"Early Riser" Discuss Everything *Spoilers*

[Allison, Fairy Mod-mother]

So, what did you think? Tell us everything!

[Dawn F]

I’m probably again going to be the odd one out, but to me is was kind of meh. I liked the setup and the idea, I love Wales and Welsh and actually wish the narrator - who is Welsh - had a much stronger accent than he had, and I’d have loved more stories of Wales (there was one mythical creature mentioned in passing), and not just of winter and honestly that winter didn’t seem particularly bad, people manage to live in Alaska with the temperatures mentioned, so ehm?

But it’s a really simple story - man figures out zombies are not dead but alive. Surprise! Not really. Why did it take four hours to get there?

It could have been told in half the pages, or even less. There was so much uninteresting extra info and conversations about nothing everywhere cluttering up what I think would have worked better as a really tight short story or novella maybe.

Just my opinion of course :)

[Kate]

I enjoyed discovering all the little historical facts that had been changed by having hibernation. I actually felt cold reading parts of this book. Intriguing story

[D.L.]

I found it remarkably imaginative and different. It came short of my rare 5-star call simply because I failed to connect strongly with the protagonist. A damn good story, though.

[Ariana]

I LOVED this. It may be partly because it was the perfect palate cleanser after Black Leopard, Red Wolf, but I just found it so so enjoyable. I loved how well thought out the world was; the internal consistency was very satisfying. It's also well paced, I was totally engaged the whole time; it never felt like it dragged. And the humor was great too.

[Melanie, the neutral party]

I’m really good at suspending my disbelief, so I don’t care, but I’m pretty sure very little of the science in this science-fiction is legit.

I enjoyed the unraveling mystery and the quirky camaraderie. This was a nice, fun read.

[Ariana]

Melanie wrote: "I’m really good at suspending my disbelief, so I don’t care, but I’m pretty sure very little of the science in this science-fiction is legit.

I enjoyed the unraveling mystery and the q..."

This the fantasy pick for the month, not SciFi, right? It almost feels like alternate history, though, which is always kind of a nebulous/hard-to-categorize sub-genre...

[Raucous]

The NY Times Book Review take on Early Riser:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/bo...

I'm about half way through the book myself and am finding the writing very refreshing after slogging through Frankenstein earlier this month.

[Kristin B.]

I'm with Dawn in that this was a very meh read. I kept some notes while I was reading which I pretty much just copy and pasted below. Apologies for the disjointedness of thoughts. :)

They have two different stats for nightwalkers. Early in the book he said 1 in 2000, then around page 175 he said 1 in 3000. Then later on he says 1 in 2,000 again. That irked me. And if it's that low, why do they come across so many! I did not get the sense that there was quite that many people living in Sector Twelve, yet there was a new nightwalker every five minutes.

And it seems that keeping population levels up is really important, but for all that they seem to kill people an awful lot.

I never really felt super engaged. Once I put the book down I don't really care about the characters. At one point I was driving home from work and had to stop and think about what I had been reading, because I couldn't remember for a bit. When Jonesy died I didn't really feel it, because Charlie didn't really feel it. All the emotion was muted.

I also felt like there was a bit too much going on. The Gronk, hibernation, the Consul politics, Villians, Wintervolk, Nightwalkers, dream sharing.

Towards the end there were way too many deus ex machinas. Charlie was saved way too many times by amazing strokes of luck and timing.

I did like the chapter opening passages as explainers. They worked much better than info dumping. It was cool that they had different writing styles and gave you really great information about the world in tiny slices.

I also got a kick out of the parts that overlapped with our world, like Carmen Miranda and Thomas Edison.

I LOVED Jonesy and her "let's make up a shared history" thing. It was adorable. I could read a whole book about her just going around creating history with random people. Her and Laura were my favorite characters. And maybe a little bit Toccatta, because she was bonkers.

Am I the only one who found the whole having a winter coat of hair kind of adorable? It was hard to picture, and most of the time I forgot it was a thing. But every now and then Charlie would mention it and I would just picture everyone as snuggly bears getting ready to sleep.

(Last random thought) This felt a lot like Sci-Fi to me. I actually forgot it was the fantasy pick until I came the thread. I can see why it was Fantasy, but it just had the feel of a Sci-Fi story.

[Allison, Fairy Mod-mother]

Kristin, I agree with a lot of what you said!

We have to go off of blurbs, reviews and author commentary to figure out what side of the divide a book falls on and sometimes it's questionable, but with the Gronks and the dreamers and all that, I think it's fantastical enough that I didn't feel lied to.

I found some of the world to be jarring. Like Kristin noted, the statistics were off and it would have meant that almost 5 times the average number of Nightwalkers came from Sector 12, which I think would have been noticed pretty quickly.

