chrisbiss's reviews
527 reviews

Well written and gripping but relies on a twist that the reader has no way of spotting, which goes against much of the genre fiction it's paying homage to.

I loved this so much. Easily the best book I've read this year so far (and that remains true as I type up this review two months later). I don't really know what to say about it other than that I loved it. It's beautifully written, sparse in its language, leaving gaps around meaning for you to interpret as you see fit - even going so far as to use all our knowledge of what's come before to answer the question of the ending for ourselves. What does Lucy ask for at the end? I don't know, and I don't even know if she knows what she wants until she asks for it.

This is about the stories we tell ourselves and others, the stories about who we are and where we come from and what we want. It's about the fluidity of identity, and how we remake ourselves anew every time we speak, every time we meet a new person and come to a new place, about all our opportunities to begin again even as we try to cling to where we came from (or bury it, or both).

This is an incredible book.

Absolutely revolting but brilliant.

I added this to my TBR at the start of the year and by the time I picked it up I'd forgotten everything about it. I went in without bothering to reread the synopsis or remind myself why I'd wanted to read it in the first place. 

What a pleasant surprise this was. It's not amazing - the two main characters don't really struggle to achieve their goals or face any huge setbacks - but it's well written, brilliantly paced, kept me guessing, and surprised me, and I cared about the characters and the stakes. That's all I want from a thriller, and I'm glad I read this.

I've started to call Turton the M Night Shyamalan of fiction. His books are very high concept and start really strongly but lose themselves in the pursuit of a surprising twist that manifest as a messy third act that more or less ruins the book for me.

This is definitely better than The Devil and the Dark Water for the most part, but the final 20% is a hot mess that I read more out of a sense of obligation than any sort of enjoyment. And it's a shame, because up until that point I was really enjoying it. It's an interesting mystery, and there's some novel stuff going on here. I particularly liked the clever way of making an omnipotent third person narrator actually be a meaningful character in the narrative (though it stops being clever when you realise that Abi knows everything that happened the entire time and that the plot is driven largely by her refusal to ever tell anyone, for reasons that are sort of addressed but not in a satisfying way).

I have a laundry list of complaints and things that bugged me about the final section of the book that range from big structural things to minor annoyances like "you lost track of the geography of your own setting", but I won't list them here. I really wanted to enjoy this. I loved The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle despite not caring for the ending (in that case I simply didn't like it rather than thinking it was Bad) and wanted to see Turton return to that form after missing on Dark Water, but this is another miss for me. There are some great ideas here and a very gripping first half but ultimately it just doesn't work.

I was really into this when it was about humans exploring an alien megastructure and trying to figure out what the hell was going on but that didn't last. Once it became about galactic politics I quickly lost interest. The mildly racist portrayal of Chinese people and weirdly shoehorned-in sex scenes didn't help, either.

Really incredible writing here but this just wasn't what I wanted to read right now. I'm sure I'll come back to it in future but for now I'm DNFing.

Over the past few months I re-read all of The First Law and the standalone novels so that I could read this trilogy for the first time.

I'm still not enjoying this series as much as the earlier books. So far it suffers from the same problems as Best Served Cold. I don't feel like I really know the characters all that well, and it's not as rooted in the geography as the earlier books soworld doesn't feel quite as alive or well-realised, either. People travel huge distances on journeys we don't get to see, and we don't really get any sense of how much time has passed in the interim. Meanwhile we keep being teased with glimpses and hints of the things Bayaz is getting up to off-screen, and I'm starting to wish that I was reading that book instead. Hopefully that will pay off in book 3.

It's strange, because these books are of a similar length to the original trilogy and feature a similar number of POV characters, and yet they feel a little rushed pacing-wise in ways that trilogy never did. We're presumably spending a similar amount of time with each of these characters but I don't feel like we're given long enough to really get to know them. After two books I honestly don't know what Rikke or Orso actually *want*. 

I'll finish the series because at this point I'd be daft not to, but I sincerely hope it all comes together in book 3 so I can be excited about the books that Joe is currently writing.