aphrael's reviews
719 reviews

Within the first few chapters I called that there would be 

giant spiders, and the writer called me out for my arachnaphobia. I really disliked picturing the spiders, and not researching the writers inspiration

but I did like the book. It was really tragic and hopeful and interesting. I normally don't like stories that happen over a really long time scale, but with cryo and different generations having the same name, it really helped to stay in the story. I will try to read some more by this author, but hopefully there will be fewer

spiders

!

What a weird strange book. It's about the book eaters but really it's more about like an abusive family/cult with extra steps. In that context it's very sad and tense for the majority of the book, but on the other hand there's still hope and good people within all the sad stuff. It was a very human book, for all that they didn't like humans. I was pretty captivated by the book, although I would have loved some more lore.

I read the whole series a few years ago in quick succession, but I forgot 90% of it so I had a hard time remembering all the people and events alluded to. The book did give enough context for that not to matter so much though. I enjoyed the book, it is just another book in the series so you know what you will get. Not enough dogs in it, but other than that it was fine. 

Pretty interesting. I like how there's different generations of main characters. I'm not sure I quite understand what a sagean (empire) means, but the big bad sounds scary so it still works. The book is interesting and fun but is  at times kinda slow. I did like it but I don't really feel the need to read more.

This book is an epic fantasy told like a fairy tale, which is quite interesting.

I liked how the main characters interacted, even though I always hate the 'human and hundred years old human-like person are attracted to each other' trope. The author does have a pretty ok twist on that, but I thought the ending was really rather quick after all the buildup. The confrontation with the 'villain' is pretty much of off-screen too. I understand why the author chose this way to end the book, but I had to read it a few times to really get it and felt a bit let down.

 

This book is extremely weird, but pretty interesting. There's a lot of mystery about what happened in the past and what even the plan is. It does mean you want to keep reading, but only half understanding everything does get kind of tiring after a while. I do think this book put the mystery before the characters. I liked how the main 'love story' had an unusual ending though.

The idea of a fleshy ship where the people on it are sort of part of the ship itself is pretty disturbing, so bravo for that particular bit of originality

This books is quite out there thematically. But it's quite interesting to see how it commidifies gods and magic, and how magic is tied to legal details. I would love to know some more about the God War and that backstory. I'm surprised to see this listed as part 3 of a series, it was easy to read on its own, I had no idea it was part 3, I guess I'll need to go back and read part 1 and 2, I'm assuming those have different characters because the main character is just starting out in the world. 

Loved it! Quite interesting to have murderbot interact with another system, and to have B-E as a villain. Corporates are so evil. The way murderbot and ART/Peri interact is lovely, I like how much everyone cares about each other <3.

This book a very general overview of different cult tactics and in what type of groups you can find these tactics in, even if they're not cults. For every point made there are several examples but none are very in depth and the same groups keep popping up all over the place so the story of the specific group is a bit fragmented, which made it sometimes hard to remember which group was which. The book doesn't really capture the depth the podcast has, since it doesn't really tell a story. It's a good overview for people who know very little about cults (if you can keep track of which group is which), but for someone who listened to the podcast and is interested in cult stories, this probably won't add much. The explanations of how difficult it is for politics and law to get a handle on high control groups and cults was very interesting and new for me, but it was mainly about Australia so not super relevant for me in my European country. That said, it's not a difficult read, it's very general and somewhat superficial, but it's a decent primer if you are getting into stories about sects.

So this story is fairly simple and generic, and it's written about in excruciating detail. I did appreciate that there's little to no logistics holes (except for the society and technology and arc not progressing in a 1000 years). Some of the writing had repeated words and expressions that were a bit annoying. I honestly don't know why I kept on listening for so long, but somehow because everything is extremely generic, it's also pretty relatable. Except when Zara is mistrustful and bitchy for no reason for all of book 3 and a little before and after too. All of the book necessarily has to involve the two main characters since we mostlysee things from their perspective, which means that for a lot of the book the world seems kind of claustrophobic, not even counting that they literally live under a dome of fixed size. The main characters have little back story too, Zara only turns out to have a living parent in book 4, which she is all of a sudden very worried about even if he was never mentioned before. Owen doesn't seem to have bonded with anyone at all during his training, or at least from the time he was 14-15 when he went to the rangers, until we find him with Elias (which he has been with for 6 months, and he's like 16-17ish?). My biggest pet peeve is how spectacularly useless the magic seems to be. It can do fire, shields, elevators and restraints, that's it. There's mention of other stuff, but it's never used in any way. 

I was interested in the book for a long time but I'm glad it's over now. I don't think I'll read anything from this author again.