Hate to DNF an eARC (from NetGalley and publisher University of Chicago Press), but I just cannot with Battle of the Big Bang. It’s written like a fever dream of a science book, and on every page I was left asking, who is this book for?

Niayesh Afshordi is a cosmologist; Phil Halper is a science comms YouTuber. Together, they’ve teamed up to write a tour of cosmology. They trace the various theories of the origins of the universe, from steady-state to the different Big Bang theories out there. Then the book gets down to the fine details of what cosmologists are battling about today: inflation, spontaneous genesis from nothing, branes, etc. Some of it is stuff I had heard or read about before, though perhaps not in years. Some of it is brand new, and it’s a shame I didn’t finish the book, because I really was interested.

First, a small disclaimer: I was reading this on my Kindle, and it was converted from a PDF galley. Somehow the conversion wasn’t able to read any of the numerals present in the text, so all years and quantities were just … omitted (and quantities are kind of important in physics). Similarly, all ligatures with the letter “f” were gone. So … that made for an interesting read. Yet I persevered, for that is not the fault of the authors, and it’s not why I didn’t finish the book.

No, I DNFed this behemoth because I was a third of the way through the book and felt like I was spinning my wheels. Afshordi and Halper just have no sense of how to tell a story in prose—a complaint I recently levelled at Proof as well. Most popular science books, when they want to tell a story of a complex topic like cosmology, ground each chapter in a singular story, usually with a particular person as a main character. Afshordi and Halper seem to want to do this, but they can’t manage to find their narrative. Instead, they get bogged down in details and gossip and talking about multiple people at once—some of whom are still alive—such that Battle of the Big Bang feels like it’s inside baseball, meant for other physicists.

Similarly, this book is not for the faint of heart. The authors brag about there being no equations, but honestly, we need to dismantle that Hawking shibboleth already: please publish physics books with equations! I am fine with it. I am a mathematician. I get that this is a book from an academic press rather than a big publisher, so maybe it is meant for a more technical audience … in which case, though, why is this a book and not a peer-reviewed lit review paper?

That’s my main complaint. Battle of the Big Bang feels like it’s trying to be popular science when in reality it’s too technical and too much engrossed by insider gossip from the scientific community to be interesting or even comprehensible to lay readers. I now understand why most physicists don’t write popular science books.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Writing style was not to my taste. The characters felt flat, and the narrator kept announcing what she was doing (both in her narration and in dialogue to others). In general, the storytelling didn’t feel natural, and I had no interest in the main character’s growth or the overall plot.

It has been over a year since I DNFed a book, and that’s a statistic I am pleased with. I am afraid that C.J. Cherryh, despite being recognized as a titan of science fiction, might be one of those authors whose books just don’t work for me. My other outing, The Paladin was all right but didn’t leave me astonished the way I hope most of my science fiction and fantasy does. I picked up Rider at the Gate and its sequel at the same time from the used bookstore—but I won’t be reading the sequel. I couldn’t get through this one, and that’s OK.

Classically, the original Star Trek series was described as “Wagon Train to the Stars”—a western in space. Rider at the Gate taps into exactly this motif. If that works for you—if you’re into westerns with a patina of science fiction layered over it—then you might enjoy this book. Unfortunately, I don’t really like westerns all that much, and it takes a lot of science fiction (like Killjoys or Defiance) to make it palatable to me, and that doesn’t happen here.

It also doesn’t help that the protagonist is a very horny teenage boy. (I guess Cherryh knows her target audience?) I noted this in my review of The Paladin: Cherryh’s writing style is heavy on description and exposition and light on dialogue. This makes these novels, not all that long, quite dense. If you are enjoying the happenings, then that’s ideal. Since I was not, it felt … interminable.

Suffice it to say, Rider at the Gate is not for me. That doesn’t make it bad, which is why I chose to DNF it instead of trudge onwards and give it an unhelpful rating. I don’t want to discourage anyone from picking up Cherryh if you think her books will be for you, but I am now wise enough to recognize when I am not getting the return I want on my reading time.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Alas, for the first time in over a year, I must shelve another book as “did not finish.” I am loath to do this with an eARC I received from NetGalley—I try my best only to apply for books I will hopefully like, and even when I don’t like them, I do my best to finish them and provide a full review. That being said, I have no problem with DNFing a book if it isn’t right for me.

 Hooked is a reimagining of the Peter Pan mythos. It is, apparently, a loose sequel to A.C. Wise’s earlier novel, Wendy, Darling (I haven’t rea dit). I love the premise behind these two novels. Retellings remain all the rage, with good reason, but the challenge is to twist the source material in such a way as to find new themes and entertaining layers to it. The idea that Captain Hook was the victim of some kind of fae spirit masquerading as a boy is really cool, and perhaps this book will work better for others, as many of the more positive reviews it has attracted so far seem to attest.

Why didn’t it work for me? Pacing was a big one. And the style of writing overall.

