I’ve been meaning to read this book but life happens and I forgot. Anyway, I was at the library the other day and it was on the “Reader’s Choice” table so I grabbed it and read it in short order. This book is a SciFi, which some might find daunting, but it is one of the most accessible SciFi books I’ve run across in a while.
Winter’s Orbit is easy to slide into. It’s warm and comfortable, like buttery popcorn while watching a Friday night movie. Sometimes that’s exactly what you need. It was extremely easy for me to get into the story being told, and feel engrossed in the characters and their trials. With some lighter world building, readers who might find SciFi daunting will probably enjoy the ease with which world-specific terms and political machinations are presented to readers. You don’t need fact sheets or diagrams in your head to grok this one.
Instead of focusing so much on the world and all the details of it, Maxwell focuses on her characters, their relationship with each other, and their relationship with the world around them. Prince Kiem, a playboy and in and out of trouble, gets thrust into a marriage with newly-widowed Jainan. However, we soon learn that not everything in that previous relationship was what it was presented to be, nor was the death of his previous partner, Prince Taam. With a peace treaty between two powers on the horizon, and this marriage essential to solidifying the deal, a lot rides on the union.
So of course it’s going to have problems.
There were a few things that pleased me about the romance and the mystery at the center of this book. First, I need to talk about representation. There are a lot of LGBTQIA+ characters and themes in Winter’s Orbit, which delighted me. More, I enjoyed seeing these parts of the book as a natural aspect of the world rather than something that needed fanfare. Normalization like this can be a powerful thing indeed, and I think the author went about it very well.
The romance itself didn’t overwhelm the plot, rather they both advanced hand in hand at a natural pace without feeling forced or overly dramatic, and maybe this is both the book’s greatest strength as well as its greatest downfall. Presented to us is a universe perched on the edge of a galactic war, and I never really felt that intensity. It was painfully easy for me to forget how dire the situation actually was. While things are happening and intrigue is present, it never really resonated with me because that aspect of the plot just wasn’t present enough to come through as much as I would have preferred. That being said, the situation was constantly changing and evolving, and the fact that Maxwell managed to keep the Big Danger both personal and ever-present without overwhelming everything else needs to be lauded. Part of what will attract people to this book is the fact that the conflict is so easy to absorb.
Romance, I think, is likely why readers will pick this one up. SciFi romance is always a plus. Maxwell hits all the sweet spots on the romance (though romance readers will find the beats a bit off, which is to be expected as this is not strictly a romance book). This is a slow-burn and an arranged marriage, two tropes I tend to have a very hard time with on the get-go. Knowing that I went into this one pretty skeptical, and I was surprised by how easy it was for me to keep reading.
However.
So many of the issues between the protagonists could have been sorted with ten minutes of conversation. They spent so long being awkward and assuming things about each other, that by the time the relationship actually did strike off, I was filled with this really weird mix of "finally" and "seriously?". I have a real issue with miscommunication tropes because they are just so easy to avoid if people sit down and speak directly. A lot of that aspect of the book came off as "for the sake of the plot" rather than a natural evolution of the relationship, and that was unfortunate. Due to how much of the book they spend not talking or only surface-level talking, by the time they do hook up I was almost stunned by the fact that they were, in fact, attracted to each other. What I wanted were fireworks and I just didn't quite get that.
The ultimate result of these two points did dramatically impact my overall enjoyment of the book as a whole. Did I like it? Yes. Will I read it again? Maybe. If there’s a time when I want to turn my brain off and just enjoy a relatively comforting, predictable read, then this is absolutely a book I will go to. However, at the end of the day, it just fell a little short of its target. Entertaining, yes, but about a half-note off on some aspects which left me feeling, overall, like this was a bit discordant.
That being said, I love science fiction and I think it can be quite intimidating to new readers. This book would serve as a great entry point for those looking to explore the genre. It’s comfortable and a bit softer. The author keeps her world just built enough to really highlight the characters in it, and her direct, no-nonsense prose works in her favor to keep this from ever getting too bogged down in the minutiae.
