Reviews tagging 'Fire/Fire injury'

The All-Consuming World by Cassandra Khaw

4 reviews

amandadevoursbooks's review

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challenging dark mysterious sad tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Ok so this book. Goodness gracious, I'm glad I read it. It has scenes it that make my teeth hurt and make me cry thinking about them. Check the trigger warnings carefully. I likely will read it again. 

In this book we follow a group of outlaws who separated 40 years ago after a job went wrong. They are getting back together to find their comrade who is missing in action.

 
There's AIs the size of ships with fascinating culture and uncertain intentions.  There's cloning. there's cyborgs. There's queer relationships. It's delicious and disgusting all at the same time. 


The only thing: the author used a ton of obscure words. I have a pretty good vocabulary, and I looked up over 70 words. At times, the big words were repeated, and it felt forced. It didn't distract from the story. If you lived for 200 years or were an AI, of course you'd pick the best weird for each occasion. 

I'll be reading more from this author.

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rmperezpadilla's review

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adventurous dark hopeful medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

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yavin_iv's review against another edition

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adventurous dark tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

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kaisermatthias's review against another edition

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adventurous dark tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? N/A
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

Imagine that Michael Bay wrote an NC-17 action movie focused exclusively on the equisite suffering of eternal life gained by constantly killing a clone and waking up in a new, slightly degraded, body that required surgical reconstruction into a half-machine, always hurting horrorshow of an existence. Then imagine that you're plotting a heist, but to do so, you have to get together a group of personalities destabilized by centuries of trauma and mutual murder. Now, disassemble all the pieces of that narrative to a point that they cannot be followed except as a series of explosion-fuck-agonizing detail of a microsecond of pain rendered in pornographic detail-technobabble especially featuring the constant use of the attosecond as time marker-remembrance of love from a time long ago-smash cut to present-fuck you-fight scene. And you have the all-consuming world. 

If you're looking for action without reason, grit, gore, and more f-bombing than the Die Hard trilogy, head on in. 

I would love to see this as a TV show. It's written like media, and would absolutely shine as the skeleton of a script. As a novel? It's a bit of a slog. There's some really excellent writing that gets absolutely buried under repeteated phrasing, profanity-as-personality, and a steadfast refusal to explain anything about the world except how the current POV character suffers from the state of it. 
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