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juushikaTitle: The Serpent Sea (The Books of the Raksura Book 2)
Author: Martha Wells
Published: Night Shade Books, 2012
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 340
Total Page Count: 269,475
Text Number: 873
Read Because: continuing the series, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: The Indigo Cloud court returns to their ancestral home, only to find it in danger. This feels remarkably like a D&D campaign in structure: a quest for a MacGuffin with predictable adventure pacing and an emphasis on problem-solving and fraught social encounters. This works best in the later acts, and does a particularly good job of conveying the exhaustion of the protracted final conflict; there's also some great setpieces like the massive tree village and the organic underbelly of the leviathan city. But the social elements are more interesting, and benefit from a series; Moon's and the reader's longterm investment in Raksura society, the domestic intimacy of the court, is compelling and nuanced; I wish it got more of the spotlight. This is an adequate adventure novel with more interesting things going on under the surface—still not quite my thing, but it's enough to keep me reading.
Title: The Devotion of Suspect X (Detective Galileo Book 3)
Author: Keigo Higashino
Translator: Alexander O. Smith
Narrator: David Pittu
Published: Macmillan Audio, 2011
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 355
Total Page Count: 269,830
Text Number: 874
Read Because: personal enjoyment, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: After a woman kills her ex-husband, a neighbor steps in to help her conceal the crime. This premise, building a crime novel around an established murder, is engaging; the emphasizes the aftermath, which creates a unique tension and upsets much of the genre's predictable pacing. The narrative plays a coy but relatively fair game regarding what it does or doesn't show the reader; the final reveals make sense and have an effective weight. The tone can be hit or miss—the internal vs. external view of Ishigami is well-rendered, but the intellectual, sometimes-distant narrative doesn't quite hold up to the heightened emotion of the final scenes. This is competent and compelling; I normally don't go in for novel-length mysteries, but enjoyed this one.
Title: The Alleluia Files (Samaria Book 3)
Author: Sharon Shinn
Published: Ace, 1999 (1998)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 460
Total Page Count: 270,290
Text Number: 875
Read Because: continuing the series, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: The persecution of a small group who believes Jovah is not a god but a machine may finally expose the truth of Samaria's origin. This runs a risk in rehashing so much of the previous book's revelations—it's difficult to be invested in the protagonists's discoveries and doubts when they're not only obvious to the reader (as they've been throughout the series) but also when they're so familiar. The social implications of these revelations is more interesting, and can fill a book—but would benefit from less hammy antagonist, to compliment the ambiguity of the larger world. And yet, despite caveats, I still find this & the series compelling. The part of me that hoped for a queer romance (the first "spark" is between two women—sisters, of course) is forever unsurprised but disappointed; still, while I don't especially care for the romances, the speculative-cum-romance combination creates an emotive personal focus within an engaging wider world; it's consumable stuff.
Author: Martha Wells
Published: Night Shade Books, 2012
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 340
Total Page Count: 269,475
Text Number: 873
Read Because: continuing the series, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: The Indigo Cloud court returns to their ancestral home, only to find it in danger. This feels remarkably like a D&D campaign in structure: a quest for a MacGuffin with predictable adventure pacing and an emphasis on problem-solving and fraught social encounters. This works best in the later acts, and does a particularly good job of conveying the exhaustion of the protracted final conflict; there's also some great setpieces like the massive tree village and the organic underbelly of the leviathan city. But the social elements are more interesting, and benefit from a series; Moon's and the reader's longterm investment in Raksura society, the domestic intimacy of the court, is compelling and nuanced; I wish it got more of the spotlight. This is an adequate adventure novel with more interesting things going on under the surface—still not quite my thing, but it's enough to keep me reading.
Title: The Devotion of Suspect X (Detective Galileo Book 3)
Author: Keigo Higashino
Translator: Alexander O. Smith
Narrator: David Pittu
Published: Macmillan Audio, 2011
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 355
Total Page Count: 269,830
Text Number: 874
Read Because: personal enjoyment, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: After a woman kills her ex-husband, a neighbor steps in to help her conceal the crime. This premise, building a crime novel around an established murder, is engaging; the emphasizes the aftermath, which creates a unique tension and upsets much of the genre's predictable pacing. The narrative plays a coy but relatively fair game regarding what it does or doesn't show the reader; the final reveals make sense and have an effective weight. The tone can be hit or miss—the internal vs. external view of Ishigami is well-rendered, but the intellectual, sometimes-distant narrative doesn't quite hold up to the heightened emotion of the final scenes. This is competent and compelling; I normally don't go in for novel-length mysteries, but enjoyed this one.
Title: The Alleluia Files (Samaria Book 3)
Author: Sharon Shinn
Published: Ace, 1999 (1998)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 460
Total Page Count: 270,290
Text Number: 875
Read Because: continuing the series, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: The persecution of a small group who believes Jovah is not a god but a machine may finally expose the truth of Samaria's origin. This runs a risk in rehashing so much of the previous book's revelations—it's difficult to be invested in the protagonists's discoveries and doubts when they're not only obvious to the reader (as they've been throughout the series) but also when they're so familiar. The social implications of these revelations is more interesting, and can fill a book—but would benefit from less hammy antagonist, to compliment the ambiguity of the larger world. And yet, despite caveats, I still find this & the series compelling. The part of me that hoped for a queer romance (the first "spark" is between two women—sisters, of course) is forever unsurprised but disappointed; still, while I don't especially care for the romances, the speculative-cum-romance combination creates an emotive personal focus within an engaging wider world; it's consumable stuff.
