Even better than the first book, Elliott's Spiritwalker trilogy has now taken on yet another trope of epic fantasy and retreated it. Not only do we have an epic fantasy heroine, we now have a visit to a foreign land wherein the natives aren't portrayed as culturally inferior to (Europe) the hero's home.
But a book isn't good simply because it refuses to make the genre's traditional mistakes. What I loved so much about this book was that it had the right amount of...perhaps "camp" is the wrong word, but let me explain. Epic fantasy is campy. It's a bit over the top, a bit ridiculous in the way that coincidences just keep coinciding, everyone is a bit more gaudy that people are. It's larger than life. And Elliott makes her characters embody that big-ness without ever losing control of them, the narrative or the reader's interest.
And, on that note, I am so glad to find a traditional epic fantasy that breaks with the problematic traditions of the genre and embraces what is good about it.

I always feel...guilty is perhaps not the right word, but uneasy when I am simply whelmed by the work that one of the greatest authors of the 20th century has done.
It's not that I wasn't impressed with The Sound and the Fury, because in many ways I was. Although I found that, given everything I had heard about the Benjy section, it was kinda disappointing in its comprehensibility (I might be the only person who has ever said that).

It was good. It just didn't thrill me.

As I mentioned regarding the Hunger Games, I tend to judge books I know to be successful more harshly. It's a fault.
Anyway, Catching Fire took a bit of time to get into and Katniss, well, she's still a bit slow (which is okay, because half the time she's just a vehicle for readerly experience).
The parts of the story I find most compelling remain the games themselves and the moment of interaction between human being and technologized nature they represent. That's where Collins is at her best, that's what makes this story so compelling and intriguing for me. The rest, well...I find the broader world of PanEm to be a bit too contrived and not well enough thought out for it to be fully believable. There's just too much that doesn't match, too many instances where technology just doesn't work the way I would expect. The world-building feels rushed, as if there isn't much detail beyond the tidbits given in the book, nothing beyond the window-dressing needed to convey a setting.
What I love about YA post-apocalypse narratives in particular is how detailed and fascinating the worlds they invent are and The Hunger Games trilogy just lacks that.

Like its predecessor, The Broken Kingdoms is a wonderfully spun fantasy story that looks at what it means to be divine in terms of what it means to be human. As before, the characters are all well realized and th story is well written as well as original. An excellent story that more than lives up to the high standards set by the first and leaves me hoping that the third one will come out soon. This was the kind of book that i simultaneously want desperately to finish and wish will never end.

I think my perennial question to myself is why I persist on reading Heinlein, even after I recognize time and time again that he annoys me.
His writing style, though not my favorite, is certainly fine and it's an absence-of-fondness for his deliberate style, rather than an absence of style on his part.
I just don't understand how anyone can enjoy reading a man who, as he attempts to destroy ridiculous or pointless stereotypes or prejudices, always and only succeeds in laying bare his own. As a study in self-delusion and misogyny, he's fascinating, but as a writer..?
On a somewhat unrelated note, I am amused at a view of the world in which polygamy and "free sex" has become de rigeur, but racism is equally the norm.
Ah, well, predicting the future has always been a risky business.
Aside from my opinions about Heinlein (and my opinions about his opinions of people, which tend to sum themselves up in the phrase "he has everything backwards"), Friday was a decent story, well-paced and exciting and capable of sustaining that tempo for over 300 pages, which is not easy. Now if only the characters didn't make me want to reanimate the author and make him sit through a lifetime of womens' studies courses in the hope that SOMETHING gets through his skull.

This series has been on my to-read list for over five years, but I jus t never got around to it. With the tv show beginning, however, I knew I had to just sit down a nd read it. After all, I don't watch movies if I haven't read the books (assuming there's a remote chance I'll ever read the things) and I wasn't going to pass up a chance to watch Sean Bean act.

At any rate, I'm glad I finally bit the bullet and read the first book. The novels themselves are well plotted, with reasonably believable characters (I'll forgive the stilted dialogue; nobody's perfect) and, most importantly for me, I gained a much better understanding of how the last decade of fantasy has developed. Martin's emphasis on the humanity of his characters and story, and his obvious debt to the histories of the European nations, England in particular, comes out in this novel and makes me look forward to the rest of the series. And, since the book is well written enough and rarely slides into either purple prose or bad writing, I have no complaints.

Definitely worth picking up, especially with the reward of Sean Bean at the end. How come there aren't any sex scenes with him?

I believe the phrase I'm looking for is REALLY late to the bandwagon. Okay, so I read this book because I had someone managed NOT to be spoiled for it so far and recognized that the odds of that state continuing are so small, I had better read it if I was ever going to.
Of course, it suffered from being THE hyped up book of the year and so I was...well, honestly, I was expecting it not to live up to the hype. I just wondered whether it would be pretty good or awful.
Pretty good, as it turns out. I liked the premise and I have a soft spot for this post-apocalyptic/dystopic young adult fiction. The book's main virtue and failing were, oddly enough, one and the same: an absence of reality. Katniss and her world and her experiences felt unreal; I didn't believe in her as a character or that her experiences were really happening to her. Everything felt as though it was coming through a wad of cotton.
Of course, that made the gory bits palatable and made Katniss a sort of every-girl for the reader to impose herself into and imagine being there. Because Katniss never puts her own stamp on her experiences, they feel unmediated and because Collins never makes you feel like you're there, the horror of the book is mitigated, leaving the (cotton swatched) drama and excitement and experience. It's kept at a distance and safe.
Anyway, I'm glad I read it and I'll definitely read the rest of it. I just can't help wondering what the relationship between the empty main character and the bestseller is...