Review: Assassin's Apprentice

Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

'Assassin' is a very interesting set of job skills bound up in a single word. It's a person who is a social strategist, economist, historian, tactical psychologist, poisoner, stealth master, messenger, codebreaker, confidante... the role requires a particularly unique, hard-to-find set of abilities and training, and gets deployed in even more unique, pivotal places, the tipping points of history, in a way that nobody should ever know of.
This book does a specially masterful job of rolling them all up into a single novel. It's brilliant.
And there's zombies, telepaths, barbarian princesses, wargs, and sorcerer-pirates.

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Review: Age of Swords

Age of Swords by Michael J. Sullivan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The best part of this story takes place in the climax-side epic underdark dungeon crawl - there's just something about vast deserted subterranean cities inhabited by Things of the Dark that is really good and feels fresh, despite LOTR and The Carpet People, and this falls somewhere between the two. You have to slightly stretch the disbelief to allow for afew thousand years of innovation and discovery to be done by a single person in a week, but it's pretty well handled. The parallel storyline has it's conclusion without ever interacting with the main, so all set up for the next one in the series.

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Review: Age of Swords

Age of Swords by Michael J. Sullivan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The best part of this story takes place in the climax-side epic underdark dungeon crawl - there's just something about vast deserted subterranean cities inhabited by Things of the Dark that is really good and feels fresh, despite LOTR and The Carpet People, and this falls somewhere between the two. You have to slightly stretch the disbelief to allow for afew thousand years of innovation and discovery to be done by a single person in a week, but it's pretty well handled. The parallel storyline has it's conclusion without ever interacting with the main, so all set up for the next one in the series.

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Review: All Systems Red

All Systems Red by Martha Wells
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Surprisingly intense, easy to get into, fun, and fast-paced, this short book hits all the right notes, pulls you in quickly, and keeps you invested. Expected something different, but was pleasantly surprised by what I got instead.

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