Todd > Recent Status Updates

Started slow, but I found chapter 3 to be much more interesting than 1 or 2. Color me interested.

I’m starting to wonder if the second half of the musical is even in the book…?

Yep, back at it. Maybe I can finish volume IV before my last Sun Eater book comes out next month.

Honestly this book was starting to redeem itself until I reached the latest plot development. I really don’t know what to expect next.

I’m about to head to Japan. Let’s see how much I end up reading while there.

I don’t love this book, but truth be told I’m a little invested to see what happens

This is definitely not my cup of tea
But the chapters are so short, it feels approachable and digestible

I have to add fantasy tag, so this is both sci-fi and fantasy, seems to be a growing trend in fiction

Much better than Shadow & Bone, so far

More ranting to do but limited by character count. At one point Alina has a “rivalry” with another girl and then somehow beats her in hand to hand combat despite us being told that she’s dreadful at it, and the other girl is the star pupil, and the whole thing takes literally 5 pages. There’s no build up or building tension, the vignette just gets barfed out. The whole book feels this way so far.

This book is not good. There’s supposedly a lot of drama with mysterious dark magic plaguing a war-torn land, but most of the pages are spent with an insecure girl fixated on silly things. The #1 most important topic of the book based on time allocated would be the stupid keftas, the clothes the Grisha wear, what color they are, etc.

Aw crud, turns out this is one of those books that keeps me up late reading

So I’m currently working on the cancer ward this week as I read this book, which may prove to be interesting timing.

Also events play out rather conveniently. Lots of perfect timing dues-ex-machina is not too satisfying for this kind of story. Also there’s tons of exposition-as-convo which seemed clever at first but now it’s overshadowing who the characters really are, they are just vehicles for barfing out the author’s admittedly cool world-building.

I learned that this is author’s first book, I don’t mean to sound like a snob, but it shows. Some events in story are so abrupt it’s jarring. Meet new character, seems interesting, oh nope he got killed. Main character kills a guy and has “a moment” where he feels bad, all of 1 paragraph of very generic stuff, and that’s that. Too many weird names and references, typical 3rd person limited, but clumsy.