A review by egid
Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone

1.0

Overwritten, predictable, and exhausting. Not sure why I finished it — Gladstone’s style is not for me.

If you like word salad and run on sentences and gross instant relationships you might have a better time. Here, have some action:

He heard her, understood, pulled free, and they ran through a hangar of acrid smoke, ozone, burning plastic, burning air, hot metal, oil, blood, and then the ramp by some miracle was underfoot, and they climbed it into a space empty of threat, a space whose silence rang like a bell, and sought, because this ship had been built by creatures not so inhuman after all, up ramps and past a dinner table (a dinner table!) and a cargo hold, for a space with two chairs and a great deal of buttons, dials, levers, and unsettling hoses that Viv, to her own surprise, recognized as a cockpit.

...or, perhaps some tech:

Viv could not see the Cloud, but as they approached the fleet Zanj told her of the shadow the fleet cast, filling the hyperdimensional night with three-thousand-year dreams, dragging in information, every meager advance in weapons patterning and science the galaxy had yielded in their silent millennia, and, too, the great art and gripping schlock and cooking shows and tritone mesosymphonies that rose, fell, rose again, surviving the empires that were their cradle. Waking, the ships fed.

…and so forth.