shidoburrito's Reviews (1.54k)

Abandoned because I just wasn't feeling it. Nothing was really hooking me. I think it was the main character I was having trouble with. Things just seemed to happen for her with no logical reasoning. I was often confused when she'd be like

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"Oh but I have this cousin that lives in PR that is an entertainment lawyer who happens to work for this raggaeton musician who happens to have a song about El Cuco which is totally what this monster is and I have it all figured out after being a snoop under the pretense of an amateur investigator for 3 days. Also I live in Vermont and really have no connection with this neighborhood my deadbeat Dad grew up in but somehow I'm able to make friends and enemies alike by just existing and not have any character development."

Wow, how does a book go from being so good in the first book I painted it on my stairs, so the second book getting two stars?
Honestly? I wonder if the author even wanted to write this? The passion and action and heartfelt fun and intriguing characters that made Ready Player One one of my all-time favorite books just wasn't there this time! I honestly could not STAND Wade in the first half of the book. OH. MY. GLOB was he a whiney, selfish little twerp! I almost couldn't keep reading!
And the quest for the shards wasn't well parsed. It felt made up on the spot. It plodded along from one point to the next, nothing really connecting them. Shards themselves.
And the ENDING....

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At the beginning it was all about making the earth a better place but too many people were wrapped up in their digital lives to care about the physical one. Samantha was all super angry with Wade for releasing the ONI and giving people even less of a reason to care about the physical state of our planet. Then, suddenly, we get the power to resurrect anyone who linked with the ONI into an immortal, digital avatar and Samantha gets to hug her dead grandma's consciousness made avatar and now she's totally fine. Forget about any lesson or plot from the first half of the book. And I didn't really see it as a good or happy ending. In fact, having a ship driven by Wade's digital consciousness-- a digital copy of the immature, man-baby I had to tolerate at the beginning of this book-- in charge of an entire space ship with hundreds of thousands of other uploads with their man-cave-in-the-sky and frozen embryos on their way to the closest, possibly-livable planet, is a terrifying prospect to me! I don't take that as "happily ever after" I call that "What can possibly go wrong, everything has gone great these past 5 years, only 2 lightyears to go, how could we possibly get bored or damage the servers on a ship piloted by a digital man-child?" *shudders*

To quote myself when I started reading this book and someone said "How is it?":
"It's easy to have character development when you start the character at the lowest of the low."

4.5 Whew, what a ride! I truly truly loved this book! Hauntings, horror, mystery, murder! It has it all!
Is it anything new? No, not really. Is it a fun read? Most definitely! Will I buy my own copy? For sure!

Just imagine if your Dad ruined your life by writing about your experience living in the Amityville house when you were 5 and you remember nothing of those frightening experiences. Then you had the chance to renovate that house and look for answers.

Also, +500 points for being the first horror book in a LONG time to have no pet deaths! THANK YOU!

I'm sure this is an over-used descriptor but this is Supernatural Sherlock (no Who, though). Great characters, written with humor and heart, there's really nothing wrong with this book. No awful teen romance, no love triangles. It's great! Anyone can read it! <3

Yet another good, haunted house read. I want to say cliche, but you know what? It was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it. I did enjoy the concept of different types of horror authors getting together in a supposedly-haunted house.

Hey, remember that Cardassian kid who was raised by Bajorans and then Sisko made him live with his birth father on Cardassia rather than stay with his adoptive parents who loved him? Wanna know his life story (well, 8 years of his life's story)? Now you can!
And while this isn't edge-of-your-seat, non-stop thrills, it is a great story full of ups and (mostly) downs as poor Rugal just tries to get back to Bajor and find a place to belong and recapture that love he felt. Definitely worth the read if you're wanting to delve deeper into DS9 and its Cardassian characters.

What a wonderful, terrifying and frustrating book! I have a term that I made up when I read this book: Nineties Drama Anger. A special kind of frustration and anger felt for protagonists of (usually) books and movies from the nineties when they are abandoned by friends and family and disbelieved. I remember feeling this level of anger for a fictional character when I was younger and watching A Little Princess.
ANYWAY, I felt this for our poor protagonist Patricia.

