealed at the very end, rather than the conclusion being a logical production of the investigating that the main character, even if it's not immediately clear until that moment. I don't know, maybe it's because I grew up reading Encyclopedia Brown, and so is my problem and not the book's.

Really I think the issue was: the ending came out of nowhere, and it really felt like the author realized she was running out of space to finish, when she had crammed all these details about Charleston and tea and all these other things and hadn't given more space to the actual mystery solving. And I enjoyed all those details, but with the ending, it felt like they came at the cost of the actual story. There were also so, SO many things that were not tied up at the end--all the moments, for example, when the narrative switched to be in the perspective of one of the suspects or the detective. Is the stalker going to come back in another book? What about the creepy comments of the detective? I don't know that I'm interested enough in the series (based on the way this one went) to really read further and figure it out, and I think that too is a flaw--if those were what was supposed to get me to read more, then why bother having mysteries at all?

For the most part, though, I wasn't mad at the book as a whole; I wasn't even that upset that the narrative makes a single mention of enslavement despite like 90% of the characters clearly having a family history tied up enslaving people (because they are Old Money in South Carolina.) That part I could let go, but the ending sort of ruined all of it for me.

I'd read this years ago and returned to it for a project, and I don't know if it's that I'm older now and/or gayer, but this is absolutely so funny. I literally laughed out loud at parts of it. The fiction especially I loved--it gets at this aesthetic that is deeply biting and just is so deeply hilarious. Strongly encourage folks to return to this if it's been a while, and if you haven't read it, definitely give it a try. Highlights for me include "Parade" and "Glen's Homophobia Newsletter."

A set of really evocative poems that dig into your head. Her line breaks are just dazzling, and the material itself is painful, angry, and so tender and soft by turns. I would love to spend more time with it, and want to for sure. Strongly recommend.

So I have to say this upfront: I read Ancillary Justice before I read this book, and I think in some ways that was a mistake. I couldn't stop comparing the two, and finding the former better than the latter, both in plot and the ways that the Gender Thing was handled.

And boy that gender thing. I understand this was probably super revolutionary when it was published, but it's so tied up in Earth conceptions of gender and sex without doing much that feels super important? Like for all that the Gethenians are supposed to be without sex or gender, this book still felt super heavily gendered and in a kind of unquestioned way. (Again, here is where my biggest comparison to Ancillary Justice really takes root; this book didn't challenge my sense of gender, or the way that I understand and see gender in my own world at all, and certainly not to the degree that Ancillary Justice did.) The anthropological portions of the book made me feel kinda gross, like the attempts to "understand" this system, or document its differences, were part of a major mistranslation problem that was never really corrected in the book.

The plot itself was fine? I really enjoyed Estraven as a character and would have liked to see more about him. The ending felt like very very rushed, and parsing it was a little difficult because of that. This is a book that to me seems to scream sequel--for the purposes of exploring a larger world--and the fact that we don't have one is a little disappointing and adds to the sense of being unfinished in some ways.

I didn't hate this book, but I was definitely disappointed by it--it does make me want to return to the Imperial Radch series, so I can experience that world again!