wulvaen's Reviews (313)

This book repeatedly hit me on the back of the head unexpectedly, kicked me in the balls, pissed on me, ripped out my heart and then topped it off with a nice little cherry on top in the form of a good joke 🍒. That's how this book felt.
And I fucking loved every second of it.


Quite a summary, isn't it?
I no longer allow myself to be gaslit by the author and each books' blurb and the rating they're given and led to believe these are children's/ YA books.
I refuse. Fuck right off.
I do not believe you.
I'm sure a certain character in the book who was conscious while their body was torn open and had hands rummaging around inside them and literally pulling their heart out, I'm sure that character would agree with me 👀

So, how was it?
Ah, it was okay......is what I'd say if I was a little fucking liar like the author is for making us believe these are children's books! However! I'll be honest and say this was my favourite book so far.
It was really funny, more so then it had been in the series, at least since book 1 (I will say Landy needs to reign it back in certain circumstances, there's moments of real beauty in the book, emotional moments, and it gets tainted with a prolonged comedy routine that overstayed it's welcome).
The action was as gripping as ever.
The story was not another reskin of the original three books' formula.
The character work was heartbreaking and tantalized the soul. I swear there is more death in these books than I've come across in most books I've read and they also seem to come unexpectedly now.

The premise and execution was actually brilliant.
Valkyrie, Sculduggery and friends were faced with 2000 foes who could inhabit anyone they came across and control them and essentially become them. It meant each character we met is a suspect, are they secretly a remnant? Are they next? What would happen to the whole plan if this person was taken over by a remnant? How on earth do they stop them!? The premise made the whole book very exciting and it felt like any form of tragedy was on the table.

Fucking hell what on Earth happened with this audiobook? The original narrator Rupert Degas is gone, and he was amazing, and he was replaced with Brian Bowles who, while putting in some effort to retain the accents and mannerisms of each character, was shite.

He often had trouble remembering how the voices sound, for example his voice for Sanguine often went back and forth from sounding like a resident of Texas, to Chris Rock???
How does one even pull something like that off, that's impressive, terrible, but still impressive.

On top of that, the iconic music associated with the first three books is completely gone, and while the previous audiobook lacked music entirely, this book had music at the beginning and end of the book and it was incompatible with the tone and vibe of the books.

Was going to give a 2 stars for the audiobook, but at least he put effort into keeping the accents and voices, but not enough to be as enjoyable as the other books.

Finally! After 4 books, the formula hath been broken 🙌


Wow what a book! This was jam packed!
We had a LOT of character growth and a lot of twists. This book did what a lot of stories don't often do, which is the bad guys lose but they weren't just gone, they kept coming back and trying to win. So many books and media have the build up to the bad guys and then they lose and just scurry away, whereas here, they kept coming back, with backup plans and adaptations.

A romance has formed between

Valkyrie

and

Fletcher

, and honestly it feels very forced and out of left field. While they've been friendly, and there has been a lot of banter and playful bullying from

Valkyrie

towards him, it still just doesn't feel right. (And I'd like for once in my life to read a sci-fi or fantasy book series where romance was forced into it for another unnecessary subplot. But that's a preference problem, so it doesn't have any bearing on my rating.)

The plot itself was good, it was smaller, which I think was a good thing, I always think it's stupid for books to start off with gigantic world ending threats as you're expected to amp things up in sequels. The book was basically split into three acts, starting with

trying to get Sculduggery back.

The middle of the book was about figuring out who the enemy were and where they were attacking.
The third act was about figuring out the bad guys weren't done and they had backup plans, and also a tease of future antagonists.

Sculduggery got some more character development in terms of him appearing mad and quite affected by the months he spent in the Faceless ones dimension place.
Valkyrie is growing and becoming more of a threat in combat and investigations, thanks to her training with necromancy and her mentoring with Skulduggery in terms of investigations.

I'm really loving the characters of this series, but a problem I can see forming with each book is the overloading of characters. I can see it, Landy is going to keep reintroducing more and more characters and some will either die or just disappear and come back and we'll struggle to remember them.

