lit_stacks's Reviews (579)

I would've given this a better rating if Scott Lynch hadn't set the bar so high with Lies of Locke Lamora. While this book goes back to the dual storyline/flashback style, neither story is interesting for most of the book. One of the storylines is focused on the Gentlemen Bastards putting on a play, the other on a love story. Neither had the typical intelligent heist-style of the previous two books. While I really liked the Sanza brothers in the first book, they were kind of annoying in this book. It is also hard to get emotionally attached to characters that you know are dead. Red Seas at least introduced solid characters, while this book introduced so many characters in both storylines, it was hard to develop an attachment to any of them. The ending contains a cliffhanger, but I still found it difficult to be interested in picking up the next book.

This is one of those books that ended up on my Goodreads list and I don't know how it got there. It's not really a crime novel, not really a mystery novel. It is instead smut set in the future and a crime has been committed. It's smut with a story.

Two lessons to draw from this book: slut shaming leads to stalled murder cases and men should not be allowed to run things. Ever. Because they will end up having sex with suspects, suppress evidence, and discriminate against lesbians and promiscuity until they can't solve a case due to all the blind spots they've drawn.

Ultimately, I left this book feeling kind of icky. The Black Dahlia case is a real case, the girl is a real girl. But yet she will be remembered more as the fantasy version that Ellroy creates here (and also in the movie based on this book). And the fantasy version is portrayed as a promiscuous ne'er-do-well, routinely called slut, "lez", and whore by those who are trying to solve her case. Not to mention the insanely gory details that Ellroy feels necessary to share. I can abide by a good detective story, but I couldn't help feel that this was exploitative and cruel to the girl's family.

Increasing the ick factor was the raging, toxic masculinity of the 1940s on display here despite the book being written in the 70s. I'm all about putting a bygone time on parade to learn how far we have come and why going backwards would be so harmful. But this book's use of "homo," the n-word, slut, "lez", and just really terrible sexual attitudes were gratuitous and over-the-top.

If you get a later version that includes the afterword, you find out that the author truly does share some of these attitudes. Ellroy shares that his mother was murdered at age 40 after leading a promiscuous lifestyle that he clearly begrudges her despite having "incestuous feelings" about her. He confesses to channeling his feelings into the real-life Black Dahlia case that he then turned into this book. So nothing in the book was about satirizing the 1940s. Instead it was about working out a complicated mother-son relationship. And he used a real case and a real human being to do that. Hence, you leave feeling icky.

DO NOT LISTEN TO THIS BOOK. It is my understanding that the print book has footnotes, these are omitted from the audiobook. While you might not think this is a problem, this book (as Cooney explains in the beginning) has a huge number of logical leaps in it. So by the 100th time Cooney says that "X must've felt Y," you really want to see if there's a footnote that explains why X must have done something. I understand that Egyptian history is not comprehensive because of the use of papyrus rather than stone as a recording device. The footnotes would have provided the evidence that Cooney was using to make these statements or if there was any evidence at all.

Otherwise, the book could have been shorter. While the occasional foray into Hatshepsut's emotions and state of mind was entertaining, the rate at which Cooney did so and the certainty that she had when doing it ("She must've felt X") was off-putting. There is of course no way that Cooney could know how Hatshepsut felt.

This book just wasn't for me. While it may be interesting to someone of high school age, I've been out of high school for many years and the drama in this book just seems trivial most times.

This book was about half a book about meditation and half a book about Dan Harris' life. While Harris' life is interesting, it's not really what I signed up for. Even the meditation parts are less instruction and more story of Harris' experiences with it. But what really rubbed me the wrong way was that Harris keeps claiming that anyone can do meditation but then describes how his true breakthroughs came at fancy, expensive meditation retreats. I also listened to this book and Harris (who narrates) comes across as kind of whiny.

What was most interesting about the book is how stories make it on the nightly news. There is no real chain of command on it, it's rather decided by the people on the ground. So they are competing for air time and so inflating the importance of what they are covering. And in this frightening day and age, I don't really want self-described asshole Dan Harris picking what I see on the news.