Benjamin

propagandistic trash

Revisado: 09-08-21

Took me an episode and a half to establish this not merely a discussion show between the very far left and the very, very far left. I know people on the left. This not how they present thier values. This is fairly transparent anti-American propaganda. I googled Radio Sputnik afterwards. Lo and behold, it IS Russian state media. This is about as politically nourishing as reading a chain email from your uncle and following a link to americanpatrioteagle .ru. I'll admit they did make me laugh when they sarcastically addressed criticism against themselves for taking orders from "thier boss" Putin, when he literally is thier boss. Ironic sarcasm, bravo!

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Could not Finish

Revisado: 12-23-18

There were such huge holes in the premise of this book, I just couldn't carry on. The perspective character comes from a nation of hit-men basically. He trains his whole life to become an assassin, but when he goes with his father on his first hit, he is practically surprised that his whole job is to kill people. This leads to this whole shallow moral conundrum. A bit late for that when he's been knowingly training to become an assassin his whole life.

Also, as his entire people is this nation of assassins, it is completely implausible that they should be seen as the noble outcasts among other cultures. Their entire national industry is assassination, of course the locals are going to be standoffish. This author treats them like some oppressed and misunderstood minority. They are all contract killers; there's no misunderstanding about it. I'm amazed they don't get killed on sight.

"We're basically Murder Inc., but I just don't get why people don't like us?" Come on!

The whole thing is just too hokey. I couldn't continue.

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Awful, Gave Up.

Revisado: 10-25-18

This work was a blown attempt at writing a near exact copy of Super Sales on Super Heroes. It feels like this book was written over the course of a weekend. It's like the author thought that if you're reading this kind of novel, you won't care that its written badly. "A nerdy guy with cute girls, those nerds won't care that this book is basically an outline."

And the reader? It's like having a sexy action novel read to you by your high school trigonometry teacher. This is dross.

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A cliche w/in a worn out trope w/in a derivative.

Revisado: 07-21-17

This book is basically every magic school, coming of age book ever. Magic college? check. introspective hero? painfully check. Parents out of the picture, but somehow looming? check. Female character that outperforms hero? check. Intrigue that's "bigger than a student can handle?" check.

If you liked any of:
Harry Potter Series
The Magicians
The Kingkiller Chronicle

Rowe beats a particular trope to death though. He puts the hero in danger. Hero does something to protect himself. Kind of succeeds, but then gets chewed out by teachers for having done something even more dangerous. It happens roughly once every two chapters. The "teachers" at his school barely teach. The entire premise of this magic school is like turning monkeys loose in a bomb factory. Give the students mountains of power, don't teach them what to do, then be super freaking surprised when they blow something up, then curse them for their ignorance. Over and over and over.

I'm not asking for reality in a fantasy book. I am trying to accept the author's premise, but if I am to do that, I'd have to believe that the entire school would have blown itself to fine powder and bone fragments by the end of the first semester.

Do not play a drinking game triggered by the words "honestly boy, how could you not have known?" I keep wanting to shout at the book, "Maybe, because the faculty in this school is so monumentally disastrous they couldn't teach their way out of a wet paper bag!" Even J.K. Rowling tried to keep "first years" out of the "restricted section." Here, the librarians hand out matches along side of copies of the Anarchists' Cookbook. And then blame the students when things go awry.

I have a bunch of other hangups, but to be fair there are some things that redeem this book a bit. Rowe is able to capture snarky teenagers pretty well. His teenagers actually sound like you would expect. Faux-clever wordplay, shyness, angst, posturing, even distorted self-awareness. The teens sound like teens. I didn't think this would be too hard until I read Card's "The Gate Thief." Rowe definitely clears the bar here.

The book also has quite a few "puzzle rooms" like in the computer game "Myst." These can be interesting. I suppose whether or not this device is overused is up to the reader. I found them interesting.

Podehl has a strong performance. His accents and voice characterizations are well crafted.

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Liked it alright, but I'm a forgiving guy

Revisado: 05-27-17

If you are a big fan of the mechanics of MMORPGs you will probably like this book. The specifics are well described with lots of "level up" messages and how that effects the character. Basically, if you played WoW or its analogues and loved chasing stats and reading level up messages, you will also love this book. If you do not, or get bored easily with this stuff, you probably aren't even considering this book enough to read this review. Go with that feeling.

