Tiny little novella, typical "find a duke" stuff. However...
I was struck by the use of a character with a disability, and a disfigurement. To have a Tiny little novella, typical "find a duke" stuff. However...
I was struck by the use of a character with a disability, and a disfigurement. To have a scene in which the man looks at her up and down, runs a hand over the disfigurement and tells her how beautiful it is, she is. It struck a chord with me. It made me want to write books with people seeing the beauty in others, seeing past the skin.
We talk about seeing past the skin a lot, but pretty much every book that I read has a beautiful lead character that wins everyone over with her looks alone. For that reason alone I think this book will remain a favourite, despite some rather appalling writing (and I the samples for two of her other books and couldn't continue).
Merged review:
Tiny little novella, typical "find a duke" stuff. However...
I was struck by the use of a character with a disability, and a disfigurement. To have a scene in which the man looks at her up and down, runs a hand over the disfigurement and tells her how beautiful it is, she is. It struck a chord with me. It made me want to write books with people seeing the beauty in others, seeing past the skin.
We talk about seeing past the skin a lot, but pretty much every book that I read has a beautiful lead character that wins everyone over with her looks alone. For that reason alone I think this book will remain a favourite, despite some rather appalling writing (and I the samples for two of her other books and couldn't continue)....more
This was an odd book. I don't think the author really knew what angle he was trying to talk about, so it just came off as an odd memoir about a nobodyThis was an odd book. I don't think the author really knew what angle he was trying to talk about, so it just came off as an odd memoir about a nobody.
Was it about being a domestique? I don't think so because in his head he never was one. Was it about drugs? I am not sure. The drug side made me queezy, but it didn't seem to be the main part of the book. Was it about youth and ideas? I don't think it was that either, because the author seemed to always believe in his own superiority, never doubting it.
As a first year pro he complained about how much rookies are disliked by the experienced pros (how unfair it was), but chapters later he went on about how annoying and troublesome the rookies were. The way he wrote it, he seemed to exclude himself. ...more
This book reads like an overview of half a dozen interesting books, all crammed into one - with a whole lot of world building and very little storylinThis book reads like an overview of half a dozen interesting books, all crammed into one - with a whole lot of world building and very little storyline. The book is boring. Several times during the book I had to force myself to keep slogging through pages and pages of descriptions about the world, stuff that wasn't actually relevant to the scant attempt at a storyline.
When I read the acknowledgements at the end of the book I finally understood the problem... The author had access to an impressive think tank. I am presuming they spent loads of time discussing the science behind this world, and the author made sure that all of it went into the book.
At one stage the protagonist, newly down from space, sees a person in what should be an uninhabited region. This occupies two sentences of the book, followed by half a dozen pages describing in excrutiating detail how she lands in a hangar. The detail is insane, I am bored, I am confused. I thought she just spotted something really important, why is the story not reflecting this. But the story is really caught up on how she lands in the hangar, and then who is in the room with her, and then how she gets up to the space city. By the time they get back to talking about this man, well I have pretty much forgotten about him. In the acknowledges it becomes clear, one of the people in the author's think tank had spent considerable time working on the details of landing in that hangar... and none of it was going to be left out!
It is not just technical stuff either, the book gets bogged down in the historical reasons behind actions. For example, why this race uses this particular handshake and that race uses that one (despite never again in the book are the handshakes really important), E.g. An entire paragraph dedicated to explaining why the space station was called "Endurance". Non of which is relevant or interesting in a book already overloaded with an excess of useless information.
They couldn't make out what to call the thing. People tried and failed to combine the words Izzy and Ymir. The closest they came was Izmir, but that had been the name of a city in Turkey. Sentiment was in favor of naming her after the martyrs of the Ymir expedition, but there had been several. In honor of Markus it was likened to the Daubenhorn, later shortened to the Horn. Which was not a bad nickname. But the name that stuck was a continuation of the Shackleton theme that Markus had established with New Caird. Shackleton's big ship had been called Endurance, and was famous for having gotten stuck in the ice. So Endurance it was....
The premise is interesting, in fact the book is full of lots of interesting premises. The moon blows up, the people of earth come together to send people into an ark in space, the gene pool becomes very small and an awesome scientist has to work out how to overcome this. A society under a mountain, another society survives underwater (but presumably no societies survive outside of the continental USA). How will the human race survive.
It is kind of "The 100" meets "The Martian", with some of Orson Scott Card's ability to right generational fiction. Except it did all of it badly, there was no storyline, the technical details were downright boring. What this book is, is an interesting discussion about what this kind of world might look like, and that stuff is interesting, and I would love to look at concept art, and to read these details alongside the concept art. Trying to turn it into a story does not work at all.
Okay, here comes some spoilers as I rant a bit more.
