jayeless's reviews
337 reviews

This novel was okay. The futuristic setting seemed interesting, but the execution of the novel wasn't the best. The dialogue of the foreign characters was really cringeworthy, with Cylea continually having "und" attributed to her instead of "and" (like, when I'm speaking Spanish, I never say "and" instead of "y", you know?) and Jack speaking in the most hackneyed, clichéd Strine that no one's ever spoken in over a hundred years, probably. The novel swapped between the minds of a few different characters, but not cleanly. And there was too much description and the action scenes dragged on for sooo long.

The worst conceit of this novel, though, is that so much of it revolved around this one mystery — why is there a sixty million dollar bounty on Cylea's head? — and we never got an answer to this. I gather that maybe the answer comes later in the trilogy, but basically it means that the conclusion doesn't really conclude much of anything, and is extremely unsatisfying. I can't say I'm compelled to sell out the next instalment.

Una mica avorrit. Havia de llegir aquest llibre per una classe, i mentre la història és curta i passa ràpidament (probablement perquè és molt condensada), no és interessant. Hi ha un home arrogant i odiós que es fa invisible perquè pugui fer delictes, quina història!

No ho odio. Però em va semblar avorrit i no vull rellegir-lo en anglès!

I'd highly recommend this to all fans of Douglas Adams. It does veer into darker, gruesome territory at times, but maintains a fairly light, humorous tone anyway. That said, this is definitely a book you need to pay close attention to. Don't make the mistake that I did and try to read it when you're very tired, distracted, or on a bus packed with boisterous private school kids, because you will get confused and have to re-read large chunks. This is a book to give undivided attention to.

In terms of its scientific accuracy, We Are Mars is hard sci-fi. Evidently, the story revolves around a colony on Mars. The surface of the planet remains inhospitable to life, albeit staggeringly beautiful to those who appreciate it. Life inside the compound sustaining the colony is tough, as the people there face the challenges of limited resources, crumbling machinery, and a Planet Earth that has lost interest in their project, and as such has mostly eliminated its support.

Not only does the plot look at the difficulties of trying to sustain human life in a hostile environment, but it also explores the dangers of trying to create genetically-perfect humans, a pandemic raging in a small, confined community, and some of the psychological effects of having to live in such a controlled, disciplined environment – where even such things as relationships are banned, because relationships can lead to babies, and babies drain resources that the project would prefer to reserve for the "perfect", test-tube created, g-mods.

It manages to do all this while telling an extremely compelling thriller of a story (at least until the last part where things slow down somewhat), which is to be lauded. This is a really enjoyable hard sci-fi thriller with relevance to a lot of the topics being raised in the popular science sphere right now.

For me it wasn't quite a five-star book though. Mostly, I felt that it could have done with a bit more polish. There were a number of times that we, the reader, would be told how wise or caring or cool-under-pressure a certain character would be, when it would have been more satisfying to let those characters' actions stand for themselves. There was one specific character who ended up being quite different from what we were initially told her character was like, in a transition that didn't quite feel natural to me. The pace also slowed down considerably in the last part of the book, such that a big confrontation that you might have expected to be the climax of this book ends up being pushed off to the second in the series. Don't get me wrong – despite these doubts, I fully intend to read the second in the series – but that was a bit disappointing.

Overall, even though it lacks a little refinement, the raw excellence of the thriller pacing (throughout most of the book) and the well-researched, superbly-detailed science fiction storyline truly shine. Recommended for fans of the genre.

A beautiful, engrossing novel about Palestine, set shortly before the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. It follows a sixty-something-year-old writer, Walid – who would seem to be based on the author himself – as he returns to Palestine for the first time in thirty-eight years, having been forcibly separated from his family by the occupation, and observes the ways in which his homeland, his family and his friends have changed, mostly for the worse. The Khan Younis where he spent his childhood has been lost, and many of his loved ones have met tragic ends. The novel is naturally scathing of Israel, of the daily humiliations meted out on the Palestinians, of the violence of the occupation, and the theft of the land in the first place, including Ashdod, where Walid was born.

