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kristensushi's review against another edition
5.0
Fantastic description, beautiful prose, a fascinating plot, and excellent characters.
blairconrad's review against another edition
3.0
Interesting, and generally likeable, main characters, but there wasn't really enough depth in the story for me to become that involved. A pleasant diversion.
sarahbethbrown's review against another edition
michael chabon is my favorite author (kavalier and clay, the yiddish policemen's union, that children's baseball book...) but i cannot finish this. it has been "currently-reading" since it came out last fall, and it's only like 150 pages. 150 unreadable pages.
abbywdan's review against another edition
1.0
Um, I gave up on this. Seriously, it's like 100 pages long with pictures, and I was so bored that I quit. Ouch.
lekoweko's review against another edition
4.0
I think I prefer Chabon in this way, in a small, fun and lively dose.
fictionjunky's review against another edition
2.0
meh. Michael, you're losing it. You had it with simple stories about complex people in complex situations. Then all of a sudden, you're doing your best Neal Stephenson impression. I just saw "Tyson," today, so I will steal his quote: "The Past is history, the future is a mystery." Write more towards a future. Anyone's future. Just please write toward driving the narrative, and stop over explaining the damn thing.
rbreade's review against another edition
Dedicated to Michael Moorcock, to whose Elric stories, as well as to Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser tales, this novel functions as a love letter--with one difference. Whereas both Moorcock and Leiber wrote within the sword and sorcery subgenre of fantasy, Chabon opts for swords sans sorcery in this story set ca. 950 CE in that area between the Black and Caspian Seas.
The language is suitably rococo, with Chabon successfully taking on some of the tone often found in such tales of swashbuckling and derring-do, though because this is Chabon, said language is uniformly fresher than is usually encountered in either fantasy or science fiction.
Two examples among many to demonstrate what I mean by rococo and fresh:
At one point, a young man is described as "a would-be sharp operator who lacked for the satisfaction of his ambition only the quality of sharpness and who expended all his energies...on preserving his opinions from contamination by experience."
Elsewhere: "The agent only nodded his head and smiled a Radanite smile, which was not a smile at all but rather a promissory note to deliver one at some unspecified future date."
The language is suitably rococo, with Chabon successfully taking on some of the tone often found in such tales of swashbuckling and derring-do, though because this is Chabon, said language is uniformly fresher than is usually encountered in either fantasy or science fiction.
Two examples among many to demonstrate what I mean by rococo and fresh:
At one point, a young man is described as "a would-be sharp operator who lacked for the satisfaction of his ambition only the quality of sharpness and who expended all his energies...on preserving his opinions from contamination by experience."
Elsewhere: "The agent only nodded his head and smiled a Radanite smile, which was not a smile at all but rather a promissory note to deliver one at some unspecified future date."
cassie_grace's review against another edition
3.0
A fun short novel with the working title of Jews With Swords. Takes place in an interesting setting that I'm very unfamiliar with, Jewish Khazaria. Interesting protagonists, particularly Zelikman, a Frankish Jew and a surgeon, who has the most fascinating character arc.
charsiew21's review against another edition
4.0
(note: read in audiobook form)
Jews with swords! Chabon has an extremely pleasing turn of phrase, which he uses to great effect in this most entertaining book. His description of a character's attempt to mount a moving horse made me laugh out loud, which I rarely do with books.
Jews with swords! Chabon has an extremely pleasing turn of phrase, which he uses to great effect in this most entertaining book. His description of a character's attempt to mount a moving horse made me laugh out loud, which I rarely do with books.