Gladstone remains in top form. Like the rest of the Craft sequence, Full Fathom Five begins with some kind of worrying event, slowly builds the layers of mystery and then, slightly more than halfway through, becomes impossible to put down.
I really enjoy both halves of the book, the setup (which is never slow even when it's leisurely) and the denouement. It helps that Gladstone seriously sticks his endings.
Leaving aside the plot arc, the actual narrative is completely brilliant and mashes together fantasy worlds, contemporary capitalist concerns, and epic battles fought not with swords, but with contracts. And, as with so many of the authors I enjoy, fully realized characters.
Now I just need to decide whether to wait for the next book in paperback or just grab the kindle version that came out last week...

(Note to self - check Dena's reviews because I would never have bothered with this if I'd seen her rating first)

What bothered me most about this book was that I could see the glimmerings of a good book beneath it. There was a really interesting story here - pirates, assassins, strange worlds...all of which were obscured by a complete lack of likable characters.
There are books in which one is not supposed to like the characters. I did not get the impression this was one of them. The book is written as though the protagonist is a good, loyal person who cares for others, is a bit prone to anger and is looking to make her mark on the world. The protagonist as portrayed, however, is nasty, petty and something of a hypocrite. These are perfectly acceptable qualities (some of my favorite protagonists are jerks!) and that would have been a fine story. But then the narrative and the people in it need to stop treating her like the former. Her habit of shouting at people for doing a specific thing and then going on to do that exact thing herself was a quality I found particularly grating, especially because no one ever calls her out on it. A character who lacks self-awareness is fine. When the narrative also lacks that self-awareness, I start to get grumpy.
And then there's Naji, the assassin, who manages to drive the plot of the entire book by being closed-mouthed FOR NO APPARENT REASON. Seriously, this book could have been so much shorter if our protagonists stopped shouting at each other and just had a conversation. I loathe this convention; so many authors do it and so few actually think through whether it makes sense in context.
Speaking of shouting at each other and conventions I hate, the romance also entirely failed to work for me. I've read Pride and Prejudice, I can absolutely buy in to falling in love as you get to know someone better. But, you know, it's not enough to show that your characters don't get along. You also need to portray the move towards appreciating one another. And that never happened.
Anyway, this book was disappointing. Which is a pity; I've heard good things about this author. I might try one of her other series and see if my problems with this book turn out to be "first novel issues" (which is totally possible) or whether Clarke is just not right for me. Either way, despite the cliffhanger ending, I have no desire to continue this series.

I know I'm not the first person to say this, but holy cow, its a book about the end of the world that's actually somewhat hopeful! It cares about humanity and people surviving and, while it doesn't gloss over the badness that is, you know, near total annihilation of everyone, it emphasizes humanity and not just surviving, but thriving.
Also, traveling symphony and Shakespeare company. I prefer my end of the world scenarios to contain those.
Station Eleven is so interesting because it takes the usual narrative (here's how the world ended, here's how we survived) and mostly shoves it to the background in favor of looking at the lives of people before and after the end. It's a series of character meditations and works precisely because I was invested in all these characters and how the world they live in made them who they are. It had a David Mitchell feel to it, except without the sense of inescapable environmental disaster hanging over it.
Station Eleven straddles the line between speculative and literary (as a genre) fiction admirably. I think I'd like to see more like it.

Well, that was a gorgeously designed piece of art. That I read. That fits in nicely with the Bookwork After New Media course I took in 2012.
Not entirely sure how I feel about it as a book. It was an experience that happened to me, one of those that require thinking about in a group - possibly a classroom, among friends or even just between the reader and a piece of paper. It doesn't really stand on its own, it functions almost solely as a springboard for conversation.
I still have no idea what to do with it. Teach it one day, perhaps.

But, like, a really GOOD three. If I was rating by some kind of objective book quality rather than personal enjoyment, this would probably be a four.
I'm not sure what exactly failed to click for me about this book - it might have just been the result of a good book with a lot of hype. My mind remained unblown and my ratings, alas, suffer.
But it was a really interesting story with any number of elements that, in the hands of a less skilled writer, would have fallen apart. The mix of post-apocalypse and psychopomp could easily go badly, but I never felt lost or confused by the setting or the narrative. And Wasp herself was a great central figure.
I think this just highlights how subjective the line is between a good book and an equally good book that I love to pieces because reasons.

It is important to note that I listened to this book. I think I would have had a very different experience (and probably a less enjoyable one) had I read it myself rather than had it read to me.
Some of that was the interaction between narrative and narrator - the weirdness of the landscape, the absence of names and speech from the main character, the number of characters who are just "the ______" could be frustrating when read, but the rhythm of the prose works when encountered aurally. It has that odd, folklore-esque feel wherein the definite article serves to both particularize the narrative and cut it loose in space and time, so hearing it read made the story almost soothing rather than disconcerting.
The actual voice of the narrator probably helped a lot with that.
It reminds me in some ways of China Mieville in terms of dark weirdness (and someone should tell the author's wife that I said so), but hews much more closely to a traditional fantasy narrative. I didn't expect the combination of the two to work for me as well as it did, but I really did enjoy The Vagrant far more than I expected to.
Very glad I had the good sense to get it in audio format, though. Clearly the right choice for me and this.
Also, the baby and the goat. Both of them absolutely made the book for me.

I was reminded by NPR's list of romance novels that I'd never finished this series, which is a shame, because this book was just as much fun as the previous ones. Milan clearly enjoys writing characters with modern sensibilities in historical eras, but does so in such a way that it feels like the reader is brought in on the joke. All the books in this series lean somewhat on the fourth wall and this one is no exception, which is part of the fun. It also allows the characters to have worthwhile conversations about things like women's rights and how change happens in a way that straddles the ideas of the day and liberal contemporary attitudes.
Also, did I mention that it's just fun? It is. And that's why I keep reading her.

Well, this was the first book in this series where the title made very little sense given the actual story. It remains somewhat difficult to describe - it's the strangeness of the sci-fi conceit merged with the quirkiness of Pratchett's characters that make it both incredibly readable and decidedly difficult to take seriously (which is, interestingly enough, NOT a problem in Discworld).
My biggest...hmm, complaint is that the authors are under the mistaken apprehension that I remember things between books in the series. I don't. It does lead to a book that feels populated with complete strangers whose life histories I am expected to remember.
One book left in this series and, I imagine that when next June rolls around, I'll be just as surprised as I was this summer to discover that, yes, here's another one. I should read it.

So this book didn't make me cry, but that's because I am hard-hearted and a terrible person. It was magnificent, though. A WWII narrative about women pilots and spies and friendship and everything about it was just so well done.
It's impressive that I liked it - 13 years of yeshiva education is usually enough to put me off any narrative with a Nazi in it, but this was just so well done, I couldn't help but like it.