Cashore is very good at telling a completry different story in the same universe as Graceling. Her characters are fairly unique and her world is extraordinarily fascinating. It took a while to get into, but I found the book was very rewarding and a lot of fun. Fire is a great character and develops very well.

On an entirely different note, I appreciate that Cashore does not whitewash the annoyances of being female or the sensuality of her characters. It's very refreshing.

While this one was better, plotwise, than the second book in the series, it was nowhere near as good as the first. The romances were far less well-defined and the characters were nowhere near as compelling.
I didn't find that the sequels ruined the first book for me, but I would have been just as happy had I not read them.

I thought this was a fantastic example of someone doing something new in urban fantasy (which is one of my favorite fields to see people doing something new in because I dislike most of the old stuff). Beukes version of magic is innovative and bizarre, but also wholly believable. She clearly put a lot of time and effort into thinking about how the world would change and the universe she created shows that level of care. Zinzi is a great character and easy to feel for, even when you don't feel with.
I feel like most of my good reviews are "nice world building, good characterization, thank you for being innovative in fantasy". Which, I admit, is a bit repetitive, but the exciting thing about an author like Beukes is that she can find her own voice in the world of urban fantasy, adapt it to suit her story and craft a narrative that is both very culturally centered and, without sacrificing its individuality and awareness of it provenance, manages to be universal as well (something that most white male fantasy fails at__�only we let WMF get away with it because the rest of us just suck it up and adapt to the paradigm).
Anyway, Zoo City was awesome and I highly recommend it.

In the words of someone or other, this had BETTER be a series.
If you're expecting Pratchett, it had better be the Pratchett of "Nation" rather than of the Discworld. Which is a compliment; it means the man can write in more than one register.
At any rate, this book sits in that weird space between science fiction and fantasy that I tend to think of as speculative fiction. And speculative it is. Pratchett (and yes, I know I seem to be ignoring Baxter here, but I've never read the man so I can't really think about his authorial tendencies) has never been particularly subtle and this book is very much in the tradition of philosophical speculative fiction that forces questions on you whether you want them or not. That being said, the sly wink that is Pratchett's humor, though not as blatant, is still felt throughout the pages and it makes the book feel oddly distorted, as if it does not quite into any genre because it is, stylewise, its own thing.
It was a fascinating read, much slower paced and mellower than Discworld, but enjoyable nonetheless and the way that both the science and the people are handled makes this a good science fiction book for people who dislike hard sci-fi.
Now when's the bloody sequel coming out!?

I wasn't quite sure what to do with this book. It feels...unfinished, perhaps As though it is still one draft away from being done. I've enjoyed the other books in this series and love Stevermer's collaborations with Wrede, so it's not the author. Just this book.
For those who enjoyed College of Magic, this book is interesting because of the background it provides for Galazon and the rest of the story but, overall, it was just meh.

I kept waiting for this book to get less weird and it inexplicably failed to do so. I liked hte way the story unwound, the way it unsettled me and left me always wondering what was or was not true. What may or may not have happened. Egan could have, perhaps, been a bit defter about it, but I didn't mind the confusion.
The book did drag a little; there were moments when I felt as though the pacing should speed up, but it slowed to a crawl. Overall, though, it was a well crafted story-within-a-story and did a good job evoking what I can only call the post-modern gothic novel.

I was very unimpressed with this book, which annoyed me (as it always does, because I assume books intelligent people recommend will be enjoyable). Not getting into whether this was a good book or not, I found it to be a very unenjoyable reading experience. The male lead was a profoundly unsympathetic person and I found myself wishing bad things would happen to him just so he would wake up and grow up.The female lead was more relatable (which is not surprising - she's roughly my age, but one of the marks of a great writer is to invite sympathy across difference), but constantly deluding her audience and herself. Even in the passages where she was, ostensibly, being truthful, I still felt as though she was lying; telling us and herself things on the off chance that might make them true. I didn't believe her.
Which, of course, meant that I found the romance between the two completely implausible.
Shteygart's visions of America were troubling (though I found it amusing that he fell into the Heinlein trap of assuming that racial stereotypes will outlive sexual taboos - a trap that seems far more common among male writers), but in a good way. Once again, my biggest problem was that I doubted their plausibility. We seemed to be in some strange world that merged the 1950s with 2050s and there was no explanation for why certain things had progressed while others regressed. Perhaps Shteyngart felt that the horrible America he envisioned was simply the self-evident end of the road we're currently on, but I completely disagree and so, once again, found myself unable to fully buy into his world.
Which sums up my problem with the book - it was unbelievable in a way that no novel, speculative or realistic, has a right to be. Given what I know about the world, about the characters in it, about the way people behave...events just did not make sense. People did not do what I thought, based on Shteyngart's own descriptions of them, they should have done. And that, for me, kills a book.
There were two other minor points. One was that I did find the book to be surprisingly bad about race and ethnicity. Whether this was deliberate or not is unclear, but the number of characters who were not people but stereotypes was upsetting to me.
Finally, I thought that the ending was a particularly contrived and silly bit of post-modernist fluff. Having the character comment on the text as a published text is fine, if there's a reason to do so. I could not think of a single good reason for the coda and so, arguably, it shouldn't have been there.
In Shteyngart's defense, he writes very well (hence two stars). I just wish I could believe what he had to say.

This book was recommended to me by a friend who described it as really good, but really weird. She was right.
Granted, it wasn't the weird I was expecting (most of my baseline for weird is China Mieville and this was nothing like), but I could certainly see her point. The story tended to progress in unexpected ways and the storytelling style was intriguing, especially in how Bloom wraps up lives - neatly, but without mitigating their complexity.
I enjoyed this story, intrigued as I was by the character and the different view of the historical era. But still, nothing at all what I was expecting from a book about a Jewish immigrant woman.