Daniel Smith > Recent Status Updates

Book good! Tchaikovsky has another winner to potentially rival Cage of Souls (shhhhh, no jinx please).

I really appreciate the author's talent for writing about dark, sometimes gruesome settings and manage to keep enough levity to balance between feeling like he's not taking the dark subjects seriously and depressing his reader. This is a really fine line to walk and he is doing marvelously at it.

I'm not sure why, but in the last few pages the editing and the choices made by the author have really gone downhill. There are a couple really bad typos, the author gets left and right confused within the space of two sentences, and a character's speech impediment is transferred to a different character momentarily (I'm assuming by accident and lack of editing). On top of this, there's a theme emerging I don't like.

I'm starting to slow down as I get through this book. Something about it isn't working for me, and I suspect it's the characters. The other aspects of the book are excellent, however I keep returning to the fact that I all the characters are manipulative, power-hungry, overly-pragmatic, and deeply unlikeable. The main character especially makes choices for power that I'd never make, and it's hard to root for her.

This book is excellent. This is probably my own preconceived notion (and I apologize to the author), but I thought of Baldacci as a beach read author prior to my exposure to him in The Fix. I’m very happy to revise my opinion of him up to an author who understands how to hook readers without sacrificing depth.

I started this series out of order with The Fix, and it was so good I wanted to go back and start at the beginning. The way Baldacci captures details and nuances of a mental condition his main character has that he presumably does not is done extremely well. A character with an almost supernatural mental ability is hard to capture by us Average Joes, and Baldacci captures subtleties that make Decker feel real.

“When we think of War and her atrocities, we imagine that the unforgivable is prosecuted on the battlefield, in the heat and fire. It is not. Atrocity is writ by quiet men in men in council chambers over crystal glasses of cool water. Strange little men with ashes in their hearts.”
This book is good.

This book continues to - intentionally or otherwise - borrow from some of my favorite sci-fi authors. I've mentioned before some of the other works Christopher Ruocchio's novel touched, but I have to add Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space to that list. I've already listed Reynolds, but something about the clarity with which Ruocchio expresses complex, alien-based plotlines and archaeology is really enjoyable.

This book is reminding me strongly of a few other of my favorite books smashed together into a delicious bouillabaisse: Ender's Game for the main character and his sympathy to the "xenobites," Cage of Souls for the general dark atmosphere and realism, Dune for the expansive world-building and backstabbing politics, and a little bit of the general tone of Heinlein. Oh! Plus there are lightsabers!

This book is really pulling me in so far. I'm just over 10% through it and I'm enjoying the way the author has set up the world. The tone and expansiveness of Dune, the lightsabers of the Jedi knights, the character development that reminds me of W. Michael Gear's Requiem For A Conqueror, and the imaginative hard sci-fi of Alastair Reynolds and Neal Asher. This is sort of a list of my favorites, which bodes well.

I think some of my antipathy toward the plot in this book is that I'm reading Follett's Winter of the World at the same time (very slowly). WotW manages to be historical, heartbreaking, hopeful, and humorous at once. It's unfortunate for Into the Darkness that I'm reading both at the same time. They're similar enough to be comparable, but WotW revolves around real events and just feels more impactful in every way.

This feels like a military planning exercise, not a novel. I acknowledge Turtledove's painstaking thoughts on what a real-life World War in his fictitious world would be like, and kudos to him for his attempt at realism and completeness. That being said, it's really uninteresting as a story. I didn't pick this up to read a hypothetical battle plan for war taking place in another universe. Interesting; not fun to read

I've become exhausted with this book. It's managed to be such a slog, while remaining just interesting enough to keep me from hating it or putting it down, that I just don't have any more will to fight. Disappointingly, I think I'll have to forego my usual long-form reviews and will intend to use these updates to piece something together. I just don't have the energy left after this book has drained me to review.

To continue my earlier point - pacing seems way off. As I've mentioned before, all the impactful war events happen off-screen. We spend our whole time with characters' thoughts and opinions about these off-screen events that are pretty momentous (conquering, defeat, etc.). The first 80% of the book was just a slow grind as one country dominates all the others in the World War they're having. Could've been a chapter.

I'm struggling to cross the finish line of this book. It's getting a incrementally more interesting as some of the (too many) characters are finally crossing paths, more than 85% into the book. I think my issues with this book are partly from expectations that maybe weren't fair to the book. That being said, the book jacket gave me those expectations, so perhaps the editors need to take another look at this.

This passage leads me to a choice by the author that doesn't make sense to me. This is supposed to be essentially a reimagining of WW2 in a fantasy world. Magic has been peppered throughout (guns = wands, warplanes = dragons, bombs = "eggs."), however all of these have literally just been magical equivalents of real things. Just now, over 60% in we see some interesting magic. It feels like a sadly missed opportunity.

Finally - all the races in this book are only distinguished (both by themselves and by the narrator) by their clothing styles and their hair colors. Almost no cultural references are made or appear to matter to these folks. All that matters is "redheads" vs "blonds" and "kilts" vs "trousers." This seems like a bizarre choice, especially as the only trait the characters have in common is hatred for the other races.

The pacing - the most interesting parts of the war are skipped over in a sentence, while we're subjected to paragraphs and paragraphs of the characters' thoughts about the action that got skipped over, many of whom have the exact same (or directly opposite) opinions about the same subjects. This makes them feel indistinguishable and uninteresting.

I'm struggling with immersing myself in this book. As I've mentioned in a prior post, we're just not given enough time with any of the (numerous) characters to care about them. So nothing that happens to them feels impactful.
Another issue is that they all feel like they're invincible. This book is basically a translation of WW2 into fantasy, but none of the 17 main characters have died, which seems unlikely at least

Once I reconciled myself with the type of book - definitely different than I expected - I have started enjoying it a little. Still far too many characters who are far too similar to really feel like individuals. Half of them could be removed without hurting the story, but that's just my opinion. Really weird fixation on blowjobs by one of the female characters. Feels like it doesn't belong with the rest of the story.

I really like Turtledove's attention to detail. He makes all the intricate politicking and tactical planning feel dysfunctional and real. Unfortunately, I can't really tell if this realism extends to the characters yet due to a couple issues I'm having with this book. There are 168 characters, 17 of whom have their own perspectives. It's too much, and doesn't leave me time to get to know or care about any of them.