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Calamity (Reckoners, #3)

2016-02-27 00:00

Cover for Calamity (Reckoners, #3)

Review:

Nice con­clu­sion to the tril­o­gy. Even ties up all the lose ends AFAIC­S.

Axis (Spin, #2)

2016-02-24 00:00

Cover for Axis (Spin, #2)

Review:

Did­n't like it as much as the 1st one in the se­ries. The hy­po­thet­i­cal's pow­er set is veer­ing dan­ger­ous­ly to the ar­bi­trary, which, con­sid­er­ing their 1st known ac­tion was wrap­ping earth in a mem­brane that slowed time is re­al­ly a bit much. Not sure if I will get the 3rd one.

Spin (Spin, #1)

2016-02-10 00:00

Cover for Spin (Spin, #1)

Review:

I think the out of se­quence nar­ra­tive struc­ture re­moved a bit too much of the sus­pense. It's a "high con­cep­t" book, so it takes an idea and runs with it, re­veal­ing it grad­u­al­ly, but know­ing a few of the things that are re­vealed so ear­ly in the book re­moves the mis­tery, and I may (or maybe not) pre­fer if it were told in a more straight­for­ward way.

I liked the char­ac­ter­s, though, they are grownup­s, which is al­most re­fresh­ing nowa­days.

All the Birds in the Sky

2016-02-01 00:00

Cover for All the Birds in the Sky

Review:

Could be 4.5 stars may­be, even 5 for some­one who was more in­to this kind of thing.

Of course the com­pli­cat­ed part there is, what kind of thing is this?

* De­but nov­el, with the ex­pect­ed over­growth of ran­dom ideas that could be awe­some in a sep­a­rate book.

* Pup­py love.

* Apoc­a­lypse.

* Mag­ic vs. Tech­nol­o­gy (the mag­ic sys­tem could use a bit more de­tail, the tech sys­tem, if that is even a thing could al­so (where did the 2 sec­ond time ma­chines schemat­ics come from?)

* Love­ly writ­ing

Did I men­tion that Tech­nol­o­gy here feels more like a sep­a­rate school of mag­ic than what we IRL un­der­stand as tech­nol­o­gy? In some oth­er book (Wear­ing the cape, may­be?) I read about a sort of su­per­heros/­su­pervil­lains called "Verne" who were able to cre­ate ran­dom "tech­no­log­i­cal" giz­mos and ma­te­ri­als that de­spite look­ing sci­ence-based were in fact to­tal­ly im­pos­si­ble for nor­mal peo­ple to re­pro­duce. That's how some of the "tech" things in this book ap­pear to work, and I think it makes the book slight­ly more in­ter­est­ing to me: it's a book about a war be­tween two mag­i­cal fac­tion­s, where one of the fac­tions does­n't know what they do is mag­ic.

All in al­l, very solid, en­ter­tain­ing book.
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