This book caused me to grit my teeth so many times I need to go to the dentist.

Abandoned at 27%.

This review by Emma sums up everything I felt.

I liked seeing Bay's necromancy powers grow, but she was so immature and whiny throughout the whole book.

It was so hard to read about humans just exploring the universe after reading Chambers' quartet where humans are already safely enmeshed in alien politics.

I want to give this book to everyone who has ever looked at the stars and wondered, or looked at a microscope and wondered, or to a teenager dreaming of space travel.

Let's say yes.

Oh, Clove.

In two words: fucked up.

In one word: refreshing.

Tristran Thorn has fairy blood, and so after his lady love sends him off to the fairy world to fetch a falling star, he actually does quite well for himself until he finds that the star is actually a woman, and a rambunctious one at that. Tristran wasn't a strong enough character for me; I really loved the opening section where his father meets the woman from the fairy world who will be Tristran's mother, and I liked the seven brothers all vying for the throne, but it just isn't a story I found very memorable. It is a good light read if you want a nice fairy tale.

I'm honestly not sure how this battered and mildewed hardcover found its way into my home, but I'm glad it did. This was a fascinating look at the world of the 5th century BC seen through the eyes of Zoroaster's grandson. It was fun to read something from the Persian perspective since I've read so much about the Greeks and Greek gods that to read about a culture that viewed them as a minor annoyance made me laugh.

Our main character travels from the courts of Persia to India to Cathay and back again before telling his tale for posterity as he lives out his final days in Greece. Overall a really great story and unlike anything I normally read.

A few favorite anti-religion quotes aimed at our Zoroastrian protagonist below:

"If I were a supreme deity, I wouldn't go to the trouble of creating either evil or man or anything at all that was not entirely pleasing to me. I'm afraid that when it comes to explaining your supreme deity, you're obliged to work backwards. Evil exists. You cannot explain why. So you turn your creator into a sort of cruel sportsman who plays games with human life."

"What you believe makes no sense, if you'll forgive me. We can't conceive a god who takes an immortal soul, allows it to be born once, plays a game with it, then passes a judgment on it and condemns it to pain or pleasure forever."

"You serve that peculiar god who created evil so that he would have an excuse to torture his other creations."

"We've long since abandoned the very notion of a supreme deity. And so, I gather, has your friend Confucius. He realizes, as do we, that to accept such a monster means an endorsement of evil, since evil is his creation, too. [...] For practical reasons, we think that men behave better in a world where there is no supreme deity endorsing mischief and confusing the simple. As your Confucius so wisely said, 'Heaven is far. Man is near.'"

I picked up this book from a tweet that pointed out it had an all-Asian cast and a heist, and I was sold. I live for a good heist. I am currently planning my Six of Crows tattoo, and I almost bought a mini Cooper for my first car because I've seen the Italian Job (the original and the remake) way too many times.

This is not a heist book, and it hasn't done a great job of being anything else either.

There is no heist: To me, the essence of a heist is having a cast of characters who are all really excellent at their one job (and for humor, probably shit at everything else) and they use their skills despite their interpersonal issues to pull off the job. The book opens with a kidnapping to get money for the plan. I was still invested at this point. But it's just a series of small jobs that work out through sheer luck. Only two out of the five characters have special skills, and in one small job only four characters are used. You can't have a heist where you literally have a line that says "Arun, who wasn't needed for this operation, had some lab crisis to deal with." Just. No.

The worldbuilding sucks: They have cell phone parallels called Palm and Vox and I never understood what the difference was. They can't see the sky, so the pollution is bad, but everyone just walks around in cloth masks. I get that the whole point of the book is the rich vs the poor, but that still seems over the top. You never get to know the other members of Zhou's group and so it's hard to care about them when they are in (mild to moderately) dangerous situations. Also this minor spoiler:

Spoiler

The bad guy creates a flu virus, and Arun is somehow able to come up with an antidote in a matter of weeks, which we all know in today's covid world that that ain't happening.

The romance takes precedence over everything: This speaks for itself. Get your bland romance out of my heist.

It's really unfair to put V E Schwab up against other authors. Her ability with language is so far beyond any of these other authors that by the time you end the collection with hers, you regret wasting your time the others.

Most of the stories were decent, except Mark Oshiro's which was boring and stupid and Dhonielle Clayton's which tried to be eighty stories at once and managed to be as interesting as a stray piece of cat hair.