bluejayreads's reviews
847 reviews

I enjoyed the first book in this series. *Shatter the Sky* was creative and interesting, and I enjoyed the way the reader found out what was actually going on along with protagonist Maren. Plus, dragons and a unique take on dragon taming and riding. It's not one I would call fantastic or a must-read or anything, but it was good enough that I was willing to pick up the sequel.

Unfortunately, *Storm the Earth* didn't do it for me. Not all of it was the book's fault - some of it was the circumstances in which I read it, and some of it was my personal reading preferences. But one of the challenges with a sequel is that the situation and the characters have to change, and those changes also have to be compelling to the reader. The ending of *Shatter the Sky* brought a bunch of changes all at once. And moving those changes forward in this book just didn't do it for me.

Circumstantially, some of that is the fact that I finished the first book almost a year ago and this book picks up mere seconds after book one ended. I think that's always a big risk for authors, for exactly the reasons that happened with me - it's been such a long time since I read the first book that jumping immediately into the other half of the first book's climactic scene left me disoriented. I remembered the big picture of book one, but not the specifics, so I spent a good chunk of the beginning trying to reorient myself within the world and the story. And since the action was immediate, without a slower or lower-stakes section to orient myself before important things started happening, I just had a general feeling that not remembering the past details meant I was missing some important current details.

By the time I felt like I had remembered enough been reminded of enough about the previous book to engage with the story on its own terms, I wasn't interested enough to do so. Spending most of the beginning disoriented and disconnected didn't help. But neither did the fact that the changes in this book removed a large part of what I liked about book one and added several elements I don't really like in books. One of the things I liked most about *Shatter the Sky* was how the reader learned the truth about the dragons slowly as Maren learned it. Understandably, that didn't apply here. But my other favorite thing was the dragons. And beyond the very first scene, they didn't play a huge part. Sure, they were there and they did things, but it wouldn't have taken a whole lot of changes to replace them with horses, or dire wolves, or for the dragon traveling with Maren, a particularly intelligent housecat. The story was *about* dragons, but it didn't really *include* dragons.

Sev and Maren separated towards the end of the first book, so their alternating perspectives in this one showed different events. But Sev's side was mostly politics, which I tend not to enjoy in books overall. And though I enjoyed the accidentally-becoming-a-folk-hero elements of Maren's perspective, her parts were largely travel and her relationship with Kaia. And I'll be honest, I really was not invested in that relationship. I think some of it was that in book one, she was a goal and a memory and a motivation instead of a character - an idealized version of herself that Maren put on a pedestal but that didn't change or grow or act like a real person in any way. In this book, she's a real character with opinions and flaws, and also basically a stranger who the book wants me to believe is Maren's girlfriend. I get that their adventures in book one changed them. But despite how much Maren says she loves Kaia, they don't even seem to like each other very much. This is not actually a huge change from book one. The narrative told me they were in love, but their relationship didn't feel real. Since Kaia's role in that book was to be the reason Maren went on her adventure in the first place, I was willing to forgive that. Now that they have to actually be in a relationship again, it doesn't feel like either of them are actually interested in that. They don't read like characters who are in love, or even ones that were in love in the past. The romantic aspects that do show up feel forced; I can't really bring myself to believe that these two are anything more than casual acquaintances, no matter what Maren's internal monologue tries to tell me.

I've read enough YA fantasies featuring rebellions to predict roughly how this will go. Maren and Kaia will find some backup and Sev will do some stuff from the inside. There will probably be a moment where some miscommunication shenanigans will make Maren think that Sev has gone over to the evil emperor's side. There will be some sort of epic final battle with dragons. And then the rebellion will win, Maren will figure out her relationships, Sev probably becomes the new emperor, and everybody lives happily ever after. I don't want to deny that there's always a possibility that a book could surprise me. But nothing about this book really makes me want to give it a chance to do so. The only thing that's really holding my interest at this point is the dragons, and they're not even doing a whole lot (beyond existing and being pawns in this conflict between the emperor and the rebels). Which is really disappointing, because I enjoyed the first book. The series has some really interesting ideas, and even the weird relationship issues between Maren and Kaia could have been an interesting exploration of how relationships change when the people involved change. But it didn't do any of that. Instead, in spite of all the cool and interesting directions it could have gone, it just ended up bland and uninspired.

