stuckinpermafrost's Reviews (146)

About an hour into the audiobook, I looked up a list of characters because I was struggling to keep track of who’s who. Big mistake — Sparknotes instantly said who the murderer was. Oh well. Love how tense the story was, this was my first Agatha Christie novel and I’ll definitely read more. Dan Stevens is an incredible narrator (Matthew Crawley my beloved).

This is now the longest book I’ve ever read, and the other books in the series are even longer! I feel like it didn’t need to be this long. There were long stretches that dragged for me, but I did enjoy it overall. I saw someone say (I think on Reddit?) that for much of this book, the characters are doing things and you really don’t get a sense of where it’s leading; I would say that’s accurate. I spent a lot of time wondering where this was going, how the plot and the characters were going to connect, and it wasn’t until pretty close to the end that they finally started to do that. I’ve already read the first era of Mistborn, so I knew what to expect from Sanderson’s writing and just kind of accepted how slow it could be. It pays off in the end!

For me, this was a book where all the pieces were there, but it just didn’t really click for some reason. I think I’m just not a big fan of this kind of cat and mouse plot, where all the characters are constantly trying to one up each other. I wasn’t really all that attached to the characters either, except Chono maybe. I did like how this had a kind of science fantasy feel to it, the kind of sci-fi you see in things like Star Wars. It’s a very soft sci-fi to the point that some details almost feel magical.

The last two or so acts were by far my favorite. Zane really had a cringy edgelord, “welcome to my twisted mind” Tumblr blog, “crazy frog… to me it’s just normal frog” kind of vibe. The book instantly got better for me when he was gone!

Greenteeth is a fantastic debut novel! There were a few minor things that kept this from being 100% perfect for me. Sentences seemed to be missing a comma fairly often, although this was "fixed" by the fact that I read about half of the book via audiobook. I‘ve also never really seen a “character seems to be doing X while really Y was the plan all along” twist done well. This was far from the worst example of that I’ve seen, but it’s still a kind of twist that always feels a bit cheap. The book is in first person, we literally know the main character's thoughts, so it's just odd that the actual plan is hidden from us. Either way, those gripes are small enough that this is easily a 4.5/5 for me.

This book reminded me a good bit of Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher. Somewhat dark fantasy but with a decently lighthearted tone, too. I’m always a sucker for a story where a party of characters gets together for a quest to save someone or something.

I adored all three of the main characters. Jenny and Temperance had a wonderful friendship, and I loved Jenny and Brackus’ frenemy relationship too. I really liked all of the folklore we got to see from the British Isles, and that it wasn’t just English! The reveal that

the sword was Excalibur

was pretty easy to see from early on (

Chekhov's legendary sword

), but it was still a fun twist; I wasn’t expecting

Jenny to essentially be the Lady of the Lake

though!

All in all, I’d highly recommend this book. The author answered a question of mine in an AMA a few months ago about how her geologist background impacts her writing, and I could definitely see hints of that throughout (who else would use the word botryoidal?) :)

r/Fantasy Bingo 2025 squares: Published in 2025 (HM), Parent Protagonist, perhaps Cozy SFF? (that square's very much in the eye of the beholder, anyway)

Short book about a future where elephants are extinct in the wild, mammoths have been brought back in Siberia, and human minds can be extracted and transplanted. The message wasn’t anything mind-blowing (poaching bad, restoring natural habitats good, etc) but it was good regardless.

The way it came back around at the end to the mammoths booting Svyatoslav from the herd… heartbreaking! Incredible writing!

I read this partially via ebook, partially via audiobook. I hate to say it but I really didn’t like the voice of one of the two audiobook narrators. I got used to it eventually but wow, the vocal fry on that man is wild.

I received an audiobook ARC through RBmedia on NetGalley. This was an interesting collection of short stories — it was more realistic fiction than I’d expected from the blurb (maybe half of them were speculative fiction), but I’m not complaining. Some of the more speculative stories were very Black Mirror-esque, and I think they were well done. Sometimes that kind of story can feel way too blunt or heavy-handed. I enjoyed what a lot of the stories had to say about loss, and I liked the audiobook narrator.

I picked this up since it was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novella. I wasn’t aware it was a retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo until just now, since I haven’t read it and I guess I’m not all that familiar with the plot… I’ll have to read that sometime too!

Really great novella about the impact of colonialism, in a space version of the West Indies. I’m generally much more of a fantasy reader than sci-fi, but I absolutely love when sci-fi is used to critique issues in modern society (or in history — although the effects of colonialism obviously still exist today). I really like that everything wasn’t wrapped up neatly at the end; it’s a fight that will take ages to win, but it’s absolutely still worthwhile.