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A cute cozy fantasy read- similar in tone to her other one. I recommend reading it in winter, when there’s snow on the ground.

This better not be the ending because if it is that’s totally lame

Enjoying the mystery element. Probably the main thing keeping me reading. Relieved it’s a slow burn. Easy enough to read and not too many annoying tropes. Not amazing either

The last 100 pages certainly sped things up, and made up for much of what I disliked in the first 3/4 of the book (slow introspection). That being said the content of the last 100 pages was awful. I see why it won the 2016 Pulitzer. I’d recommend it only to people who have an interest in history and a stomach for war.

Besides sadness and sorrow, he had asked me, what’s really heavy but weighs nothing at all? When he saw that I was stumped, he said, Nihilism, which was, in fact his philosophy.

[...]so, just to be polite, I cast a tasteful glance[...]In between those marvelous breasts bumped a gold crucifix on a gold chain, & for once I wished I were a true Christian so I could be nailed to that cross."

Hilarious paragraph devoted to cleavage

[...]separated a woman from a man & yet drew him to her with the irresistible force of sliding down a slippery slope. Men had no equivalent, except, perhaps, for the only kind of male cleavage most women truly cared for, the opening & closing of a well-stuffed billfold

[...] semi-exposed breasts was not only engaging in simple lasciviousness, he was also meditating, even if unawares, on the visual embodiment of the verb "to cleave," which meant both to cut apart and to put together. A woman's cleavage perfectly illustrated this double and contradictory meaning, the breasts two separate entities with one identity. The double meaning was also present in how cleavage separated [...]

All this time I kept my gaze fixed on hers, an enormously difficult task given the gravitational pull exerted by her cleavage. While I was critical of many things when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them. The Chinese might have invented gunpowder and the noodle, but the West had invented cleavage, with profound if underappreciated implications. A man gazing on semi- [...]

Disarming an idealist was easy. One only needed to ask why the idealist was not on the front line of the particular battle he had chosen. The question was one of commitment[…]

[…] cont 199. But while science fiction imagined time travelers as moving forward or backward in time, this timepiece demonstrated a different chronology. The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles.” (War - winning and losing - going in circles)

199 (vietnam shaped clock set to Saigon time, 14hrs off) “Refugee, exile, immigrant— whatever species of displaced human we were, we did not simply live in 2 cultures, as celebrants of the great American melting pot imagined. Displaced people also lived in 2 time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past, being as we were reluctant time travelers. [… cont]

Some craftsman in exile had understood that this was exactly the timepiece his refugee countrymen desired. We were displaced persons, but it was time more than space that defined us. While the distance to return to our lost country was far but finite, the # of years it would take to close that distance was potentially infinite. Thus, for displaced people, the 1st question was always about time: When can I return?

179-180. The movie was just a sequel to our war and a prequel to the next one that America was destined to wage. Killing the extras was either a reenactment or what had happened to us natives or a dress rehearsal for the next such episode, with the Movie the local anesthetic applied to the American mind, preparing it for any minor irritation before or after such a deed.

709 cont […] They owned the means of production, and therefore the means of representation, and the best that we could ever hope for was to get a word in edgewise before our anonymous deaths.

709. The swing of a dialect and the trim of a costume had to be real, but the truly important things in such a movie, like emotions or ideas, could be fake. I was no more than the garment worker who made sure the stitching was correct in an outfit designed, produced, and consumed by the wealthy white people of the world. […]

They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented. Marx spoke of the oppressed class that was not politically conscious enough to see itself as a class, but was anything ever more true of the dead, as well as the extras? (In the film)

[…] At Yan’an, Mao said that Art and literature were crucial to revolution. Conversely, he warned, Art and literature could also be tools of domination. Art could not be separated from politics, and politics needed Art in order to reach the people where they lived, through entertaining them.

Im not sure why the author thought the squid flashback was necessary or relevant to the plot. I strongly dislike when authors, all male in my experience, do this.

It really picked up in the end. Not a wholly satisfying ending but definitely not a cliff hanger. The only truly emotional bits revolved around animals (dogs). Hobb is a good writer but the style is still not entirely to my liking. I found a lot of the book to be a bit boring/ dawn out/ too descriptive of unnecessary things. Over all I liked it but I wouldn’t reread it. don’t think I’ll read rest of series

The authors writing style is good just not my preference- a lot of unnecessary atmospheric detail. The plot has been very slow. Since he started learning the skill things have finally gotten interesting