Also things like re-runs of tv shows being so common that the porters knew them by heart and anyone who accidentally woke up might watch it until they drifted back off but Charlie's entire pool had no TVs, none of his rooms did he mention a TV, and the only thing we see being used is radio.

What year was this supposed to be? My timeline is all messed up.

I did like the world, and thought there were a lot of fun what ifs. I think it got stronger as the story went, but I do think I would have liked it better as a short story. It was a good palate cleanser, though, and I think part of my being underwhelmed is reading another book with a similar vibe that's doing it much more my style, so it dulls in comparison.

[Ariana]

Yeah, I kept waiting for there to be some sort of explanation for the extra nightwalkers in sector 12, like something nefarious HiberTech was up to, but we never really got one. Then I thought maybe it was an accumulation: consuls bring nightwalkers to HiberTech and Tocata or Jonesy (or Logan) head them off so they won't be redeployed, but sometimes they get loose.

[Allison, Fairy Mod-mother]

Ariana wrote: "Yeah, I kept waiting for there to be some sort of explanation for the extra nightwalkers in sector 12, like something nefarious HiberTech was up to, but we never really got one. Then I thought mayb..."

Yeah, that was sort of my thought, too, Ariana! But we know that Nightwalkers are deployed to different sectors so as not to be a burden on any one of them for the Winter, they're only made during the Winter, and they're gathered up at the start of each Spring. So unless all of them were being harbored, that seems unlikely. And we know that there's around maybe a dozen per sector, so having even triple that and feeding them would likely be noticed by people allocating food.

I just keep worrying at it and I think the answer is "let it go, Allison, it was very dramatic and they saved a bunch of people!"

[Kristin B.]

Allison wrote: "I just keep worrying at it and I think the answer is "let it go, Allison, it was very dramatic and they saved a bunch of people!"..."

I support this strategy!

[Melanie, the neutral party]

Ariana wrote: "Melanie wrote: "I’m really good at suspending my disbelief, so I don’t care, but I’m pretty sure very little of the science in this science-fiction is legit.

I enjoyed the unraveling mystery and t..."

It reads like a sci-fi premise, but yeah it is tagged as a fantasy read.

[Raucous]

I enjoyed reading Early Riser. I was especially taken by all of the little details that Fforde tossed off. It made the world feel very real to me. I also got cold at times although our heat being out might have been a contributing factor there.

Two things bugged me about it: the numbers not adding up in various places (especially everything around the number of nightwalkers in Sector 12) and the deus ex machina ending. I had to read the ending a couple of times to understand what happened there and I still can't get my head around how far ahead people like Logan would had to have thought to make it work out that way. I liked the rest of it quite a lot.

[Sarah, The Unsettled]

I enjoyed the last 50 pages or so a lot more than the rest of the book. I think it’s probably a 3.5 Star read for me.

I mentioned it in one of my updates- but I think this would have been an excellent horror novel if he had gone that route. The frigid setting- the night walkers- heck it would make an excellent video game.

Now, I’m not very worldly, and I don’t want to make assumptions here, but did anyone else get the feeling he was poking fun at a lot of American culture? In the beginning it was hysterical to me because there was this whole obsession with: Get fat! Be lazy! Sleep all winter! Whereas I feel like right now America is all: Get fit! Go to the gym! Don’t eat sugar/wheat/gluten etc. EDITED: to add, what I’m asking is- is this obsession with health and fitness a world wide thing?

There are a couple American heroes in there though I guess in retrospect I don’t think he was poking fun at them. I did notice an ad in the back that listed “Boring books to put you to sleep: Farming Carrots..The Story of Gingham... and Moby Dick.”

I just started cracking up when I saw it. Also the Gronk ended up being a little girl... but also an eater/devourer of the unworthy.. so probably not related, but I sort of like the idea so I think I’ll keep it.

[Sarah, The Unsettled]

I left this out of the previous post, but in regards to the criticisms I’ve already mentioned, there’s also the whole big pharma thing, which I do feel like is largely an American issue, since we are one of those countries that still pays out-of-pocket for anything health care related. I won’t get started on this tangent just wondering what others thought.

[Raucous]

I was wondering the same thing about the haves/have nots with respect to medication and employment. He made some references to ignoring the effects of climate change that also made me think that. It's not that the US is the only place where this happens but it's one of the few where the attitude is so deeply entrenched in the culture and political system.

[Sarah, The Unsettled]

That’s a much better way of putting it, and I think that’s what I was trying to get at. I don’t want to go too deep down that rabbit hole because it’s a frustrating issue for me, but I appreciate the message.

[Peggy]

I liked the story and loved the alternate world-building, but grew tired of the "twee" language. The story did take a while to get going, and to Fforde's credit, all the pieces he played at the end were placed on the board throughout the narrative. But oh, the language grew tiresome. It would have been all right in a shorter book, and reminded me of why I bailed on the Tuesday Next series.