 I really wanted to actually finish this book - mainly because I was just so close to finishing it and it felt like I might as well push through. But eventually I gave up. Life's too short to read bad books, or those that probably aren't bad but are definitely dull and beyond my comprehension. This feels like a book that might be assigned in a class on post-World War II Europe. That's not a bad thing. If I'd been reading it with an instructor's guidance and through some sort of historical-critical lens, I might have had a chance at understanding what the heck was happening here. But without some additional guidance, it feels like something that Eastern Europeans who grew up in the 1970s-1980s would find relatable, funny, and/or true to life, but that I just didn't get as an American who grew up in the 2000s. And that definitely didn't help my enjoyment, because without that understanding this book is just dull. The initial concept, setting up rooms as if they're from previous decades as an experimental dementia treatment, was interesting. But the unnamed narrator kept going on long tangents about European history and attitudes, to the point where the entire Part 4 of the book is just a discussion of what year or decade the majority of people in each European country think is the best. There are also some weird and confusing elements that feel almost like they're trying to be magical realism but not quite succeeding, or maybe are metaphors that I just don't get. Either way, it all felt very boring and pointless. Or perhaps I just don't have enough context or background information or intelligence or something to understand the point. 

My youngest sister is getting married in August, and I volunteered to make origami flowers out of book pages for the bridesmaids’ bouquets. So I ended up with a small stack of my late great-grandmother’s old books to cut up and turn into flowers. But there’s not that many bridesmaids, and even with all the pages that didn’t make for good-looking flowers and all the flowers that tore because the paper was old and fragile, it still took less than a single book to make all the flowers my sister needed. So I was left with a stack of old books with no real purpose. And for most of them, I had no information about them except a title and author name. 

This is one of the books in that stack. It was a hardcover missing a dust jacket, so all I had was the fact that the cover itself was green, the book was old enough to have some yellowing around the edges of the pages but not old enough to be really fragile, and it had the title and author embossed on the spine. That’s it. So, as I was briefly looking through all of the books to see if any were worth more than the donate bin, I flipped This Other Eden open to the first page and tried to see if I could figure out what it was about. 

To no one’s surprise more than my own, I was actually drawn into the story! Whatever this book was actually about, it had a strong beginning that grabbed my interest, and I was instantly absorbed in the story of the clever but naïve young woman sentenced to a brutal public whipping over a misunderstanding with the fickle and feckless lord of the castle. It spent a lot of time with the perspectives of other characters, giving me insight into the cast of mostly-unlikeable but always human-feeling characters surrounding the central lord and young woman, and while nothing really seemed to be coalescing into a plot, it was well-written for the most part and the characters were interesting enough to keep me engaged. 

Then I made the mistake of looking this book up on The StoryGraph so I could mark it as currently reading. And The StoryGraph had a cover. And some back cover copy. So if you looked at the information at the top of this post and went, “This does not at all look like something I expected to find on this blog,” it’s because you went in with a lot more context than I did. 

But sometimes that lack of context can be a good thing. After all, there’s no way I would have even cracked this book open if I’d known from the start it was some variety of bodice-ripper. I do generally think trying new things is a good thing to do, and if I have to do it by lack of context, so be it. I did feel a little weird about the romance being between the 16/17-year-old girl and the 40ish-year-old man who had her whipped, but it was probably historically accurate to the 1700s when the book is set, and considering the start of the book it would probably be a few years before she could stand to be in the same room as him. So while that would still be a creepy and disturbing age gap, it would probably at least avoid literal pedophilia. So I decided to keep giving it a chance. Even as Marianne’s characterization devolved into inconsistency, by turns a shrewd and calculated manipulator and a cheerful, innocent Pollyanna type who inadvertently (and disturbingly) kept seducing all the much older men around her, I kept reading. It managed to keep my interest. 

Where I finally decided to stop reading is the point where Marianne’s older sister sets her up to be raped. (I don’t feel like this is a spoiler since A, it’s less than halfway into the book, and B, the back cover itself says that Marianne and Thomas get together in the end so I can’t spoil anything much worse than that.) It’s established earlier in the book that her sister has always disliked her, but it’s also clearly established that the dislike has nothing to do with this scenario – the sister just thinks Marianne should have had sex with Thomas the first chance she had and letting him rape her would actually be good for her. Minor spoiler, the rape attempt is thwarted, but I couldn’t bring myself to continue reading after that. I can believe that under unlikely but possible circumstances, a woman might be able to forgive a nobleman for having her whipped. I cannot reasonably believe that a woman could forgive the man who had her whipped and then attempted to rape her so thoroughly that she’d become his romantic partner – at least not without some sort of violent force or intense psychological manipulation that I have no interest in reading about. So either this book turns into some sort of psychological horror around the halfway point (unlikely, given the ostensible genre) or it makes attempted rape into at best something that can be overlooked in a romantic partner or at worst a manifestation of love. Either way, I’m out. 

