Night Child by Jes Battis
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I honestly don’t know what to think about this…it was ambitious, probably moreso than Battis was up to. Interesting series premise. Don’t think first installment delivered on — and can’t see that future ones would, either. It wasn’t bad, don’t misunderstand me. But it wasn’t good either. Very disappointing.
Blood Work by Kim Harrison
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I’m trying to come up with a nice way to talk about this one, but I don’t think I can.
The writing was . . . lacking. It seemed like notes for a story more than anything else. My guess was that Harrison was learning how to write a comic script, knew she couldn’t put the same kind of detail she normally puts in her 400+ page novels, and over-corrected. It’s a potentially interesting tale, but just one poorly told.
And the art? Stiff, unnatural, not terribly consistent. It didn’t look so much like capturing motion or movement, but a series of awkward poses.
Honestly, I gave this an extra star because it scratched the itch wondering how things started between the two (didn’t eliminate the itch as it’s only part of the story, and so poorly told). Really, that’s the best that can be said for this waste of time. Despite this, I’ll probably read the sequel, just to find out what happens. And I’ll probably not be thrilled with myself throughout it.
Dream Dark by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This is pretty much the textbook definition of “meh.” The primary purpose of this short story “of Gatlin’s first, and only, Linkubus” is to provide a bridge between Beautiful Darkness and Beautiful Chaos, which is does well enough.
But the thing is, there’s already a land-bridge between the two books — Chapter 1 of Beautiful Chaos. Dream Dark is totally unnecessary.
Add to that the fact that practically nothing happens. Nothing we need to know, anyhow. We get more details on the aftermath of Link being bitten by the half-Incubus, and how he deals with it early on — but we don’t learn anything we need to know. And it’s not even that particularly entertaining.
If this story’d been told from Link’s POV rather than Ethan’s, maybe that could’ve been enough to justify this. But as it is…meh.
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P.S. For the record, I’d have felt this way about the story even if I hadn’t bought the e-copy and then discovered that it was printed in the back of my paperback copy of Beautiful Chaos. Really.
Clean by Alex Hughes
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This was a totally adequate book. This is a futuristic police procedural featuring a telepath who acts as an interrogator, a case of “You’ve got Urban Fantasy in my SF,” “No, you’ve got SF in my Urban Fantasy.”
The telepath in question is a recovering drug addict on his last second chance — and that was pretty well done. I work with a log of people in Recovery, and this rang true. But beyond that, he was sort of a stock PI-type down on his luck. The same goes for his tough, driven and beautiful Homicide detective partner, and the various superiors they have — even his sponsor. They’re all characters we’ve seen dozens upon dozens of times before. To an extent, that’s forgivable in a first novel in a series, you’re building a world, setting up everything, you can skate by with mostly stock characters, as long as you flesh them out later. But there wasn’t a single original character.
The plot wasn’t much better once you strip away the Mindspace parts of the equation.
At the end of the day, for all it had going for it, Clean just wasn’t all that well-written. Too often it read like something I’d write on my best day (and I’m fully aware of my limitations) — sure, it its moments, and the last 40 or so pages, really delivered. But that was more plot than execution, by that point, as long as she wasn’t being incoherent, it would work — it was just getting to that point that was the struggle. It was the setup and curiosity that got me to that point.
It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if one day I really liked Hughes’ stuff, but today wasn’t that day.
Christ Of The Bible And The Church by Grogan, Geoffrey
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
It’s tough to know what to say about this, it’s a wholly carefully-written, exhaustive, entirely orthodox look at Christ as set forth in Scripture and in the doctrines of the Church. It’s an apologetic for the Faith once delivered as well as an explanation of it.
However, wow. It just didn’t work for me at all. The points I liked, I’ve seen better developed, better explained elsewhere. His most evangelical moments seemed half-hearted and perfunctory (although I don’t think they were, it just struck me that way). He is far too concerned with unbelieving scholarship, and does not respond to critics with as much force and thoroughness as he ought. There’s just doesn’t seem to be much heart to this work.
Your results may vary, certainly any book carrying the cover blurbs on it that this does would catch my eye, and I’d expect to be well worth the time, but this just didn’t work for me.
