28th November, 2008
3 Tales for the Price of 2. Black Friday Edition.
Three new books for you today. Going from worst to best (and the last one is really, really good).
Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi.
I have to admit that I’m not a huge fan of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series. I find the writing overly simplistic and a bit lacking in depth, however, The Android’s Dream was decent enough and his blog Whatever is often times amusing and even, gasp, insightful, so I figured I’d give his third installment in the OMW universe a shot.
As expected, it pretty much follows the same style as the rest of the OMW series, with the story expanding upon some goings-on between the 2nd and 3rd OMW books. At this point, I’d be happy to say this is classic Scalzi and if you like that kind of thing, good, but otherwise I’m giving it a 3.5/5 gogs and leave it at that. BUT, there is one big issue I have with this book: he framed it from the point-of-view of a teenage girl, which makes sense since it turns out that he and his publisher have decided that this book should be targeted at the young adult audience. “OK, so it’s a YA novel”, you say, “that’s no biggie.” Well, this would be true if it weren’t for a couple of things, namely, that they use the same cover artist for this book as in previous OMW covers and I didn’t find this book in the YA section, I found it in the (adult) Sci-Fi section. These two things make it seem like the book would be intended for an “adult” audience and if you picked it up expecting just such a thing, you’d be in for a disappointing surprise. I’m not perusing books in SF/F looking for tales of omg, like, so cute boys and the, like, total unfairness of adults and how they so don’t understand things.
Skip it unless you’re a die-hard Scalzi fan or you have a YA reader in your life – they’d probably enjoy it quite a bit.
2.5/5 gogs.
The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson.
“What, what??”, you’re saying, “another Sanderson book even though you tarred and feathered his last one?” Well, yes. Mostly because my reading stack is growing precipitously small, but also because he did have a couple of winners in Mistborn and Elantris. Mr. Sanderson wraps up the Mistborn trilogy in this third installment and manages to redeem himself as a worthwhile fantasy writer. Endless rambling was truncated or even non-existent. The book was fairly fast paced with a lot going on and he neatly tied up the loose ends in unexpected, yet plausible, ways. Even the ending was better than average. If you made it through book 2, you should definitely reward yourself by checking out the third.
4/5 gogs.
Last Argument of Kings by Joe Abercrombie.
Hmm, how to describe this one. I’ve been very positive with Mr. Abercrombie’s books in the past so let’s not downplay things and just call the ending of The First Law trilogy as EPIC. Seriously, if you enjoyed the first two books at all, this one will make you mess your pants. My wife even had to remind me a couple of times to turn out the damn light and go to bed if I know what’s good for me; that’s how engrossing Last Argument of Kings is. I think one of the reasons I like Abercrombie’s characters so much is because they aren’t black and white. They all have flaws and can flow from good to neutral to evil and back again and despite this, they’re still very likeable. Also, the siege that takes takes place in the latter half of the book is truly marvelous. Peter Jackson would have a ball translating this to film. Very much recommended.
4.5/5 gogs.
Posted at 5:58 am | Comments (2)
