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hidekisohma's review against another edition
2.0
Man, i'm giving this book a 2 and that's GENEROUS.
I found this book for $2 at a Half price books, and honestly, i think i paid too much.
The cover looked pretty cool with a cyberpunk-ish bar and grill with aliens and robots. Spoiler warning. There are no aliens and robots. It's one of the most misleading covers i've ever seen in my life. I of course could forgive this if the book was good. Once again spoilers, it wasn't.
I shall do my best to explain the positives and negatives
Positives
- It was short.
That's it.
Now for the negatives.
1. I didn't care about a single character. they were incredibly interchangeable and half the time i didn't know who was speaking or care.
2. the author was just terrible at world building. This is supposed to be a bar and grill that travels through space and time. like a nuclear powered TARDIS. that premise sounds really cool. However, it hardly travels anywhere and almost the entire book takes place in a location that looks like french-canada. Very..exotic? The problem is, i didn't even KNOW it was supposed to look like french canada until about 1/3 of the way through when he flat out said so. The author was too busy playing music and name dropping songs (so bad that he actually has a legend in the back of the book that describes what songs he references there's so many) He'll talk about his and his pals' instruments for 3 pages and then jump right to the next event. no world building at all.
3. it was BARELY sci-fi. 90% of the book was just normal stuff like playing music or guns (regular guns not sci-fi). Barely any of it was related to sci-fi.
4. The romance aspect was shoe-horned in and felt unnecessary and forced due to the length of the book. You already have enough to do in a 220 page "sci-fi" book explaining the world, the mechanics, introducing 10+ main characters, create a problem and defeat the evil without adding a love interest. Not to mention your ridiculous amount of talking about your music. there just wasn't enough time and felt very tacked on.
I could keep listing, but i think you get the point. This book feels like to me like someone had a REALLY cool idea. like someone walked up to a publisher and went "hey, how about a book where a TARDIS is a diner?" and then after the publisher greenlit it, he then read it and went "oh....oh god this isn't what i wanted AT ALL" But it was too late and published it.
This has first draft written ALL over it. the First 1/3 is so boring and terrible, i nearly dropped it 70 pages in. But hearing it got better later, i pressed on, and the final 1/3 kept me to want to finish it. it ended up not being great, but it kept my interest enough to finish it. so there's that.
If i could give halves, this would ABSOLUTELY be a 1.5. However since i can't, i can't give it a 1 as i didn't actively HATE it, but it was not a good book and i didn't really enjoy hardly any of it. I can't understand people who would ever read this again as i could barely get through it once i was so bored for the first third.
2 out of 5 and that's a GIFT.
I found this book for $2 at a Half price books, and honestly, i think i paid too much.
The cover looked pretty cool with a cyberpunk-ish bar and grill with aliens and robots. Spoiler warning. There are no aliens and robots. It's one of the most misleading covers i've ever seen in my life. I of course could forgive this if the book was good. Once again spoilers, it wasn't.
I shall do my best to explain the positives and negatives
Positives
- It was short.
That's it.
Now for the negatives.
1. I didn't care about a single character. they were incredibly interchangeable and half the time i didn't know who was speaking or care.
2. the author was just terrible at world building. This is supposed to be a bar and grill that travels through space and time. like a nuclear powered TARDIS. that premise sounds really cool. However, it hardly travels anywhere and almost the entire book takes place in a location that looks like french-canada. Very..exotic? The problem is, i didn't even KNOW it was supposed to look like french canada until about 1/3 of the way through when he flat out said so. The author was too busy playing music and name dropping songs (so bad that he actually has a legend in the back of the book that describes what songs he references there's so many) He'll talk about his and his pals' instruments for 3 pages and then jump right to the next event. no world building at all.
3. it was BARELY sci-fi. 90% of the book was just normal stuff like playing music or guns (regular guns not sci-fi). Barely any of it was related to sci-fi.
4. The romance aspect was shoe-horned in and felt unnecessary and forced due to the length of the book. You already have enough to do in a 220 page "sci-fi" book explaining the world, the mechanics, introducing 10+ main characters, create a problem and defeat the evil without adding a love interest. Not to mention your ridiculous amount of talking about your music. there just wasn't enough time and felt very tacked on.
I could keep listing, but i think you get the point. This book feels like to me like someone had a REALLY cool idea. like someone walked up to a publisher and went "hey, how about a book where a TARDIS is a diner?" and then after the publisher greenlit it, he then read it and went "oh....oh god this isn't what i wanted AT ALL" But it was too late and published it.