Black Cherry Blues by James Lee Burke
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
that seemed like it took forever to read, and it was totally not worth it. Still trying to figure out the appeal of Robicheaux to mystery readers. I appreciate the insights I’m getting to someone working the program (AA) and his relapses, etc. But just don’t see the point in continuing to read the series (‘tho I fully expect I’ll read a few more)
I spent the better part of an hour writing a different review this morning — it wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be, but I’d worked on it a lot. And then I lost it. One stupid, wrong and mostly stupid click of the mouse and …poof. Didn’t have time to try to recreate it, but wanted to post something new today. And hey, I just purchased the Evanovich/Goldberg short story, Pros and Cons. Perfect! That’d fit the bill. Right? well…
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Pros and Cons: A Short Story by Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg
Series: Fox and O’Hare, #0.5
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I’ve been eagerly awaiting The Heist since it was first announced — I’m a big fan of both Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg, so when this short story prequel was released I couldn’t resist.
I probably should have found the will power. This, at best, was not bad. Amusing at times, but most of the humor felt forced. Even then, the humor was overly broad most of the time. Worse than that, the story was chock-full of exposition dumps that are almost worthy of Dan Brown.
That said, I’ve read almost 30 books by these two over the years and have no doubt that the novels are going to be better. The primary characters — Agent O’Hare and scoundrel Fox, are promising and chock-full of potential. Sure, I’m a little less enthused about The Heist than I was yesterday, but I’ll get over that once it’s in my hot little hands.
Short version: Skip this tease, come back for the real thing.
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Man, I wanted to like this book. Really, really wanted to…and I almost did.
The plot, the characters, the world de Lint built…were all so close to being good, to being right what I was looking for, but ultimately missed it.
The elements are all there for something great: a mix of the real world, a secret government program, Celtic mythology and Native American tales–oh, yeah, and a magic house. Who could want more? Not me. Unless you count a plot that moves faster than a glacier and well-developed characters that get the chance to do something.
There are just far too many characters moving around this book — it’s honestly difficult at times to keep track of some of them. And tracking is essential, because the book is essentially 320 pages of introducing players and moving them around to set up the last 90 pages (don’t have the book with me, so my page counts are estimates).
Nice try, but nowhere near as good as his straight fantasy that preceded it.
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I was almost disappointed by this one, on second thought, maybe I was disappointed by this installment in the Anna Strong series.
Stein introduces us to her version of werewolves (different, a la Meyer, than the shapechangers we’ve already met). Her take on the species isn’t my favorite, but I dig what she’s doing with them and the backstory for vamps/werewolves/demons she worked up.
I wasn’t crazy about how Anna “solved” the real world job (which she really didn’t do), but I thought she handled the supernatural “case” okay. On the whole, though, this book showed Anna at her most clueless, which may be what Stein intended–as long as she’s denying one side of her nature, she can’t be what she needs to be, etc.–but I doubt it.
For a page or so I thought we were done with the Max subplot after book #3, but no. I thought we were done with the Gloria thing, but no. I thought the David stuff had turned a page and onto something new there, but no. And so on.
Basically, this book served to shuffle the characters around a bit to (potentially, hopefully) do something with next time around.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m back for (at least) #5 and #6. Just hoping I don’t regret it.
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
On a planet colonized by Muslims using insect-based technology in the far-flung future ravaged a multi-sect religious war, in the midst of which a scrappy band of pansexual assassins try to scrap out a living (selling the occasional organ to pay bills). Ho-hum. Nothing we all haven’t read a thousand times before, right?
Well, maybe not. Fantastic concept, well-written, heckuva world built by Hurley here.
But here’s the problem — I couldn’t force myself to care about any of these characters, particularly the protagonist Nyx. Unpleasant people, no real moral core, no reason to root for/against them, to care about their lives, their missions, their wars. I kept trying and trying and trying to find a reason to get invested in this beyond trying to figure out exactly how the insect-tech worked and utterly failed at every turn.
You can have the coolest, most inventive setup imaginable, but if you don’t fill it with people readers can give a rip about, it’s just not worth the effort.
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