Scan barcode
A review by iam
The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon
Did not finish book. Stopped at 45%.
I tried reading this for over a month, and having almost reached 50% now, I'm gonna have to bite the bullet and give up on it.
I'm sad, because I really wanted to like this. Everything about it sounded right up my alley. But my god, every chapter of this was a struggle. I tried to motivate myself by setting myself a simple goal of one chapter a day, but it just made me not want to read alltogether.
The biggest issue is the combination of the writing and worldbuilding. I am not stranger to hard SFF that throws you in cold into a fully developed world and you have to figure out how everything works yourself - and I enjoy that! But here, even halfway through, I still could not tell you anything about how this world works. I could not give you more than the vaguest of descriptions of what words like relic, archivist, ENGINE, etc. mean or how they are connected, and at least one of those words appears on almost every page.
I did enjoy the character dynamics between Sunai and others like Jin and Veyadi, but even those were hard to follow because SO much was unsaid, implied, or strongly tied to the context of the incomprehensible world around them.
Reading this felt like I was constantly missing something, and that unfortunately grew tiring quickly. What little I did gather was very interesting and super cool, but I could not make sense of it, and it ended up just not being any fun anymore.
I received an ARC and reviewed honestly and voluntarily.
I'm sad, because I really wanted to like this. Everything about it sounded right up my alley. But my god, every chapter of this was a struggle. I tried to motivate myself by setting myself a simple goal of one chapter a day, but it just made me not want to read alltogether.
The biggest issue is the combination of the writing and worldbuilding. I am not stranger to hard SFF that throws you in cold into a fully developed world and you have to figure out how everything works yourself - and I enjoy that! But here, even halfway through, I still could not tell you anything about how this world works. I could not give you more than the vaguest of descriptions of what words like relic, archivist, ENGINE, etc. mean or how they are connected, and at least one of those words appears on almost every page.
I did enjoy the character dynamics between Sunai and others like Jin and Veyadi, but even those were hard to follow because SO much was unsaid, implied, or strongly tied to the context of the incomprehensible world around them.
Reading this felt like I was constantly missing something, and that unfortunately grew tiring quickly. What little I did gather was very interesting and super cool, but I could not make sense of it, and it ended up just not being any fun anymore.
I received an ARC and reviewed honestly and voluntarily.