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And when you find out about the husbands and what they were up to behind the wives' backs? I was seeing red! Hear me, husband of mine, if you ever pulled a stunt like that, don't expect me to meekly step down and let you tell me how to live my life and raise our kids! Oooooh, I'll {redacted}!!!

This book was very similar to the plot and feel of Fright Night, and also a wonderful book by Mary Downing Hahn called "Look for me by Moonlight". I great book with a very mean, bad vampire man. And a group of mothers that are more than just housewives drinking wine at a bookclub.

Ok, technically this is a 3.5 star, but I'll give it 4 because looking back at all the books that lead up to this, this one was somewhere in the middle.
To start off, if you're like me and want to know more about Garak, Cardassia and all those wonderful (awful, terrible) characters, don't be like me and start at the end (with Enigma Tales, which I feel I should re-read now that I'm all caught up).
Wanna know Garak's backstory? Start with Robinson's A Stitch In Time
Wanna know what it was like being a Cardassian during The Fire and Dominion War? Read it from Rugal's POV in The Never Ending Sacrifice (the beginning of the Cardassian books by Una McCormack)
What about Garak after the War and he makes it back to Cardassia after becoming an Ambassador? Next on your list is this book, Crimson Shadow, then.
How do you sum it up all neatly (enough)? Finish with Enigma Tales.

I really wish I had started with this one, at least, before reading Enigma Tales. There are some great characters that Una has created that continue on into ET. I think that's definitely her strength is in her characters. Yeah, it gets a bit slow in places, and I am easily confused when there's a lot of characters to follow (and having similar names starting with the same letter just does me in). But all in all, a great book to read if you're interested in what is going on in Cardassia about a decade after The Fire and how things are holding up politics-wise (not well and shadily) and what Garak is up to (being his wonderful sassy self and taking on too much at once, but happy to be home). And Parmak. Lovely, wonderful Parmak.

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Honest truth? I started with Enigma Tales because someone online in the Garashir fandom was like "read this! it's great! almost makes Garashir canon!" Not really, but it was enough to get me into the Star Trek novels and with a little more researching into the chronological order of these books by Robinson and McCormack, I was able to follow Garak through his life, before and beyond what we watch on DS9. Is it great for G/B shippers? There's a few tiny mentions here and there to enjoy, but don't read it just for that. Read it to learn what happens to Cardassia after the war, what happens to Garak, and grow to love the characters, both original and canon. And learn about the amazingly loving partner that is Parmak and consider that perhaps he might be better for Garak than Bashir? All our poor old lizard needs is someone to love and forgive him. <3

I'm trying to pinpoint which strength I want to list first. The characters? Amazing, three dimensional, super well-written (like most of Schwab's characters)! The story? Epic, fantastical, cinematic! Makes me almost think of Gaiman when he turns an ordinary human into a mythological hero living a life they write ballads about and tell tales of. I think my favorite aspect was that Schwab worked hard to really paint her words in this book. It's so much more florid and lyrical than her other books I've read.
Alas, the one downside was the pacing. It does start off slow. Don't worry, the pacing changes (I wouldn't say picks up) and you'll know it when you get there. And the end of the book's pacing is a bit of a whirlwind. A bit more things packed in there and I'd say it was too much too soon, but thankfully it is just a touch overcooked, but not burnt.

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And +1,000 points for creating a Faustian character that keeps her end of the bargain and continues to play the game and doesn't turn into the moping, angry, depressed being that insists they're still human and their resistance just makes them unlikable. Also, none of this "I love this human, it's true love, it'll defeat the curse!" bull-honky. I applaud you Schwab with how you dealt with Adeline's personality, how she changes and grows within her deal with Luc and their relationship. I really, REALLY, did like how she dealt with Luc and Adeline's relationship. Although I'm always a sucker for Enemies to Lovers to Frenemies.
And another +500 points for Luc in general. For some reason I pictured black-haired Howl, which certainly didn't hurt my imagining of Luc while reading AT ALL.
And AND this is a complete novel. Not a series. +1,000,000 points from me for that alone.