octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

The strength of this book lies I think in the philosophy behind it - in the system of magic and names. That being said, while I do enjoy the system and think very fondly of the setting, I'm not that much interested in the characters. I'm largely indifferent to Ged and always have been, and that hasn't changed on my rereading. It has to be said the plot is a little thin as well, though this is frequently disguised by the clean, quiet prose.

I do look forward to the next in the series however; it's the one I remember admiring most. (And it had an actual woman in it, which was nice.)

A fairly simple story but nicely told. I've always been a sucker for the "stories within stories" structure, and this is certainly that. The illustrations are very good as well, with a nice blend of genres.

A book of two halves. The first I was deeply interested in: an original, heavily character-based story, in which people who couldn't fit into a future universe chose, for a variety of reasons, to travel back in time to the Pliocene Era and spend their lives there.

Unfortunately, then it turned into a story about a war against aliens who'd come to live on early Earth. The character stuff got essentially dropped in favour of action and my interest plummeted right along with it. It was a struggle to finish. Apparently there's another book following this one, but I care so very little about the Tanu that I can't see myself bothering to read it. A shame, as it started so well.

A collection of short writings, originally appearing in a number of magazines, on science fiction. I found the early sections most interesting but it all went on for quite a while, and, unsurprisingly given the format, could be a little repetitive.

And this is picky on my part, but the scientific nit-picking on Orwell's 1984 seems to me a perfect example of not seeing the forest for the trees. Yes, the trees are not very accurate, but the forest is fascinating and it's hard for me not to side-eye Asimov for missing that.

Readable story in which a child buys a dragon egg and hatches it, with attending difficulties. Young Jeremy, however, seems too good to be true to me, could never really quite connect with him. He's doing all the right things, but I still want to poke at him with a stick. And I feel churlish saying this about a kids' book, but the feel-good ending sort of took away from the story for me. But I get it, Jeremy made a series of good decisions and was rewarded for it, so fairness restores the universe.

There's also times, sad to say, that the prose is not that great. The one example that really stuck out was referring to Jeremy's feelings of anxiety/excitement: "Ignoring the crescendo of his stomach symphony..." Yeah.

Fantastic premise, and fantastic characters. Hardly any of them are nice, and they're all working separate agendas, leading to a story that's both interesting and complex and painted almost entirely in shades of grey. It is in fact almost uniformly excellent until it gets to the end, and the end is where it all fell apart for me. I didn't find it convincing on any level, and it kind of dragged the rest of the story down by association. Which is a real shame, but there you are.

This is the first book I've read in this series, so I'm quite sure I'm not getting all the subtleties of it, but it was an easy, enjoyable read. Rather too stuffed full with characters, perhaps, in that they were all rather thinly drawn. It says on the cover "A Tale of Langdon St. Ives" and I must say he was the most cipher-like of the lot, nearly entirely devoid of personality.

That being said, there were some lovely creepy images in here, the severed heads being kept alive by fungi the chief of them.

There's just too much thrown at the wall here. Vampires, wendigo, aswang, multiples cases of hidden identity, a cannibalistic prologue that's promptly dropped. It's not that well tied together either, and I'm still not sure why the book doesn't have a laser focus on the aswang, which is a creepy creepy figure that hasn't been done to death already, instead of messing about trying to be all things to all readers.

The snowy sense of landscape was well done, though. Really gave the book a sense of place.

Quick-paced, surprisingly grim story. It does have the reset button that appears so often in Trek, but this was compensated for by the really enjoyable spotlight on Sulu, as well as that on the individual members of the security crew.

A quick, interesting read - I particularly liked the "syllables as basis of text" idea - but otherwise not much use to me. With my non/fiction, editorial comments are invariably on what needs expanding. For writers who habitually work too short, cutting down's not the problem!