Skip to main content

Ralsina.Me — Roberto Alsina's website

Posts about books (old posts, page 70)

Storm Front (The Dresden Files, #1)

Cover for Storm Front (The Dresden Files, #1)

Review:

Was slight­ly let­down af­ter all the fa­natism in­volv­ing the se­ries, but maybe it gets bet­ter? A per­fect­ly rea­son­able noir-ur­ban-­fan­ta­sy.

Half a King (Shattered Sea, #1)

Cover for Half a King (Shattered Sea, #1)

Review:

YA Aber­crom­bie means it's a lit­tle lighter in the gore, much lighter in the sex, yet still pret­ty heavy in the treach­ery and mis­for­tune.

And a big plus! Even though this is part of a tril­o­gy, it works fine as a stand­alone book! It has a be­gin­ning a mid­dle and an end­ing, too!

A fun read, will hap­pi­ly read the se­quel­s.

Heaven and Mel

Cover for Heaven and Mel

Review:

Two stars is "it was ok". In this case, it means "it was ok for what it is". What it is is crap. Ok crap, though!

Jow Es­zter­has is prob­a­bly the worst writ­er I have ev­er read. He is a sanc­ti­mo­nious, delu­sion­al, self­-­glo­ri­fy­ing as­s. He be­lieves god talks to him about his movies. He be­lieves the vir­gin sends sig­nals to him and his pro­duc­ers green­light­ing his scripts (and even then, they don't get pro­duced!)

And he writes about an­oth­er sanc­ti­mo­nious, delu­sion­al, self­-­glo­ri­fy­ing as­s, Mel Gib­son. They re­al­ly sound pret­ty much the same to me, ex­cept one sounds an­gry and stupid, and the oth­er sounds pet­ty and stupid.

Al­leged­ly, the au­thor had such fear of Mel Gib­son he slept hold­ing a rosary in one hand and a golf club in the oth­er while stay­ing at his house. Then, af­ter a year of work­ing on a script with this man he feared so much, he takes his teenage son and wife to stay at Mel Gib­son's house in a se­clud­ed, re­mote lo­ca­tion in Cos­ta Ri­ca, so his son can go on long na­ture walks with Mel Gib­son.

How does that end? With the fam­i­ly so afraid of Mel Gib­son they sleep with butch­er knives un­der their pil­lows.

That's be­yond stupid, that's un­be­liev­ably stupid., so I ei­ther have to be­lieve Joe Es­zter­has lacks the com­mon sense evo­lu­tion gave a gar­den slug, or will­ing­ly put his fam­i­ly in harms way, or things did­n't quite hap­pen that way.

So, ei­ther the au­thor is a mo­ron, he's evil, or he's a liar. Please no­tice that those are not mu­tu­al­ly ex­clu­sive ex­pla­na­tion­s.

If the av­er­age chris­tian is any­thing like him and Mel Gib­son, I sure am hap­py to be an athe­ist.

Fi­nal­ly, the prose is aw­ful. How a per­son so in­ca­pable of thread­ing three sen­tences in­to a co­her­ent para­graph has man­aged to make a liv­ing off his writ­ing is a mis­tery.

The Goblin Emperor (The Chronicles of Osreth, #1)

Cover for The Goblin Emperor (The Chronicles of Osreth, #1)

Review:

I liked it a lot. Sort of a fish out of wa­ter sto­ry about a boy that does­n't know how to be an em­per­or, and his strug­gle with tra­di­tion, com­pli­cat­ed fam­i­ly his­to­ry, etc.

Nit­pick: The nam­ing schemes are *painful*. They are ex­plained in an ap­pen­dix that it would prob­a­bly be a good idea to read be­fore the book.


Contents © 2000-2024 Roberto Alsina