K.N. Salustro's Blog, page 3

Review – Gemina

Whew, the Illuminae Files series is something else. I actually regret not shelling out for print copies of this one, since a lot of the formatting made it difficult to read on my Kindle. That’s part of its brilliance, though. (The formatting, I mean. Not the hard to read part.)

This book starts with some timeline overlap with the first book. It’s a new cast of characters, all compelling on their own, with some cameos from the first book in the series. In a way, I suppose that spoils some ...

Review – The Promise

I love Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. I’m on record for saying that I think that TLA is one of the best shows ever made. So I was really excited to read one of the sequel stories.

The Promise delivers on a lot of fronts. It ages up the characters nicely, and it’s great seeing them settling into their roles in life and coming even more into their own. That said, there were a lot of moments where the dialogue did not feel as clean as it did in the show. As a comic, this...

Review – The Wind’s Twelve Quarters

I don’t always read short fiction collections, but when I do, it’s because it has a cool title and comes from one of the best authors I can name.

I really enjoyed the majority of the stories in this collection. The couple that didn’t captivate me are ones that I probably would have appreciated more if I’d read the books they tied to beforehand, including The Left Hand of Darkness. (It’s on my list but I haven’t gotten to it yet. Someday… someday…) All in all, though, this is a wide collec...

Review – Blackout

4 stars on goodreads, 3.5 in my mind

This is a solid finisher to the Newsflesh series, wrapping up a lot of threads while revealing a lot more truths than I expected. That said, the pacing didn’t feel as tight to me this time around, potentially because there was one point where the dual narrator characters were retreading the same events, and then there was a whole thing with an identity forger that ended up not really going anywhere. I think the point of that latter bit was to show just how fa...

Thoughts on “The Nightbird”

I made it a little more than halfway through this book. Big plot things were happening. The climax was approaching. People were starting to realize things. And I just didn’t care.

I had a lot of trouble with this book from the beginning thanks to a lot of sexist writing and bland-as-unbuttered-white-toast characters. The building romance between Milquetoast McCop and Way Too Naive And Definitely Way Too Young For You And Also A F***ing Witness To A Murder had me alternating between cringing and ...

Review – Deadline

The sequel to Feed does not disappoint. Maybe it does if you were looking for more zombies, but as is so often the case with this particular genre, the monsters aren’t the walking undead. They’re the living people making conscientious decisions to screw absolutely everyone else over.

I wasn’t too keen on Shaun as a narrator in the beginning, mostly because I loved George so much as the narrator of the first one. But Grant (McGuire) keeps her firmly haunting the edges of Shaun’s sanity, which is ...

Review – Paladin’s Grace

Here’s a book I enjoyed start to finish, all the way through. It’s not action-packed or thrilling, but it is humorous and poignant and shows two broken people learning to mend themselves again before they can be with each other. It’s a really nice, well-paced story, with a good dash of sexiness thrown in. Plus an assassination attempt and a murder plot. And an additional mystery murderer who’s leaving a trail of severed heads throughout Archenhold.

Because why not, right?

Seriously though, it do...

Review – Feed

Twitter told me that this was probably the best and worst time to read the Newsflesh trilogy by Mira Grant (aka Seanan McGuire). After finishing Feed, I can honestly say… It was not wrong.

On the on hand, there’s a weird sense of catharsis in seeing viral outbreaks leading to fictionalized events like zombie outbreaks and bloggers riding dirt bikes through hazard zones. On the other, there’s some stuff in here that hits a little too close to home, including the authoritarian attempt at a governm...

Review – The Proper Thing

I liked this novella a LOT. It’s wildly imaginative, explores a lot of concepts around magic I haven’t seen before, and stars a woman who used to be a fox. A FOX. And all the instincts and needs for survival that go along with that.

It’s also about cheese, and that’s amazing.

This was a pretty fast read, and I finished the majority of it in a couple of hours. There’s a surprising amount packed in here, though, from a merchandise heist to main character Maisie’s disillusionment and emotional grow...

Review – The Grace of Kings

4 stars on goodreads, 3.5 in my mind

This is a sweeping, epic story that runs from the fickle, vindictive hearts of gods all the way to the love and betrayals of humans. It’s an excellent story about forging and shattering intimate bonds, but it really takes its time to get going.

That’s where my dinged stars come in. I really enjoyed this book when it was focusing on Kuni and Mata, and the people directly related to the wars they fought with and against each other. But the beginning was a bit o...