booksny's Reviews (332)

A fun imaginative ride

A pleasant read with lovely illustrations. The characters were sweet and relatively emotional aware/mature, and their dynamics were accordingly healthy though they worked through some difficult themes.

I'm a big fan of discworld but found this one of my least favorite in the series - it was quite early on in Pratchett 's career I think, so the usual elements I like were there but it was hard to get through given how the scene kept switching abruptly and there was a lot of wordy description. Nijel also annoyed me a fair bit.

Quick read, interesting set up. Felt somewhat melodramatic at times; thought Hannah's discovery was a bit too coincidental and the murder victim was overwhelmingly sociopathic. There was a lot of lusty objectification and dysfunctional misery in the characters, which made me very impatient to see at least one of them killed off (was frustrated that the murder took ages to get to)

Some powerful speeches within - was particularly struck by the ones from Andre Lorde, Vito Russo, Mary Fisher Tammy Baldwin , Arsham Parsi, Debi Jackson. Would recommend reading up on each person in further details - for example,Harry Hay had a very complicated background which could not be fully captured in a short summary 

The setting and writing style felt simple and straightforward. I enjoyed it for how easy it was to read and the details of the geography and culture. However, as I'm not familiar with Botswana, I wasn't certain in how authentically the author (white Scotsman born in Zimbabwe) was portraying Botswana

Easy read but wasn't a fan of any of the characters. 

Even acknowledging that they were all seen through an unreliable narrator's (Theo) eyes, they felt quite one-dimensional and were unrealistically open to interacting with Theo and giving him (a stranger) all sorts of personal details. 

This felt particularly bizarre when it came to his colleagues - they all made highly unprofessional choices and continued to make them despite little personal reward.

Informative and provoking a lot of food for thought; it's interesting to be reading the op-eds within this book a couple decades past when they were first published and seeing how some things have changed (but many have not)

The writing is good, but would've preferred if more focus was given to briseis than to Achilles 

The pacing of the story was too slow for my tastes, felt like there was a lot of telling rather than showing, the characters just weren't particularly likable and the dialogue felt wooden