Is it worth reading? Yes, but know what you’re getting into first. This isn’t going to break the genre, but if you need something comfortable and warm, a soft blanket during a snowstorm, then pick this one up....more
I first ran across T.R. Napper when I was editing the most recent edition of Grimdark Magazine. I was editing his story and was absolutely blown away by every part of it. The story itself, the execution, the way Napper uses words like a sledgehammer. I’ve never seen someone use prose so carefully, so each word not only carried its own weight, but so fundamentally impacted how I read and enjoyed the story. I knew this was an author I could read over and over again, and so I took myself to Amazon to buy his books.
I ended up picking up Neon Leviathan and starting it right away, and then pre-ordering his book 36 Streets, which I will start soon.
What really intrigued me about Napper, and the reason why I tracked down more of his work, was really the prose. He’s almost a lyrical writer in the fact that some of his turns of phrase just sing. His writing feels poetic and rich, without ever really dipping into poetry. He makes each word count. There were quite a few times when I was editing his story when I just had to sit back and admire how he was using words. His writing is a unique blend of aggressive and beautiful, and it just worked for me on a fundamental level. I’ve seen a few people compare his prose to Richard K. Morgan, and I think that is probably a good one. Morgan’s writing always strike me a similar way: visceral, with a hint of raw beauty in the most unexpected places.
And that spark of his, that gift he has for an eloquent, visceral turn of phrase was not unique to that story I edited for Grimdark Magazine, but it’s a trait of Napper’s entire body of work. It’s one of the many elements of Neon Leviathan that sets this author head and shoulders above the rest. He not only knows how to tell an interesting story, he also knows how to connect it to his readers.
Set against a rich near(ish)-future world, Neon Leviathan tell twelve different stories, most of them set around the year 2090. These stories are loose and unconnected, and yet there’s an overarching narrative arc that each one helps sustain as well. This was another element of Neon Leviathan I enjoyed. I went in expecting a loose collection of stories with a unifying theme. I did not expect stories that not only stand alone, but also work together.
This is, I’m learning, one of Napper’s best skills. He works on multiple levels, and often times I don’t quite understand the genius of what he’s doing until an “ah ha” moment comes along that is so profound, I have to put the book down and walk away for a while just to absorb it.
The unifying theme in Neon Leviathan is that of a world on the brink. Things have progressed, and everything is out of control, from people to their private lives, to the political and global situation, to the relationship between humanity and technology. There’s a lot happening on numerous different levels from war to personal strife, and, through twelve different stories told through twelve different perspectives, we get to explore different dimensions of life in this world.
This is really where those layers I mentioned come to play, because each story works on several levels. There’s the surface level, entertaining story, but that entertainment is often buoyed by some hefty ideas that Napper explores from numerous different angles. The relationship between humanity and technology is a complicated one with some surprising fallout, and Napper really gets in there and explores that space with visceral prose and interesting characters. Stories that feel real and possible. I often left a story surprised, not just by how much I enjoyed it, but how much it gave me to think about.
The characters we read about here are the outsiders, which was an interesting and effective choice. The everyman, the washed-up has-been, the criminals who navigate the societal underbelly, those who operate best with gray morality. It allowed Napper to give me a feel for more of the average person, the average life, the ways we all choose to survive. These are the people who interest me, and the stories I tend to connect with. More, it allowed Napper to play with some interesting ideas with a bit more liberty than he might have otherwise been able to use. One of my particular favorites, was a person who got a memory reassignment surgery to deal with some extreme PTSD as a result of fighting in the war. Interesting story on the surface with a lot of hefty supporting themes. I love stuff like that.
I’m a sucker for cyberpunk and near-future SciFi, I will admit. The really, really good ones will not just entertain you, but show you a future that feels like a possibility, and that’s what Napper did with Neon Leviathan. He told stories that work on so many different levels. He explored a futurescape that was so thoughtfully wrought, it felt real. Through his stories, we see a landscape of dark possibility, and using his stunning prose as a vehicle, he brought it to life.
