Category Archives: Reviews

books, Reviews, science fiction

Midnight, Water City (Water City 1) by Chris McKinney

Leave a comment

Stars: 2.5 out of 5

Honestly, my reaction after finishing this book is “meh.” 

I went into this book excited about the premise. An underwater city? Humanity averting the end of the world for once? This sounded so exciting! Unfortunately, we spend little to no time at all in the actual underwater city. 

And the worldbuilding isn’t really fleshed out at all. So the mankind mostly lives underwater to stay safe from solar flares? Okay, I get get onboard with that if you explain to me how that works. How did we manage to combat the enormous pressure in the ocean depths? How do we deal with the endless night, the decompression, etc.? Our protagonist seems to zip in and out of the deepest ocean reaches to the highest mountain in a matter of minutes with no visible side effects. 

Also, how are those seascrapers built? That hints at significant advances in engineering and construction materials, especially considering that today we can barely explore the depths in what amounts to an extremely reinforced safe with small windows. Yet 100 years from now, after some major wars and natural catastrophes, mind you, humanity can build penthouses at the bottom of the ocean that are about 80% reinforced glass. I know this is sci-fi. I am ready to suspend my disbelief, but the author needs to throw me a bone – some kind of explanation is in order.

That’s a trend for every scientific advancement in this book. Things happen because they need to happen for the story, and no thought is given to how feasible they are. This approach really undermines the credibility of the story and the worldbuilding starts to wobble and break around the edges. 

But the biggest problem with this book for me is that I couldn’t care less for any of the characters. Quite frankly, they are all horrible human beings. 

The protagonist used to be a killer for hire. Yes, he killed for the greater good, or at least that’s how he justifies it, but he is still a cold-blooded murderer. Add to that that he is on his fourth marriage and and his fourth kid. He’s lost all contact with his previous wives after the divorce (apart from the one that was killed), and doesn’t even know what happened to his children. He even mentions in the story that he is in the same country as his first ex-wife at one point, but has no desire to check on them. He basically ignores his current wife and avoids his daughter, because “children never interested him.” What a wonderful human being! /end sarcasm.

And the woman he works for is even worse, especially if the story about her lying about the Killing Rock is true. Akira Kimura is a sociopath and a megalomaniac who has zero concern for anyone but herself. Her daughter is even worse. 

So the protagonist’s constant devotion to Akira feels more and more twisted and sick, the further the story progresses and the more we learn about that individual. And his unwillingness to kill Ascalon also makes no sense at all. In fact, the whole ending is a perfect example of a protagonist robbed of his agency. He didn’t make the decision in the end, circumstances did it for him, which makes the payoff extremely unsatisfying in my eyes.

All in all, this wasn’t a book I will remember. And this certainly wasn’t on of the best books I read in 2022. It was okay. It kept me interested enough to finish it, but that’s about it. I’m certainly not interested enough to pick up the next book in the series.

PS: I received a free copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

books, Horror, Reviews

The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher

Leave a comment

Stars: 5 out of 5.

This was an amazingly, delightfully creepy book! The older I get, the less I seem to enjoy horror books, especially the gore and guts kind of horror. I still enjoy the atmospheric, psychological horror, but I find it hard to find good book that don’t repeat the same tired clichés or manage to completely botch the ending. I’m glad I picked up The Hollow Places, because this book delivered.

I think the best part about it is how slowly it develops the creep factor. We start in this wonderful little museum of improbable and impossible things that might look scary and unusual, but are, most of them fake. And our protagonist is someone who grew up in that museum. Who knows every nook and cranny of that building, who played among the display cases and hugged the stuffed animals as if they were her childhood friends. To Kara, or “Carrot” how her family and friends call her, the museum is the safest place on earth. This is a refuge when her family life is shattered by a divorce. A chance to regroup and start over.

And the author takes time to set the stage and introduce us to Kara and her uncle, as well as the museum itself. It’s done in such a way that as a reader, I was in love with the little building as well. I was feeling warm and safe there.

So when creepy and unexplained things start happen in this safe place, it completely knocks the ground from under your feet along with the protagonist. The horror of what’s happening has an even bigger impact because it is intruding into this safe zone.