I am only about ten percent into the novel, which I admit isn’t that much. Normally I give a book a little longer to grab me—but something is telling me that Hooked won’t do that, and I want to listen to my gut. Very little has happened so far. The chapters are long and meandering. Wise flits in and out of flashbacks, taking us from present-day London, 1939, to James’s time as Hook in Neverland. The exposition this provides allows me to understand what’s happening, yet I don’t feel it, if that makes any sense.

Stylistically, then, Wise and I seem to be working at cross purposes. These days I much prefer novels with shorter, concrete scenes, and a good mix of dialogue and narration. Though Wise is fond of in media res storytelling, the action we get dropped into doesn’t seem to culminate in anything that then furthers the plot, so far as I can see.

Consequently, what I have read of the novel so far feels very jumbled to me. We have James, haunted by the ghost of someone I think was a former lover? Wendy, all growed up, off to help her daughter, who just witnessed a murder most foul. Pan and his monster are lurking somewhere. Like I said—this is a really intriguing premise, and I wish I could have enjoyed the writing enough to keep going. As it is, I will pass on this one.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Let me begin by saying that everyone who says this book’s illustrations and layout are beautiful is absolutely right. As a print book, I suspect this would be gorgeous. I received an eARC from NetGalley and MIT Press, and it was a little harder to read on my phone screen, but that isn’t why I didn’t finish Rewilding. Rather, as beautiful and perhaps comprehensive a review of this subject as it is, I found Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe’s writing style incompatible with how I like my popular science books.

I first came upon the concept of rewilding when I read How to Clone a Mammoth last year. Beth Shapiro provided a great overview of the state of the ancient DNA field, and she mentioned many of the rewilding experiments that this book covers in more detail. I think it’s a fascinating and perhaps worthwhile enterprise; I want to be clear that I’m not objecting to this book based on its authors’ ideas (so far as I got through reading them). Instead, I didn’t appreciate their voice here.

When I read a science book, I’m happy for the authors to inject their own thoughts, opinions, and personality into their writing. However, I want them to be able to separate those biases from how they present the science itself. Jepson and Blythe don’t do that here.

Here’s an early example that raised my hackles: they present the overkill hypothesis as a settled fact within the scientific community. They laud Paul Martin as a visionary, a “time traveller” who has “the imagination and command of facts to think across eras and continents.” When they touch on “resistance to the overkill theory” they say, “In retrospect, it is interesting to ask why there was so much resistance to the overkill hypothesis” and then go on to say it was inexorably logical and blame conservation movements in the 1980s. Ok.

Look, I am not a scientist. I don’t even have a particularly deep knowledge of this subject as a layperson. But I can use Google, and I do have some sweet critical thinking skills, and literally the first result when I google “overkill hypothesis” is this meta-analysis from 2018. It concludes that the overkill hypothesis enjoys excellent support among ecologists, like Jepson and Blythe, but remains controversial among archaeologists, and it points to a breakdown in communication between these disciplines as a result for the discrepancy. Note that I’m not saying Jepson and Blythe are wrong to champion the overkill hypothesis—I just take issue with how they present it as more settled than it is, and how their anemic attempt at presenting “both sides” criticism makes it seem like critics are unreasonable or biased while they are not.

As I continued reading, I encountered more writing that left me on edge. Chapter 4 begins to talk about the rewilding experiments of past decades and says, “A few of these scientists had the combination of vision, boldness, powers of persuasion, and opportunity to try out new approaches….” When Jepson and Blythe describe the Oostvaardersplassen experiment, they say, “Frans Vera is someone with a genius for looking at things differently and assembling disparate forms of evidence to develop, test, and articulate new ideas. He is also fearless when it comes to challenging mainstream thinking….” I cannot stand this level of aggrandizement in a popular science book!

It is one thing to laud the accomplishments of scientists. Praise Marie Curie all you want for her contributions to theories of radioactivity in the face of institutional sexism. By all means, tell me that Vera did some good ecological research into rewilding. But stop trying to paint individual scientists as mavericks who challenge a system that is somehow otherwise going to hold back scientific progress. Sure, I am open to critiquing the conservatism within science—but that’s not the same thing as saying, “this person is a visionary!!1111.”

So I stopped reading after that. Your mileage may vary. As I said at the beginning, the illustrations and layout of this book are great—props to whatever designers worked on it. There is bound to be a lot of good, accurate, useful information to be learned here when it comes to environmental history, ecology, and the subject of rewilding in particular. Nevertheless, I personally could not stomach the biased writing any longer, and rather than trudge through the remaining seventy pages or so, I decided to call it a day.

I’m not panning the book to the point of saying don’t read it, but I hope that my review provides some perspective as you go into it.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

I put this book down at the start of Chapter 6, where one of the supposed protagonists (a 15-year-old girl) is sexually assaulting a kidnapped 15-year-old boy she idolizes. I don’t care why it’s happening or what justification there is—Kill the Boy Band had already tried my patience with some other red flags as well as Goldy Moldavsky’s style; I was already mulling over DNFing it despite being less than 50 pages in. As usual, Kara needs to learn to trust her gut.

