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3.58 AVERAGE
3.58 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
emotional
funny
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
That... Was a very strange book and I'm not sure how I feel about it. I couldn't stop reading it, so there's thAt. And sometimes I was confused as fuck, which was less great. I dunno. Also it somehow reminded me a lot -- sometimes too much -- of The Magicians, but also also it was mad original. I feel very best of times/worst of times about this one.
adventurous
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
dark
emotional
funny
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
challenging
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
It started out with so much potential, but the characters and story were shitty and boring. I gave it 2 stars instead of 1 because there were a few sentences that made me laugh.
listened at 1.5x speed at work
I liked it enough to finish but...I have the same issues I had with City in the Middle of the Night. The characters change from moment to moment, feeling more like they're being dragged by the plot than moving it. Cool elements and plots that dont get developed as much as I'd like in favor of writing about characters' emotions that I frankly didnt care about. The writing style is certainly very distinctive. I DID want to shake them when
I did quite like the birds tho
I liked it enough to finish but...I have the same issues I had with City in the Middle of the Night. The characters change from moment to moment, feeling more like they're being dragged by the plot than moving it. Cool elements and plots that dont get developed as much as I'd like in favor of writing about characters' emotions that I frankly didnt care about. The writing style is certainly very distinctive. I DID want to shake them when
Spoiler
they ended up falling in love with each other. I wouldn't want to fall in love with someone who knew me in middle school, blehI did quite like the birds tho
If the kids from The Magicians had a nemesis, and that nemesis was Kim Stanley Robinson... oh and everyone was incredibly callous.
While I like the writing style this book was really frustrating to read. So many things don’t matter in this book it drove me nuts. The proclivity where actual important information is dropped casually and is often nonsense drove me bananas. Often times information the characters are privy to isn’t explained about another character until much later in the book. I think it’s supposed to wet your appetite until you get that information but it was done so frequently I just honestly didn’t care or was annoyed when dropped. Like hinting at Ernesto’s condition and then casually dropping it.
The plot felt really haphazard and there was basically no through line of themes, or they just didn’t hit and felt like they were tied into later, again casually and in passing. Made it seem like 75% of the book is just there for no real reason.
There’s lots of pop culture references and stylistic languages similar to The Magicians. Swearing and jargon and nerd references. But while Magicians does this to kind of ground the fiction in a way that says ‘this could be our world now and we wouldn’t know it’, there is no internal logic to this world at all.
There is some charm in how the world is expressed through the characters but it gets less charming and more frustrating about halfway in when it feels more like someone just wanted to throw some cool shit in without explanation, while swapping to the lives of the two main characters that, again, are pretty much just bloated with stuff that I GUESS would throw you off what the book is about and or headed? But instead just completely undermines any semblance of stakes or plot that the book attempts.
All this is to say, this book is not for me, apparently.
The plot felt really haphazard and there was basically no through line of themes, or they just didn’t hit and felt like they were tied into later, again casually and in passing. Made it seem like 75% of the book is just there for no real reason.
There’s lots of pop culture references and stylistic languages similar to The Magicians. Swearing and jargon and nerd references. But while Magicians does this to kind of ground the fiction in a way that says ‘this could be our world now and we wouldn’t know it’, there is no internal logic to this world at all.
There is some charm in how the world is expressed through the characters but it gets less charming and more frustrating about halfway in when it feels more like someone just wanted to throw some cool shit in without explanation, while swapping to the lives of the two main characters that, again, are pretty much just bloated with stuff that I GUESS would throw you off what the book is about and or headed? But instead just completely undermines any semblance of stakes or plot that the book attempts.
All this is to say, this book is not for me, apparently.