The author also introduces the horrors of the Willows very progressively. At first, it just looks like a slightly creepy, but ultimately benign world. Yes, it’s flooded. Yes, there are bunkers everywhere, but no people. Yes, the willows are strange, but they are just trees, right? As more an more bizarre things happen to our protagonists, as the level of horror slowly ramps up, so did my blood pressure. I felt for them. I felt with them, especially after the school bus and their realization that they lost their bunker, and that they are possibly stuck in this weird no-man’s land forever.

I loved Kara. She is funny, she is a mess, but she is so relatable. Maybe because I’ve been in her shoes, with a messy divorce and a husband that acted exactly the same way. Yes, Carrot was slightly too stupid to live when it came to one particular object, but I can let it slide, because I liked everything else about her.

And Simon! If I had to get lost in a weird in-between place of existence with somebody, he would be my first choice. He is cool under pressure, and funny, and also relatable. 

And special shoutout to Beau, the bestest, most adorable cranky cat in literature. 

As I mentioned, the horror in this slowly builds up and finds its culmination when the safe place suddenly becomes unsafe. Unlike other horror books I’ve read recently, the author didn’t drop the ball here. The resolution is satisfying and the ending is everything I wanted it to be. And even though our protagonist win in th end, they are left with physical and emotional scars, which is also very logical and realistic. 

All in all, this was a very enjoyable book. I will definitely recommend it to my friends and I will check out other books by this author. Heck, I already told my husband he absolutely needs to read it.

books, Dark fantasy, Fantasy, Horror, Reviews, Urban fantasy

Last Exit by Max Gladstone

Leave a comment

Stars: 2.5 out of 5

It pains me to give a less than stellar rating to Max Gladstone, but this is the first book of his I’ve been disappointed with. How can a book about found family, road trip, end of the world, parallel universes and so on be so… boring?

I loved this author’s Craft series. They are wonderfully imaginative and full of interesting characters and thought provoking concepts. So of course I jumped on the chance to get an ARC of this through NetGalley. And my initial state while I was reading this book, before the boredom set in, was that of bewilderment. Is this the author who wowed me with his other books? Am I reading this wrong? What is going on?

Oh, there are glimpses of the author I love in this story. There are moments that are tightly written and intensely terrifying. Like when the Cowboy first becomes aware of Sarah on the interstate, or the confrontation at the Best Western, or when Zelda is in the bug-infested tunnels under an alt New York. Those scenes had me at the edge of my seat, with my heart in my throat, terrified for the well-being of the characters…

Unfortunately, those moments of brilliance are few and far between. And they are bogged down by pages and pages of flashbacks, introspections, inner dialog about how miserable the characters are and how they think that the world is ending. It’s self-pity and self-recrimination on page upon page upon page. So you get this brilliant scene when the action is non-stop, the stakes are high, and the characters in danger… then you have 50 pages of inner monolog topped with a flashback on their first journey. Momentum – shot dead, not by the cowboy in a white hat, but by sheer boredom. In fact, I think that the book is at least 200 pages too long. My Kindle assured me that it was 400 pages long, but it felt like one of those 1000+ pages door stoppers – never-ending.

I think this approach would have worked if I cared for any of the characters, but I didn’t. They are all unlikeable, selfish people who wear their failures like a badge of honor and wallow in self-pity for most of the book. And since the reader has to follow them and be privy to their most inner thoughts, it makes for a very painful read, and not in a good way. 

Also, it is constantly hinted that their first journey to find the crossroads went horribly wrong and resulted in Sal’s downfall, but the book drags the actual story over pages and pages of hints and self-pity. By the time we actually learn what happened it feels… anti-climatic? I was like, “So all this misery is because of this? Are you kidding me?” Not a good thing when Sal’s downfall and Zelda’s guilt about it are the cornerstone of this story. 

By the end of the book I was so bored with the story, that I just skimmed through the last 10%. Also not good. The ending is supposed to be rewarding. It’s supposed to justify the effort the reader put into sticking with 400 pages of story. It was anything but that. And the big reveal and twist wasn’t all that shocking either. 