This has first draft written ALL over it. the First 1/3 is so boring and terrible, i nearly dropped it 70 pages in. But hearing it got better later, i pressed on, and the final 1/3 kept me to want to finish it. it ended up not being great, but it kept my interest enough to finish it. so there's that.
If i could give halves, this would ABSOLUTELY be a 1.5. However since i can't, i can't give it a 1 as i didn't actively HATE it, but it was not a good book and i didn't really enjoy hardly any of it. I can't understand people who would ever read this again as i could barely get through it once i was so bored for the first third.
2 out of 5 and that's a GIFT.
kaepotter's review against another edition
adventurous
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.0
No.
Only not 0 stars because it made me laugh exactly three times, and I had fun ripping it apart in book club
Only not 0 stars because it made me laugh exactly three times, and I had fun ripping it apart in book club
nantoka_neko's review against another edition
3.0
Atmosphere: ★★★★☆
Characters: ★★☆☆☆
Story: ★★★☆☆
Pacing: ★★★☆☆
Writing: ★★★☆☆
The characters and the story just fell flat for me. Too much going on for such a short book. Everyone felt bland, no real distinction between people. And sometimes the world building and story was hard to follow.
The characters and the story just fell flat for me. Too much going on for such a short book. Everyone felt bland, no real distinction between people. And sometimes the world building and story was hard to follow.
changeablelandscape's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.75
It's hard for me to be objective about this book, because I can remember so clearly the bookcase at my first contract job (at SGI! which doesn't exist anymore!) with tons of free f&sf books, and how excited I was because FREE BOOKS in MY GENRES, and I grabbed this one and read it during my lunch break, having read some other Brust previously but not knowing that this one existed -- it was too early in the 90s for Amazon, books were just something I found or didn't find, it was all serendipity.
So coming back to it now... what I remembered about this was lots of Irish folk-rock and characters who were in a band together, both of which I still love now. I had vaguely remembered that there were nuclear threats and that the bar teleported around to avoid the nuclear strikes, but in the mid-90s it didn't really hit me that this is a very 80s book about living with the constant fear of nuclear war, and also a (strangely topical in 2023) book about pandemics, except not really topical because there is no public health response to HAGS disease, so in a way that is very 80s too -- oh dear g-d I JUST realised that it is entirely 80s, HAGS is reflecting on AIDS, and about the horrific right-wing response to AIDS; this is an imagined future in which the insane fundamentalists would rather nuke the earth than live with the fact that AIDS exists. And that is why there is no public health response or vaccination or anything, just people going 'well I probably won't get it' and other people trying to kill everyone to maintain some kind of imaginary ideological & physical purity.
Okay, sometimes I am an idiot and it takes me writing a review to realise that Brust is writing about current-to-him political concerns, but -- wow. I get it now.
So coming back to it now... what I remembered about this was
Okay, sometimes I am an idiot and it takes me writing a review to realise that Brust is writing about current-to-him political concerns, but -- wow. I get it now.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Pandemic/Epidemic
fallona's review against another edition
2.0
Aspects really are charming, and I wanted to like this novel more than I did. I can't fault it for reading like 1980s/early 1990s sci fi, given that's exactly what it is. Beyond that, though, I found the pacing uneven and the characterization often a little weak (mostly, I mean I had a hard time differentiating characters by anything beyond which instrument they played until nearly the end of the book).
duffypratt's review against another edition
4.0
A group of folk musicians find themselves in a bar. The city the bar is in gets nuked, but somehow the bar jumps to another city in another time and place in the galaxy. Sometime later, the new city is nuked again. Who is doing this, and why? And what does it have to do with great cooking, traditional music, the Grateful Dead, and dysfunctional romantic relationships? That's what Cowboy Feng's is about, and fortunately for me, almost all of Brust's bizarre obsessions align fairly nicely with mine, so I thought this was alot of fun. The fact that Brust weaves all of this into a traditional Western plot only makes it better.
I will call foul on a couple of points. At one point he talks about a computer program falling back into Bach's seventh sonata after failing at an improvisation in G. There is no such thing. Also, he writes brilliantly about what it's like to play in a quasi-improvisational band, but he is not quite so good when he tries to give detail about guitar or banjo playing. Drums are his thing, and I had the distinct impression at times that he was in a bit over his head when trying to describe other instruments. His writing about food is first rate. There's a description here of making scrambled eggs that had me wanting to go to Feng's and get in on the Breakfast. And then there's the ending, which didn't work for me. It wrapped things up nicely, but I didn't buy it.The revelation of Feng didn't work for me. I thought the idea was great, but I didn't buy that this guy from the future had such feelings of longing and loss for a long dead Earth that he barely knew. If that was all, I might be OK, but I also didn't buy his knowledge of lots and lots of long dead traditional Earth music. The music is so central to the character, and I just don't see how it worked, how Feng, as Billy, could know all the music that he did. So the end felt like a cheat to me, and almost spoiled what I otherwise thought was a very fun book.
