competencefantasy's Reviews (912)

Very very romantic assexual rep. However the drawn out part was a little exhausting

So um... I've never seen this level of taboo outside of fanfiction before. At one point I realized a pair of sexually involved underage first cousins was the healthiest relationship in the place, and things hadn't nearly finished getting bad yet. This is dark. Yet it's also seriously literary about it. For example I had a lot of feelings about some of the nuances with respect to the abusive family. I think that may be the weird thing here. The book is somehow nuanced while winning every how dark can I get contest by a mile. I honestly dont know what I think of the thing as a whole.

You can tell that Andre Leon Talley is a very skilled fashion writer. The scenes in this book are painted in wonderful detail, and even if I don't always get the references the whole thing is very rich. Some of the personal stuff felt a bit more distanced, which is a problem I often have with memoirs. I also thought it was an interesting insight into the author's industry and the way it worked and once worked. The photos were great too.

I like this a lot as an addition to the series. However, I do feel it has some "middle book" problems. The center section lagged, especially with all the sailing, and the theology got very tell not showy. I felt like the last 50 or so pages could have been a bigger part of the whole. However, this is still Leguin and she is very very good at words. It often felt like being told a story around a campfire, and it relaxed me enough that I sometimes had trouble concentrating. I look forward to reading the next one.

This really is a fairy tale. The author is just magnificent at mimicking the cadence of these oral stories and as a result any given passage feels full of symbolic significance and allegory. The one problem with that is that in a novel length story that can mess with the pacing, but it really makes the part where all the plot threads come together feel substantial. I was especially interested in the two antagonists, who were portrayed as complexly interacting with forces beyond their control and in the theology/cosmology of this world, which borrows substantial from our world but I think puts it together in interesting ways. There's an old/pagan knowledge vs corrupted Christianity thing going on that gets where you'd expect but by an unusual route. The gender related threads feel a little bit less original to me, but are executed competently. This apparently is part of a series and, while I feel like it didn't really need a followup, I am interested to see where they go with it and if they try to keep going with the fairy tale tone or not.

I got this one in a giveaway and though it took me a while to get through it, that was well worth the time. I am really amazed by what a feat of writing this is. The general feel is somewhere in between space opera and Mad Max, which is an impressive enough marriage as it is, but the author manages to keep so many different themes in the air. There's identity, as we're dealing with a first person narrator who finds "I" a fraught concept. There's all the various multiverse themes, which introduce multiple versions of the important characters, all handled with skill by the author to the point where I never needed to go back and look up where I am and who some minor character was. There's borders/ social class, recovery from abuse, inevitability vs the possibility of change, a wlw romance, family tensions, mentorship... There's even interesting and sensitive portrayal of sex work at one point. I'm not sure what this book doesn't have. It's so fast paced that I did large chunks in a single sitting because I couldn't find a place to stop, yet it somehow keeps track of everything. I think this author is very good at what she does and I look forward to her next work.

This is very technically competent. The prose is lovely and translates well. Pacing is strong and symbolism is used provocatively.

The problem is that the impact of the story hangs on a particular character arc, which is based off of the protagonists possessive obsession with a woman whose character is the trope of the determined to be Christian Martyr borrowed wholesale from the likes of Acts with very little extra detailing. The author did a lot of interesting things from playing with a protagonist who doesn't know what the audience knows about the doctrine and eventual reach of Christianity. However because the protagonist's obsession has to be dialed up an unreasonable amount to get him to even be involved with the sect under those circumstance, it gets creepy and uninteresting in its creepiness quickly.

I picked this off the free books table at work and wish I knew which of my colleagues also read it.

The low score is primarily for the forward and introduction who spend the majority of the page count arguing about whether modern gender and sexual understandings can be visualized in this instance and ... ok fine argue away but could we all at least pretend to notice that the central narrative chapter structure in this primary source is ' I killed, nearly killed, stole from some person and had to get out of town quick' and the central thematic identity is 'I am a Spaniard (in the 16--s)

Quick and pleasant

There are some dated elements here, as is common with the western genre, but I thought the ending was good.

I think this probably worked better when it was newer and the radical elements were more novel. or maybe the problem is that I was being derailed by constantly being reminded of how little I am interested by attraction of women to men.