When I had finished the other books of this author, I had a sense of satisfaction and joy. I had wanted to savor the story, to re-read passages that I liked the most. When I finished Last Exit, all I had is a sense of relief that the slog was finally over and that I could delete the ARC from my Kindle. 

I will not recommend this book. Max Gladstone is a wonderful author though, so I suggest you read his Craft series instead. 

books, Reviews, Urban fantasy, YA

The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa

Leave a comment

Stars: 2.5 out of 5

I’m always eager to discover new voices in literature, especially if they come from other cultures. Those authors always have very unique outlooks at life that you won’t find in our Western civilizations. It definitely broadens my horizon as a reader. So I was very eager to pick up this book when I saw it on NetGalley – a translation of an new Japanese author, and we have a talking cat who saves books? What is there not to like?

Well, the writing, as it turns out. 

The story itself is interesting and rather uplifting – we follow Rintaro, a very shy and introverted high school student, who is trying to deal with the sudden death of his grandfather, who had been his only family for all these years. It doesn’t help that Rintaro is a literal shut-in with severe social anxiety, and that the safe bubble that he’d built in his grandfather’s bookshop is about to burst. Then a talking cat appears and takes him on a fantastical adventure to save books and find his own voice. By the end of the journey, Rintaro finally discovers his own value and decides what he wants to do in life. 

It is a nice coming of age story that would definitely appeal to a younger audience… and a book I would never have picked up if I’d known it was aimed at the younger adult audience. I don’t read YA. This book just reaffirmed all the reasons why I don’t. 

The writing, as I had mentioned earlier, is simplistic at best. I don’t know if it’s due to so many nuances getting lost in translation, as they inevitably do, or if the original was written this way as well. It might have been, if it was intended for a 12+ audience, even if it was classified as General Fiction (Adult) on NetGalley.

Problem with this book is that it does a lot of telling and almost zero showing. Everything has to be spelled out for the reader. We are told how Rintaro feels and what he thinks of his few friends or people he encounters, but there is nothing in the writing that shows these reactions. It might also be that the author is Japanese, so he relies on Japanese stereotypes that would be familiar to a younger Japanese audience, but that are rather foreign to us. For example, Sayo, the class representative, came across as pushy, rude, and judgmental of Rintaro every time I read about her… Yet, he admires her for being a straight talker and very dedicated to her duties. And he just takes her verbal abuse like it’s normal. 

Another problem is that I can’t even visualize these characters. What does Rintaro look like? His only distinctive feature are his glasses that he likes to fiddle with. Same for Sayo. She could be any other Japanese high school student from the street and it wouldn’t make a difference. Or Akiba? Heck, the only character who gets a real description is Tiger the cat. Maybe that’s normal for Japanese novels. Maybe relying on common stereotypes is good enough for that audience. Me, it just left me rather bored. I felt like I was following a shadow play on the wall, where characters are blank cutouts. 

So all in all, it really wasn’t my cup of tea, even if it gave me a peak, of sorts, into the life of an insecure teenage boy living in a second hand book store somewhere in Japan. I wanted a bit more than that though, but it was probably just a matter of managing my expectations.

PS: I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

books, Cyberpunk, Reviews, science fiction

Moon Rising (The Upsilon Series 1) by Daniel Weisbeck

Leave a comment

Stars: 3.5 out of 5

This was an interesting novella about an android that’s just different enough to finally achieve consciousness. I liked our main protagonist Silon and her slow realization that everything is not as it seems. I also must admit that the first chapter was really chilling, especially since we didn’t know she was an android yet.

I cared less about the other characters that were introduced and whose POWs we followed during this book. I think this is where the book doesn’t quite work for me. It’s such a short read, but we have so many different POVs relating the events, and often backtracking to re-narrate what we already saw happening. This makes for a very chopped up delivery. In my opinion, this book is too short for this many different narrators.

In my opinion, this story would have benefited from being a bit more fleshed out. It moves too fast, too many things happen one after another, so there is not time for actual character exploration. 

Take Silon, for example, most of the changes she experienced are done either off screen or described through the eyes of other characters. So I didn’t see the progressive evolution of her character. She feels more like a playable character in an RPG – get enough experience to unlock the next level and look – upgrades! The problem with that is that all the changes feel done to her, not chosen by her. 

