Meg’s Reviews > Ninefox Gambit > Status Update

YHL is just getting lazy. Jedao-Cheris amounts to the author having Jedao just never tell Cheris what's up for no reason. Nerevor is semi-sympathetic. Feels like the author just wanted to turn a first person shooter game into an SF novel. Now we're just blowing away civilians like it's funny. YHL can pretend to want to show the horror of it but THAT much focus on the killers and not the victims tells the truth.

Yay, more words that mean fuck all. This should be a tense, climactic part of this novel, but there are no stakes. Not because there isn't something to win or lose, but because I don't care who wins or loses it. There's no one to root for. I don't care who dies or if Jedao completely takes over Cheris. I'm continuing with this book so that when I fully review it nobody can shout "but you didn't finish it!" at me.

More stuff is happening. Mostly everyone second guessing each other and then themselves. The word-salad barrage disguised that Cheris can get boring. Jedao is interesting. There's lots of intrigue but it's not intriguing. There's a boring duel with "calendrical swords". I've resigned myself to the fact that the author just isn't going to explain that EVER. It's just YHL's magic word. It means nothing.

It's improving. The barrage of contextless scifi words slowed. Plot finally started. Conversations now have some meaning. Still don't get the calendrical thing. Guess it's just a grim techno-fueled struggle over following the Joke-a-Day desk calendar vs. Hot Firemen of Milwaukee monthly on the wall. "The Eels employed the misprinted Dilbert system. Such heresy," said Mikodez, archly. TELL ME OTHERWISE AUTHOR.

The reading is slightly easier now. The author has stopped inserting twenty different brand new undefined, context-clueless, world-specific terms on every page. Plus, we're getting to the actual thing this book is about. So far, I like it and I'm interested enough to keep going. Note to self: warn people in reviews that chapters 1-4 are going to be bumpy rides. Still don't know what a calendar is, though.

Struggling with this one. Characters in the book live in a world where "calendars" are so important people go to war over them it's the main thrust of the plot, but almost 30 pages in and the author can't spare two or three sentences to hint at why THEIR "calendars" are not the same as the things that hang on your wall and tell you what month and day of the week it is. Ugh. I'd been looking forward to this one.