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wetdryvac's review
5.0
The afterword on this one, hinting at changes made: Damn, those changes worked well indeed. Bloody loved this one.
linluvsbooks's review
adventurous
dark
funny
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
Love and adore the A Girl and Her Fed comic and the Peng novel series is AMAZING. excellent story telling and world building. (This one is my fav of the 4 Peng novels to date because it has lots of Hope in it!)
kwugirl's review
3.0
This series is the rare automatic-purchase from me. The mystery/detective part is always pretty engrossing to me, and I so appreciate a world where you're not just always breathing in an assumption of the inferiority of anything that doesn't follow the progressive ideals of the Left.
terriaminute's review
I guess I have hit my limit with this author's clumsy backfilling of past events; the third or fourth instance in just a few pages would've made me through the book against a wall if it hadn't been an ebook. This many books into a series, I was hoping for improvement in this aspect of writing craft. But nope.
hteph's review
tense
fast-paced
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
efyoung's review
5.0
Some parts of Brute Force are funnier if you’re familiar with the rest of Spangler’s work. It’s probably an inevitable part of being the fourth installment in a series that is itself set in the five year gap between two narrative parts of a webcomic. But the thing that first struck me was a mention of gardening – any mention of yardwork becomes tragicomic when you’ve read about Spangler’s misadventures in rebuilding the Randall Jarrell house.
Spangler manages to stay topical and current in a sea of wildly varied emergent concerns. Every one of the Rachel Peng novels so far has tackled a facet of that, in addition to the difficulties of living as part of a hive mind and being a cyborg in general. One of the interesting issues with the hive mind - particularly a hive mind centered in DC - is that it manages to encompass a variety of political beliefs. The books are about politics, but don't particularly proselytize any one political view - except maybe the view that you probably shouldn't trust most politicians as far as you can throw them.
The pacing of this book starts with a bang and then just keeps rolling; one of my favorite things in suspense novels is when everything just keeps happening such that sleep becomes wildly elusive, and Brute Force delivers on that. Things just keep rolling in such a way that hints are dropped and missed just because there's too much else to do. I'll have to reread and see what I can pick up on a second pass - and Spangler's works take rereading well, so this is no hardship - because when I got to the end I wasn't expecting the reveal. It left me surprised and delighted, but now I want to hunt through for what I missed in terms of clues while I was distracted by militias and functionally psychic cyborgs.
Spangler manages to stay topical and current in a sea of wildly varied emergent concerns. Every one of the Rachel Peng novels so far has tackled a facet of that, in addition to the difficulties of living as part of a hive mind and being a cyborg in general. One of the interesting issues with the hive mind - particularly a hive mind centered in DC - is that it manages to encompass a variety of political beliefs. The books are about politics, but don't particularly proselytize any one political view - except maybe the view that you probably shouldn't trust most politicians as far as you can throw them.
The pacing of this book starts with a bang and then just keeps rolling; one of my favorite things in suspense novels is when everything just keeps happening such that sleep becomes wildly elusive, and Brute Force delivers on that. Things just keep rolling in such a way that hints are dropped and missed just because there's too much else to do. I'll have to reread and see what I can pick up on a second pass - and Spangler's works take rereading well, so this is no hardship - because when I got to the end I wasn't expecting the reveal. It left me surprised and delighted, but now I want to hunt through for what I missed in terms of clues while I was distracted by militias and functionally psychic cyborgs.
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