First, she is stuck in that basement until another character disables her safety protocols and orders her to come out. No real active choice made there, since she just obeys a command. Then at Charlie’s lab she is basically hacked again and a whole new set of programs is downloaded into her brain. I think the only really independent choice she makes is when she decides to stay with Teacher. I would have liked a little bit more agency from her in this story.

The other problem is character motivation. It’s very fuzzy and never really explained for some of them, and very on the nose for others. And that’s also a result of the book being so short. We simply don’t have time to explore the motivations of the different actors in this story. Which makes them seems a lot less like fleshed out characters and a lot more like devices put there by the author to move the story along. And them becoming basically cannon fodder doesn’t have an emotional impact on the reader at all, because we didn’t get to know them enough to care.

But despite these misgivings, this was an enjoyable and quick read that helped me pass a snowy afternoon curled up on my couch. I’m just hoping that the next book will be longer, and that the author takes time to explore the characters more.

PS: I received a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

books, Fantasy, Ghost Story, Horror, Reviews, Urban fantasy

Goblin by Josh Malerman

Leave a comment

 

Stars: 3 out of 5

This was a meh kind of book. It’s a series of short stories book ended by the story of a delivery driver bringing something terrifying to the city of Goblin. The short stories are related only by the location where they happen – the city of Goblin on the same particularly rainy day and night. 

I think that was one of the reasons the book was kinda meh to me. Yes, Goblin in itself is an interesting, if rather unhappy place. A place for the spirits. A place where humans were never supposed to settle and thrive. The short stories illustrate the eeriness of Goblin perfectly. Problem is, they don’t do much more than that. 

I read a book mostly for the characters and then for the worldbuilding. I notice that I tend to lose interest if I don’t have anybody to root for. If I don’t have a tour guide through the world the author is showing me. And that’s what happened here. Goblin is a fascinating place. Unfortunately, the people who live there are a lot less so.

We read stories of several different people who are not connected to each other, so it’s already hard to figure out why we should follow these characters or even care. Those stories are also not connected at all to the prolog, where a delivery driver is bringing something to Goblin. Something horrible… Well, Goblin already has plenty of horrible things. There is the Goblin police, the Witch of the North Woods, the owls, etc. So by the time that horrible thing finally reaches Goblin, it’s rather anticlimactic. It’s just another monster to add to a city already full of them. What’s the point?

Also, none of the stories we read about have any real resolutions, apart from the story of the man who was afraid of the ghosts. That one, we see to it’s logical conclusion. The rest of them leave is suspended in the air, without an explanation or a conclusion to them. I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to say.  And the arrival of this great terrible thing in the end isn’t enough to satisfyingly end any of those stories. 

In conclusion, it was an okay book to pass the time with, but I probably won’t remember what it is about in a month or so. This is the third book by this author I’ve read and found rather underwhelming, so I think I’m just not the intended audience here. A lot of people love these books, so your mileage might vary. 

PS: I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

books, Horror, Reviews, Zombies

Of Starlight and Plague by Beth Hersant

Leave a comment

Stars: 1 out of 5

DNF at 52%

I know that zombie books aren’t a paragon of high literature. I expect that. But when I pick up one, I expect to be entertained at least. This is the first boring zombie book I’ve ever read, so that must be a record. I picked it up because it has a bunch of 4 and 5 star reviews on Goodreads, and now I am honestly baffled. Were we reading the same book? Was there a particular lens I forgot to put on before I started this? I came for mindless zombie fun, what I got instead is a poorly written snooze fest. 

I think the biggest problem here is that the characters are skin deep. Granted, I don’t expect great characterization in a zombie book, since most of them will be zombie appetizer, but I expect to have one or two main characters that I can follow through the story. I need to have somebody I can associate myself with and see the world through their eyes. 

Here, we have no such thing. The two people responsible for the plague die by end of part 1. Which is a shame, because it would have been an interesting story to follow them through the pandemic. To see them realize the horror of what they have unleashed and do everything in their power to stop it before the world is destroyed. It’s a wasted opportunity and it’s such a shame.