I am all for suspending your disbelief in a novel. However this one takes it a bit far. The titular event happens about half way through the book when we suddenly have just seven women from which to populate the entire human race... Just seven you ask. How did that happen, you ask.
Well, hold on. Because the population of the earth got together to launches hundreds of pods into space... and the first thing they did when they arrived was start a war and eat each other... Charming. We ended up with 8 woman.
How can woman get pregnant, you ask. Well, they could use those dead bodies frozen in the airlock... You know, a scapel and a turkey baster would do the trick.... Or, rather they could use genetics and impregnate themselves with their own resequenced DNA... Because one of them was a geneticist and she could do that.
But wait it gets better. The former-cannibal pronounces a curse that they will be giving birth to seven distinct races... So 5000 years later it is apparent that, despite the need for genetic diversity, none of the races intermarried, instead they become raging stereotypes. The Teklans are all strong, yet disciplined enough not to even hint at fucking a woman whom they are spooning with (discretely masturbating in the bathroom instead), and the Julians are uber politicians, and doesn't it suck that all the other races are just so science-minded that none of them are good at being politicians. I mean - WTF? Seriously this shit is racist, purist, ridiculous, and just plain makes zero sense. I am supposed to buy the idea that after 5000 years of living together on a tiny asteroid, it is still really easy to tell exactly which race someone is from. I am calling bullshit on this book.
Great premises, handled so badly, I only finished reading it because I had paid $5 for it....more
Another book that I just can't remember reading. It must not have been that good.Another book that I just can't remember reading. It must not have been that good....more
I was taken with the idea of reading about the behind-the-scenes of reality TV. The writing is not bad, but I failed to look at the page count of the I was taken with the idea of reading about the behind-the-scenes of reality TV. The writing is not bad, but I failed to look at the page count of the book before I paid for it. Not worth the cover price....more
Really interesting, but ends stupidly and I don't get why authors publish half a novel. Is this a serial? What was the point of it all? Great idea, grReally interesting, but ends stupidly and I don't get why authors publish half a novel. Is this a serial? What was the point of it all? Great idea, great world building, but only half a plot.... What the heck, publish it anyway and see how many suckers pay for it....more
For a book about dangerous women, their were surprisingly few, especially given that Geroge R.R. Martin is so good at writing strong women.
The book isFor a book about dangerous women, their were surprisingly few, especially given that Geroge R.R. Martin is so good at writing strong women.
The book is an anthology of short stories by a variety of authors. They are all supposed to be about dangerous women, and yet story after story were full of male protagonists, male narrators, and some barely seemed to have a woman in it at all.
One particular story had 4 characters, 3 of them were male, 2 of them were having a fight to see who could win the girl. The girl was dangerous because she had performed voodoo on the men to make them fight... except she hadn't, she had done nothing, she barely even spoke. One time 50 years earlier she had made a joke about doing voodoo and the guy had believed her. She had forgotten all about it and sat mutely looking bored as the boxing match progressed. How does that warrant being called dangerous? It is insulting, women are dangerous just by being women - it is a fake compliment.
One story involves a woman picking up a man at a bar. The woman is unhappily married and looking for a hookup. They go back to a motel. He enjoys the sex, pretty much decides he is in love with her, offers to kill her husband for her, then gets angry at her for picking him up in order to kill the husband (She never suggested murder, never agreed to it, and there is no indication that this was her motive), and then the guy kills her.... Again, how is she the dangerous one? Because she had an affair? Again, it is insulting, a woman cheating is not a dangerous woman.
Diana Gabaldon gives us a story which actually does have a pretty cool woman in it... except she is not the main character, and barely says two words. The main characters are male, we see it all from the male viewpoint, and the backstories are all about the men.
The stories were good, but I felt a bit ripped off by the title and the intro (which proclaimed to be about dangerous women). It is disappointing because I have read Game of Thrones (by George R.R. Martin in case you have been hiding under a rock) and it is full of strong women, in fact, it is one of the few books that have as many strong women as men. I expected him to get it right. Was he disappointed by the stories that he received?
Walker is a decent writer but he needs a better editor. Someone to tell him to remove the sexism, and the racism.
Every time he meets a women he commenWalker is a decent writer but he needs a better editor. Someone to tell him to remove the sexism, and the racism.
Every time he meets a women he comments on the way she looks (despite being 20 years older then many of them). At one point, as he is waving goodbye to his mother who has dropped him off at the start of the hike, he derisively comments on a 22yo women leading her two sisters on the trek. The woman has experience but her sisters do not. He is appalled and smugly comments that they never even made it out of the first state. This from a guy who has, at this point, never slept outside for a night in his life. It is insulting and sexist.
He goes into too much detail about the sexist and racist jokes that they tell to each other, and it gets old. Remove all of that stuff and the book is okay.
+1 For going the entire book without talking about phones going flat and needing to find a place to charge them....more
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