I liked the ends of a couple of the arcs but didn’t really like the pacing of each set or the artwork. dNF’d on the third story when the first issue neither had a premise I liked and featured artwork I liked less than the others.

DNF’d. I just... can’t bring myself to care about any of the characters.

I gave it 2 hours on the audiobook. Pretty cookie-cutter stock fantasy so far. The promise of finding out who hunts the woman with Too Much Power isn’t enticing enough to continue. The hazards of coming to old fantasy novels many years after publication, I guess.

DNF’d it at 26%. Some characters and events were interesting, and I think it’s got nice prose and decent writing, even. But it’s just far to meandering with in world jargon that is never explained that I just don’t connect with anything going on.

Dnf’d.

DNF around a few hours into the audible book. The movie has different problems than the book, with the book having some cool world building ideas around technology but everything else is pretty thin and the constant reiteration at how ugly the main character was by everyone all the time, along with the audible reader trying to do Asian accents for characters like Fang make it not worth the effort to finish.

1/5 The other side of life. This was recommended to me and I kept finding it on sites for cyberpunk quotes, some of which are great. I did not like it at all though:

I really wanted to like this book and the writing itself isn't bad. But at 60 pages I had to stop reading. The characters aren't believable at all.

The best I can describe it is that this is twilight, except there's even less reason for one of the main protagonists of the story to act as she does. She falls for Nin immediately, while just beforehand self proclaims herself a thief- but her and her friend trust and go with Nin right away. No problem barely any hint of distrust. It's bizarre.

There's numerous references to Tolkien elves, kryptonite and other really weird things. They both fall for each other after 30 minutes in, she seems like she's not even a protagonist in the story.

I get that this is young adult but it's even more juvenile than is typical of the genre. There also doesn't appear to be a clear understand of the genre by the time I stopped reading. Casually floating in Nin's view on society and technology doesn't make the story high tech and low life, both staples of the genre. In fact there's so many pop culture references in it, the author is actively working against creating a cyberpunk work.

There WERE some great quotes that fall into the cyberpunk genre but they are only Nins thoughts, they're never actually realized in the story at all, up until the point I got up to, anyways.

Neat concept, some better dialogue and some more research into the genre are needed though--if it's actually supposed to have cyberpunk elements as it states.

2021 reread: I actually liked this a Lot more than I did initially. Nikolai is less annoying to me and coming off the previous books, I’m honestly super here for Zoya and Nina’s storylines. There’s some more interesting worldbuilding and taking fascist sexists down a peg.

I was probably just not in the mood for it when I read it last as well. And I would have only known who Nina was out of everyone, pretty much. Nikolai gets a cameo in Six of Crows but he wasn’t a wise cracking annoying man child in it. He was his altar ego, for the most part. Reading what happened to him gave me some empathy for this story, though, to be honest, it takes a backseat to Zoya and Nina for me.

My largest gripe is the dialogue. I don’t find the quips charming, I find them annoying. But the world building, magic, and characters and their arcs are all enjoyable. I’ll probably check out the next one too. So far, my favourite part of Grisha verse is still the Six of Crows duology. But there was enough reference to the original trilogy that I haven’t finished yet that I might go back and finish the last two books. Sounds like some cool stuff happened.

I read this last year and really enjoyed it. Not sure why this wasn’t in any of my shelves. I loved the prose and the characters, and against the opinions of most, it seems, the ending. It was a bit neat but also felt incredibly fitting and poetic. After I finished it I bought it because I knew I’d want to read it again sometime in the future. The only thing slightly lacking was pertaining to the plot beats, which felt like a strange arrangement to play, but somehow was pulled off anyway.

This is staggeringly good. It is pretty genius climate fiction, drawing a clear narrative and thematic parallel between nature and Franny herself. She believes herself a damaged creature as she feels the edges of cage in every place she’s ever been. While we struggle to understand her via the consequences of her actions before cause, the structure of the novel jumps around in time and place, coming together masterfully.

It’s actually difficult to talk about why I liked this because I liked everything about it! The prose are something akin to A River Runs Through It, the structure is utilized to great effect. The theme and character are so intertwined yet so effective and simple it made think that this is the cli-fi we need to wake up people to environmental problems we face. This idea that people are somehow divorced and above nature while we continue to be impacted in positive and negative ways by it daily is brought into such sharp focus with Franny.

It’s nuanced yet it effectively communicates complex ideas so well. There’s a balance too, which is hard to find in cli-fi sometimes. Either too hopefully or too dire. Plus, it tries to disabuse people of the notion that nature could somehow be entirely eradicated, when we don’t actually understand vast amounts of ecologies, or even ourselves. We hardly know how to nurture anything, let alone the outliers. But that doesn’t mean their fate is defined. As happens not infrequently with nature, edge cases and the non-typical may find a way to thrive in ways we can’t even imagine for ourselves.