The foreshadowing of Valkyrie's future is really fucking good, I'm absolutely loving it and Landy is playing the long game!

Also, I cannot overstate my love for Landy using a wax statue of Phil Lynott from Thin Lizzy as a secretary for the sanctuary, jesus it's so funny, and I know people related to Phil and we're friends with him when he was alive and I think they'd be quite touched of how he was portrayed in this book.

Also, again, I have to point out, THIS IS A CHILDREN'S / YA BOOK??? The amount of deaths, and gruesome ones might I add, is giving me so much whiplash and I fucking love it! Landy doesn't treat his readers like idiots and it's really appreciated. Swear I seen more death in these books that most books I've read, and I've read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy books tailored to full grown adults 😂

Unfortunately the audiobook quality felt much lesser for this book. The transitional music is gone, the silence gap between sentences was so much longer (and I even had it sped up to 1. 25x speed). The voice acting was as good as ever though, just a shame

Slight deviation from formula, but still the same premise


Okay, it's still "Stop thees bad guys from bringing back the Faceless Ones from the other dimension and killing everyone", as it has been in the previous 2 books, but at least the plot structure and characters weren't identical like book 2 was to book 1.

We have some returning characters, such as Sanguine, White Cleaver and Ghastly, it was nice that we got to see what happened to White Cleaver as he seemed interesting but he sorta just disappeared. We've really seen Valkyrie grow, people are even commenting how she's getting more and more like Sculduggery, but we're also seeing some development with Valkyrie's magical reflection, which is clearly foreshadowing for possibly a darker outcome of an evil twin twist? 🤔

The book definitely felt more fleshed out than book 2, most characters had a bit more depth and the dialogue is as good as ever and the jokes might not have been as present as in previous books but it was still of the same quality.

My issue at the moment is the series is about Sculduggery Pleasant, he's literally the namesake of the series, and yet, it feels like every character except him is getting more attention and more growth than he, which would be perfectly fine if instead Landy developed him as a character by revealing more of his history and backstory, if more details were being revealed about him and his past then it would still feel like character growth as we'd be able to compare and contrast who he was to who he is now, and there have been glimpses of that, such as people alluding to some big secret to do with his past and how who he is now is not who he was during the wars and he's not the hero Valkyrie believes him to be. That's some really intriguing fruit left hanging.
But I wish there was more, because he just feels left out of the story in terms of character development and growth, he's sorta just there to save the day and add comedic relief, whereas Valkyrie is getting all the attention. 

Overall, not as good as the first book's story, better than book 2, so it's sorta in the middle.
The action was brilliant, the twist at the end was predictable if you paid attention and it became obvious, which isn't the way to do twists, wasn't executed as well as it could have.

Onto book 4!

Tldr: ....😬🤷‍♂️


Soooooo this felt pretty much the exact same, plot-wise, as book 1. While there was so developing of things such as world-building and some new characters, it wasn't enough for the story to feel much different:

Book 1:

Book 2:

Same formula, some differences, but overall it was the same story but with the same beloved humor.

I found this book had less character depth than the first, especially with Sculduggery. Valkyrie (Stephanie) did get some attention with character reveals but it was mostly about her attitude towards her family which we already sorta knew from book 1. She was also more active in fight scenes and in the schemes and leadership roles and I did enjoy the little glimpses of her and Sculduggery's progress as partners, such as secret code phrases and their unbreakable trust in eachother.

While there were some new characters introduced, such as Sanguine and the Grotesquery, the Grotesquery felt like a reskin of the White Cleaver Zombie from book 1, which is essentially just Nemesis from the Resident Evil 1 Remake game.

Overall, I love the humor, the vibe and the chemistry between Valkyrie and Sculduggery, and there were little bits of world-building present, but everything needed to be more fleshed out with more depth. And the story needed to be different than book 1.

The voice actor is actually amazing and does so many different voices! His Sculduggery voice is very reminiscent of Brendan Gleeson 😂
The little bits of music between chapters and their variations are a nice touch and add to the feel of the book. 