I would have liked have read this story by an author who would have treated it like a straight urban fantasy.

[Victoria]

I just finished this one (lunch break!) and I enjoyed it so much. I was surprised it had a happy ending, I was bracing for a dark winter-will-prevail ending. Also, I do agree it could have been told in many many less words, but I actually too enjoyed the extra info and non essential conversations.

[J.W.]

When I started this I was so so blown away by the setting. I loved the cozy feel of it all, taking care of some quaint little hibernation group. But then it got weird, and then it got weirder, and I started to think I just couldn't really understand what was really going on and why some of the major plot events were happening.

I admit, I even started to skim, which then contributed to greater confusion.

The cozy feeling was gone. I felt cold. As cold as the characters in the book.

And then it kind of got okay-ish again.

But it never, for me, re-captured the feel of the early 20ish pages, which just felt like a delightful sci-fi equivalent of Hobbiton. Alas.

So I guess I'm still looking for my cozy sci-fi that feels like an episode of Murder She Wrote- bad things might happen, but JB Fletcher will make it right, and, dangit, they'll be some cute and outdated humor, too. Anyone know of some sci-fi fantasy to meet this need?

[J.W.]

J.w. wrote: "When I started this I was so so blown away by the setting. I loved the cozy feel of it all, taking care of some quaint little hibernation group. But then it got weird, and then it got weirder, and ..."

Oh, and how do people get it to do the "Rated it x stars" on their comment? I gave it a rating of 3 stars when I marked it as finished, mostly because I adored the opening.

Also also, is there a post somewhere explaining the basic HTML we can use on here? I can't remember how to make book or author links be clickable and I'm not tech savvy at all.

[Sarah, The Unsettled]

J.w. wrote: "J.w. wrote: "When I started this I was so so blown away by the setting. I loved the cozy feel of it all, taking care of some quaint little hibernation group. But then it got weird, and then it got ..."

Hi J.W., the "rated it x stars" is automatic when you mark it as "read" and give it a rating. I can see it on yours now.

If you go to a computer or desktop version of the site, at the upper right of the comment box you'll see "(some html is ok)". If you click the link it explains all the HTML codes to you.

[J.W.]

Sarah- wow! Thank you for helping with that! Also, I see it now on my name too. Maybe it just takes a second to update. Thanks again.

[Allison, Fairy Mod-mother]

Yes!

I also agree with you about the book. It started off fun. I liked the wacky, but it all did feel a little disjointed to me.

As far as cozy books, here are a few others have suggested, but you can always go and start your own thread int he Recommendations folder for more tailored replies!

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

[J.W.]

Thank you for that link!

[Rachel]

I just finished. Another one that makes me wish GR could do half stars - I think it would be 3.5
I have noticed that in some books I will continually try to flip ahead. Sometimes it’s cause it is SO good but I think lately that more frequently I ... do t want to take the time to read it all but I still am invested enough to want to know what happens.
I did really enjoy the premise of “ what would the world look like if people had always hibernated?”
All the little details he had thought out were just great. I enjoyed the silliness of it as well in general.
Like others though I rarely felt emotionally invested in the characters- once Logan who seemed like would be a major character went down it was easy to see that anyone could be thumped.

[Sarah, The Unsettled]

Rachel I do that flip ahead thing too and drive myself crazy. Some books I never feel the need. This was one of them flip ahead books though.

[Sarah, The Unsettled]

J.w. wrote: "Sarah- wow! Thank you for helping with that! Also, I see it now on my name too. Maybe it just takes a second to update. Thanks again."

You're welcome!

[Rachel]

Sooo didn’t see anyone mention this but:

What gender did you think Charlie was?

[Rachel]

B/C Worthing/Wonky/Novice is never given a gendered word. Which is pretty neat in this context. Plus what afforded us with Fodder.

[Anna]

I was waiting for someone to bring that up, but then forgot about the whole thing. As with that other book, which I shall not name because of spoilers, I would've appreciated it much more if the name was truly genderless, or if there was no first name used at all. I know it *can* be used for a woman, but for me it would have to be clearly stated that the person named Charlie is not a man.

[Allison, Fairy Mod-mother]

Yeah, mostly masculine name, written by a man, read by a man, and no feminine signifiers (hair, uterine concerns, power imbalances/forced birthing concerns), and only feminine people hitting on/getting close with Charlie meant that I read him as a him!

[Nicol]

Rachel wrote: "Sooo didn’t see anyone mention this but:

What gender did you think Charlie was?"

I made the assumption that Charlie identified as a woman and queer, then I saw a review that used male pronouns and I thought I missed something, but Fforde never uses pronouns for Charlie just the characters around the character, was wondering if I was the only one!

[Trike]

About the book:

My mom: If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

Me: