Nightwitch > Recent Status Updates

No hipster cidery striving to win fancy cider awards anywhere, ever, makes a single varietal Honeycrisp cider. NEVER.

OMG, the "brewmaster" of a cidery just described leaving the peels on the apples he was pressing ("brewing" in the book's lingo) as something unusual that he did only because he wanted the "extra earthier flavor." I can't even.

The romance is decent so far but the cider-making is, uh, not.

"For a start I should need a bigger office, a room with more windows. Electric light's no good for your eyes all day." Call OSHA, Laura! (She's not going to call OSHA.)

I'm feeling so swamped, like I want to take the author by the shoulders and say "No, I don't know anything about Carthage. No, less than that. Less than that, too!" There is a prologue AND an intro, both of which assume a baseline I don't have, which made them hard going.

"Anne was tall and willowy, and the fullness of her breasts defied her model's figure." They don't write them like this any more, folks! At least I hope they don't!

This covers so much in such a brief page count that as soon as we left the mostly-familiar-to-me terrain of Kyivan Rus I got hopelessly bogged down - it's hard to follow events when you don't have an understanding of the larger world which prompted them... which I don't.

The heroine of this is such a Mary Sue. I guess in fairness that's not so unusual for so-so SF, it's just usually a Gary Stu, but combined with the sloppy prose it's making it hard to feel fully engaged - I feel like we're constantly learning that the heroine is the Best Ever at yet another new thing. It takes the mystery out of all these new discoveries!

The narrative is moving fast but my gosh, the writing is clunky - and more than that, it could really have used an editor. (Someone looked "discomforted" - no, they looked discomfited! And don't end your sentences with prepositions!)

I haven't even watched the last Star Wars movie and even I can tell this is Reylo fanfiction with the serial numbers... well, not so much scratched off as lightly buffed, because changing "empire" to "imperium" and dubbing lightsabers "starswords" is not so much with the new and original worldbuilding.

I know I'm getting old because my primary thought at this point in the book is "dude, you married an over-excitable teenager who's been busy bopping around London with nary a thought for propriety, do you really have any right to be annoyed that she's... still acting like an over-excitable teenager?"

Did she seriously just give a shout out to the python that got loose on the red line that one time? Yes. Yes she did.

This book has gotten weirdly, creepily judgmental. Of a minor character, a prostitute, whose adopted daughter was about to be repossessed by the orphanage 6 years later (yes really) and who consequently fled with husband and kid, she writes that “given (the mother’s) lifestyle, she hardly seems the type to want to raise a child, so the question must be asked: to what purpose did she acquire this little girl?” WTF?

"Only fifteen at the time of her debut... but already physically mature, Mlle. George stunned Paris, and within a few months she had made her way to Napoleon's bed." Thanks dude, we really needed to be aware that Napoleon checked to make sure she had boobs before he screwed a girl in her early teens. Otherwise that might be gross or something.

I cannot believe I am three hundred pages in and the author is still dutifully recounting what seems like every carriage ride Carnegie took, every author Carnegie corresponded with, every article Carnegie wrote (and its response)... not to mention that I am just NOT in the mood to read about robber barons if there's no critical commentary involved.