sleepey's reviews
74 reviews

This is a fun little book for revisiting the characters from FF13-2 & filling in a few nuggets of extra backstory/lore. Kinda made me want to play the game again!

There's a problem running through a couple of the stories though, where they're trying to cover a lot in a very small number of pages, and they actually end up shrinking the world instead of expanding it. I found this most egregious in the latter half of the 2nd story, focusing on Snow.

In FF13-2 it's implied that he's on his own time-hopping adventure parallel to the main characters, showing up in unexpected places & leaving his footprints all over the timeline (the graviton cores). You can imagine he's been going through all sorts of things, seeing a whole other game's worth of new places & people.

So how does this book fill in that gap? Every location he visited off-screen in the game, he gets dropped into for about 5 seconds over the course of one whistle-stop tour to the end of the world. Then he lands in the first place the main characters would meet him. Then he goes directly to the 2nd place. Turns out he didn't have any off-screen adventures at all, you saw the whole thing in the game. I guess there's nothing else out there!

I've seen a few reviews saying this book starts slow & picks up toward the end, but personally I would flip that around -- the first half is perfectly paced to build up the characters & the mystery, and then it kind of runs off the rails later on.

For the most part, there's a good balance of tension & humour to keep the pages turning without it getting exhausting (& somehow this works despite half the jokes just being lame, barely-motivated pop culture references). But then in the course of 1 single chapter it just starts blasting out all sorts of twist reveals & political intrigue, everything becomes incredibly charged & convoluted, & the main mystery suddenly becomes where any of it could possibly be going.

There's a final boss at the end of this book, & I honestly couldn't tell you why anyone did anything in that whole chapter. But I think I enjoyed it anyway? It's bewildering in a fun way, like a really good B-movie (and gory like one too, fyi)

Kind of a mild experience honestly, more quiet chuckles than outright laughs. The story is structured in a weird way, almost like it was written backwards -- serious plot & action up-front, then a lot of increasingly unfocused wandering around (leaning on the "wacky random thing happens for no reason" button one too many times for my liking) until everyone finally splits up at the end. Couldn't quite hold my attention at times but, as usual, when Adams goes for a big idea he goes for it hard. The cruise ship part was a big standout for me, as was the robot fight in the office building.

"I think I exist, therefore I exist. I think."

Seen a couple of reviews criticising a certain part where a character claims they "chose to be" gay & I just want to address that real quick:

3 reasons I don't think you're supposed to take him saying that at face value:

1) He's actually bi, duh

2) It's the part of the book where he goes mad & declares himself a god, he thinks he can decide literally everything

3) It's right after the part of the book where his future self tries to excise their first kiss - to choose not to be gay - & it doesn't work

Getting through this book was a supremely frustrating experience for me. It's got some really sharp dialogue, a strong emotional core, and the plot is always right on the verge of running off the rails in a fun & exciting way. But every few chapters, when it seems like something might be about to happen, the characters just shrug it all off & sit down to chat about Bush-era American politics, for page after page after page. It's a book about a gay time traveller on the run from Literally Dick Cheney, & somehow they made it boring???

I read through the trilogy as a teenager & loved it, so now I've picked up the anniversary set & I'm giving it a re-read.

This first instalment has been quoted & adapted so often over the years that I knew all the big jokes by heart, so it's hard to really judge how well it's held up. Some of the smaller ones still got me though ("To business!") & the plot was a fun ride. If I had to give a rating strictly on how much I enjoyed this read-through in isolation, I might say 3.5 or 4.0. But nothing less than a 5-star book could stick in my head like this for 20 years, even to its own detriment.

I'll probably write a proper review later but I just want to brag that I called the arsonist's identity on day 1. Who's the miserable gay detective now, TYLER

There's some debate, fuelled by comments from the author, over whether this book is actually trying to depict autism, or if it's just providing an autism-ish "outsider" lens as an interesting way to view a mystery. But to be frank, it doesn't matter which is true.

As autism rep it seems pretty terrible, taking all sorts of outdated & stereotypical notions for granted. The protagonist is arbitrary, he's violent, he has no theory of mind, and so on. No autistic person I know is like this; many who have read it were quite insulted, & frustrated that so many people read this & think it's really what's going on inside their heads.

If you take the author at his word though and divorce it all from reality, that still only gets you halfway through the book. It's charming enough to begin with, letting Christopher walk you through his thought processes while picking up hints of what he's missing from the lives of the people around him. But then the mystery plot completely collapses (

someone just tells him who did it out of the blue

) & the story becomes all about Christopher & his condition - the specific ways he struggles with things & the strain it puts on his family. Which, if it's just supposed to be some non-specific fantasy disorder... who cares? What are we to gain from such a deep dive into a made-up problem?

Overall this is a miserable, cynical, half-arsed book with a flimsy story & a grim ending, all at the expense of a marginalised group. And they teach it in schools.