Review: The Grace of Kings

The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was an awesome book. It's not so much a novel as an epic saga rooted in oral tradition - a series of small stories all interlinked to a grand tale spanning time and space, each with enough fun to be memorable and subtle philosophical concepts to emerge on every telling, a curved mirror forcing you to look deep into yourself.
It's really, really long - covering a fairly eventful chunk of the lifetime of the protagonists - but it doesn't feel log, just eventful. You do see them grow.
The language is simple, almost childlike at times - adding to the easy readability and sense of verbally transmitted stories.
The cast is HUGE. hundreds, easily, and all of them unique, different, stereotypes and archetypes. One thing this did really well was the shades of grey in people. There are no absolutes, no good an bad - bad people did good things sometimes, and good ones did bad, and they switched it around, over and over. They felt more human than a lot of people I'd seen elsewhere. Also found a lot of people being casually killed off very GoT-style.
Also liked how the gods and men are on such familiar terms with each other and interacting while staying separate - that was an interesting dynamic. Not much magic here, except the very subtle magic of misdirection and illusion - even the gods interfere a lot less directly than you think.
An excellent read. Unputdownable, beginning to end.

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Review: Biggles of 266

Biggles of 266 by W.E. Johns
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have to admit I have a soft spot for this series. Before the war movies, before the Commando Comics, before Blue Max, before even the history books, there were the summer afternoons with words on a page that would take me across the planet, seventy years in the past, and fifteen thousand feet up. I'd feel the cold, the wind, the vibration, be deafened by the roaring engines, squint into the blue for telltale twinkles of color, smell the oil and the cordite, sway with the gforces... it started a lifelong interest, and opened up a whole new way of looking at history as something so much more alive than dates and things that happened. It was a world now.
It was all words, and the only images I'd ever seen to show what it looked like was on faded, tattered covers - but the world behind the words was crystalline, gloriously detailed, and fun.
Could any ten-year-old ask for more in a story?

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Review: The Martian

The Martian by Andy Weir
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was pretty good, actually. Brilliant exercise in setting a situation with a fixed set of variables, and then throw situation after situation and making those variables fit together in the perfect way to solve those situations. And in the end, getting to the end result.
And more than that, it's an awesome exercise in watching an object lesson in not giving up - however hilariously impossible things look.

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Review: Prince of Thorns

Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a fascinatingly dysfunctional book - it sets up a character who completely breaks every expectation of what a hero should be, yet you still somewhere grudgingly have to hand it to him for sheer bloody-mindedness - and yes, entertainment.
There's some slightly confusing bits - the whole thing reads likely something coming from a mind not exactly firing on all cylinders - but the sensation of the story holds up pretty well.
It's gory, vicious, ultraviolent... but also a fascinating read, especially once you start putting some of the pieces together.

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Review: Stormdancer

Stormdancer by Jay Kristoff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's interesting how some world-building ideas have become fantasy canon. Cities are always filthy, crawling with rats, disease, thieves, and a robust, thriving underworld. Farms are always simple and clean, as are the hearts and minds of their peoples. Desert cities have a bazaar and siestas, elaborate conversations, and classes. The icy north is full of warriors. And now, anything resembling oriental culture must have at it's head a god-like absolute despot ruling with an iron fist over not just the hearts but the minds of his subjects as well, rigid and widely separated classes, intrigue and conspiracy, layered meanings and subtlety - and always, somewhere in a far-off forest, a resistance awakens to fight back.

Stormdancer sports the fairly standard coming-of-age dragonrider story, but by placing it in this world adds an interesting variation. It's complex, nuanced, thoughtful, edge-of-the-seat pacy, and does not get sappy or shy away from the gory details.
And it's a ton of fun. Looking forward to the next.

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Review: Heartless

Heartless by Gail Carriger
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not bad, but running out of stuff now. Alexia's becoming the kind of person you'd want to avoid at all cost - whiny, irritating, meddling, always getting herself into trouble rashly and then needing to be rescued, and with absolutely no regard for anyone 'common' - maybe it's meant to be immersive, but there's a thing as going too far. It just comes out as really classist.
The Lefoux storyline was decent, but the ending and the apparently 'neat resolution' with all loose ends tied up kinda felt... forced. Not right. I liked Lefoux. Now she's been turned into a weird caricature of herself to fit the storyline, to make the reader more comfortable with the storyline, where literally everyone gets displaced except Alexia, who gets exactly what she wants.

So... guess the title is truer than I expected.

Reminds me of an ex.

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