Then we have Tammany, an old wise mambo in New Orleans. She seemed interesting and had at least a little depth to her character, even if most of that depth was full of  clichés about voodoo practitioners.  But her story was cut short by the end of part 2. 

By the time I decided to part ways with the book, we were introduced to yet another smart old lady who was planning on surviving the plague with her family. That felt redundant. Why not just continue with Tammany? Why introduce a whole new character, when they serve exactly the same purpose. The story of survival would have been in a swamp in New Orleans in Louisiana instead of a farm up north, but it would have served the same purpose. As it stands, that’s yet another character that has to be introduced, yet another conflict that has to be set up from the beginning. 

And that’s another problem with this book. Since the author has to set up so many characters, the action constantly jumps back and forth in time. We get to the inevitable “zombie” outbreak from the point of view of one character… then we switch to the very beginning of the story again for the next one and follow them to the same precise moment of the outbreak again. Rinse and repeat. This made me feel like the story is just spinning its wheels without going anywhere. And if a story isn’t going anywhere, I eventually loose all interest in it. 

Or the author introduces a character just as they get killed or loose their soul to the New Rabbis then backtracks a few days or weeks to show us how they got there. Problem is, we already know that character is zombie food (or zombie themselves), so why invest time in making an emotional connection with them by learning their story? We won’t be following them for long. 

And what about this irritating way all characters have to quote scientific journals or other sources in their conversations or even in their thoughts? Who, in their right mind does that? Who stops in the middle of their dream to explain a term that she’d known since she was a child? A term that is part of her culture? Yes, that term might be confusing for the reader at first, but most of us are smarter than an average monkey. We can figure out what it means based on the context. Explaining it so blatantly in the text does two things – it insults the reader’s intelligence and it immediately pulls them out of the story because it sticks out like a sore thumb.

Same with incessant quotations of scientific articles and research. I get that the author did her research and is proud of it, but why make your characters shove it down my throat in every conversation? If only one character did that, it would have been a quirk and an interesting layer to their character, no matter how strange, but they all do that. The neuroscientists quote medical journals at each other. Wouldn’t they have read them independently if they are so good at their job? Tammany quotes voodoo research… which is even more weird. Why would a mambo read research done into her religion by outsiders anyway?

All this made for a very frustrating and boring read. This book had potential. But it needs a good developmental editor to unearth that potential out of the confusing heap of dirt the story is right now.

PS: I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. 

books, Reviews, Time Travel

The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley

Leave a comment

Stars 3.5 out of 5

This was a very interesting take on time travel and on what happens to people when history changes. The idea of the deja vu and the fact that people would suddenly forget who they were for a few moments wile reality rewrote itself is something I never saw before.

What would have happened if the English lost the battle of Trafalgar? How would history have changed? What kind of world would have emerged from that crucial change? I was delightfully along for the ride for that. And I certainly wasn’t disappointed. That alternate reality was well-thought out and rather fascinating. 

It is actually a very sad book, if you think about it. Especially considering that all those people Joe vaguely remembers in his deja vu episodes existed in the previous versions of reality, but are gone from the surface of the Earth now. 

Having an unreliable narrator who struggles with his own memories (and lack of there of) as well as with his identity add to the confusion of the situation. We are on that train station with Joe when he first realizes that he doesn’t remember anything but his name. We experience that terror and sense of being utterly lost. I was happily along for the ride on his journey to find his identity and discover who sent him that postcard 100 years ago. 

This is also where the problematic part of the book is for me. I understand that the author wanted to keep the mystery of Joe’s identity for as long as possible, so none of the characters ever tell him what they really know. But that also makes for a very frustrating read. 

First of all, it seems that a lot of characters are withholding information just because the author decided so. I understand why Kite would do it, but what stopped Agatha from revealing Joe’s identity? Or the other marines and sailors he’d served with before? It makes no sense and it feels more and more forced the further in the book we get. 