What an unexpected pleasure!
A book of surprising depths tied together in a perfect balance of mature and immature.

As an Irishman myself, it was absolutely mind boggling reading a book set in the city I was born and raised in.
We read all sorts of books and they're usually set in places such as the US or the UK, cities and road names are dropped and we've not visited these places in person and have no idea what they're like, this, for the first time, was not the case for my own experience.

The author, Derek Landy, drops the names of famous Dublin places, such as the Christ Church Cathedral and even having a secret door to a magical vault under the Wax Museum in the City Centre.
I could very vividly picture them in my head, unlike most places I read of.
This book filled me with so much Irish pride, to have a book series well-known and beloved globally that's written by an Irishman and set in Ireland.

Now, as for the book, it was hilarious!
Not as funny as Dungeon Crawler Carl, but a bit funnier than Fred The Vampire Accountant.
It was rich with the sarcastic Irish humor we're infamous for, and there was this hilarious scene at the beginning during a will reading where the dead uncle gives his brother his own wife in his will and says he thinks he'd like her, and oh he'd probably wanna visit his villa with her so what the hell he'll throw the villa in too, all while the snobby sibling and his insufferable wife got his boat and a car (he's afraid of water and they already have a car) and everything else was left to a 12 year old girl 🤣🤣🤣

Sculduggery himself as a character is subtly interesting and there is depth below the surface. He comes across as a one-dimensional straight forward character, but I found sometimes it's not about what he does but what he doesn't do that says more about him. His friend dies, he investigates, the friend had a 12 year old girl who really only felt understood and seen by the uncle. Bad guys come along to hurt her to acquire some key to lead them to some evil magic thingy her uncle hid away, she hasn't a fucking clue what's going on. So after Sculduggery kicks his way through the front door and drives the attacker off, he gave little Stephanie a warning about joining this world of magic and chaos, she wanted in regardless, and he respected that.

His relationship with Stephanie was somewhat complex, wholesome, and super fucking heartbreaking, and how he doesn't treat her says a huge amount about his character and really adds depth to him.
You see, he doesn't really treat her like a child. He himself is like a big kid, and she's almost like a little adult woman following him around and asking questions and rolling her eyes at him and his shenanigans, but there is an unspoken understanding that he is the adult and she is the inexperienced child, and they accept it. She respects his authority, and he respects her choices.
He doesn't treat her like a baby to be coddled and shielded, but instead accompanies her through it and let's her grow with his aid.

Also his tragic past is quite heartbreaking and adds a whole other layer to his relationship with Stephanie, I believe in one aspect he is honoring some unspoken wish of his friend Gordon, Stephanie's uncle, but she is also the closest thing Scul has to feeling like being a father again. Whether he likes it or knows it or not, Stephanie and Skulduggery have become quite close and very quickly and it makes perfect sense.
Her uncle was the only person that truly understood her and didn't treat her like a weak little girl, and Sculduggery does the same, and Stephanie challenges him and I suspect heals his pain in some little ways.

The character work in this book is impressive, and I'm hooked on this series so far from that alone. As for the world building and the rest, it's quite decent. Landy has took vampires for example and not made them the traditional vampire and added his own flavor to it, which I enjoyed, and there was a very surprising amount of people killed in this book. I swear, more people died in this than the latest Dungeon Crawler Carl book "This Inevitable Ruin". And this is a children's/ YA book?

This book, all in all, was surprisingly brilliant with unexpected depths, brilliant character growth and chemistries all tied together in a book well balanced in the mature and immature.
I think I might have a new series to consume me 🥳

Tldr:  Wahhhhhhh 😭😭😭

I'm legit fighting back tears writing this, I very much loved this book, and while I have criticisms, they are mostly towards the author's narrative shenanigans and not towards the book itself.

I'll start with the shenanigans:
At the end of the previous book, Prelude to Foundation, Asimov included a scene which proved to be a gigantic mistake, Seldon's revelation that Dors was a robot.
After Hari was told the four laws of Robotics by Daneel, he then figured out Dors was a robot, based on her extraordinary physical abilities and her very strong desire to protect him.
After revealing his suspicions to Dors, and asking if she'd ever kissed or slept with any men (why is that his first question???) she revealed that she only let men kiss her and have sex with her because she could not hurt them and thus did not refuse them, she literally had no choice. Then Hari proceeded to say and do things that boxed Dors into a romantic and physical relationship with him as he put pressure on her Zeroth and First Laws. It was disgusting, and it made Hari look despicable, and that was on top of Asimov already portraying Hari as being a dumbass.

So now with that context, let's start with this book:
Asimov did everything in his power to retcon that end scene, gaslight the reader and roll over that scene with a bulldozer and atomize it from our memory banks. He failed, and the attempt made me lose some respect for him as a writer.
Hari Seldon in this book did not know Dors was a robot, and he acted as if he never accused her of being a robot and like he never even thought she was a robot. This book quite literally continued from previous book from the point BEFORE the end scene, literally acting like it didn't exist!

Dors was one of the few woman characters in Asimov's catalogue that actually had depth and who's sole purpose wasn't to be a romance or sex object, and thank fuck he did not turn her into that in this book. While her character was quite repetitive in this book (as was a lot of things), she did have a her shining moments and even reminded me of Elijah Baley where she was walking around and questioning people and coming to conclusions from what seem like out of left field. It was brilliant and I enjoyed it.

This book felt brimming with life, the whole world felt real and alive, and this was attributed to the way it was constructed, which was very reminiscent of his novella I, Robot.
This book makes me feel like Prelude to Foundation should not have even existed, all the interesting stuff from that book could have been squeezed into this book and this book could have cut some of the fat away and it would have been a better book.

Hari in this book was less of an idiot like in the previous, but still a bit of an idiot. And it became quite clear that his work on Psychohistory didn't even contribute much and it was other people like Yugo who were the real builders. So history remembers Hari Seldon, the creator of Psychohistory, the man who came up with the plan, yet it was not he alone, and yet he's happy to take the credit.

This book was quite emotional, so many sad moments and some joyous ones too. Raych was my favourite character, with Emperor Agis being a very very close second. I very much loved Raych's character development, and Agis' friendship with Hari may have been short but it was lovely and I really enjoyed his portrayal as not being a typical pompous insecure emperor, he had no power and did not want the position and felt he could be himself completely with Hari.

I'm finding it difficult to to review this book because it felt like so much crammed into it, so much happened, it literally spanned like 40 years of Hari's life. Oh also, Wanda was an interesting character,

I was not expecting her to have Mentalic abilities.

Overall, one of the better of his Foundation books, and a fitting end.

Somewhat enjoyable, not what was expected, but also kinda fucked up and paints Seldon very badly! (Also some concerns about how the author is about women 💀) 

I have mixed feelings on this book.
On one hand it felt like one complete novel and wasn't broken up into parts which usually break the flow, like his earlier Foundation novels did.
On the other hand, despite it being complete like that, it also felt somewhat directionless.

Part of me is really enjoying how Asimov is fusing and bridging the gap between the history of his Robots series and Foundation, but part of me is also worried

because it feels like Asimov has turned Daneel into some god-like being and is bordering on a Deus Ex Machina situation.

It feels like

Daneel

has his hands in everyone's cookie jar. He knows everyone, he manipulates everyone, he keeps swooping in at the last minute to save the day.

He has god-like mental abilities compounded with over 20,000 years of experience of human behaviors and time to hone his mentalic abilities, that humans are indeed like puppets to him. He really is a god among men, and he repeatedly in this book (and from what we know from his other three series) has his hands in everyone's cookie jars and maneuvering people and situations to make the least harm to humanity possible.

This sort of shit takes away a lot of character's agency and I really don't like it.

While I really really loved seeing Daneel again, I figured out around the 60% mark that Hummin was actually Demerzal, but I didn't guess he was also Daneel Olivaw until Seldon and Dors said they believed Hummin was responsible for what happened in Wye, then I put two and two together and suspected mentalic influences in play and then I thought of all the connections Hummin had, how persuasive he was to everyone and how Seldon trusted him so easily straight from the beginning. And then I remembered from Foundation and Earth that it was said Daneel helped in the creation of Psychohistory.

