unsuccessfulbookclub's Reviews (916)

This book was fine, but I found it very derivative - like I had read all of it some place before. It’s basically like Top Gun plus Hunger Games plus A Court of Thorns and Roses. If you like the dragons, I cannot recommend Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series enough - it’s basically the same dragon-magic system but the world makes more sense. 

Basgiath has to be the world’s worst military school - it seems like it exists simply to kill off its cadets which seems counterproductive? Call me crazy but there are stakes higher and fates worse than death. In a book written in first person POV you know from the jump that the narrator isn’t dying soooooo the tension I wanted in the first part of the book simply wasn’t there.

In the year of our lord 2024, I simply cannot get into a hero named Xaden, even though I liked him just fine in terms of his actual actions/personality. Tairn was the best character in a SEA of named characters who were interchangeable and forgettable. Violet is very much a 20 year old dystopian fantasy heroine.

I have never even considered what happens in a nuclear reactor nor had I thought much about Soviet politics or the Chernobyl disaster and | feel like | have taken a well-taught graduate level course on all of those things now. This book was riveting. I listened to quite a bit of it - the audio had a wonderful narrator (Jacques Roy) 

If you like apocalyptic science fiction, you will like this. 
Higginbotham puts so much humanity in the story of atomic disaster and political maneuvering giving this beefy nonfiction intense plot points to pull you through the story.

I was bored despite all of the kidnappings but kudos to Hoyt for making me love Trevillion after spending 7 books making me hate him. 

Moments of brilliance but also a lot of really broad-brush statements about men and women in general. Additionally lots of “all heterosexual relationships…” are x y or z. I feel like hooks veered off topic quite a bit through each chapter in a frustrating way because all about love was an incredible piece of writing that, to me, fundamentally changed the way I looked at the world, while this book felt very dated and rambling. Worth the read, I think, just not as good as I was hoping for.

Incredible. Amazing. Thrilling. INTENSE. This series is everything and each book was somehow better than the last. What an ending to such an epic story of the universe  but also a deep exploration of what it means to love someone, to trust them, to truly know them, to set them free at the cost of your own heart. A thousand stars. SO FREAKING GOOD.

I liked this installment, and found it especially funny, but I missed the bananas adventures of The Ghost of St Giles a little bit. I did like the murder mystery story in this and it was lovely to see Apollo get his HEA. One note: I listened to the audio for part of this and I’m confused as to why the narrator made Phoebe sound like a child with a lisp who couldn’t say her “r”s either. An odd, infantilizing choice for a character who is blind (not hearing or speech impaired). 

I have never been more grossed out by descriptions of sex and yet less able to look away. If Lisa Valdez is not the pen name of a cis het man, I hope she has had therapy since 2005, because the misogyny in this goes deeper than Mark’s [redacted]. I never want to read the words boiling, gaping, torrent, moisture or roiling in relation to sex again and suggest some basic human anatomy lessons as a sidecar to this book given the current state of sex education.

On the other hand I have never laughed harder at dirty talk, so there’s that.

The female characters in this book were completely one dimensional and the men were gross. This is not a book you read for the romance, which oddly happens in the last half. The first fifty percent is absolutely bananas, squelchy, bad-idea sex, and it was really fun to read.

This one just wasn’t for me. I think the start of it with the

dog body mutilation/resurrection of the villain (??) from book 1

just kinda put me in a bad place. Too much horror for me this time.