I have actually read some of this type of romance before. (By “this type,” I’m drawing a distinction between contemporary romance and historical/bodice-ripper-type romances, because they’re very different in my head.) Both of my grandmothers were into them, and one lent me a few, at least one of which I know I actually read. So it would be inaccurate to say finishing this would have made it my first of this type of romance novel. But it would have been my first in over a decade and my first as an adult. So I kinda wanted to give it a chance for that. And up until that point, it was engaging enough to keep reading. But that whole rape thing killed my interest. Regardless of the reprehensible message, I don’t think there is a redemption arc in literary history powerful enough to make me see middle-aged attempted rapist Thomas Eden as a suitable husband for anybody, let alone the teenager he attempted to rape. I realize that sexual-assault-as-a-sign-of-love was not an uncommon trope in older romances and that this book was published in the 1970s. But it wasn’t okay then and it still isn’t okay now. This book got its chance, and that’s all it gets. 

If you like your graphic novels packed with dramatic car chases, cartoonish villains, gunfights, and fiery explosions, you'll probably like Death or Glory. Unfortunately, that's about all it has going for it. The plot is, quite frankly, absurd. What starts off with a simple, if dangerous, idea for protagonist Glory to steal enough money to get her dying father a liver transplant quickly boils into just plain over-the-top. The very first attempt at a heist gets her on the wrong side of a human trafficking ring, and it eventually devolves into a cross-country chase with Glory and two trafficking victims she picked up along the way being pursued by Glory's ex-husband (definitely a slimy weasel, but very unclear about whether he's evil to the bone, in over his head, or a sucker with anger issues), a viciously sadistic cop with unclear allegiances, some guy (or possibly multiple similarly-dressed guys) in a Mexican wrestling mask who are somehow involved in the trafficking, a guy with a liquid nitrogen gun who is also somehow involved in the trafficking, and a group of people from a different trafficking ring doing a whole different kind of trafficking. It's gruesome, it's gory, it's frankly confusing in a lot of places, tons of people die brutally and painfully, and I can't help thinking of how this is an absurd amount of death and destruction to get one old guy an organ transplant. I mean, sure, it's great to try to take down a trafficking ring, but Glory's not even trying to do that - any harm to the trafficking operation is incidental, just collateral damage in Glory's quest to get her father a new liver. And that collateral damage also includes a lot of innocent people. The stakes just seem way too low for all this death and injury. If it was the fate of the world or something, it might seem more reasonable. But the stakes are just one guy dying, and even if you exclude the traffickers' deaths from the tally, at least 50 innocent people died along the way. Perhaps that just illustrates Glory's morally grey nature, being willing to sacrifice so many strangers to save one person she loves. But it just seems too much for me. 

The Industrial Revolution sub-series is a challenging one for me to review in general, because they don’t have a reoccurring cast of characters, and often have very little to no connection to the other books besides the obvious one of all taking place in the same world. But this book has less connection than most. Commander Sam Vimes makes a small appearance, along with William de Worde and the vampire photographer from The Truth, and Discworld readers will recognize the names of several countries and the general concept of the klax. Beyond that, everything in here is new.

Which is not, necessarily, a bad thing. Polly herself is a solid character. She doesn’t exactly jump off the page, but she’s interesting enough. And the story of dressing up as a boy to go join the army for some reason or another is a fun concept, especially done by Sir Terry – witty, clever, hyperbolized into hilarity despite the fact that there is, actually, a war happening. And Polly is surrounded by an entertaining cast of side characters, including a vampire who’s traded blood for coffee, a troll (always entertaining), a fellow soldier who may or may not be getting messages from a possibly-dead ruler who may or may not also be a deity, an Igor (also always entertaining), and an amusingly inept commander, among others. They make for a collection of delightfully-weird people doing things the wrong way, but in a wrong way that ends up solving the problem. In short, it’s a Discworld book, with all the fun, humor, and whimsy that entails.

