Finished reading:
Six wakes by Mur Lafferty. This was ... this was not a bad read, but it was not a good read. Six clones wake up in new bodies, in the spaceship they remember boarding. Their previous bodies are floating around in the zero-gravity, murdered. It’s such a great set up! But I cannot emphasise enough just how much these characters are just names walking around on a page. The back stories are somewhat interesting (enough to tip me over into finishing, anyhow), the world building teeters somewhat and on balance remains standing, buuut. But. The author really hasn’t done any of her characters justice. There’s waaay too much headhopping, and we’re so distanced it’s hard to tell whose eyes we’re seeing through, and the sentence structure is just...horribly stilted and mechanical. The ideas were great, and maybe if you're deeply into plot and don't care about characters then this is Your Book, buuut, it feel sorely lacking to me. I feel like they deserved either a better author, or an author later in their career who could handle multiple characters better.
I’m doubly disappointed, tbh, because I had this idea that Mur Lafferty was ... I’m sure they’re an excellent person, so I’m struggling to find the words. A writers of higher skill than this work suggests.
Currently reading:
La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman. This continues to be a gentle, quiet delight, even with the introduction of a scary fascist religious take-over group. This is written from a sensitive eleven year old’s eyelevel, with the assurance and competency of an adult steering the narration, and I love it so quietly much.
Summer in Orcus by Ursula Vernon. [Pre-read]I think I’ve tried to read the opening of this several times online, and lightly bounced off it each time. Looking forward to settling in with a physical copy and giving it another go (thanks![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fred_mouse!)
[60-ish pages in]Physical book was definitely the trick – this is also a delight, and choosing between the two for voting is going to suck. I love Summer and the as yet unnamed weasel. (Heads up for the parental anxiety type that is verging on emotional abuse in part of the first chapter)
Up next:
And Then There Were (N-One), by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny, Mar-Apr 2017) (full text in the link, says file770) Just realised there was a free novella in the list.
Six wakes by Mur Lafferty. This was ... this was not a bad read, but it was not a good read. Six clones wake up in new bodies, in the spaceship they remember boarding. Their previous bodies are floating around in the zero-gravity, murdered. It’s such a great set up! But I cannot emphasise enough just how much these characters are just names walking around on a page. The back stories are somewhat interesting (enough to tip me over into finishing, anyhow), the world building teeters somewhat and on balance remains standing, buuut. But. The author really hasn’t done any of her characters justice. There’s waaay too much headhopping, and we’re so distanced it’s hard to tell whose eyes we’re seeing through, and the sentence structure is just...horribly stilted and mechanical. The ideas were great, and maybe if you're deeply into plot and don't care about characters then this is Your Book, buuut, it feel sorely lacking to me. I feel like they deserved either a better author, or an author later in their career who could handle multiple characters better.
I’m doubly disappointed, tbh, because I had this idea that Mur Lafferty was ... I’m sure they’re an excellent person, so I’m struggling to find the words. A writers of higher skill than this work suggests.
Currently reading:
La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman. This continues to be a gentle, quiet delight, even with the introduction of a scary fascist religious take-over group. This is written from a sensitive eleven year old’s eyelevel, with the assurance and competency of an adult steering the narration, and I love it so quietly much.
Summer in Orcus by Ursula Vernon. [Pre-read]I think I’ve tried to read the opening of this several times online, and lightly bounced off it each time. Looking forward to settling in with a physical copy and giving it another go (thanks
fred_mouse!)[60-ish pages in]Physical book was definitely the trick – this is also a delight, and choosing between the two for voting is going to suck. I love Summer and the as yet unnamed weasel. (Heads up for the parental anxiety type that is verging on emotional abuse in part of the first chapter)
Up next:
And Then There Were (N-One), by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny, Mar-Apr 2017) (full text in the link, says file770) Just realised there was a free novella in the list.