Neon Leviathan was a lot of fun, but I was also almost overwhelmed by the author’s attention to detail, his ability to craft the perfect sentence for the perfect moment, his marriage of beauty and pain, his unflinching desire to go spelunking down the dark cave of “What if”. Mostly, what impresses me about Napper is his ingenuity and his cunning use of layers. I was never just reading a story, rather I was exploring an idea and Napper was the perfect guide.
Neon Leviathan really knocked my socks off. Napper is an author to watch....more
I’m a big fan of Bradley P. Beaulieu (writing under the pen name Brendan Bellecourt here), but when I heard about this book, my excitement really moved to a whole other level. I have a huge interest in books that are set in a time similar to/in the 1920s. I saw “speakeasies” and went all Liz Lemon ala 30 Rock, “I want to go to there.” Thankfully, I apparently annoyed the appropriate people the appropriate amount of times, because the next thing I knew, the author was sending me an audible code for the book.
I will say, I loved the narration on this audiobook. It was really easy for me to sink into the story. I usually listen to audiobooks while I do things around the house (when I take editing breaks during my workday, and cook dinner and the like), and I found myself actually wanting to prolong my cleaning/cooking/whatever just so I could listen to the book longer. Simon Vance is basically one of those narrators who could read a phonebook and I’d be one-more-paging that sucker until hell froze over. The combination of his dulcet voice and the story itself really delivered a one-two punch that knocked this one out of the park.
One of the first things that stuck out to me regarding Absynthe was the worldbuilding. There are so many different ideas stuck together in a world that, upon first glance, feels too busy to work but once I got into the book, I saw how well all these ideas fit together. A brief glance through reviews so far will show you that elements of this book are being compared to the Pacific Rim, “decopunk”, steampunk, alternative history, and more. There’s a lot going on, and while it can get busy at times, the author has a knack for synthesizing ideas, playing with new concepts, making things that shouldn’t work, work. Nothing in this world was what I expected it to be, and all of it was so carefully executed, I was left with a newfound appreciation of just how profoundly SFF authors can break boundaries.
There’s a real interesting synthesis of ideas here, from tommy guns and speakeasies to zeppelins and performance-enhancing biotech. There’s some aspects that will immediately put readers in the mind of the 1920s, like flapper dresses and the jazz age excitement of a big, metropolitan area. Then there’s other elements that will make you think “steampunk” or “Pacific Rim”. It was a really interesting blend of different ideas which all merged together to create a world that was instantly gripping, and absolutely unlike anything I have ever read before.
But, while there is a lot of potential for action, and there is action, this book isn’t really about that. At least, in my mind, Absynthe felt a bit more thoughtful, a bit more measured. This world, while fantastic and captivating, is balanced by a bit of darkness as well. A lot of this book, in my mind, was an exploration of some of the results of war we rarely see in books like this. This careful exploration of poignant emotional and social themes really balanced out some of the larger-than-life worldbuilding elements, grounding them in a reality many of us will find one uncomfortable step removed from our own.
And maybe that’s where the book the was the most enjoyable for me. I enjoy stories that make me think, explorations of deep themes through the eyes of characters I can really relate to, or feel for. Here, in this world, so much is amazing and wonderful, and yet it doesn’t take long for readers to realize that things aren’t all that great. Veterans are forgotten about and go through life with conditions like PTSD, or have wounds healed with mechanical implants and devices, which present their own host of problems. People are injected with mysterious serums. The citizens of this United States are breaking into factions. Tensions are rising. People are beginning to distrust each other, and the government. There is a very pervasive feel that everything is falling apart, unraveling, and into this milieu, we have our character, one Liam Mulcahey.