This is supposedly a dark comedy about four 15-year-old American girls who are diehard fans of British boy band The Ruperts (because they are all named Rupert, get it?). These girls are so hardcore that they get a room at the same hotel where the Ruperts will be staying during their appearance in New York City. They end up inadvertently kidnapping one of the Ruperts, though, and holding him in their room, bound and gagged with tights. And that is all I know, because I didn’t even bother to look up how the book ends. I don’t care.

From the beginning of the book, I wasn’t happy with how Moldavsky was characterizing these girls. It felt like she was satirizing the idea of a boy band fangirl. I didn’t want to bring this up initially, because I wasn’t too sure where Moldavsky is coming from—but then I saw this answer from her on Goodreads where she basically admits that she herself hasn’t been a boy band fan girl, and this is all based on watching a documentary about boy bands.

So … yeah. So much of the humour in this book, at least the chapters I managed to read, feels like it is punching down, like Moldavsky is making fun of our protagonists. That’s a weird tone to take for a young adult novel. There’s also some fatphobia with Apple, one of the girls, who was adopted from an orphanage in Beijing (and therefore, presumably, Chinese). Similarly, Isabel is of Dominican descent, but she has patchier Spanish than our narrator and also apparently knows stuff about crime?? This exemplifies the poor attempts at diversity among our main characters. It’s not enough to just toss in a couple of different races if you aren’t thinking carefully about the stereotypes involved. Also, the character development itself is clunky—our narrator (who apparently, according to other reviews, just goes unnamed for the whole book??) just straight-up tells us Apple is an adopted Chinese orphan. Like, maybe save that for a moment where it’s relevant instead of giving us a “crit stats” rundown on each of your friends?

For all these reasons and more, I wasn’t too happy with Kill the Boy Band before we got to Chapter 6. And then, within the first paragraph, there’s the sexual assault. Yeah, it’s just straddling and licking his face—but that is happening while he’s bound and gagged and unable to consent. That makes it assault. And like so much already seen in this book, it isn’t treated with the severity that such an action deserves.

This is an unfortunate trend I see in books, both YA and adult, that try to blend comedy with darkness without verging full-on into horror. Yeah, the premise that a bunch of 15-year-old girls accidentally kidnap a member of their favourite band and maybe (?) end up accidentally killing him is dark. You can also make it funny. But making it sympathetic? So much more difficult. If you want an example of a YA novel that embraces the darkness and doesn’t look away, go read Hannah Capin’s Foul is Fair instead.

I just restocked on library books and owned books. Let’s move on.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

It pains me, because everyone is so hyped about Kameron Hurley, and I want to be hyped too. Alas, this first foray into her writing was not a successful venture. Despite spending exactly a week with this book, I am just barely halfway through. It was this realization that made me decide to cut my losses. I am not going to finish The Mirror Empire.

Principally, I just don’t care about any of the main characters and their fate. I genuinely do not care to find out how this book ends.

That isn’t just a problem with the characterization (which is poor) but also the plot, which is stretched thin. For example, Lilia’s entire plot in this first half of the book is “go back and forth between two travel companions, both of whom she hates, and ending up exactly nowhere.” Zezili is a fearsome general who spends her time whinging that her empress is going to get everyone killed, but after half a novel, she still hasn’t done anything about it. Likewise with Ahkio or Roh—these characters are moving slower than molasses.

I was in a reading slump earlier, one which Felix Ever After rescued me from. This book has threatened to send me spiralling back into the slump. Sigh.

 I am in the minority for this one judging by the rave reviews it is getting ahead of its release. Like many of those other reviewers, I received a copy of The Councillor from NetGalley and DAW in exchange for a review. Unfortunately, it’s going to be a short one: I did not finish this book.

We’re off to a great start. Lysande is an advisor/close friend to Queen Sarelin, who plucked her from an orphanage for her scholastic potential. Sarelin dies unexpectedly (murder!), but not before she secretly named Lysande as her Councillor. Lysande’s sole purpose in this role? Since Sarelin died without an heir, Lysande must select the new monarch of their realm from one of the four rulers of the cities that make up the realm. Of course, those rulers hate each other, and one or more of them might have murdered the queen. Sounds like a fun job.

This is exactly the kind of political intrigue I want from my high fantasy. Toss in the fact that there are a ton of openly queer characters (and it’s normal), and that’s cool: The Councillor should be a book for me. So what gives?

It drags. Like seriously, seriously dragged for me. Page after page after scene after scene of repetitive action and description. I reached a point where I was skimming just to see when something actually happened, and I think I finally got about a quarter of the way into the book before that occurred.

Despite a great setting and cool plot, none of the characterization and especially none of the narration works for me. Nothing gels into a compelling voice that makes me want to sit on the edge of my seat and bite my nails like I did for a book like The Goblin Emperor, which faces a similarly-inexperienced person dealing with huge political machinations.

All I can say, attempting to assuage my feeling bad for writing this review, is that I don’t think these are problems with the book or Beaton’s writing. As I said earlier, the critical consensus seems to be positive, so if you are interested in The Councillor, I would go with that—please don’t take this critique as a recommendation to skip this one. Unfortunately, it just didn’t work for me, and I decided to accept that and move on. Maybe next time!

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.