Joe Kessler > Recent Status Updates

Okay, through with those old reviews from 2011. I may find and add some more later.

I found a few old old old reviews I'd posted elsewhere, so I'll be cleaning them up and posting them here. Hopefully GR doesn't mess up and show them as 2020 reads.

This flashback structure literally only makes sense if one of the six kids in the room is the culprit. I don't even care if I'm wrong about which one it is, but they need to start suspecting one another if this book is really going to kick into gear.

The narrator has now described both her mother and her birth mother as sexy, which is kind of a bizarre offhand detail to include.

Still no other major female characters. The main one just revealed another rape attempt from her past.

This has gotten incrementally better.

And now a rape attempt of the only female character so far. In her first appearance.

There is NO plot to this book yet. No larger motivation for the protagonist, just a few seemingly run-of-the-mill incidents from his life.

What even is this worldbuilding? It's felt like a generic medieval fantasy world until now, and suddenly someone's wielding a semi-automatic handgun?

Carry this pig up the mountain each day to get strong. Guess somebody's a fan of Holes!

This is... not good. But short enough that I might finish it anyway.

Feeling surprisingly invested in the Queen/Mordred dynamic. (I guess he's our Lancelot?) But the major twist that's been telegraphed all along just keeps getting more and more obvious. It's well past time to just reveal it and move on to the fallout.

Started this earlier today. So far it's a perfectly competent YA that isn't giving me any particular reason to continue on with the forthcoming sequel(s).

I don't know if I can put into words how much this narrator (and, I have to assume, author) hates women.

The main two ethnicities in this fantasy setting are "kirrin" and "white." And the non-white skin colors have all been described in food terms.

This book is really bad. I'm only going on because it was a Patreon donor's selection for me.

I can't decide if making Cinderella's stepsisters end up as mistreated servants for someone else is clever or profoundly uninspired.

My library copy expired when I was 20 minutes from the end. Next expected available in 10 weeks.

This book has... no real plot yet.

I was not expecting to see the simile "like a roller coaster" in this fantasy world. Are there really roller coasters in this setting? That doesn't seem to match the general level of technology that's been shown so far.

This is solid but not spectacular, especially compared to some of Claudia Gray's other books (Star Wars or otherwise).

The main characters have finally met. I guess I'll stick with this for a little longer just to see if it gets more interesting now.

Only now meeting the fifth main character. Each one has had about one scene so far, and none of them have met. I'm pretty bored.

This is by far the weirdest book in this series yet.

This big reveal has been telegraphed from almost the first page. Thank goodness it's finally here and we can move on.

This eighth story... is also the same as the first two.

JOE HILL: This protagonist is an asshole! And now they're being punished for it in a spooky way!

ME: I absolutely do not care.

These first two stories are reeeeeeaaaally similar.

This is pretty good so far but it's really weird to have scenes set in DC 2019 with nobody talking about politics at all. (More excusable in The Raven Cycle when the kids were mostly off in the rural part of Virginia.) Including Ronan's exact birth date feels like a misstep in that regard; it locks this narrative into a temporal setting that demands more attention than it's getting.

This author literally just tried to argue that the crows in Dumbo aren't racist.

Bro, just tell me about the theme park!!