P. Kirby > Recent Status Updates

Mileage may vary, but the purple prose is this is absolutely wonderful. LOL. I mean, purple is my favorite color. First time I've been this engaged in a book in a while.

Nice to hang out with Marci, Julius and the gang again, but, ugh, too much dragon politics!

Earthquake. Finally, something happens....

The premise--what little I understand of it--is interesting and timely, but it's hard to see how fictitious election politics can sustain a novel for hundreds of pages.

"There was a study done with minimally educated voters who, given a hypothetical ballot, picked the names of famous serial killers over randomly generated names as well as over those of actual, less well-know politicians." Sounds familiar...pretty much why the inmates are now running the asylum.

I'm getting a Snowcrash vibe off of this, which, given my opinion of that book, is not a good thing. Hmmm. Time will tell.

Pretty much the standard gimmick-driven YA dystopian. Nothing original or special here. Not sure why it got optioned and eventually made into a series of movies. Meh.

Just read a cloyingly, awful, YA fairy tale retelling, and need something grim to clear my palette.

Diane and her "I haz reli-jun" fundie bullshit is getting on my nerves. Time she stopped drinking the cray-zee Kool-aid.

Given my current mindset, I need some serious escapism, and this...ain't it. All the characters sound the same and despite all the action, it's stunningly dull.

Despite the fact that the science is key in this fiction, the characterization is surprisingly strong and complex. In fact, at times, it takes on the navel-gazing tone of literary fiction, but at least it isn't the usual Sahara-dry prose of most hard SF.

Perhaps because I've seen the first two movie adaptations, but this is not holding my interest. Characterization is thin, and everyone sounds the same.

Surprisingly, this doesn't suck. Fascinating concept that is, so far, held up by actual accessibly characterization.

The Glade slang is annoying. I already prefer the movie adaptations.

I confess, this really isn't all that engaging. There are moments of brilliance followed by a lot of "Meh."

Took me a while to warm up to the protagonist--still find her a little distant--but the setting (Chinatown) and immersion in the diversity of Chinese culture is wonderful. The villains' motivation seem a little thin, though.

The execution on this leaves me a little cold, although not so much that I want to stop reading. Hmmmm.

This is pretty much a journey type of fantasy novel. Loads of traveling, not much tension. Pleasant, and much better than Tor's other free ebooks, but probably not worth reading beyond book one.

I confess, even after learning why she willingly was circumcised as an adult, I'm still not quite feeling the um, empathy. The problem, I think is the highly fragmented narrative. Messy.

Original fantasy world but the plot is losing steam.

Alice Walker's prose is nice, as expected, but the narrative jumps between four POV's and back and forth in time, making for a disjointed read.

It's okay...but the insta-lust is insta-boring me. ZZZZZZzzzzzz.

Holy shit! A fantasy novel that actually acknowledges that horses and mules, but especially horses, need to eat and drink regularly on long journeys. For that alone, I think I love this book.

Not exactly "stories." More like long anecdotes about the minutia of life in the white, upper middle class suburbs of America.

This feels like it's trying hard to be grimdark fantasy with a multicultural, twist, right down to the pidgin English and use of words like "nigga." Which could work if the prose wasn't so awkward, with confusing use of pronouns and very little exposition. Quick read, so I haven't totally committed to DNFing it, but it's possible.

Weird, with POV shifts from second person present to third person, past tense, but...oddly compelling.

"...a single word came to mind: tsundoku. It was the Japanese word for letting books pile up without reading them all."

Miss Landon, the fake version who is actually the "evil" witch, is more interesting than the real, uptight version. Miss Landon is too true to Jane Austen type, uptight and unbending. I'm shipping the witch with Aubranael --who lost his mojo and got dull when coming to the human world.