yumdirt's Reviews (310)

Sometimes, fun. Other times, tedious. I found the tedium stemming from what I perceived as this need to justify and give the magic system its due diligence because That's Just What Happens In Every Cosmere Book. It was overall touching and genuine. The "action" and magic system was neat, but I don't think Water + Spores = Jack's Beanstalk is robust enough to carry the book upon.

I hate to seem like I'm comparing, but since they were both fresh on my mind, I frequently found it feeling similar to Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones, and to Senlin Ascends/Hand of the Sphinx by Josiah Bancroft. Maybe some Treasure Island too. Good things, all.

Descriptions of love are elemental and howling, loved the language and grammar. Felt like I was being confided in. Utterly heartbreaking, but moreso it feels undeniably formative and it feels true and it feels like memories feel. WOW BLEH LOVE IS ROUGH

Very enlightening and seemingly closer to the full picture than ever, but also a whole crock of spitballin'. Guess that's archaeology baby!

If we make it through December
Everything's gonna be alright, I know

"I was excited to meet Patsy." Yeah honestly real

I did not love the pacing and overall shape of it, but the believable camaraderie and the confident command of language makes me so excited to keep reading Dan Jones. Even if this was his fiction piece, there are seriously good things here.

This has taken me like half a year to finish, and I have had to resort to the audiobook because I was having severe trouble making more than one to two pages of progress per sitting. In the early book, I mainly struggled with the 2nd-person POV (and to its credit, it doesn't stay in that POV), but for the rest of the book, I found the "somehows" and the inevitable "change" events too distracting. Plotwise, it's unique and structured out in a way that creates this building rumble, this vacuum of mystery, inter-connectedness, pain, and tragedy to really pull you in. I can see how it's well-done, but I was just not very intrigued or captured by any of the world, nor the characters. I'd still recommend it because it does have its special merits, but I won't be continuing the series.