Liam really stuck out to me. He, like so much of this book, wasn’t what I expected. A thoughtful character who wasn’t afraid to feel, it’s his perspective that really humanizes many of these deeper themes, and layers them into Bellecourt’s unique world in a way that felt pretty natural. Through Liam, some of the ideas, themes, aspects of the world that shouldn’t have worked, actually did work, because he made it all make sense. He was the bridge that spanned these waters, allowing readers to connect the flashy worldbuilding with these deeper issues, like the slow degradation of the social order, the unravelling of trust, the personal, human cost of war.
At its core, this book is a mystery, and it is quite fast paced at that. Liam, a war veteran, unexpectedly finds himself in the center of tension and change. He has to make pieces fit and find answers to seemingly unanswerable questions. He finds himself immersed in a situation that’s far larger and deeper than he ever imagined. Ultimately, this journey is profound, as it forces him to question everything from his leaders to his society, to his most important relationships, to himself. Nothing is what it seems to be, and the truth he finds, the truth he is chasing, is far more more pervasive than I anticipated. This book kept me guessing throughout, with no shortage of “ah ha” moments as the clues Bellecourt wove throughout his narrative clicked into place.
So, where does this leave us?
Absynthe is a fast-paced, wild ride through a stunningly crafted world, but it was the deeper themes and the sympathetic protagonist that truly captivated me. This book is as much a mystery as it is an exploration of the often-overlooked, uncomfortable human cost of some of our actions. Bellecourt managed to write a story that balanced on the knife’s edge between flashy and thought provoking, displaying, for all to see, why he is a master of his craft.
A little while ago, I bought Peacemaker by this author. Then, as soon as I bought it, I realized Dalí was out, and I decided to buy that too and read this one first, then move on to Peacemaker. And… long story short, here we are.
Set in a futuristic world, replete with spaceships and planetary travel, Dalí is the kind of book that was seriously gripping from page one. Hamill has a real eye for detail, letting no aspect of her world (universe?) building be overlooked. Somehow she manages all of this, including its complexities, without ever making me feel bogged down by information overload. Naturally flowing into the text, the world comes alive through the brushstrokes she uses to create it with.
Where Hamill truly shines, however, are with the complexities (apparently this is my favorite word in this review) of the people and various other beings that populate this futuristic space. Politics play a big role in this book, and while some of the themes felt a bit heavy-handed, I think they were believable in the context of the world she created. A natural, if uncomfortable, evolution, if you will. And I could also see where some real-world influences could have nudged these events along in the story. Basically, there’s obviously something the author is trying to say, and I think Hamill does it well.
This is also where some readers might be a bit overwhelmed and decide the book isn’t for them. There’s a lot of trans and nonbinary oppression in Dalí, and while the book makes it’s standpoint (fundamentally against all of this) absolutely clear, it is a pretty important plot point. A lot of bad things happen offstage, like rape is alluded to, for example. Slavery. Human trafficking. A whole lot of harmful slurs and the like. Again, the book is absolutely against all of this, but for some people it might be a bit too much, so I feel like you might want to be aware before you jump in with both feet.
I will say, it’s not all bad. There are places in this world where people can go and be accepted, and we do experience some of that in the story. There are people fighting the good fight, and you’ll meet them.
That being said, Dalí, a character reeling from the very personal tragedy of losing their husband, wife, and unborn child in a terrorist attack, is asked to investigate a particularly gnarly case of human trafficking. Dalí is a changeling in this messy universe, which means they are genderfluid and can change whether they present as male or female, including musculature and genitalia. This puts Dalí in a unique position to not only feel the very real impact of terrorism and harmful beliefs on a fundamental level, but also understand the plight of changelings and those of the third gender that are being so ruthlessly acted against.
Dalí was an amazing character, and I thought they were crafted very well. Flawed, and so emotionally raw (which I absolutely love), Dalí gave me a unique insight into the politics that the book otherwise would have lacked. The fact Dalí is a changeling also gave me some interesting insight into themes touching on gender and identity that I really felt carefully dealt with, and incredibly impactful. More, Hamill doesn’t shy away from the darker impacts of loss, which I truly appreciated. I feel like, all too often, loss in books is portrayed and then a chapter or two later the character sort of just moves on, and that wasn’t the case here. Dalí is raw and reeling, and the emotional upheaval from losing their entire family is felt and felt profoundly throughout the book.
Politics plays a huge role in Dalí, and there are plenty of shenanigans as well. The idea of genetic purity is not really a new one, and a few of my favorite books play on this theme. In Dalí, the New Puritan Movement is pushing for genetic purity. Humanity is sliding toward extinction (for reasons that are covered in the book), and changelings like Dalí are becoming more and more plentiful. Mixed in with this are personal and political alliances, human trafficking, blatant oppression, terrorism, and more. Then you drop Dalí, a trained ambassador reeling from the loss of everything they love, into the middle of this chaotic stew, and you have quite a book on your hands.
The plot is pretty breakneck. A lot needs to be covered in 256 pages, so there was no real resting time. And yet, I never really hit that point where I was thinking, “Okay, but how are these people not collapsing from exhaustion?” which I sometimes do when I read books that just don’t slow down. The genius thing here, is while there’s so much going on outside of Dalí, in the wider world, there’s also a lot going on inside of Dalí, and Hamill does an amazing job balancing these two spheres of action. There are quiet moments of reflection, and there is plenty of action as well. The unique balance struck between the two made the book feel like it carried itself well, never really slipping far to one side at the cost of the other.
The characters are all as brilliantly developed as the politics. Hamill puts a lot of care into the characters she presents in her books. Even secondary characters felt fully fleshed out, and the ones I’d categorize as villains felt real as well, with motivations that were understood, if not agreed with. In another way, I’d say her characters and politics balance each other as well as the inside/outside action I mention above. Both the politics and characters are just so brilliantly crafted, with such attention to detail and nuance, they felt real and believable to me. Then, you see how they appear when played against each other, and you realize how truly skilled Hamill is as an author. All of the elements of her story, from setting, to culture, to politics, to strife, trauma, and characters, play off each other perfectly to make this a supremely memorable story.
Dalí is a book I should have read a while ago. Highlighting heavy themes, such as love, family, loss, human rights, Hamill tells an amazing story. I cannot wait for more....more
I absolutely love near future and social SciFi. It’s a genre I don’t read enough of, and it’s one that, if done well, will really leave me thinking some deep thoughts for a long time after I read the book. I adore the genre. I really do. So, the other day when I was flitting through Netgalley to see if anyone had anything on the offer that looked interesting, I saw this book and jumped on it.
I will be honest, though. I almost bounced off this book pretty hard when I just started reading it. The reason being, there’s a lot of baseball, and I think baseball is about as interesting as watching paint dry (I’m sorry, don’t throw things at me) so yeah. However, I have a feeling my threshold for interest in sports is abnormally low, so don’t let that deter you. Just be aware. If you don’t like reading about sports, aspects of this book might be something you need to power through.
That being said, the plot quickly takes off and things get moving in a whole bunch of different directions. At times, the worldbuilding was a bit overwhelming, and I think some readers could get a bit lost in the rapid fire details, but I actually liked that aspect of the book. I loved how much thought and attention the author put into just about every aspect of the world, the evolving culture, the relationships and more. This is a book that obviously took a lot of careful thought to write, and that paid off with a fascinating story set in a world that is similar enough to ours to be believable. It did the thing I love these sorts of books for: It made me think.
In this near-future world, body modifications are the hot thing. The body you are born with is more a suggestion than anything else, and people pay good money to modify and upgrade themselves. They go in debt for body modifications. They hire people to hunt for the right body modification. Sometimes modifications become outdated. It’s a whole thriving, wild industry and it’s the core of this book.