So, that aside, I actually really enjoyed the book.
It felt very reminiscent of Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth, it was very much an adventure of exploration, Seldon and Dors were exploring all the different Trantorian cultures, the colloquialisms, the offshoots of humanity and even exploring their own selves, all in the name of discovering Psychohistory. While Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth explored the galaxy and earth's past, this book explored the world of Trantor, it's decay, and humans themself. This explored the cultures within, and the previous two books explored the cultures outward of Trantor.

While there was a lot of plot contrivances, deus-ex-machina-like moments and a somewhat non existent plot that was filled with repeated moments (such as Seldon appearing to be dumb as fuck and complaining that Psychohistory is not practical blah blah blah), it was still well crafted and enjoyable and it was a good experience. Also, again, the fucking names are SO BAD and cringe 🤮😂

HOWEVER!....however.....this book portrayed Hari Seldon very VERY badly. How is it even one bit believable that Seldon come up with Psychohistory when the man doesn't even know anything about history? How did he even come across it? What was he originally working on? Did he one day say "I wonder if you can mathematically predict human civilisation with maths? 🤔", if that was the case, anyone with a brain cell would presume to study history, the fact he didn't, tells me he came across this by accident, but then...HOW? These are the sort of things I expected the book to AT LEAST touch on, I wanted to see how one man became the legend, became someone practically worshipped by people for centuries and centuries and how he became the legendary Hari Seldon. Instead, this story ended up recycling a lot of the plots Asimov has done before where he has a man of importance on the run while trying to figure something out and each location adds to his understanding and he figures it out in the end.

And, yes, you guess it, ANOTHER FORCED ROMANCE WITH TWO PEOPLE FROM COMPLETELY DIFFERENT WORLDS! I will say at least this romance was a more realistic length of time, compared to the usual 2 chapter length romance, ending in "I Love You".

And that ending? Dors is a robot? What? I mean yeah once it was revealed and I thought back it made more sense, but again it just felt like another recycled plot, except it was recycled FROM THE SAME BOOK, we literally just went from "Surpise I'm Daneel and a robot" to "btw Hari I'm also a robot".

Also jesus christ, what the fuck? Hari figured out Dors was a robot and then asked about whether she kissed guys or had sex before, it was revealed she only did it because she could not hurt the humans and so let it happen (which is fucked up) but then she reveals she's never felt love and Seldon said he didn't care, he still wanted her. He even implied it would make him feel really good if she asked him to kiss her, like as if she actually wanted him and felt for him, and he also reinforced her having to ease him by literally saying he wouldn't work on Psychohistory unless she was with him. She LITERALLY had no choice but to kiss him and presumably have sex with him later and marry him, if she doesn't be his woman, he won't work on Psychohistory and therefore humanity will be harmed and the zeroth law will be broken.
Whether he knew it or not, he manipulated Dors into being with him, and it's disgusting and really makes me feel sick, which is NOT what I wanted to feel about the legendary Hari Seldon.

What the fuck was Asimov thinking?

And, a side note about the author and his portrayal of women:

I am quite troubled by Asimov himself, this ending, with

Dors being a robot and Hari doing what he did

.
If we look back on all his other books; Robots, Galactic Empire and Foundation, almost in all of those books when there is a romance centred around a main character, the woman is almost always treated as a tool and only there to be the romance or to be used to enact sexual things or romantic fantasies. I think the only time Asimov portrayed a woman well and love in itself well, was in the second book (or was it the third? 🤔) with the couple that had Magnifico with them

and the wife figured out he was the Mule in the end.

She was an intelligent, empathetic, complex character and her romantic connection to her husband was present and felt real but wasn't the sole focus of her character and actually took a backseat and she had an actual role in the story and was in fact the most important character.
That one example aside, I think Asimov himself might have some serious issues with women, or at least how he writes them, but it is somewhat concerning.