However. The Discworld books are also big on themes and messages, and Monstrous Regiment is no exception. I accused The Truth of being less than subtle, but it’s a masterful tale of hidden meaning compared to this one. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely agree that someone’s gender doesn’t make them unfit for any particular role and that wars are often stupid, pointless, and make everything worse, but this book just goes so over-the-top to make those points. Well, mainly the gender equality point. The war one is there, but it feels secondary to the conceptual bludgeon that is gender equality in this book. I get the concept of overdoing something for satirical purposes, but in my opinion this tipped way past satirical and into patently absurd and utterly unbelievable. The Discworld series is full of all sorts of absurd and ridiculous things, but this was the only one to actually shake my suspension of disbelief. I’m avoiding spoilers here, but there’s one particular thing that keeps happening. Once was a twist, twice was a funny coincidence, and several times was amusing. But as the book marched towards the end the sheer quantity of this thing happening rapidly tipped from funny and satirical to outlandish and gauche. It was just too much to be remotely believable.

Which sucks, because the rest of the book is good! It manages to give a whimsical edge to a literal war story, and it has solid characters, an engaging plot, plenty of witty humor, and the first confirmed queer characters I recall reading about in the Discworld series. So much of it was good, and I did really enjoy the read. It just went way too far with that one element, and that tanked the vast majority of the ending for me. 

   This is an unusual book. First of all, the back cover doesn't actually tell you much about what actually goes on in the book - which is Sarkis, immortal swordsman in the most literal possible sense, is now bound to Halla, a housekeeper trying her darndest to get her inheritance and evade her aunt's attempts to steal it. Considering the majority of the story takes place while traveling back and forth on one particular stretch of road in an effort to set up what is essentially a court case, it doesn't sound all that appealing. 

There's also the whole romance angle. It's not even hinted at on the back cover, but it's glaringly obvious from the moment Sarkis enters the story that he and Halla are going to be a thing. And for how much of that angle is some variety of mutual pining, I shouldn't have liked that very much, either. 

And yet. And yet I liked this book a lot. Because while boiling this story down to its barest elements does indeed make it sound quite boring, it's the details that get boiled away that make it so much fun. The world itself is, for the most part, a standard rural vaguely-Western-European setting. But with Sarkis being several hundred years old and remembering different things about his homeland and his home time, the world has a sense of having depth and longevity and realness - it may not be teeming with excitement and adventure, but it feels solid, somewhere you could sink your teeth into. (Plus there's that one weird group of hills full of very nasty things that definitely do not stay in one place, which adds some delightfully dangerous whimsy to the whole thing.) And the plot itself, while not on the surface incredibly exciting, is solid. The goals and motivations are clear, the consequences of failure are quite dreadful (though not life-and-death), and the journey, though mostly back and forth on one road, has enough detours and obstacles to never feel truly dull. Besides creepy moving hills, they also encounter bandits, some very unpleasant priests, and a host of other interesting allies, antagonists, and situations that add up to a very entertaining story. 

What really makes this book sing, though, are the characters. Halla and Sarkis, obviously, but also Zale, the nonbinary lawyer-priest who Halla enlists to help legally stake her claim on the inheritance and so ends up spending a lot of the journey with them. All of them are great in their own unique ways, and even the more minor characters are engaging. Even with all of that, though, this book could have easily slipped into "well-written and generally fine but overall lackluster" territory - if it wasn't for the dynamic between Halla and Sarkis, which was the absolute star of the book for me. 

And most of that was Halla. I love her so much. She's smart, practical, no-nonsense, and incredibly quick-witted. She knows her options are limited as a widow in a patriarchal society, but she refuses to let that stop her, and her humility bordering on self-effacement makes her utterly unashamed to let people think less of her if it moves her closer to her goals. She wields ingenuity and fast-talking instead of a sword and shield, but she's just as much of a warrior as Sarkis. And that's what made their dynamic so good - I loved Halla accepting each new development and figuring out how to deal with it, while Sarkis got progressively more amazed at how this random middle-aged housekeeper was dealing with everything so well and kept falling more in love with her. (The romance angle could easily have been annoying, but I liked their dynamic so much I didn't mind.) 

This book is also hilarious. It's peppered with absurd moments and unexpected one-liners that made me laugh. Although I tried reading a few of them to my husband and he didn't find them funny, so I think they're only funny in the context of the book itself. Either way, I thought it was a great touch, and the humor was balanced really well with the darker elements of the book. 