This book is only the second non-Dragaera book I've read of Brust's, and even here I'm not so sure. It's entirely possible that this book is, in Brust's twisted mind, a very ancient history of Dragaera, and that Feng's people ultimately go on to found the Dragaeran world. But that's pure speculation on my part. I like to think that Brust has been working, all along, on a very, very big picture for the world that he created.
It's been a while since I have read any Brust, and I had sort of forgotten how much fun he can be.
I will call foul on a couple of points. At one point he talks about a computer program falling back into Bach's seventh sonata after failing at an improvisation in G. There is no such thing. Also, he writes brilliantly about what it's like to play in a quasi-improvisational band, but he is not quite so good when he tries to give detail about guitar or banjo playing. Drums are his thing, and I had the distinct impression at times that he was in a bit over his head when trying to describe other instruments. His writing about food is first rate. There's a description here of making scrambled eggs that had me wanting to go to Feng's and get in on the Breakfast. And then there's the ending, which didn't work for me. It wrapped things up nicely, but I didn't buy it.
This book is only the second non-Dragaera book I've read of Brust's, and even here I'm not so sure. It's entirely possible that this book is, in Brust's twisted mind, a very ancient history of Dragaera, and that Feng's people ultimately go on to found the Dragaeran world. But that's pure speculation on my part. I like to think that Brust has been working, all along, on a very, very big picture for the world that he created.
It's been a while since I have read any Brust, and I had sort of forgotten how much fun he can be.
slferg's review against another edition
4.0
I quite enjoyed this book. I had read it before, but it was years back so I bought it for my Nook and quite enjoyed it. These people are work and love in this bar/grill and when a nuclear attack hits, the bar jumps to another time and place. Where they begin all over. They become rather hesitatnt about living outside the bar - and when an attack is supposed to be imminent they take shelter in the back. The currently place the bar has landed and fit in is the only one really shown. Other places and times are mentioned. But these residents become determined to learn what is in back of these happenings and why someone is trying to kill them.
As I side, I really enjoyed this. One of my favorites.
As I side, I really enjoyed this. One of my favorites.
mindsplinters's review against another edition
2.0
One of those books where I feel I should have liked it more than I did. The concept, the world, the set dressing - all stuff that trips my trigger. The more-than-passing similarities to a certain favorite Crosstime Saloon should have been a sure-thing... Except it wasn't because, while this book had a number of things going for it, it failed to have the most important part that my beloved punny-pub never runs out of -heart. Despite its lush descriptions of music and food, the clear love the author has for both of those art forms, there is a stunning lack of heart and soul everywhere else... And a stunning lack of likeable characters or even clear-cut characters.
When you barely pause at a death in a story, that's not a good sign.
When you barely pause at a death in a story, that's not a good sign.
bydandii's review against another edition
4.0
I do not know the number of times I have read this book over the last couple of decades. We shall call it many.
The only correct review for this book is:
“I laughed. I cried. I fell down. It changed my life.”
The premise is pretty unique, even while perhaps a stretch. And there are plot holes. But I love it. It brings together all of the things I love about Brust’s writing into one tight bundle: dialogue that is fast sharp and witty, characters with personality, a story line to unravel, and food. I don’t know why, but Brust manages to pull food into a narrative in a way that only strengthens a scene and characters better than many that try. He even effectively channels his personal love of music into prominence (in a way that does not put off this non-musician). It is perhaps the most Brustian of Brust books, and for that it needs to be approached like an old friend from time to time just to laugh, and cry, and fall down again.
The only correct review for this book is:
“I laughed. I cried. I fell down. It changed my life.”
The premise is pretty unique, even while perhaps a stretch. And there are plot holes. But I love it. It brings together all of the things I love about Brust’s writing into one tight bundle: dialogue that is fast sharp and witty, characters with personality, a story line to unravel, and food. I don’t know why, but Brust manages to pull food into a narrative in a way that only strengthens a scene and characters better than many that try. He even effectively channels his personal love of music into prominence (in a way that does not put off this non-musician). It is perhaps the most Brustian of Brust books, and for that it needs to be approached like an old friend from time to time just to laugh, and cry, and fall down again.