silverflight8 | Entries tagged with bookfails

I should mention up front that I hated this book, I think it's incompetent in the extreme, and if it were just regular reading, I'd have DNF'd within a few pages. Not an angry DNF, just that for me, at a certain number of eyerolls, it becomes difficult to read a book. However, this was a book club book, so I read it from cover to cover.

It is TERRIBLE.

( Wherein I detail how much I hated this book. )

In short, 1/10. If I wanted to read a spellchecked first-draft nanowrimo manuscript written by a seventeen-year-old, I own one!

Current Mood: productive
Crossposts: https://silverflight8.livejournal.com/441595.html

So I am grumpy tonight, but man, Every Heart A Doorway. I should have a tag that simultaneously expresses my love for libraries and annoyance: #backtothelibrarybin #wouldhavethrownagainstwall #exceptlibrarybook #nextreaderbeware #wouldveburnt #exceptlibrarybook

(camelcase, what's camelcase? it doesn't look as good, ok)

Crossposts: https://silverflight8.livejournal.com/402705.html

OH BOY this book.

I read it for book club and then I managed to miss book club (it was Monday! On Tuesday, I looked at my email again....) and I have feelings about it. And by feelings, I mean I pretty much hated it by the end.

The book's premise is that it's set at a boarding school for the children who have gone through the portals of Fantasyland and then been spat back out. The way the Pensevie children grow up, become kings and queens, and then tumble back out of the wardrobe as children again - that's always been a bit of a weird cognitive dissonance for me, because while on one hand, it's great for the story for them to achieve those prophecies and rule a great kingdom and all. On the other hand, I can't imagine going an adult right back to a child and not having major issues. If right now I went back to being eight, keeping those memories, I'd be so messed up! And I don't even rule a kingdom.

The story's told through the perspective of a newly-returned girl, who went to a kingdom of the dead. Silent, unmoving, black. Six months pass in the real world, but much longer in the other world, and she's unsurprisingly pretty different when she comes back. Her parents, concerned, send her to Miss Eleanor West's boarding school.

( Reader, I did not enjoy this. Also, I'm spoiling the end of the book. It was bad. How did this win a Hugo?! )

3/10 because I also read Walden this year. Walden deserves 0/10, possibly lower than that. But yeah. I did not like this, do not recommend. You want portal fantasy? Don't even bother.

ETA: I just made myself mad by reading reviews. You know what a resilient heroine looks like for kids who were weird and didn't fit in? Growing up, trying, sometimes failing, making a space for themselves. NOT AN ENDING WHERE BAM, PERFECT WORLD DROPPED IN THEIR LAP! What an utterly stupid statement. What's emotional payoff, what's character arc, what's "creating a gothic world" (haha except no because we see none of it)? Argh!

Current Mood: angry
Crossposts: https://silverflight8.livejournal.com/402508.html

cover: arched domes and pyramids rising in distance, foreground people in colourful clothing

This book was so bad. I read it all the way through because I wanted to figure out what was going on and partly because the worldbuilding premise and finally, because if a book is terrible and I'm 50% through I might as well finish it and pick it apart.

I really really wanted to like this book. Here is the back cover, but its premise can be summed up in the following words--"alternate-universe nineteenth-century Egyptian empire with spies and terrorist Otto von Bismark."

Lord Scott Oken, a prince of Albion, and Professor-Prince Mikel Mabruke live in a world where the sun never set on the Egyptian Empire. In the year 1877 of Our Lord Julius Caesar, Pharaoh Djoser-George governs a sprawling realm that spans Europe, Africa, and much of Asia. When the European terrorist Otto von Bismarck touches off an international conspiracy, Scott and Mik are charged with exposing the plot against the Empire.

Their adventure takes them from the sands of Memphis to a lush New World, home of the Incan Tawantinsuyu, a rival empire across the glittering Atlantic Ocean. Encompassing Quetzal airships, operas, blood sacrifice and high diplomacy, Ramona Wheeler's Three Princes is a richly imagined, cinematic vision of a modern Egyptian Empire.

This is such a cool premise and setting but it's botched because plotting was a mess, characterization painful and writing abysmal.

( I did not like this book )

I am so bitterly disappointed. I love speculative fiction and I love alternate history--to describe this book as up my alley cannot describe how excited I was to read this--and it was just horrible on so many fronts. It was so bad that it lowered my opinion of Tor, who published this. It wasn't entertainingly bad, it was incompetent. Complete, sheer incompetence. I expected so, so much better.

Current Mood: grumpy
Crossposts: http://silverflight8.livejournal.com/360880.html

cover of Interface Masque, pixellated blue bird wing

I'm going to admit this upfront: this is a rant disguised as a book review. By this I mean that this is me getting my music-student rage on. Among general reader rage, too. I fully admit to getting frustrated at around the first 1/3rd of the book because of logic, world-building, and characterization inconsistencies on top of bad, bad treatment of music, but sticking it out purely for the catharsis of writing a review. I finally finished it today. While it took me about a month-and-a-half to read the book (where normally a book this size is 2 hours, max) partly because of real life, it wasalso because I could not get through five or ten pages without being brought up short by some inconsistency or problem.

