books? I guess I have read things?
Nov. 10th, 2020 10:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraA bunch of things have been happening but I am still also reading things.
A Deadly Education, Naomi Novik, 2020. I have already talked about this book a bunch with actual live people (!!) which has somewhat disincentivized me to write a review. But I will try, if only for my own records when I read the next one next year and have to remember what the hell I thought about this one. So, hey, future self, I liked it a lot - fast-paced, super page-turney, clever in a bunch of ways - and I can't wait to read the rest of the trilogy. It's pretty impressive how Novik has managed to write a book that is so clearly and overtly Harry Potter fanfic that it distracts from it secretly being Transformers fanfic - I didn't think about Transformers at all while reading it, despite having read all her relevant fic, and yet once it was pointed out to me it was like *oh*. That's some excellent authorial slight of hand. Sorry if that is spoilers. While I'm sharing spoilers, btw, I had somewhere picked up the false impression that this book was supposed to center a f/f romance, and was thrown by het developments - I mention this only in case anyone else has somehow gotten that bad intel (which I cannot for the life of me find again, so for all I know this happened in a dream or something); I think it would have been more fun if I hadn't wrongfooted myself, so, free spoiler. (If anyone is upset by my spoiler choices here, please let me know for future reference.)
Peasprout Chen: Battle of Champions, Henry Lien, 2019. Sequel to the first Peasprout Chen book discussed here. I think the idea of what Lien is doing with these is really neat and yet I was not all that into this book. I felt like he dropped the ball on the interesting relationship dynamics he'd set up at the end of the last one, and I just wasn't invested enough in the characters. The action is so cool though! So inventive! It would make the best anime! The end of this book seems to set up a third book, but I don't know if there's actually going to be one.
A Deadly Education, Naomi Novik, 2020. I have already talked about this book a bunch with actual live people (!!) which has somewhat disincentivized me to write a review. But I will try, if only for my own records when I read the next one next year and have to remember what the hell I thought about this one. So, hey, future self, I liked it a lot - fast-paced, super page-turney, clever in a bunch of ways - and I can't wait to read the rest of the trilogy. It's pretty impressive how Novik has managed to write a book that is so clearly and overtly Harry Potter fanfic that it distracts from it secretly being Transformers fanfic - I didn't think about Transformers at all while reading it, despite having read all her relevant fic, and yet once it was pointed out to me it was like *oh*. That's some excellent authorial slight of hand. Sorry if that is spoilers. While I'm sharing spoilers, btw, I had somewhere picked up the false impression that this book was supposed to center a f/f romance, and was thrown by het developments - I mention this only in case anyone else has somehow gotten that bad intel (which I cannot for the life of me find again, so for all I know this happened in a dream or something); I think it would have been more fun if I hadn't wrongfooted myself, so, free spoiler. (If anyone is upset by my spoiler choices here, please let me know for future reference.)
Peasprout Chen: Battle of Champions, Henry Lien, 2019. Sequel to the first Peasprout Chen book discussed here. I think the idea of what Lien is doing with these is really neat and yet I was not all that into this book. I felt like he dropped the ball on the interesting relationship dynamics he'd set up at the end of the last one, and I just wasn't invested enough in the characters. The action is so cool though! So inventive! It would make the best anime! The end of this book seems to set up a third book, but I don't know if there's actually going to be one.
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Date: 2020-11-11 06:39 am (UTC)