Book #117 of 2017: Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #15) This second Discworld City Watch novel is an improvement over the first, thanks mostly to some appreciated deepening of the characters of Carrot and Sam Vimes. But it’s still not great, and the satire on affirmative action involving the appointment of fantasy creatures …
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Book #115 of 2017: A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray (Gemma Doyle #1) I liked this book, but I didn’t quite love it. Author Libba Bray is talented at writing realistically flawed teenagers, and the downside is that her heroine Gemma Doyle comes across as very selfish, impetuous, and otherwise immature. I also …
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Book #114 of 2017: Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor (Strange the Dreamer #1) A gorgeously-written fantasy novel about a boy raised in a library, who spends his early life chasing down obscure references to the faraway city whose name was removed from the world by magic. It’s a bit reminiscent of The Kingkiller Chronicle, …
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Book #106 of 2017: Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo (Six of Crows #2) As much as I liked the fantasy heist novel Six of Crows, I was a little put off when the ending seemed to wrap up its main plot and then throw a curveball cliffhanger out of nowhere, because I didn’t relish the …
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Book #101 of 2017: The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie (The First Law #1) An overall solid fantasy novel, very much in the George R. R. Martin tradition of court intrigue and gratuitous violence. Unfortunately the plot was slow-moving and fairly opaque, and I found myself struggling to care about most of the characters. Still, …
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Book #98 of 2017: His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik (Temeraire #1) The plot of this novel moves at glacier speed, which is fairly agonizing when the premise is as rich as this fantastic alternate history of dragons fighting in the Napoleonic Wars. So although I did love the characters, I’m not sure if I’m …
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Book #92 of 2017: A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness A powerful novel of grief and guilt, where a boy struggling to come to terms with his mother’s cancer must also face down the primeval creature that has crawled out of his dreams with harsh truths of its own. There’s a reading of this story …
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Book #89 of 2017: White Sand, Volume 1 by Brandon Sanderson, Rik Hoskin, and Julius Gopez (White Sand #1) White Sand is an unpublished manuscript by author Brandon Sanderson, and this graphic novel is an adaptation of the first part of that unreleased novel, with two more planned volumes to follow. I had hoped that …
Book #85 of 2017: Ever by Gail Carson Levine I’ve liked Gail Carson Levine’s other works, but Ever was a bit of a misfire for me. The ancient Mesopotamian setting felt very surface-level, as though Levine had only a cursory understanding of the area and its culture when she decided to use it for her …
Book #82 of 2017: Wolf-Speaker by Tamora Pierce (The Immortals #2) An okay follow-up to Tamora Pierce’s earlier novel Wild Magic. I liked that Pierce went out of her way to emphasize that not all creatures who look like monsters are evil, but this was kind of a weird message in a novel where the …
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