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Tak!

Tak@reading.taks.garden

Joined 3 years, 7 months ago

I like to read

Non-bookposting: @Tak@glitch.taks.garden

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Days of Shattered Faith (2024) 4 stars

Welcome to Alkhalend, Jewel of the Waters, capital of Usmai, greatest of the Successor States, …

Days of Shattered Faith

4 stars

Days of Shattered Faith does feel like a proper sequel to House of Open Wounds. It brings back a bunch of interesting characters from earlier installments, but also introduces some fun fresh faces.

This time around, we're dealing with diplomatic imperialism, integration, and free will, again through a lens of magic, gods, and demons.

It's a solid story, and I'd be interested to follow some of the characters a while longer and see what they get up to.

House of Open Wounds (2023, Head of Zeus) 5 stars

City-by-city, kingdom-by-kingdom, the Palleseen have sworn to bring Perfection and Correctness to an imperfect world. …

House of Open Wounds

4 stars

This feels like a big departure from the previous book. The first one was kind of a set of slices of life from a weird fantasy city under occupation, and this one follows one of the characters into an army field hospital.

The main theme seems to be exploration of what it would look like to attempt to rules-lawyer a world with magic, gods, and demons.

I enjoyed it, but I didn't get a real sense of continuity from City of Last Chances - they're essentially two distinct novels set in the same world.

Silver Nitrate (Paperback, 2023, Random House Large Print) 4 stars

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Daughter of Doctor Moreau and Mexican …

Silver Nitrate

4 stars

This one takes a while to get going - after several chapters, I was convinced that this was going to be a slice-of-life novel about the glory days of the mexican movie industry as seen from the 90s. (Which it is not (I mean, it is, but there's also more))

It reminds me quite a lot of The Skeleton Key(2005), in a good way.

Good characters; fun, creepy, twisty plot; unique setting.

Blade of Dream

4 stars

Blade of Dream is a very good sequel to Age of Ash. Instead of continuing the events from the previous book, it tells the story of different characters during the same time period. There are only a few points where events overlap, so it doesn't give that "ugh, I'm just reading a different flavor of the same story again" feeling that you can get from this approach.

I found it especially interesting that one of the main characters in Blade of Dream was a very marginal character in Age of Ash that one of the narrative characters had dismissed as a silly girl with no real agency (and thus the reader implicitly seeing her that way as well), and seeing the stark contrast here.

Luxorian is a dragon without a rider, and that's a problem.

Since ancient times, dragons …

Space Dragons: Luxorian's Crew

5 stars

Space Dragons: Luxorian's Crew is first and foremost a novella about space dragons, or at least one particular space dragon.

However, it is also about recovering from abusive relationships, building a family, doing and being more than others believe you can, and thriving in a universe where everything is built for beings of different sizes, shapes, and abilities.

If any of this resonates with you, or even if you're just in the mood for a wonderfully-written, bite-sized space opera, go and read Space Dragons: Luxorian's Crew! Space Dragons!

Dirt Town (2022, Macmillan Publishers Limited) 4 stars

When twelve-year-old Esther disappears on the way home from school in a small town in …

Dirt Town

4 stars

This is a novel so Australian that it goes from Milo to "no worries" to lamington in the course of a single paragraph.

Apart from that, it's kind of a typical crime novel following the investigation of a young teenage girl's disappearance.

The most interesting thing it does, in my opinion, is, among the chapters following various characters' viewpoints, adding "we" chapters that are meant to be kind of a combined viewpoint of the town's kids.