Mike > Recent Status Updates

I don't usually tag Netgalley books with "seriously-needs-editing" because in theory I'm not seeing the final version, but the grammar of so many sentences is so wrong in such basic ways that even a very good editor would struggle to clean it up to a decent standard.

In-medias-res beginning, but we relatively soon get oriented. Some unfortunate vocabulary issues and some hyphens where they shouldn't be (and "may" where it should be "might"), but generally OK editing otherwise. Don't know if I love the ship, given that the guy is genuinely flaky and annoying. Implausible reason for the MC to understand languages.

If you can see the whole thing from a hot air balloon, it's not a "continent." It's quite a small island.

Nobody ever travels or trades between continents, even though they're close. Despite this, the language is the same worldwide. Everything is stable and unchanging and just works.

I don't find any of this remotely credible.

So far, mostly forgettable.

Just tagged this as "weak-worldbuilding," though it's not so much weak as incoherent. At least the mechanics are good, and it's shaping up to be an OK story.

The big drawback of these books based on a long-running serial is the lack of "previously-on" to reorient you to the characters and prior events, if it's been a while since you read the last one.

I really wish publishers realised how ridiculously difficult it is to borrow an ebook from Overdrive with Adobe Digital Editions DRM enabled. It's a multi-step process across three different devices. Books without ADE enabled are just as secure, and can be borrowed with a couple of clicks.

Page 2 is a textbook example of why you have to approach using singular "they" carefully and with prior context, or risk confusing your readers.

Apart from that, this is, so far, well edited, not cliched, and hardly feels like a licensed property at all, which is what I'd expect from this author.

I think this book needs to go up on its Ritalin.

I'm thinking of giving this my "take a break and see if I want to go back" test. It's well written, but confusing - the characters are mostly representatives/descendants of folk tales, but it's not always clear which ones - and honestly I don't much enjoy spending time with them either. May be a DNF.

Finding this heavy going, because it's constantly alluding (I assume) to folktales and stories I'm not familiar with in ways that leave whole paragraphs only slightly comprehensible. I can glean the meaning of the untranslated Korean words from context, but maybe you need a different cultural background from me to follow this one.

Is it possible to do The Fall of the House of Usher without the house being gothic?

This may be what the author is attempting.

Or not. We shall see.

The voice is of a lawyer, verbose and self-conscious, even self-dramatizing, but not quite so much so that it's put me off yet.

This wild dragon knows what apothecaries, vacations and cathedrals are, but not writing?

A few odd vocabulary errors, including here/hear.

Promising start - the underqualified guard who has to solve a murder because there's nobody else. Editing good, apart from a couple of errors with singular noun/plural verb (in a pattern I've seen before: there's a plural noun between the subject and the verb).

Pig in a poke book; picked it off the Project Gutenberg feed knowing nothing about it and not much about the author. So far, it's promising. The interaction between bored elite university graduates who don't have a project in life, and starving and overworked (to death, in one case) people of humble origins who have made big sacrifices and managed to get to university in order to better themselves.

Painfully earnest in a specifically mid-2020s way, but otherwise good so far (even the editing).

I have a suspicion about who is behind the crisis. We will see if it's accurate.

This one's a complete pig in a poke. I don't know what genre it is, have never heard of the author, couldn't find a blurb. Just picked it up off the Project Gutenberg new books feed.

It's set in 1941, and features lawyers who're involved in politics in New York. Can't tell you much more than that yet.

Straight off to a roaring start. We're in noir territory from the first scene: fog and rain in New York City, detective in a slouch hat and long raincoat smoking a cigar while keeping watch on a suspect's house. Fancy car pulls up, beautiful woman invites him to get in, takes him to a meeting with mysterious figures who try to bribe and threaten him to give up the case. It's well written, too, genuinely suspenseful.

Sets out to be serious and profound; achieves serious. Not actually a detective story, despite the subtitle. Original premise, mediocre execution.

Cozy fantasy bingo card is filling rapidly, but the editing is mostly good (just a few missing past perfects and some vocabulary that's just slightly off), and the characters are appealing. Instalove + long-drawn-out will they/won't they for no particular articulated reason is probably the biggest flaw.

Cozy fantasy bingo card is filling rapidly, but the editing is mostly good (just a few missing past perfects and some vocabulary that's just slightly off), and the characters are appealing. Instalove + long-drawn-out will they/won't they for no particular articulated reason is probably the biggest flaw.

Cozy fantasy bingo card is filling rapidly, but the editing is mostly good (just a few missing past perfects and some vocabulary that's just slightly off), and the characters are appealing. Instalove + long-drawn-out will they/won't they for no particular articulated reason is probably the biggest flaw.

Terrific mysterious opening! Allingham knows how to do it.

This is a recommendation from someone on the Codex writers' forum, and it's really good. Not my usual fare - neither spec-fic nor mystery/thriller - but unusual in some really good ways. The main character isn't any kind of cliche, and is wonderful.

I'm not sure who wrote the blurb, but they substitute a raccoon for a stoat, and state that there are "no fights to the death" even though there's one right in the prolog.
So far, pleasantly cozy but with good stakes, relatively few editing issues (mostly typos and comma placement), and a likeable protagonist with a solid backstory.

Just had to switch off recommendations for my "casual-racism" shelf.

No, GR, I don't want more books like that.

(Not that the recommendations are usually all that accurate.)

My main issue so far is that everything seems far too close together - it only takes a few hours (at premodern transport speeds) to get to somewhere with a very different climate, and there are rebels extremely close to the city and yet important people leave the walls with no escort.

By a massively convenient coincidence, a British man who wants to get to Berlin during World War I (for reasons) happens to meet a man who looks a lot like him, has the right papers, and conveniently dies of natural causes with nobody else present. What are the odds?

No, seriously, what are they?