Baseball comes into this because while the game is the same as the we know now, the players have changed. They’ve modified their bodies for improved performance, and our protagonist, Kobo, has his finger on the pulse on the modification market. He gets called by his professional athlete brother, who is a bit out of sorts, seems off, and Kobo isn’t that surprised. Sometimes this sort of thing can happen with mods. However, Kobo is surprised when his brother ends up dead. The League hires him to investigate his brother’s death, and we go down a Who Done It rabbit hole that had some impressive twists and turns.
The plot is pretty relentless. It doesn’t take much time to get to the mystery at the center of this book, and then it takes even less time to realize that not everything is as it seems. In this future vision of our world, evolution is guided by humans, and there’s a lot of deep, dark secrets into just how things are progressing on that front. So while Kobo’s investigation is interesting, it was really the world itself that almost gripped me more than anything else, and the social and personal problems that ensued from a future where humanity is so dramatically focused on modifications for personal improvement.
The Body Scout is pretty relentlessly paced. There’s never really any downtime, which reminded me a lot of some noir books I’ve read, where no one really has time to rest. It’s constantly one thing, then another, then another. Things are just constantly moving, which keeps it interesting, but perhaps I would have longed for some quiet moments occasionally. Some pauses in the motion to give both Kobo and the reader time to breathe and really digest the story a bit more.
Kobo was a character that I instantly liked. He’s flawed, self-absorbed, and focused on surgeries and modifying his own body with very little regard to the debt he finds himself in. However, as the book progresses, Kobo grows and evolves. He’s not the same man at the end as he was at the beginning. He starts to feel some empathy. He starts to look at the world a bit differently. Still flawed to his core, I found his personal arc, how the events he was enmeshed in changed him, to be rather fascinating and extremely well done.
I will say, baseball stays a theme throughout this book, and I did detach from that part of it because… baseball… but that’s my personal flavor and that’s not the author’s problem. I will also say that this was an absolutely wonderful debut offering. It was wild, and unexpected, with some of the best near-future worldbuilding I’ve seen in a long time. The plot was intricate, and the author’s attention to detail truly floored me. So, if you’re a fan of near-future SciFi, and you don’t mind baseball, you’ll probably want to check this one out. ...more
Kazuo Ishiguro is an author who basically slayed me a few years ago. You see, I randomly downloaded the audiobook for Never Let Me Go and then went off to work the day job and listened to it. I had no idea what I was getting into. So I go to work, and I listen to that book and then I get to the end where you finally figure out what’s going on and holy mother of god, I have never in my life had a book undo me as much as that one did. I mean, I was bawling so hard my coworkers asked me if someone died. I laugh about it now, but the truth is, an author who writes books that can make a reader feel that profoundly is an author to notice.
Ishiguro has won the Nobel Prize for literature, so that really says enough right there, doesn’t it? However, Klara and the Sun is his first book released since he won said prize, and because I love it when authors make me feel, I knew I had to read this one.
First off, I listened to the audiobook of this, and I really enjoyed the narrator. She was easy to understand, and had a good flow and voice for Klara herself. She made it quite easy to sink into the book. So, if you’re an audiobook fan, give this one a listen. It’s well done, and you’ll likely enjoy it as much as I did.
Klara and the Sun is an interesting book. Told from the perspective of Klara, an AF (Artificial Friend). While this book is about friendship, and love, and various other deep themes of that nature, the story itself is told with the voice of a robot. Therefore, the book doesn’t quite shine on a sentence level the way some of his other books do. Klara has a bit of a, dare I say, robotic voice. It does loosen up as time goes by, but she never quite slips out of being what she is.
That being said, I didn’t have a problem with that at all. In fact, while the prose did feel utilitarian, it was welded like a hammer, making a large impact with few words. Her voice was unique and it really helped hammer her own evolution and experiences home.
In this near future world, the evolution of society is seen mostly in genetics, and the social stratification that results from genetic tinkering. This is one of those nebulous things, where you see hints of the world, the shape of these issues that are at the core of this book. In fact, this ability for Ishiguro to reveal in fits and starts, holding the big picture back until it will have the largest impact on the reader is one of my favorite things about this author. In so many ways, this world is so similar to our own, but when you do start seeing these differences, they are both subtle and monumental at the same time. And then, that last gasp when you finally understand everything you’ve been reading about is nothing short of amazing.
