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A review by reanne
Cloudbound by Fran Wilde
1.0
Review crossposted from Reanne Reads.
I reviewed the first book in this series last year and enjoyed it. But my memory is not so good and I’ve read a lot of books between then and now, so I had some trouble remembering all the details for this one. Cloudbound jumps right into the world of this series without any reminders or easing back in like you normally get in series. For this reason, I’d definitely recommend that you read this book immediately after reading the first one, and certainly don’t read it without reading the first one at all. Even having read the first one, I was pretty confused.
This book follows Naton, the friend of the protagonist of the first book. Maybe because of Naton’s personality or the fact that the big action happened in the last book, this book is much more about politics and vague threats. It takes quite a while for anything very exciting to happen. I’m sure some people enjoy reading about politics and shadowy threats, but that’s not really my thing. I was hoping this book would get more into the lore and history of the world, why these people ended up in the clouds, etc. I’d hoped the story would start expanding their world outside of just the towers. Apparently that’s not where the author wanted to take. I guess this is really more of a politics story than a fantasy adventure story.
The story does eventually get to exploring the world at the base of the towers and showing more of what that world looks like, but it doesn’t happen until about 93% through the story. While it was nice to see that and the story left off with a promising hook for the next book, I’m afraid that all came far too late for me. What happens at the very end of the book should have happened at the beginning. As in, inciting incident, then discovering the ground beneath the towers, then carrying on the story from there. Ultimately, it really did just feel like this author wanted to write a totally different book than the one I wanted to read.
The narrator’s style is more gently read it to you than really perform it for you. He read in a steady, smooth, clear, and very slow way which I’m sure some people prefer but which I didn’t care for at all. My favorite narrators are guys like Ray Porter, MacLeod Andrews, and James Marsters–narrators who really go all out in performing the story in a big, epic type of way. I love that. The narrator of this book was pretty much the opposite of that.
I reviewed the first book in this series last year and enjoyed it. But my memory is not so good and I’ve read a lot of books between then and now, so I had some trouble remembering all the details for this one. Cloudbound jumps right into the world of this series without any reminders or easing back in like you normally get in series. For this reason, I’d definitely recommend that you read this book immediately after reading the first one, and certainly don’t read it without reading the first one at all. Even having read the first one, I was pretty confused.
This book follows Naton, the friend of the protagonist of the first book. Maybe because of Naton’s personality or the fact that the big action happened in the last book, this book is much more about politics and vague threats. It takes quite a while for anything very exciting to happen. I’m sure some people enjoy reading about politics and shadowy threats, but that’s not really my thing. I was hoping this book would get more into the lore and history of the world, why these people ended up in the clouds, etc. I’d hoped the story would start expanding their world outside of just the towers. Apparently that’s not where the author wanted to take. I guess this is really more of a politics story than a fantasy adventure story.
The story does eventually get to exploring the world at the base of the towers and showing more of what that world looks like, but it doesn’t happen until about 93% through the story. While it was nice to see that and the story left off with a promising hook for the next book, I’m afraid that all came far too late for me. What happens at the very end of the book should have happened at the beginning. As in, inciting incident, then discovering the ground beneath the towers, then carrying on the story from there. Ultimately, it really did just feel like this author wanted to write a totally different book than the one I wanted to read.
The narrator’s style is more gently read it to you than really perform it for you. He read in a steady, smooth, clear, and very slow way which I’m sure some people prefer but which I didn’t care for at all. My favorite narrators are guys like Ray Porter, MacLeod Andrews, and James Marsters–narrators who really go all out in performing the story in a big, epic type of way. I love that. The narrator of this book was pretty much the opposite of that.