Reviews and Comments

I hate to hate on a book too much, because I understand how hard it is to finish one and get it published...but this book was one of the only books I have ever stopped reading once I got past the 50% mark (this one I stopped less than 100 pages from the end because my faith that it would get better just never happened the next books are even longer than this one).

The characters were mid-level unlikeable across the board; not a single female character was believable at all (I'm not even saying it failed the B test, it did, but mainly the female characters feel like they were written by a 15 year old boy who has never spent time with a girl).

The plot was all over the place; with people who are supposed to be the best warrior in blah and blah getting their butts handed to them by kids; the interspersed historical and religious texts seemed to be written for a video game; and did I mention how badly the female characters were written?

I mean there was a nugget of goodness in it that I kept hoping would get shined but it never did... it just got more and more shite dumped on it. This book made me very sad because I hate when a book disappoints this badly.

This was so much fun. So, I know (and love) Glen Cook from the Black Company. This is the first time I've ventured out of his dark and gritty stuff and it is so much better. This was such an amazing mix of noir detective story and fantasy tropes that I think I smiled through the entire thing and read it in 2 sittings.

The main character is a PI who takes a simple (at first) job from a bunch of gnomes to go and track down a guy's old flame and get her to appear before the family to either accept the bloke's inheritance or sign off on giving it away.

This turns into a traipse across a warzone, jolly troll hirelings, a vegetarian half-elf killer for hire, a long dead and rotting corpse wiseman, two gnomish femme-fetales, suger high garden fae, centaurs, vampires, city clerks (the most difficult and frustrating of the list) and a ton of other problems. Oh, and the main character used to be the lover of the mark he's been hired to find.

Man... this is what Dresdin tried so hard to be (and succeeded for a time). If you do like Butcher's Harry Dresdin or Harrison's Rachel Morgan then you owe yourself this book. I can't be convinced that Garrett wasn't the inspiration for at least one of them.

OH Lord, what to say. WOD, so much memory tied into you and so much nostalgia that keeps getting trashed. This book has so much going against it: It's rpg fiction which means it is usually written by fans or staff writers. It's an anthology which often means it is hit or miss as well. It's WoD which means it's filled with angst and pseudo-goth diatribes.

This is the first book in a long time that I completely gave up on. I tried to read 4 of the stories and then skimmed another 3. The number of trite tropish non-since is baffling to me at 40+. I know that I was never much into the wider WOD scene back in the day and kind of thought most people who were were a bit.... silly. I loved the system and it has had a huge impact on my gaming life, and I had two really good irl groups who I ran it with. I was also in three major online games (one of my own that had 100+ registered players and 10 STs at one point) and for the most part 60-70% of the players were childish immature idiots who mainly wanted to have cybersex with vampires.

I am sure at some point I would have read this book and thought it was ok, but I've actually read good things since then. Hell, Mack Bolan is better written than most of the stories in this thing.

Oh Heinlein... how complicated my life with you has been.

I wasn't even sure how to rate this one, much like the trouble I have rating any Heinlein book that I have read in the past decade. His stuff just... hasn't aged well. Would I recommend this to anyone? The way I see it, if you haven't read this you fall into one of two camps: 1) You are either Heinlein fan or a fan of this period of science fiction and it's on your list to read, OR 2) You wouldn't be interested in this.

This is not a good book. Even by Heinlein standards this isn't a great book. It's short and I sloughed through it at an extremely rapid pace so I guess that's a merit? There is enough pseudo-psychology/sociology in this thing to drown a grad student. Heinlein loves his pseudo-sociology and he definitely had some ideas about the subject... they just weren't very good ideas and by today's advances they seem head-shakingly misguided.

Then there's the "science" used. I love the pulp and post pulp era of paperback sci-fi so I can ignore bad science as well as anyone out there, but man this one gave me some chuckles. It reminded me of one of my favorite youtube snark move reviewers Brandon Tenold (seriously, if you like mystery science theater check this guy out, he's a step above that in my opinion). I kept thinking throughout this book that Heinlein just threw mumbo-jumbo at the wall. I kept hearing "check the phase-capacitor to see if the neutrinos have been flipped and if so then cross the damn streams" in my head. So much of the this book talks about space travel and physics as if they author really knows what he's talking about but it is all just pseudo-mumble-core claptrap.

So, why read it? Well, once upon a time, I loved Heinlein. Twenty years ago I'd put the book Friday up in my top 5 favorite books of all time. What can I say? I was younger and thought I was supposed to worship the man. Now, I understand the impact he had, and some of his stories are even fun for what they are, but I also now see all of the craziness hiding under the surface too. I read this because I am working through all of my paperbacks and this was at the start of a stack for whatever reason and I thought it would be fun.

It was... for the combined two hours or so it took to read it, and then it was just... a meh aftertaste. I am sure I have it because it's an old beat-up copy that looks like it had a story to tell and I wanted to preserve it and save it from the trash. Do I regret reading it? Not at all, it took two hours to read and I have definitely spent two hours watching worse movies. Would I recommend it? Not in the slightest. If you want to read Heinlein focus on some of his non-Future History stuff.