Reviews and Comments

I have loved all of the Old Kingdom books and hope we'll get more. This one fits chronologically before others because these two were Sabriel's parents. I suspect that means we won't get a sequel with more of Terciel and Elinor, which is a shame because I'd really like to spend more time with them.

This is apparently the last book Gene Wolfe wrote and it feels like he didn't get to finish it. But I'm still glad I read it. It was great to see how things were going with this version of Ern Smithe after the events of A Borrowed Man.

Smithe is a reclone in a world where he is treated as a thing that can be damaged or destroyed with little to no repercussions. I found it refreshing that Wolfe tells how Smithe copes with this instead of making this a story of the massive revolution that would be required to correct this injustice.

This was a delightful fairy tale - excellent variation on Sleeping Beauty, Snow White themes.

This was a fun story, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say it was a series of fun stories. 

Although some of the things that happened strained believability, the characters were entirely believable and I'd love to read any future stories or novels that feature any of them. 

Titanium Noir lives up to the "noir" in the title.

I'm stuck in the read-everything-Mick-Herron-has-written-especially-if-it-is-linked-to-Slough-House trap. If you're also in this trap, you'll read this no matter what I say. So all I'll say is that is as well written as Herron's other stuff and adds to the overall story, but I didn't feel like it had a proper ending.

It seems there are a lot of books out these days that involve libraries or book stores. This one has a library that is wildly different from all of them. Not as fast moving as some of the other stories from Mark Lawrence, but still compelling and I'm very interested in reading the next one when it comes out.

I watched the TV series before I read this. They are different enough that the book fully engaged me.

This is a terrific follow-up to Children of Time.

Adrian Tchaikovsky is great at writing characters that think differently from how you or I might think  but who you can still grow attached to.

Like all of the other books of his I've read, In this one, he managed to find four or five major science fiction ideas I've never come across before.

And this book has octopuses!

The one story featuring Jackson Lamb and Molly Doran make this a must-read for Slow Horses fans.

The great find for me were the stories with Zoe Boehm. I've now got a whole set of novels to track down and go through.

<spoiler>Mick Herron seems to prefer taking you somewhere that you weren't expecting to go</spoiler>

This was a fun read that focussed on a bunch of sub-plots with different characters who eventually, of course, all come together. 

I particularly enjoyed the sub-plots about hunting feral hogs and the volunteer fighters at the Line of Actual Control between China and India.

If you're looking at reviews of this, the last book in the Expanse series to tell you if you should start the series, I'd say, yes. It is worth it.

If you're looking at reviews to see what other people think because if you've started the series, of course you're going to finish it, all I can say is that I'm sorry it's over. But really the part I liked the most was the early books and seeing what life was like in the Solar System - particularly the habitats in the Belt.

I thoroughly enjoyed this story of a rising academic's field studies of the high and low faeries on a remote Nordic island. Anyone pining for a follow-up to Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell will likely find this to be satisfying.  

King Mordak and the "new" evil was fun.

This book widely diverges from the TV series, but it was still a good engaging read.