Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera
Rating: LOVED! (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



What a horrible terrible wonderful book. There's something to be said about a book that tells you in the title what will happen, but you still spend the whole entire book thinking, hoping, wishing it won't come true.

They Both Die at the End is set in the near future. Something called Death-Cast exists, a forecast of deaths. The day you're going to die, you get a phone call just after midnight. You will be dead before the next midnight. Could be minutes later, could be almost 24 hours later. Death-Cast has never been wrong.

Most of the story is told in alternating POV from Mateo and Rufus, two teenage boys who got their calls. Through an app called Last Friends, they meet each other. The entire book takes place over one single day. The two get to know each other, and we follow how their relationship grows, and what they do during their last day.

Doesn't it sound insane to hope the title is wrong? We're told early (and repeatedly) that Death-Cast has never been wrong, yet still I spent the entire book hoping somehow it wouldn't happen. [Edit: I feel like I'm spoiling the book, but... it's in the title!]

The two boys were so completely different, if they both hadn't been on their Last Day, they might never have been even friends. It's really hard to write this review, I've been crying more than thirty minutes now, and I keep restarting.

It's important to say the book isn't all sad -- just exactly the opposite of that (at least until the end). The two boys live. Mateo had been a shy boy, scared of the world, who never went out and spent all his time online. Rufus was a foster care kid who watched his family die. But together they improved each other, helped the other heal and grow, and together the two of them lived... Their deaths are never far from their (or the reader's) mind, but it's not a looming presence until the end of the story.

There were a few other POV chapters tossed in. Most were interesting (like seeing how the people who work at Death-Cast making those calls react), and while a few didn't seem necessary, it was interesting to see how other characters reacted to getting calls, too.

The author did something I really liked, though it's hard to describe it... He kept making the threads of different characters' lives interact. Rufus only downloaded the Last Friend app because he saw graffiti about it, and later in the story we met who drew that graffiti, though the characters never gain the same information. Little details from earlier in the book sometimes became important later, or sometimes just made a neat little crossing-over into another character's life later. It made life seem so woven together...

The book never covers how Death-Cast gets its information, but that's not the focus of the book, so that's not a big deal at all -- I would have read the info if the author had included a chapter about it, but the book was not lacking at all for not including that information. It was, however, very interesting to see all the new industries that popped up -- if you have a section of the population that knew it was going to die, and at least some of them have no family/friends to leave their money to, businesses would pop up to give them final things to spend it on -- VR experiences of things that they now would never be able to do, things like that.

I had two small issues with the story/book. One with the book itself: The final 5% of the book, almost 10 full minutes of reading time, was just non-story material. Tons of stuff from the publisher (HarperCollins), advertisements for the author's other books, a very long (5+ page) acknowledgement section, etc. I had thought I had so much of the story left, then suddenly it was just over! (Which now that I think about it... that's kind of like life/death, huh?)

The other issue is a spoiler. Please, please go read the book instead! But if you don't intend to, then go ahead and click to see it:


**** SPOILERS *****

This might sound backwards, since I was crying so much about their deaths, but I don't like that we didn't get to see Rufus's death. I think I can guess what happened, but since we KNOW he had to die, I wish it had been spelled out. I'm not sure what the point of leaving it open ended was.

**** END SPOILERS *****


As long as you're okay with a sad ending, I highly recommend this book. I mean really, really highly. It's very rare for a book to change my life, but I feel like this one has... or at least gives me ideas on how I should change it. Acting on those changes is much harder to do.

The Boy Who Plaited Manes by Nancy Springer
Rating: Okay (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



Going into The Boy Who Plaited Manes, I had thought it was a book, but instead it was just a short story. Turns out that was fine, as it didn't hook me at all. It seemed like the retelling of a fairy tale or an original one. Set in some older time, a boy showed up at a Lord's stables and braided horses' manes. He was god-like in his ability to make horses look great, but who he is or where he came from was completely unknown, as he never said a word.

The Lord's wife needed her hair braided, so she had him do it, and like the horses, she fell in love with him. That lead to the downfall of every character in the story.

I felt like I just didn't get this story. Did it have a moral I was supposed to pick up on? Something other than the completely unsubtle 'Don't cheat on your spouse'? Either way, it just didn't work for me.