The story and characters are ok. It reads a lot like the early levels of a role playing game. So the characters are a bit contrived and not entirely human, but in the situation, it works ok. The reader does a pretty good job of making the individuals distinct. He's not world class, definitely does journeyman work.

All in all, a novel (or genre) like this is self-selecting. Like RPGs? Try it. If you are unfamiliar with them, or have no interest in them, you will be constantly asking yourself, "what am I reading?"

If you came from a similar genre novel like "Ready Player One," don't be fooled, this book is not that. That book could be read by general audiences. This is more for gamers.

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Leisurely but Enjoyable

Revisado: 10-23-16

If you've been a fantasy fan for any amount of time, you're familiar with the coming-of-age, "hero from the country encounters big ol' world" then goes to "the academy" archetype. This is one like that. I'm not trying to knock it. If it wasn't a compelling trope, it wouldn't get used as often as it does. Dawn of Wonder, takes it in a bit of a different direction though, and it is a direction I find appealing.

Often, you encounter a tween that is just so smart, canny, clever, precocious, and powerful that he just has to go out into the world for everything to be yielded to him (See: Jorg Ancrath, Jimmy the Hand, Kaz Brekker, Eragon, Kylar Stern, Tavi, Kvothe, and on and on). I like that well enough, but Dawn of Wonder does a better job. The hero certainly is all those admirable things, but the story never seems to give him more than someone of his age might be able to conceivably handle and does indeed give him plenty of age appropriate issues. Often, with other books of the type, you get 13 year olds acting like 45 year olds. Not here. It seems like Renshaw may have met a 13 year old or two in his life.

This does contribute to a slow pacing for the book. It is a long book for not a ton of main story arc progress. I admit this freely, but the diversions are enjoyable and the prose is jaunty and comical. The author knows how to string words together. As long as you don't need a twist and a falling ax every page or two, it will hold your interest.

Reynolds is strong. Does accents well. Voice characterizations are consistent and relatable. I have come to appreciate him as one of those readers that amplifies the author's work and adds his own flavor.

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esto le resultó útil a 12 personas

Brilliant and Stupid at the Same Time

Revisado: 08-09-16

There are things to love about this book and series. Then there are things that just don’t make any sense which are very frustrating when you are really rooting for this series to succeed.

I love what Sakey has done to build his premise. I think that his conflict built by social upheaval because of the effects a generation of genius children have on the world is itself genius. It touches on all kinds of things, adjustments to new technologies, psychological effects of estrangement due to different powers and perspectives, bigotry, the national interest, family relationships, that feeling that the normal world is just changing too fast, etc. It is a fantastic and layered premise sprinkled with his interludes that give it color and make it more real to the reader. (If there were a generation of brilliant people, wouldn’t there be a “personals” section focused on them specifically? Yes. Yes there would. Of course!)
Then he has to go and screw it up with one dimensional characters and monkeywrenching the suspension of disbelief he asks of his readers.

First the characters: Most are made of wood. Professorial, wishy-washy President. Ambitious, conniving SecDef. Diabolical, megalomaniacal villain. “Protect my Family!” Hero. Other “Protect my Family!” Hero. Supportive wife. Other supportive (ex) wife. There are a few with human-like motivations, but some characters who were much better fleshed out in the first book became more one dimensional here. Daniels does yeoman-like work fleshing them out, but you can’t make substance out of nothing.

My major gripe is the laziness with which Sakey treats the contract he writes with the reader. I am all for suspension of disbelief in fiction. If the author tells me that Superman is super strong and can basically lift, well, anything, I say ok. If the author tells me then that Kryptonite is the only thing that makes him weak and it makes him weak as a kitten, I say ok. But if the same author tells me that, despite the previous statement, Superman can pick up an entire Island of Kryptonite and throw it into space because he just grits his teeth really hard simply because the author needed something really dramatic (I’m looking at you Bryan Singer), you lost me. In that case as in this one, the author breaks the promise he makes.

Nick Cooper is the greatest profiler in the world, a Brilliant who can look at people’s patterns of behavior and predict pretty much exactly what those people will do next. At the start of the first book he tracked a hacker across country to a specific bar, basically by looking at her rap sheet and her clothes closet. And I say ok. But he goes through most of this book forgetting about his fantastic gift for reading people until the end. This makes me want to scream. Cooper is supposed to be a Brilliant, but only seems to remember his gift after the author has had a chance to build the tension.

