Joe Kessler > Recent Status Updates

Please tell me the author's life story isn't going to be this intrusive throughout the whole book. I don't care about your own first memories of Disneyland, dude.

Please tell me the author's life story isn't going to be this intrusive throughout the whole book. I don't care about your own first memories of Disney Land, dude.

I'm barely even into this book and the author has already objectified his heroine, used an absurd stereotype about homeless people, and featured an anachronistic description of the era's technology. Yikes.

Halfway through, the (first?) murder has happened, and I think I remember whodunnit now.

Just finished Part I, which was way heavier on military maneuvers than I would prefer. Hopefully the rest of the book takes a turn.

I know I've read this entire mystery series before, but this is the only one where I can't remember the solution.

This felt like a 5-star read from the very first scene, and nothing since then has made me change my mind at all.

Way too many instances of characters locking eyes from across a room and instantly understanding something about one another.

How has it taken this long for Nova / the series to actually articulate a meaningful critique of the Renegads as an institution??

This is so much better than Children of Blood and Bone. (It's not entirely fair to put them in competition, but hard not to when they're both drawing from the same mythology.)

I need to go to sleep, but this is mad creepy. Strong Stephen King / Joe Hill vibes so far

This development feels unearned.

Update on the setting... teenage heroine is reading her father's journal entries from when she was a child, dated 1800. So Regency-ish sounds about right.

‪There's some lovely (albeit minor) Jewish representation in this that I was not expecting. Surprise mezuzahs and shabbat candles in my regency (?) fantasy!‬

‪There's some lovely (albeit minor) Jewish representation in this that I was not expecting. Surprise mezuzahs and shabbat candles in my regency (?) fantasy!‬

I've been reading this on Kindle and it reaaaaaaally hasn't grabbed me yet. I think I'm gonna push on to at least 33%, but that might be it until my library picks up an audiobook copy.

CW sexual assault. Of Lyra Silvertongue, which feels especially brutal given that she's a character we first got to know as a child.

So a 31-year-old character has apparently decided that he's "in love" with a 20-year-old... Quotation marks because she has no idea he feels that way. Even worse: he's had this feeling since she was his student four years ago. Y I K E S. Philip Pullman, what are you doing???

So far I'm enjoying the story within the story a lot more than January's own.

1) This book is AMAZING so far.

2) I'm listening to the audiobook, and I only just saw the description and realized the main character's name is spelled Gyre, not Jair.

I was more interested in those two pages just now about Disney theme park foot traffic than I have been about anything else in this book.

"Really old suckers are almost always really wealthy suckers. Any time there isn't any other news for a while you can pretty well count on another big article all over the globenet debating how much of the world's money is really in sucker hands."

You ever read a 'vampire' story like this and start wondering why they don't save time and just say Jews instead?

Only now are two of these protagonists meeting.

Four viewpoint characters so far, none of whom have yet interacted with one another. Woof. This is not my favorite variety of fantasy.

‪Wait, the villain is a masked cult leader who can forcibly take away people's magic? Did I pick up a Legend of Korra novelization by mistake?‬

Loving this on a story level, and for the middle-grade Jewish fantasy representation. But the mechanics on a prose level leave a lot to be desired. SO much repetition in word choice.

"There were some things more important than dragon hunting, and baking challah was one of them." Big Rosh Hashanah mood. I am loving this recent trend of explicit Jewish representation in science-fiction and fantasy!

This book has been obnoxiously sexist the whole time, and it's getting a bit racist now too.

This is way more Michael Crichton than Stephen King.