Housekeeping: As this was just a short story and not a book, I'm going to lump it in with The Weighter from earlier this week instead of taking a completed book credit for it.

Game Break: Hayden's Book 1 by G S Hodgson
Rating: Hated (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



Back when I first discovered the litRPG genre, before I realized how god awful most of them were, I downloaded a bunch of them onto my Kindle. And there they all have sat, because I can't cope with how bad they are. So, new rule on reading them: If there is a typo or a grammar issue in the very first sentence, I'm giving it next to no chance beyond that.

First sentence of this book:

"GET HER OUT OF THAT DAM MACHINE," David bellowed at his assistant.

The machine in question had nothing to do with holding water back, so I only read a couple pages beyond that, then gave up on it at the 1% mark.

Secondhand embarrassment for the author and his mother. The author thanked her in the acknowledgements: "...and special mention to my Mum who read through it so many times...". And yet she didn't spot this mistake in the very first sentence?

Adventures of a Scribe by Michael Deyhim
Rating: Disliked (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



LitRPG. First sentences:

"Edward Monteger." My mother yelled. I winced at her harsh tone...

Somewhat better than Game Break, but still bad. Abandoned a few pages later, 1% point.

Partial book credits:
Point reached in these: 1% + 1% = 2%
Previous abandoned book total: 99%
New total: 99% + 2% = One book + 1% towards the next book

The Blood of Ten Chiefs by Richard Pini and nine others
Rating: Liked (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



If you never encountered or don't remember much of Elfquest, it was a series of graphic novels about "elves" (aliens) who crash on Earth the World of Two Moons. The first elves were tall, delicate things, not at all adapted to live on the harsh Earth World of Two Moons. They could also do magic. One of those early elves shapeshifted herself into one of Earth the World of Two Moons' creatures: a wolf. She then bred with real wolves, hoping to make her own race more able to survive through the introduction of bloodlines from a native species. And from that, the Wolfriders were born. Wolfriders and their generations long war with the humans of that planet.

The graphic novel series centered around the eleventh generation chief, but each previous generation had a chief as well. The Blood of Ten Chiefs is an anthology, a story about each of those previous ten leaders.

There were some really big name authors in this book!

"Pendulum" - Richard Pini
"Coming of Age" - Lynn Abbey
"Plague of Allos" - Piers Anthony
"Swift-Spear" - Mark C. Perry & C. J. Cherryh
"Tale of the Snowbeast" - Janny Wurts
"The Deer Hunters" - Allen L. Wold
"Tanner's Dream" - Nancy Springer
"The Spirit Quest" - Diana L. Paxson
"Lessons in Passing" - Robert Lynn Asprin
"Night Hunt" - Diane Carey

Unlike most anthologies I've read, almost all of stories in this book were quite good. One I didn't finish, two I was bored with but finished, but all the rest were good. Maybe surprisingly, Piers Anthony's was one of the weakest for me (I just didn't believe his characters acted like reasonable people). C. J. Cherryh's (with Mark C. Perry, not sure why he got top billing) was easily the strongest of them all, and I was still thinking about it even after finishing all the others after it.

I was really surprised at how much I enjoyed this book. I had liked Elfquest back long, long ago (the early 80s!), I hadn't at all expected it to hold up now.

There were four other anthologies in this series, but sadly none of the rest seem to be available in ebook format. (I suspect this one isn't officially out in ebook format either, it had a few mistakes that made it seem scanned.)

Beasts of Tabat, Narrative of a Beast's Life by Cat Rambo
Rating: Loved (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)





Don't judge a book by its cover. For me, it's usually in the opposite way: I fall for a cool cover hiding a horrible book. In the case of Beasts of Tabat, it's the opposite: That cover is just awful! And what does it tell you about the story? Nothing!

There was so so so much good about this story. Set in some other world, the planet was populated by every mythical creature you can think of, as well as by humans. Every non-human, non-animal mythical creature was classified as a Beast, and other than some free ones deep in wild areas, they were all slaves to humans. Many of these Beasts were thinking creatures, many were as intelligent if not more so than humans. As humans tend to do to slaves, Beasts were generally not treated very well, and in many cases, were abused. (Seriously disturbingly, when an intelligent Beast couldn't be tamed or otherwise rebelled, it was "dulled" -- lobotomized. Though it hadn't been described in detail at all, a scene about that being done to a Beast bothered me so much!)

