Ricky Pine's Blog, page 4

Review: Coldarius: The Origin of Gallium

Coldarius: The Origin of Gallium by D.L. Hannah
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The prequel to Platirius follows a character originally from the chilly but ironically more hospitable world of Coldarius, chronicling the rise of the dreaded King Dubian (among other important events) through the eyes of one of the best and brightest on the planet - Gallium, a gifted youth in many ways. Seeing him on the cover (humorously enough, to me, his cover model resembles a coworker of mine)...

Review: Midnight in Soap Lake

Midnight in Soap Lake by Matthew J. Sullivan
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Unfortunately this one fell victim to the Goodreads hype machine and fell hard as hell. My hopes were high for this one - a sort of latter day Twin Peaks in a small Washington state town, but desert instead of forest, and imagine my surprise when I learned that Soap Lake was a real place. But for all the hype, this book’s pale, dusty imitation of Lynch (not to mention a watered down Night Vale) wound u...

Review: The Last Hero

The Last Hero by Linden A. Lewis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Lewis concludes their debut trilogy at great length, though I’m pretty sure this book was printed on thinner paper so it’d look a little less 600 pages long. Like its predecessor, it achieves that length by meandering a lot over its course, with its multiple POV’s, though it does make quick work of bringing back one who appeared to have died at the end of Book 2. But of course not, as I suspected almost immediatel...

Review: The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook

The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

”They will not break me. Fuck them all. They will not break me.”

Okay, I have to admit it…now we’re cooking. The third book in this series goes to the fourth dungeon, an immensely complicated railway network called the Iron Tangle, where it really doesn’t help to have a map because it’d probably have too many dimensions for humans to perceive. As it is, while Dinniman does provide a rudimentary ske...

Review: Carl's Doomsday Scenario

Carl's Doomsday Scenario by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The second book of Dungeon Crawler Carl steps up the game in the third level of the dungeon, here presented as “the Over City,” resembling Vegas in a lot of ways (especially with its faux open air setup like Fremont Street), but built as one of several layers of a giant old volcano. Also like Vegas, there’s a lot of sex workers to go around, with Carl and Princess Donut having to contend with a cavalcade ...

Review: Dungeon Crawler Carl

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There’s definitely something in the air in Washington state, with indie SFF authors getting the right amount of attention to hit it big. Repping Eastern Washington in this regard is Spokane’s Travis Baldree and his Legends & Lattes world, and now for Western Washington, there’s Matt Dinniman of Gig Harbor hitting it so big with Dungeon Crawler Carl that Ace bought up the seven books already published and have...

Review: Watch Me

Watch Me by Tahereh Mafi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tahereh Mafi is back to her signature dystopian saga five years after Imagine Me in the real world, and ten years in universe, and the superpowered shenanigans are giving me flashbacks to the glory days of Maximum Ride. Here, we have two new POV’s: Rosabelle, a young assassin raised at Ark Island, the last bastion of the Reestablishment, as well as James, Warner’s little brother, now all grown up and just as much a danger...

Review: The Second Rebel

The Second Rebel by Linden A. Lewis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The sequel to The First Sister is a 3.5 rounded down to a 3 largely because, unlike its predecessor, it tends to drag at times. Not only does that owe to the book being about a hundred pages longer this time, but also because instead of having three POV's (more a sort of 2.5 since Hiro's story was told in audio transcript interludes and therefore felt somewhat disconnected), this one expands with a fourth POV f...

Review: The First Sister

The First Sister by Linden A. Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first in a trilogy that I saw recommended on r/RedRising plays out more like The Expanse and The Handmaid's Tale collaborated and presented a multilayered, action-packed thriller with a hyper-diverse cast of characters. The title character is one of three major POV's, stripped of her name and voice and forced to live as a "comfort woman" to various interplanetary military commanders. Interestingly, it's not...

Review: A Drop of Corruption

A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It’s a 3.5 rounded up to a 4 for me on this second mystery of Ana and Din, those foulmouthed investigators stepping into ever fouler territory. This time, the foulness comes less from creeper plants that like to infect and kill people, and more from the generally humid jungle atmosphere of the outlying city of Yarrowdale. Despite its English-like name and the pallor and green-ness of its people, Yarr...