This is exactly the kind of book I'm starting to expect from T. Kingfisher - serious without feeling too dark, an uncomplicated but engaging plot, and characters that leap off the page and elevate the story into something great. I'm a little sad that there isn't a sequel to this book (I really want more Halla), but I have more T. Kingfisher books on my reading list, and I hope they're enjoyable as this one is. 

 I read 80% of this in the same way I used to read pretty far into mediocre audiobooks: it was fine enough while I was listening, but once I put it down, I couldn't think of a reason to pick it back up again. If you guessed this was a murder mystery from the back cover, I wouldn't blame you. Nor would I blame you for assuming it shone a withering spotlight on the pressure society puts on women to look a certain way and the potentially deadly lengths women feel they must go through to gain beauty, their only available source of power. However, this book is mostly about pretty women who work at a fashion magazine wearing interesting outfits and trying to make the fashion magazine interesting and profitable, with a hefty dose of "mutual pining but only because we're both SO bad at communication" between the protagonist and the cop investigating the death that started the story in the first place. I have a casual interest in fashion, so it kept me just engaged enough to not give up on reading while I was actively reading. But once I put the book down, I realized that there wasn't really much of a plot to speak of and I didn't really like any of the characters. I am actually curious about what actually happened to the character who died at the beginning, but it seems like the book is less invested in that question than in the questions of whether or not the protagonist and the cop get together or what happens to the fashion magazine. As much as it feels like a waste to stop reading this close to the end, I really have no desire to read the rest of it. 

Mainly focuses on project management for digital agencies, especially web design projects. Still, a solid, well-written, and (mostly) engaging overview of project management.

I really wanted to like this book. I deeply, desperately wanted to hear what a journalist had to say about business in modern society and how we might be able to get some of that leisure time back. But nowhere on the cover, in the title, in the back cover, or even in the reviews is there any mention of the real focus of this book – it is, in reality, about work, love, and play when no parent has the time.

That’s not to say the time stresses on modern parents, especially mothers, isn’t an important topic. On the contrary, I very much agree with the assertion that working parents, especially women married to men, are being asked to (or are required to or are choosing to) do too much, which harms their work, their parenting, their relationships, their personal leisure, and pretty much everything else. And this seems like a well-written, well-researched exploration of the topic. I’m not criticizing the book on that.

In fact, I don’t think I want to criticize the book at all. It’s a good book and it covers its topics thoroughly and engagingly. However, I picked it up looking for an entirely different topic altogether. I am not a parent, and I very much hope to never be a parent. Though the challenges of time and parenting are important to millions of people, they are not personally relevant for me. And I picked this book up looking for something personally relevant. I wanted an exploration of how the many pressures of modern life, the cultural elevation of busyness to virtue, etc. is affecting our ability to work effectively, form and maintain relationships, and engage in fun/play/leisure, perhaps along with some suggestions for fixing it. But this book is single-mindedly focused on parents and how the time investment children require makes working effectively and being recognized for that work, connecting with your spouse, and engaging in hobbies and personal things you enjoy much more challenging.

And, sure, the book does mention at times that “of course people who aren’t parents could also benefit from having more free time” and “single people want to have leisure too!” But these are occasional lines in a book that overwhelmingly focuses on the time-related struggles of parenthood. Would I, as a child-free person, benefit from, for example, more options around “flex-time” and hybrid or work-from-home arrangements in the workplace? Absolutely. But the benefits I get have nothing to do with being home when my kid gets off the bus or the ability to leave work when the school nurse calls. The relentless focus on parents as the subject made it feel irrelevant to me. Not that it actually is – it’s one of those issues that doesn’t benefit me personally, but would be great for society as a whole if it were fixed/improved. But I had a really hard time engaging with it because I couldn’t see myself or my struggles in the pages.

Ultimately, this comes down to the fact that I wanted to read this book out of personal interest in the topic’s relevance to my life, and the book actually focused on how the topic affects a population that doesn’t include me. That doesn’t make the book bad, or irrelevant, or even not worth reading. But going in with incorrect expectations left me disappointed. I found myself skimming sections, ready for the part where Brigid stopped talking about parents specifically and started getting into stuff that mattered to me. If I had gone into it looking for a journalistic deep dive into a particular topic affecting society as a whole, I probably would be singing its praises right now. (I can’t stress this part enough – leaving aside my own expectations, this book is well-researched, engagingly written, and overall a worthwhile read.) This is one that I may come back to in the future with revised expectations and a readiness to read about a society-level issue that isn’t personally relevant to my life. The problem here was that I came in wanting something personal and, being not a parent, didn’t get it.