tsunni's reviews
303 reviews

I devoured this so quickly. This isn’t a quick or light read, in fact it felt a bit slow quite a lot of the time, but I liked it so much I couldn’t stop. 

The main character Cazaril is a broken, beaten down man prematurely aged past his 30s by his experiences, and we spend a lot of time with his thoughts looking backwards and inwards. There’s such a richness to this introspection the story lingers on, and to the layers of meaning in every interaction with the other characters in the story; like Iselle and Betriz, younger headstrong intelligent women who manage to explode with personality, intelligence, and energy in a restrictive medieval culture. All of the characters, even the minor ones, seem to have their own earned, interesting history that would only take a little tugging to reveal.

The world feels so lived in and full of realistic complexity, especially religion, which takes more of a center stage about halfway through the book. I love how Bujold writes and she makes the world really vivid and so saturated with history; the story makes religion center stage by about halfway through, and all of how it's interwoven with everyone's roles, actions, rituals, and language is seamless and believable. 

This is self contained and really enjoyable as its own complete story; later books take place in the same world but they're all supposed to be mostly standalone. I hear Paladin of Souls is even better; really looking forward to that.

I saw a comparison of this to Ninth House and A Deadly Education. This book isn’t anywhere even near those. To its credit, it has a super creative magic system, and a very well done suffocating atmosphere (that was on purpose right?). However it’s filled with obstinate, annoying characters who refuse to communicate clearly with each other, an overused trope to artificially insert drama and tension that really wasn’t necessary; the book was about a couple hundred pages much too long. Between the moon phase based magic and the dark rituals and the connection to a fictional story within the story, this had a lot going for it; unfortunately the writing failed to do anything interesting or good with those and drowns you in tropey drama instead. 

I was recommended this years ago; without that recommendation I probably wouldn't have finished.

To its credit, I think the core story is written very well for a testosterone action fest. Strip away all that I don't like about it and the writing and action do a really good job drawing me in while being easy to breeze through. The characters all serve their purpose and mostly feel generally unique, although very obvious and tropey; forgivable when I remember this was written in the 90s. The pacing and plot builds up nicely to a satisfying climax, and we get nice wrapup near the end that cleans up loose threads well. It's aged acceptably; it pushes boundaries in ways I don't like, and some of the characterizations are definitely very 90s titillation, but I don't think it does anything so unacceptable that you can't push through even now.

That being said, I feel like this is exactly the kind of grimdark that I dislike; take away most of it and the story isn't affected. None of the terrible content warning acts that are flippantly thrown at you as setting or background noise, not the storage containers of limbs and blood and guts or any scenes involving gore of various sorts, none of the terrible torturous acts performed on each other, sliding bodies through giant statues with sexual organs, the sexual predator/murderous inner thoughts of certain pov characters; none of it was necessary or had any impact on the plot. As I read I was constantly asking "why? what does this add to the story or the characters?" I don't think there was a good answer even once, and this was the book's biggest flaw. Maybe things were different back when it was written, but now I don't feel like there's any excuse to have this level of gratuitous content just to have it. 

I honestly didn't even hate the book or felt any strong emotions toward it at the end; I just finished it feeling puzzled by it. I don't think this is a book I could recommend to anyone, because every genre it represents has a better choice someplace else. There's grimdark with better characterization where the grimdark has meaning and relevance; there's testosterone action fest hero's journey stories that don't pad with shock and awe and have better side characters and action scenes; there's a very swamped field of isekai and transported-to-other-world stories, and plenty of dystopian future fiction to pick from. Look elsewhere

I found this informative and the stories meaningful, and overall well written. I felt sad for how young the authors were when they had their realizations about being “other” (“People of the Greater Majority” in her terms); I remember having a similar realization that I wasn’t “white” early in grade school. 

I’m not the target audience of the book (the personal stories and lessons are focused on school life and would be most relevant to students) but I appreciated how informative it was, especially earlier chapters focused on definitions and overview. I can definitely recommend this and probably will to close friends with young kids.

A hard book to read but a very impactful one. Many of the stark horrors of WWII are shown (all the content warnings you can imagine do apply). The stories of heroic resistance, both quiet and explicit, and the characters and their relationships, are well written and emotionally rending; have some emotional strength saved up for this story.

Fictional but based on real heroines. I’ve been exposed to a lot of male American centric viewpoints of WWII; seeing things from the viewpoint of French women was a welcome change and really informative.

I haven't read many short story collections with multiple authors and I found I had zero guilt skipping stories I disliked and enjoying the ones I liked, which made this a refreshing, easy read. The stories ranged from ones I loved that prompted me to add the author's books to my to-read pile, to a few that I either couldn't finish or really disliked (and to-read pile removals!). All involved dragons, and it was interesting seeing how authors differed in their interpretation and use.

It was also nice to experience some popular authors' prose in short form before tackling their big novels, as I realized I probably wouldn't enjoy them for writing style reasons and don't have to prioritize spending time or money on them (sorry Ken Liu/Garth Nix, maybe one day).

I think the majority were at least likeable, and it's worth checking this collection out.

Some stories that stood out to me:

Fascinating, very data driven look at biases across multiple facets of our daily lives from personal to professional, cultural, community, national politics, everywhere. The numbers are presented very straightforwardly with references and not much unsupported conjecture, which is fantastic; the numbers speak for themselves and the picture it paints isn’t great. A lot of the time the author points out where data is missing as a result of these biases, which I appreciated a lot. I also appreciated how many different areas she explored; there’s a part of practically everyone’s life touched on in this, which makes it relevant across the board.

There’s a lot of data here; 25% of the book is references. I like it a lot and think there’s a lot of fascinating parts to explore and discuss, but set aside some extra time for it because it’s not a quick easy read and can be pretty dense.

What can I say? Last book of a long LN series I’ve read from book 1. Love the world and the characters, especially Myne and all the people she loves, and I have post series depression seeing it end. But there’s fanbooks and short story collections to read, and potential future sequels to wait for (Miya Kazuki plz)

Objectively by novel standards terribly paced and written and structured; but Light Novels aren’t really meant to be judged by normal novel standards. I love it anyway but recommendation wise you know what you’re getting

A bit of a letdown compared to book 1. Still love the worldbuilding and the characters, but the story feels really rushed in how it wraps up. I would've loved another book or just more time spent in this one building toward the finale. Wraps up ok though and I still think a lot of the ideas are really fun in this one, and I'll miss reading about Io, Biana, Edei, and the whole cast.

Tough to rate. This book frustrated me enough that I took a full day off from it. I loved the first two books but this one threw me off the ride partway through and I never managed to re-engage fully. Unfortunately it retroactively made the whole trilogy less enjoyable for me.

The good: the world and events are as imaginative and creative as before. The characters remain engaging on the surface. The story generally wraps up.

What I didn’t like: there’s a level of internal consistency for both plot and characters that got broken. I started to notice how plot twists would occur that would be glossed over quickly, that very competent and consistent characters would seemingly break character to move past while handling other situations much more directly. I understand suspension of disbelief and creating tension, but once I started seeing the cracks I couldn’t stop feeling that characters got railroaded for sake of moving the plot forward. This would not have been as much of a problem if I didn’t feel like the first two books were so much more consistent; though in retrospect I think the same problems did exist to some extent. The addition of some really big scifi trope contrivances on top served to jumped the shark fully, and I found myself finishing just to finish and not enjoying things very much. 

I kinda wish I had stopped after book two and moved on. My disappointment is probably much stronger for how much I loved Naira and Tarq in the previous books.