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technicat

technicat@bookwyrm.social

Joined 8 months, 3 weeks ago

Left goodreads a while back, nice to get organized with my reading again, especially as part of the #fediverse. Links to my mastodon account(s) and other stuff is at technicat.com/

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Grady Hendrix: The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires (Paperback, 2021, Quirk Books) 4 stars

Steel Magnolias meets Dracula in this '90s-set horror novel about a women's book club that …

Started off great, but maybe too white Southern for me

No rating

I found the first few chapters highly entertaining, slightly in the vein of Big Little Lies (or Little Big Lies?), but it threw me off when a "black woman" was introduced. Wait, was I supposed to assume everyone else is white?

S. L. Huang: The Water Outlaws (2023, Tor.com) 5 stars

In the jianghu, you break the law to make it your own.

Lin Chong is …

The story sounds pretty cool but I'm just not into the writing.

No rating

Looks like it could be a fascinating story in the mode of Ken Liu's "silkpunk" stories and R.F. Kuang's Poppy War trilogy (the author of which whose name was mangled with S.L. Huang's in the Hugo controversy "report", I just thought that was hilarious), but as with the a previous work by this author I found the prose too herky jerky, long stretches of action with some dialogue but it doesn't really convey atmosphere and character to me, reads more like a screenplay, so I set it aside after the first chapter.

Michael Lark, Greg Rucka: Lazarus (2014) 4 stars

Lazarus is an American dystopian science fiction comic book series created by writer Greg Rucka …

Cool premise, good action, stilted dialogue.

4 stars

Interesting premise in the first volume of this series, and the art depicts the action and gritty dark future tone (heavy on the black ink), although how every woman (well, all three of them) have bodacious bodies distracts from the dialogue, which isn't that great anyway. It is a good setup, though, and I read this through in one setting, so that bodes well for the following volumes.

reviewed Dust by Hugh Howey (Silo, #3)

Hugh Howey: Dust (Paperback, 2013, Broad Reach Publishing) 4 stars

In a time when secrets and lies were the foundations of life, someone has discovered …

satisfying conclusion, gives the characters (and the main character, the world-building) their due

5 stars

This was a very satisfying conclusing to the trilogy. I was mesmerized by the first book and enjoyed the second, although I have to admit it was a slowdown, but things pick up again with this third installment. These are all long stories with a lot of chapters constantly switching points of view (maybe that's a good thing as there are plenty of people-will-be-idiots scenarios which had me thinking this could get aggravating) but the action really gets going toward the end so I was bingeing the last chapters and also wondering if I was mistaken, there are so many things going on this must result in a cliffhanger for another book. And really, I wouldn't have minded.