neixin's reviews
189 reviews

withholding review in support of the harpercollins union strike.

edit: it was fine, and i honestly might come back to it in the future, but it just didn’t grip me when i'd picked it up (i was also listening to some of it while burning up with a 39.5°c fever which wasn’t the book’s fault but definitely had an effect on my enjoyment and investment regardless).

nghi vo truly never misses for me!! i had such a blast reading this; i loved the travelers chih encounters and the dynamics between everyone, i loved seeing the way chih’s more active presence in the story impacted its structure, i, as always, loved the things nghi vo had to say about the act of storytelling, and—and i cannot stress this enough—i loved her take on a wuxia so much. her fight scenes are such a delight to read, and the way she incorporated the jianghu into anh’s already established political landscape was so clever. i really hope she decides to write more wuxia in the future because she’s just so damn good at it!

also the brief mention of mai? when i tell u i screamed <3

“i’ve already glimpsed down those dark paths, just beyond the sun’s reach. and i know…people live there, too.” OUGH 14 dead 27 injured

it’s a charming, fun little story, but i really wish it had been given the space to fully develop the characters and their relationship, as well as the politics. it’s pretty clear that the author has a good grasp of these aspects so the fact that we get to see so little is absolutely tragic. it’s not written in a way that makes the development palpable even if you don’t see all of it on page either, so everything just feels incredibly rushed. it would’ve made me absolutely insane (complimentary) if it were a full-length novel though.

withholding review in support of the harpercollins union strike.

edit: i often struggle with romance novels because if i don't read them in one sitting i usually don't have enough interest to pick them back up (and i'm just not a read-in-one-sitting type of girl (gn)) but this was a rare exception. the characters were charming and interesting, their relationship was lovely, the plot complemented the romance so well and kept me engaged; i just had a really good time!

excellent premise, absolutely amateurish execution. nothing felt like it had any substance or stakes at all, and the writing was so, so try-hard. the prose reads like it wants to be flowery so bad without understanding what makes very stylized prose work so it just ends up being stilted and inauthentic, and the poetry……i can’t believe i have to say this at the end of the year of our lord 2022 but random line breaks do not a poem make! and the fact that it’s “in-character” poetry doesn’t make it any better; it takes up too much page time to be intentionally bad. all of it read like a 14-year-old’s first attempt at writing Serious Quasi-Speculative Litfic without any of the charm of being written by a child (i refuse to throw kids who love writing under the bus like that). i honestly wanted to give up the moment i read the first “poem” but it was so short and like i said, the premise sounded so promising (also i don’t have amazon prime so i did sadly spend $1.50 on it), but alas, i trudged on and wasted 20 minutes.

i have a huge fondness for novella series, and the tensorate series is an excellent example of why—an epic, sprawling story of a rebellion told through personal (and in parts of the descent of monsters, impersonal) snippets of a handful of characters who play a part in the larger plot. and it’s done so brilliantly!! the black tides of heaven was probably my favorite, mostly because i just really love akeha, and also because the ending made me shed some tears, but all four novellas were fantastic.