Reviews and Comments

I realize this is a children's book, but it seems to me this is a book about children. Or the idle rich. So far nobody seems to do anything like "work".

This is more of a fun read than the Broken Earth series. Probably correspondingly less rewarding in the end. I think it could almost qualify as YA, as long as your idea of YA includes some (tasteful) sexual content.

Race and privilege are part of the setting in a way that feels quite natural. One thing I liked is that the mechanics of magic and interaction with gods also feels quite natural. It can be challenging to construct plots with such powerful characters who still face challenges and conflicts. It does get a bit Deus Ex Machina at the end (the plot device, not the video game). On the other hand, at least the rest of the book was about gods, so it is less jarring than it could be.

It's probably because I recently read Akata Warrior by Nnedi Okorafor, but at first I thought the (to me) African-American sounding voicing of some of the characters (very noticable in the audiobook, but I think some of it is in the writing too) was making points about those characters. After listening a bit more I think the point is that there is no point, this is just how (some) people talk.

The backstory. readbytiffany.com/2020/11/15/everything-you-need-to-know-before-you-read-the-poppy-war-by-r-f-kuang/

I remember being entranced by this book when I was (much) younger. Apparently sometime in the last few decades I got less patient. At 600 plus pages, or in my case 27 plus hours of audiobook narration, it really is an endurance event. I can only hope the movie is not produced by Peter Jackson. There are some amusing bits, but there also seemed to me to be many wild loops of narrative that didn't really go anywhere. Similary some of the characters have the potential to be interesting, but perhaps because their number, they didn't really engage me.

Phew, I made it.

Homework for the Nebula winner.

It's been sitting on my desk for several years. All faded from the sun now. Perhaps I should actually read it.

This is an important book, and also good. That's my review.

Aside from the making the history of the Holocaust real, it also made me think about graphic novels as an art form. It's interesting how the drawings can fill various "tonal" aspects of the story, while the words can be quite spare.

On the surface a police procedural, but really more a character study. It nonetheless held this lazy readers attention all the way through. At the big reveal (which isn't what you think is the big reveal), I put the book down and and exclaimed something like "Oh wow, that's a bit too much".

I want to read the next in the series, but I need a break first.

At first I thought it was ridiculously overwritten, but I'm settling in.

This is space opera in the sense of being about a grand sweep of imagined history.

You probably wouldn't start the series here. If you did you would miss some references to previous books, but the book would overall make sense.

One nice thing about the Revelation space books is that the "sufficiently advanced technology a.k.a. magic" is about working around the limitations of physics, not pretending they don't exist. That means that there is consequences for travel across long distances, which gives the book a kind of "Homeric voyage" texture.

Okorafor constructs a very thought provoking story about identity and insider-vs-outsider without being preachy. There are many different kinds of identity in the book: magical leopard vs non-magical lamb, albino vs "normal", african vs. african-american, Igbo vs. Yoruba. It would be easy to take the albino girl as a metaphor about race, and I think that's true, but it's more subtle and rich than that.

The description of the food made me hungry, and overall the setting of modern Nigeria felt very real. Not without its problems, but a place that one could identify as home with real affection.

The characters also felt real in the sense that they were not just board markers for the fantasy plot but had internal lives.

Available for "free" (in exchange for submitting an email address) download for the next few days from ebookclub.tor.com/

EDIT: after posting I realized it is restricted to US / Canada. Welp, I guess I might not have posted if I saw that the first time.

I remember enjoying this a long time ago, before the author's politics had a chance to annoy me. Picked up a $5 audiobook, going to give it another shot.