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nile's review against another edition
challenging
mysterious
medium-paced
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
Difficult, wonderful far-future sf.
graculus's review against another edition
3.0
I have a feeling Liquid Crystal Nightingale is going to be one of those books that other people rave about but that leaves me cold - it's not badly written, it just didn't really do anything for me and I ended up skimming the last quarter of it to see if anything actually got resolved (which it didn't, as far as I could see).
It's written from three points of view, the first being that of Pleo, who is the child of the only survivor of a mining accident, who ends up being framed for the murder of her much-wealthier classmate. Our second point of view is that of Marsh and, to be honest, I wasn't 100% sure what he was up to even by the end of the book - he may have been a revolutionary of some kind, I'm not really certain. Our third point of view character is the man tasked with investigating the crime of which Pleo is accused and he has his own issues with the bureaucracy within which he functions and where he remains still an outsider.
All of this is set in a very hierarchical society and the blurb says that this murder/accident, depending on whose perspective you go from, sets off a chain of events that threatens this. The only problem is that (unless I'm missing the end of the book) it doesn't really seem to do that at all - the storyline just stops with what appears to be a terrorist attack on the head of one of these powerful families.
Part of the problem was that I didn't really give a damn about any of these characters and so their survival (or otherwise) failed to move me. If I hadn't been looking to review this book, I'm not completely certain I would have read it through to the end and it just didn't engage me in any meaningful way. Disappointing, considering that the author can apparently string a good sentence together, to see such possibility ending up a bit half-baked.
I received a copy of this book for free from Netgalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
It's written from three points of view, the first being that of Pleo, who is the child of the only survivor of a mining accident, who ends up being framed for the murder of her much-wealthier classmate. Our second point of view is that of Marsh and, to be honest, I wasn't 100% sure what he was up to even by the end of the book - he may have been a revolutionary of some kind, I'm not really certain. Our third point of view character is the man tasked with investigating the crime of which Pleo is accused and he has his own issues with the bureaucracy within which he functions and where he remains still an outsider.
All of this is set in a very hierarchical society and the blurb says that this murder/accident, depending on whose perspective you go from, sets off a chain of events that threatens this. The only problem is that (unless I'm missing the end of the book) it doesn't really seem to do that at all - the storyline just stops with what appears to be a terrorist attack on the head of one of these powerful families.
Part of the problem was that I didn't really give a damn about any of these characters and so their survival (or otherwise) failed to move me. If I hadn't been looking to review this book, I'm not completely certain I would have read it through to the end and it just didn't engage me in any meaningful way. Disappointing, considering that the author can apparently string a good sentence together, to see such possibility ending up a bit half-baked.
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