Josie quickly enters Klara’s life, and becomes the core of it, and Klara is hired to be her friend, and also take care of her. In a lot of ways, Klara’s relationship with Josie is a lot about care, both physically and emotionally, and the friendship that evolves from that kind of selfless love. Josie, being a teenager, spends a lot of the book trying to figure out who she is. Her illness is hinted at, and like so much else in the book, slowly revealed to the reader. Through Josie, readers get a view of how school and socialization works in this new future. You get a sense of her yearning to belong, and how hard she fights against basically her own fate. You feel, deeply, how she is both a part of, yet apart from at the same time.
Klara is an interesting voice to throw into this changing and evolving stew. Klara, being what she is, is unchanging, and in many ways the love and kindness she bestows upon those around her are far more pure than anything a human could muster, and due to that, the moments of realization feel that much more emotionally impactful because such pure selflessness is at the heart of every part of this story. While the world changes around her, Klara remains the same and it feels like there is a message in that, and also a certain marriage of hope and sorrow that went right through me. Perhaps it says something that the person in the novel who impacted me the most was the one who was not, in fact, human.
Klara and the Sun has a huge emotional impact, as all of this author’s books do. However, instead of breaking me down into buckets of tears, like Never Let Me Go, the emotional impact of this one was just as profound, if not quite as obviously so. The well this draws from is deep, but different, a kind of simmering below the surface rather than an outpouring. This book made me think, and haunted me long after I finished it.
Klara and the Sun was a delight I lost myself to, and just like Ishiguro’s other work, it’s one that has me looking at love, and kindness, and what it means to be human in a completely new light....more
"This book is billed as a humorous space opera, and while it is funny (everything Hines writes tends to make me laugh in the best way), the book is ac"This book is billed as a humorous space opera, and while it is funny (everything Hines writes tends to make me laugh in the best way), the book is actually one of the better space operas I’ve read, with a ton of layers and depth. Something is always happening somewhere to someone, and there’s never really a dull moment. More, though, is the stunning amount of thought and work Hines obviously put into the development of this new, futuristic world he’s created. There’s a lot here to chew on, and a lot to laugh about. While Hines does, at times, shine a mirror on us so we might look back at ourselves, it’s never heavy-handed. There’s a grace about how Hines handles complex topics, and a real balancing act, which he performs perfectly, between serious, funny, and thoughtful.
It’s delightful. Seriously.
In my humble opinion, this is one of Hines’s strongest books. It’s got everything that makes Hines an author to watch: humor, complex characters, complex world-building, and a thought-provoking plot."
First, I’m not much for military-intense stories. I can’t picture the battles, formations, or weapons so a lot goes over my head. I will say that due
First, I’m not much for military-intense stories. I can’t picture the battles, formations, or weapons so a lot goes over my head. I will say that due to this, some of the details of this story were kind of lost to me but overall, that did not impact the story. This is one of those books that works on a lot of levels. It’s fun, but there’s a lot of deep stuff going on under the surface. The writing is amazing, and the plot never stops.
This is a book about war and capitalism, so it can (and does) get a little political, but there are some heavy ideas here that demand attention. I love the LGBTQ representation and the graceful way Hurley deals with all this heaviness.
The audiobook narration is, hands down, one of the best I’ve ever heard. Period. There was an infodump or two toward the start that felt a little cliche (an abundance of information being dropped in a classroom setting, for example), but I’m not sure how else she could have done it, so whatever.
If you can’t tell, I loved everything about this book. The ending left me reeling. The journey to get there was unforgettable. Reading this book is noIf you can’t tell, I loved everything about this book. The ending left me reeling. The journey to get there was unforgettable. Reading this book is not an experience I will forget anytime soon.
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