The other problem is Joe himself. He is way too passive as a character. His only real act of rebellion and self-definition was to go to that lighthouse in the beginning of the book, after that, he just kind of floats with the current. You could argue that his status as a prisoner doesn’t give him much choice, but there is also this passivity in him that gets infuriating the longer you read the book. I understand why he was like that at the beginning, when he had no memories and everything around him was foreign and scary, but he never grows a backbone until almost the very end of the book. It’s’ very hard to root for a character who is a voiceless victim of circumstances for most of the book.

Another problem I have is character motivation. Why bring Joe back into the past? Yes, after finishing the book, I understand the selfish reasons of why Kite wanted him there, but historically speaking, it makes no sense. Kite said himself that he didn’t want to restore the English rule because he despised that system almost as much as the French did. And honestly, building one small telegraph didn’t change matters all that much. Or at least the author didn’t show any of those changes. History was changed by people, not an invention, in this case. 

I also didn’t particularly like the ending. I thought it was a cheep trick on the part of the author to basically have most of Joe’s current family vanish overnight just to justify his decision to go back. It would have been more emotionally rewarding if he had to say goodbye and choose between his new family and his found family from the past instead. It would have given Joe’s character growth a deeper meaning. As it stands in the book, it’s a cheep cop out. 

These problems notwithstanding, I really enjoyed this book. It’s a fresh idea and a mostly enjoyable execution. I would definitely recommend it for those who enjoy books about time travel.

PS: I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

books, Dark fantasy, Fantasy, Reviews

The Black Coast (The God-King Chronicles 1) by Mike Brooks

Leave a comment

 

Stars: 2 out of 5

DNF at 51%

This book suffers from the first book in a series syndrome. The author is so excited to introduce the reader to his brand new world, that he throws everything but the kitchen sink into the first book. This leads to a book that is a hefty 700 pages long… that are a slug to read. 

I know there is a story there, but it’s so muddled by the different side-stories and a multitude of different POVs that it progresses at a glacial pace. Well, glaciers move faster than this story, actually. I mean, when I called it quits at 50%, only two weeks narrative time had passed, and only a handful things had happened.

As I already mentioned, this story has too many narrators. I counted at least 8 or 9 different protagonists whose POVs we are privy to. That would work if they all contributed to the same story. Unfortunately, at least 4 of them (that I remember) are narrating events that don’t even happen on the same continent, that I could tell. And have no connection whatsoever to the main events in the story. Maybe the connection becomes evident later in the book, but seriously, if I can’t tell why half of the characters are even in the story after reading half of the book, something is wrong with the plotting. 

It doesn’t help that of all the protagonists, I was truly interested in maybe 2 or 3. Daimon, Saana, and her daughter. They felt fleshed out. I could understand their motives and desires. The rest of the cast? Cardboard cutouts, all of them. I couldn’t care less about them or their stories, especially since they mostly had nothing to do with the main story.

This book would have benefited with sticking with the main story of the Raiders coming to ask asylum from the very people they had been pillaging for generations. Cut all the other POVs out. Put them in the next book in the series if you want, but don’t muddy the waters unnecessarily. This forced cohabitation story was so ripe with conflicts and possibilities! It had so much potential for violence, reconciliation, and character growth! It would have made an excellent book all by itself.

My other problem with this book is the dialogue. I get what the author tried to do, and the idea that different cultures have different languages and different ways to defining genders (one culture has 9 of them) is fun and exciting in theory… but the execution of that was less than stelar.

How do the character define which gender they are and where they stand in the hierarchy of their society? By talking about themselves in third person. I mean seriously! After the tenth “This lord wants you to do this” or “This woman/sister/daughter is telling her brother/father this”, I wanted to scream. After 400 pages of this? I wanted to throw the book at the wall. Since it’s an eBook on my kindle, I had to refrain myself.

This doesn’t sound natural. It makes for stilted and convoluted dialog that grated so much on my nerves that it took me out of the story every time.

Finally, since so little time was spent on the main storyline, the author didn’t explore any of the cultural and historical conflicts that should have arisen between the two people. Oh, some of those conflicts are mentioned… then resolved in what seems like minutes. It’s all too tidy and civilized, when it’s never so in real life. I mean slavery was abolished over 200 years ago, but the repercussions are still felt in modern USA even now. Don’t underestimate the potential for violence the human race has. This easy resolution makes the story less believable and it lessens the stakes. 