It's not a novel that dehumanises Israelis though, which is the role that the titular "lady from Tel Aviv", Dana, has to play. Honestly I was expecting Dana to play a bigger role in the novel, what with the title and half the blurb being given over to her, but she is what she is. She's someone fed up with the conflict, who wants peace, but isn't political beyond that. I don't really want to spoil her subplot, so I'll leave it there…

The best part of this novel is the little things, in the observations of occupation. I get the sense that Walid is a thinly disguised version of al-Madhoun, that the novel Walid is writing represents this novel, and so on. Walid's difficulty simply entering Israel was compelling reading, and rang true; I once knew someone, a Palestinian who'd grown up in exile, who tried to visit home but was interrogated at Ben Gurion airport for twelve hours and sent back to Australia. Al-Madhoun makes sure to contrast the difficulty Palestinian exiles and refugees have accessing home with the ease that all Jewish people in the world have, and so he should.

The main problem I had with this novel is that the plot didn't seem very cohesive or unified; it was more like, "this happened, then this, then this, then this". Admittedly, this makes more sense if you think of the novel as a fictionalised retelling of the author's own experiences, but… it was narratively unsatisfying. Therefore I can't say I "really liked it" (which is Goodreads' definition of four stars) but I heartily recommend it.

EDIT: I'm bumping my rating up to four stars; in retrospect I was too harsh on it for how much I liked it! Maybe the plot is a bit thin, but it it has many more compelling qualities.

I have to give this two stars and no more because, ultimately, I don't think it held together very well. Making Aurora Del Valle the narrator, rather than opting for a third-person narration like in [b:Daughter of Fortune|16527|Daughter of Fortune|Isabel Allende|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1299666780s/16527.jpg|3471915], left Aurora narrating lots of things she wasn't present for and has no realistic way of knowing the details of. It didn't work.

And furthermore, Aurora Del Valle just isn't that interesting. She's surrounded by interesting people, but she doesn't have much going for her herself – only her love of photography which didn't interest me at all. She's no Eliza Sommers.

I liked some things about this book. I liked that we finally got to see Eliza Sommers and Tao Chi'en consummate their love, although it would have been nice to see at the end of the last book. I got invested in hating Matías Del Valle (Aurora's biological father), was pleased to see him meet his doom, and I liked Severo and Nivea. I don't remember [b:The House of the Spirits|9328|The House of the Spirits|Isabel Allende|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1358615501s/9328.jpg|3374404] very well, so it took a long time before I remembered what role they played in that book, but I was almost tempted to put it on the "to reread" list to see what happened to them. Maybe one day.

I have to say that this book was better as a sequel to Daughter of Fortune than as a prequel to House of the Spirits. The latter draws on the magical realism tradition, unlike the other two, which are straight historical fiction. This leaves Aurora, in this book, having to say things like, "and then the strangest thing happened, wouldn't you believe it, and this child had green skin! if only I'd had my camera…" It stood out and bothered me, I guess.

I did read this in Spanish, but I was too lazy to review it in that language (mostly I got stuck on how to translate "held together" from the first sentence of this review, so I gave up). The Spanish wasn't too tricky, although as always, it slowed down my reading. Overall, you might as well read it if you finished Daughter of Fortune and feel cheated by the ending, but otherwise it's not that great.

Some Goodreads librarian hijacked the original main entry for this book and made it about some late-nineties adaptation by some rando, so here I am re-adding this book that I last read in year 7. Fun fun.

There are so many interesting ideas in this book that I feel like I should have enjoyed it more than I did.

The story follows Ryan, a paraplegic in a nearish-future setting who decides to go through a mind migration – that is, his consciousness will be transplanted into a new, lab-grown, non-disabled body. Once the migration has been conducted, though, he is plagued by a series of vivid dreams (and eventually hallucinations) that appear to reveal to him the life of a completely different person: a military veteran turned accomplice of organised crime named Charlie.

The mystery is interesting

albeit not entirely resolved because it seems certain details had to be reserved to justify a sequel

, and a lot of the world-building is interesting. The world we see here is one where capitalism has been allowed to squeeze the ordinary person even harder than we see today, and there are plenty of things going on – the US has intervened in an India-Pakistan war, a disease called spotted lung has spread nastily through the population, and the unnamed city in which the story takes place has seen widespread ethnic cleansing (which weirdly only gets a brief mention late in the book) and a long period of dominance by criminal gangs.

So why this didn't fully click for me, I don't really know. I guess the characters just lacked a certain something to really grab me (and the romantic subplot was particularly ehhhh). Some of the writing in certain parts seemed a bit unpolished, although that might just have been my lack of engagement at some parts. If the concept sounds interesting to you I'd certainly encourage you to give it a chance, because there is some good stuff here. It just didn't grip me as much as I'd hoped it would.