This is the problem with trying to write perspective characters who are supposed to be really, really aware. Cooper can read people’s intentions, but he never seems to use it to head off a problem; he just conveniently turns it off when the author needs to create a plot twist. If Cooper is such a brilliant profiler, why isn’t he doing it all the time to stay a step ahead of the bad guys? If you want to put a limitation on a character, you have to do it in the story, you can’t just have him forget he’s brilliant until it’s convenient.

And speaking of forgetting: Ethan Park has no idea why people might be after him or his boss until he just happens to remember halfway into the book that his lab had made the biggest scientific discovery in the last 30 years on an amazingly controversial issue? The author made the choice that it would be better for the drama if the danger was unexpected when any reasonable person would have been paranoid from page 1.

One final hang-up that has to do with poor research: Tanks can’t get “hacked.” Sure you can foul its GPS, or maybe screw with some of its electronic systems, but the breech is loaded by human hands and the tracks are driven by mechanical linkage. And before you say it, no we weren’t waiting around for some Brilliant to invent an auto-loader. That technology has been around since before tanks. We intentionally put the human element in for safety reasons. Hacking a high-tech jet’s avionics and control systems? Ok, but tanks are mechanical; you can lock the turret with a physical lever. The funny thing is, Sakey didn’t even need to do this; the physical threat from guided missiles going off course and jets crashing would have been plenty destructive.

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Entrancing Story, Weak Reader

Revisado: 08-01-16

I read this book on paper when I was a kid. It is the book that made me a reader. I inhaled Eddings as a kid and a teenager. This book holds magic for me and is difficult for me to evaluate objectively since it was a formative event for me when I was young. I only have this one word: Spellbinding.

Beierle has the potential to be an ok reader. He makes bold choices in voice characterizations which I normally appreciate, and if he makes some choices that are different from how I imagine characters, that is not his fault. But hang it all if he isn't overdoing all the in-book names. There is hardly a world-concept that he doesn't over-pronounce into inscrutability. He manages to over-enunciate and slur his speech all at the same time to make these words, which read pretty easily on paper, into incomprehensible verbal globules. Stop trying so damn hard!

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A Solid, but Uninspired Wrap-up

Revisado: 07-16-16

I feel like the first book of the series was its best. This one was about on par with the second. This book has a deeper explanation of the various relationships between the characters that have emerged throughout the series. The characters grow and develop and that speaks well of their texture. Ryan draws his characters pretty well, but Brand adds nothing to them. He reads this book with little inflection or characterization, but if it didn't bother you on the first two, this one is no different.

I did enjoy the directions a lot of the different characters went on their divergent adventures. I never felt annoyed when I left one character's perspective for another's. You know how often there are two or three characters you really like following, but then there's one you always want to speed through to get back to the real action? This is not like that. They're all pretty good.

I had an issue with the predictability of the book. The characters lay out in the beginning what they have planned, and then they go and do it. There is very little in the way of twists. Well... that is to say, there are twists and surprises, but not a one of them keeps the entire adventure from going to plan. The characters face adversity, sure, but nothing they can't handle. It makes it feel scripted. It makes the whole book seem like a wrap-up, an extended epilogue.

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Less Awful than Predecessor

Revisado: 04-27-16

If you've read the Providence of Fire (book 2 in this series) you're probably wondering whether you should throw a good credit after bad. I managed to overcome my revulsion for the last book and listen all the way through this one. It is not as bad as the last book; I would venture to say that it rises as far as "kind of okay."

I want to give Staveley some credit. The underlying story arc is pretty cool. There is some worthy intrigue. He has built some artifacts into this world that are really interesting particularly the Kettral soldiers and the Skullsworn. There is a hint of some good world building here.

From the last book to this one, Staveley has improved on his male characters. They're no longer crashing around incoherently doing things that don't make sense, even to them. In fact, he even does some really cool things with a few of them (which would take spoilers to explain).

His female characters are half-cooked. They are more like caricatures. Most of them are one dimensional. He makes some silly decisions when he tries to flesh them out. But worst of all is Adare. She doesn't make sense as a person. Staveley uses her to increase the drama artificially. She basically walks into each scene and does something really dramatic that screws everything up for other people to fix. Her motivations are all over the place. It is so prevalent that she bends the entire book around her idiotic misadventures. This makes is significantly less enjoyable.

Vance continues to give strong narration. I took points off as some of his accents are bleeding together.

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