So. Wanna hear about Interface Masque?

The paragraphs under the first cut do not contain spoilers. The rage review contains spoilers. If I were you, though, I wouldn't read the book. Not worth it. In fact, I have so many issues with this book that I'm not even addressing the RANDOM ALIENS IN THE NET bits, because I have piled quite enough objections in this review, but please be assured that they are ??? and are like a red herring that doesn't actually help with anything. They're just there and never resolved properly.

Interface Masque, Shariann Lewitt. 350 pages. Science fiction - cyberpunk?

( The reviewer bits )

( The music-student (and general reader) rage bits )

Current Mood: determined
Crossposts: http://silverflight8.livejournal.com/190502.html

The premise was very intriguing and the book cover well made. The back cover:

Sorykah Minuit is a scholar, an engineer, and the sole woman aboard the ice-drilling submarine in the frozen land of the Sigue. What no one knows is that she is also a Trader: one who can switch genders suddenly, a rare corporeal deviance universally met with fascination and superstition and all too often punished by harassment or death.

Sorykah's infant twins, Leander and Ayeda, have inherited their mother's Trader genes. When a wealthy, reclusive madman known as the Collector abducts the babies to use in his dreadful experiments, Sorykah and her male alter-ego, Soryk, must cross icy wastes and a primeval forest to get them back. Complicating the dangerous journey is the fact that Sorykah and Soryk do not share memories: Each disorienting transformation is like awakening with a jolt from a deep and dreamless sleep.

The world through which the alternating lives of Sorykah and Soryk travel is both familiar and surreal. Environmental degradation and genetic mutation run amok; humans have been distorted into animals and animal bodies cloaak a wild humanity. But it is also a world of unexpected beauty and wonder, where kindness and love endure amid the ruins. Alluring, intense, and gorgeously rendered, Ice Song is a remarkable debut by a fiercely original new writer.

( In general, I like the books I read. I feel guilty for tearing a book apart, and this is not against you personally, Kasai, but really, this book deserves it. Spoiler warning. )

I give this 5/10 on the premise and the trying - some of the writing was truly gorgeous, but it was drowned out in the excessive wordiness, inconsistent characterization, and unevenness of the plot. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone.

Crossposted to

bookish

Current Mood: awake

I dislike Twilight for many reasons, the stalking-is-love not one of the least reasons.

HOWEVER (and yes, this merits capslock), JUST BECAUSE MEYER'S VAMPIRES ARE NOT EXACTLY LIKE BRAM STOKER'S VAMPIRES, DOES NOT MEAN THAT THEY ARE INVALID. CAN WE DITCH THE IDEA THAT A VAMPIRE MUST BE EXACTLY TO SUCH SPECIFICATIONS? THEY'RE MYTHICAL.

Too many of the reviews focus on sparkling (heaven forbid anything sparkle, it must be too girly) rather than the actual problems in Twilight.

tl;dr. a change from an established trope doesn't mean a book's bad. zomg, people

Current Mood: exasperated

This is the first book I've given up on in years.

1. I think the author was trying to make it all "creepy" and "disjointed" by trying to tell somewhere around five storylines in different worlds at once. Or whatever. I don't know his mind. But all the choppy story line and section breaks--it wasn't unusual to have one section break per page--it only served to confuse me. There was no way to tell what came first and what they were doing now or when they existed. It's all muddled and frankly by that point I couldn't be bothered to flip back and see what was going on.

2. The random swearing. OK, fine, drop the f-bomb. It's your book. But when it's just interjected three, four, five times a page, for hundreds of pages running, I get annoyed. Because really, was it necessary?

3. What got me the most, though, was how pretentious the whole thing was. This is a quote, lifted from a website (citation below): "From the Great Beyond she heard it, coming from the Deep Within. From the Great Beyond the goddess heard it, coming from the Deep Within. From the Great Beyond Inanna heard it, coming from the Deep Within." When I first read this, I thought: "OK, this is a little different," because he'd started the book in more-or-less typical voice. (I mean, the whole book sounds like the voice that's often used in prologues, but I could deal with that). But as the repetition and utter pretentiousness went on, and on, and on, I gave up.

I wanted something good to read, because the critics had praised it as--oh, let me find it--"monstrously brilliant."

Um, no.

Quote lifted from: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/ve

llum.htm, retrieved March 17, 2010

Crossposted to

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Arrow of the Mist, Christine Mercer (2/?)
#totallyunreadablehashtagsbecauseitamusesme
Every Heart a Doorway: Seanan McGuire
Ramona Wheeler: Three Princes
Shariann Lewitt: Interface Masque
Ice Song: Kirsten Imani Kasai
Another one.
Vellum: Hal Duncan

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silver

Entries tagged with bookfails

Arrow of the Mist, Christine Mercer (2/?)

#totallyunreadablehashtagsbecauseitamusesme

Every Heart a Doorway: Seanan McGuire

Ramona Wheeler: Three Princes

Shariann Lewitt: Interface Masque

Ice Song: Kirsten Imani Kasai

Another one.

Vellum: Hal Duncan