But even though I DNFed this, I cannot give this story a one star rating. There is potential here. The world seems really interesting. And dragons! Well, more like dinosaurs, but still. This book would have benefited from a good developmental edit that would have cut the fat, tightened the plot, and moved the extraneous storylines out. As it stands, however, I am not interested enough to continue with the series.

PS: I received a copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

books, Reviews, science fiction

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

Leave a comment

 Stars: 3 out of 5

For most of the book, I thought this would a solid 5 star read. The story was fun to read and fast paced – a perfect book to spend a cold day with, curled up by the fire… Then I hit the last quarter of the book and finished it with my eyes rolling so much it hurt. 

But let’s talk about what worked first, shall we? The story is lighthearted and rather optimistic, which is a plus during this pandemic times that seem never-ending. The protagonist is fun to follow. He never looses his optimism no matter what obstacles life throws in his way. We all could use a bit of that after two years of the global mess we’re in. I also liked that he is an average joe, unlike a lot of other typical protagonists who are either hidden martial artists, or retired military, or chosen ones. He isn’t even the smartest one around. He was hired to “lift things”, not do science. Yet he does indeed lift things and accomplish other dangerous and sometimes gross things with good grace, optimism, and fun. 

I also loved the Kaiju Earth. To imagine a parallel world where life has adapted to a denser atmosphere that is richer in oxygen. A world where some animals are living walking nuclear reactors that sometimes go critical and explode. Only it’s not a catastrophe, like it would be in our world, because everything else around them evolved to absorb that radiation, to use it as fuel and food. So an exploding kaiju is basically like a dinner bell – everything that survives the initial blast and firestorm rushed that way to absorb as much radiation as possible. 

It was fun to imagine a world where giant monsters like Godzilla were an inherent part of the ecosystem. It was also gratifying to have an explanation that worked. I also liked the explanation on how those monsters sometimes ended up crossing to our Earth, and why they couldn’t survive here for long. 

So this was a fun romp until the last twist and the ending, which unfortunately killed the book for me. I almost rage-quit reading at one point, but decided to carry on since I was 80% at that time.

The problem is that the whole plot twist is highly unbelievable. But I could let that slip of the motivation behind it was sound. But as it stands, this book sports the worst antagonist I have seen in a book in looooong time. It’s like Scalzi forgot the true and tried principal that every villain is the hero of his or her own story. Yes, their actions might be atrocious or ridiculous, their plans might be far-fetched, but the motivation behind them must be believable. The antagonist must have a reason for what they are doing. 

Here, they are just being bad for the sake of being bad. I mean, seriously, the author showed this antagonist in such a bad light from the beginning of the book that there isn’t a single redeeming quality in them. They are so evil, they come across as a cardboard cutout. A real person can’t be this horrible all the time. Even the worlds greatest villains and mass murderers have peoples and pets they care about. This antagonist doesn’t. 

I mean, this might work for some readers, since the premise of the book is far-fetched anyway, but this absolutely didn’t work for me. I can’t stay involved in the story if I can’t take the bad guy seriously – I simply stop believing in the stakes. 

Speaking of stakes, that twist with stealing Bella was simply ridiculous. Once again, a plan without any rhyme or reason with consequences that have been tacked on just for maximum damage and to show how villainous our antagonist is. I mean why pull the kaiju to our Earth and let it go nuclear? Those mercenaries had to come close to the kaiju in order to install the devices that would open the barrier, so why not just instruct them to take the samples required and quietly leave? It accomplishes exactly the same thing – the antagonist has all the samples he needs to breed his own living nuclear reactors, and nobody is the wiser. But now, he had to do this dramatic disappearing act, and kill a bunch of people in the process, just because he is evil. 

Oh and the fact that four nerds with absolutely no military training managed to break into a mercenary compound and bring Bella back without getting killed? Yeah, that was absolutely not believable. That’s when my eyerolls reached such a speed that they gave me a headache. 

So kudos for a fun and wonderfully created Kaiju Earth and engaging characters, but the antagonist and the ridiculous ending ruined that book.

PS: I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.