As interesting as they were, the Beasts were just background information, part of the wonderful worldbuilding of this story (though in coming books are going to be a major part of the plot). This book centered around Bella and Teo. Bella is a gladiator, the star of the most popular "penny-wides" (graphic novel-type of book, read by adults and kids alike). In a city where seasons are represented by gladiator, Bella has extended winter an unnaturally long time because she just keeps winning. Teo is a "shifter" (were-animal, a Beast), but unable to shift. His village thinks him unlucky for being unable to change into his animal shape, so send him off to the city to work for the church. Teo, a big fan of penny-wides, seeks out Bella, and the two eventually cross paths.

There was nothing at all I disliked about this book (well, other than the cover...). The worldbuilding was deliciously good. I loved the characters, major and minor. I LOVED the idea of Beasts. I believed every single character's motivations.

Happily the second book should be coming out soon-ish, and the series is intended to be four books long.

This author writes a lot, including short stories set in her other books. Narrative of a Beast's Life was about one of the minor Beast character's life. While I enjoyed it, the last 10 minutes of reading time (per my kindle) out of a 40 total minute story were all promotions for the author's other books/stories. I had thought there was so much story left, so it was disappointing that it was all just advertisement.

Oh! And Cat Rambo is the author's real name, not a pseudonym. Cat, short for Catherine, and Rambo is her married/husband's name. Like the cover, that had worried me a little at first, since it seems like an awful pen name. :P

Seven Princes by John R. Fultz
Rating: Disliked (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



It's a bad sign for a book when I'm more interested in correcting a book's grammar than I am in the story. The first page had a grammar issue big enough that I had to read a line multiple times to figure out what the author meant, and the same issue was repeated on the next page. The story seemed very stereotypical fantasy -- nothing original. Characters were "types" instead of people (typical evil sorcerer, etc). Add to that lackluster reviews on Goodreads, and I lost all desire to give this book more of a chance. Abandoned at 1%.


Lives of the Monster Dogs by Kirsten Bakis
Rating: Disliked (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)




While published in 1998, this book felt more like it was written in 1887. Which I think was the point, because "the dogs retain the nineteenth-century Germanic culture of the humans who created them" (quote from wiki).

The story was about "uplifted" dogs -- dogs created to be able to speak and walk upright, and given mechanical hands. I feel like it was supposed to be a parable or an allegory, but I didn't get far enough into it to be sure. I wanted to like it, it seemed like it would be a good fit for me, but from the very first page I was bored. Gave up at the 6% point.


Partial book credits:
Point reached in these books: 1% + 6% = 7%
Previous abandoned book total: 68%
New total: 7% + 68% = 75% towards the next book

Currently reading: Fanuilh, which hopefully I'll stick with.

The Dogs of War by Bret Brown
Rating: Hated (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



Ugh. Author has no idea about grammar, and of course no editor. I had to reread the book's first sentence multiple times to try to understand what the author was attempting to say, and never did figure it out. Dialogue tags drove me crazy:

"Boo!", he said.
"Was that supposed to be a surprise?", she asked.

Book abandoned at the 1% mark. Just an awful book full of awful writing.

Dungeon Explorers by Max Anthony
Rating: Disliked (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



Poor, poor writing. Even in just the 2% I read, nothing was believable, and the writing was just awful.

Lion's Quest: Undefeated by Michael-Scott Earle
Rating: Disliked (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



At least this book was somewhat better written than the last two (not a high bar...). However, it had other issues: The book's whole setup was impossible to believe.

Set on Earth in the very near future, sports no longer existed, people didn't care about them anymore. The only thing people were into were video games. Not playing them, but watching others play them. Old sports stadiums were expanded to seat all the people who came out to watch people play video games...

The main character was so good at a game that he was not just the best in the world, he was so much better than everyone else that he was bored. No one else in the entire world could even give him a mild challenge.

Ugh, it annoys me just writing about this. Gave up on the book at the 6% point.

Partial book credits:
Point reached in these books: 6% + 2% + 1% = 9%
Previous abandoned book total: 59%
New total: 9% + 59% = 68% towards the next book

Currently reading: Transformation (Rai Kirah Book 1). GAH! It's so so so good! It's amazing how you can tell a book is going to be good just by the first sentence or two.

Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang
Rating: Disliked (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



I'd like to say I don't know why I got this book, but I do. In fiction, things like human traffic, slavery, and abuse can work for me in a story. In nonfiction, it's completely different thing.

This book was depressing. Joyless. Not surprising, since it was about what was basically modern day slavery. But still, it was not a book I enjoyed reading at all. I wanted to stop reading it multiple times, but pushed through to the end.

It told the story of a young girl taken from her village by the China government. Apparently this is a practice in China to this day -- take rural girls and 'sell' them to factories in the cities. The girl was Muslim, and often times they would feed them only pork. They hit them. They made them work 18 hour days. They sexually abused them.

I did learn something from the book, I hadn't known this government-sanctioned human traffic practice existed. Still, I did not enjoy reading Factory Girl at all.

Wildside by Steven Gould
Rating: Okay (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



Know those SyFy movies that are so bad they're actually entertaining? That was this book. A kid (high school age) is given a farm by his uncle, and the farmhouse just happens to have a portal to another world in it, an earlier version of Earth from around prehistoric times. The kid brings in his other high school friends, and they bring animals to this world and sell them for hundreds of thousands to zoos.

To give this book credit, it was entertaining enough that I almost continued reading it. I liked seeing the prehistoric world, but the kids successfully blackmailing all the world's most successful and biggest zoos into paying them hundreds of thousands of dollars, without the government knowing what they were doing or where the prehistoric animals were coming from... I just couldn't get passed that. Abandoned at the 17% point.

We Are Both Mammals by G. Wulfing
Rating: Disliked (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



This book doesn't exist on Amazon, the above link goes to Smashwords. That should be all I need to say in this review... But the (technical) writing was surprisingly okay. The plot/world logic, on the other hand... Giant honking plot holes. Like early in the book he says the alien is 130 years old, which is a young adult in their species, but a couple chapters later supposedly this same alien race is short-lived and only lives a fraction of the time humans do.

But that's putting the cart before the horse. The plot was not very logical at all. On some planet where humans and aliens work together, a human gets into an accident in a lab: something falls on him and destroys almost every organ in his body. To save him, they hook him up to an alien -- they let the alien's organs run the man's body. The whole thing just made so little sense. Abandoned at the 26% point.

Partial book credits:
Point reached in these books: 26% + 17 % = 43%
Previous abandoned book total: 97%
New total: 97% + 43% = 140% / one book + 40% towards the next

Warchild by Karin Lowachee
Rating: Loved (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



I almost never reread books (I have too many new ones to read!) but I loved Warchild so very much, I've been itching to reread it. I read it for the first time on my vacation last year, so seemed like a good idea to reread it during my vacation this year.

At first I thought I lost the magic of the book. Through the first section (the second-person POV when the main character is the youngest), I actually didn't like it... It was only a couple days later that I realized the issue was probably me and not the book. (I was on a redeye flight, started reading it at 3 AM when all I really wanted to do was sleep, and I was bored and unhappy. Not at all a good mindset for reading.)

Anyway, after that first day of reading, I LOVED it. Gah, the journey the main character (Jos) takes! Rollercoaster of emotions! Nonstop questioning of who he can trust and who will break their relationship with him this time! Not to mention, all the abuse he suffers! Ugh, this book, it broke my heart and I loved it for doing so.

As with my first reading, I hated the ending, but only because it was an ending. I want need MORE MORE MORE of Jos and Niko! At least, unlike my first time reading, I didn't think books 2 and 3 would give me more of their story (talk about a major disappointment!).

In my earlier review of it (here, I wrote:

This book was AMAZING. A week and two books later, it's still in my head stronger than any other book has ever been before. If I had paid an author to write a book perfect for me, this book would have surpassed even that.

That still holds true. I loved this book so very much, and I want to read it a third time... without waiting for next year's vacation.

Nyxia by Scott Reintgen
Rating: Liked (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



Book received free for review from publisher.

It kind of feels cliche when reviewers compare a book to Hunger Games, but this book used the same idea. Take the Hunger Games, but make all the kids willingly involved, and you get this book.

Set in the near future, some company founds a material (Nyxia) on another planet. Nyxia is able to be almost literally anything. Need a universal translator? Need a camera? Need medical equipment? Need a power supply for your iPod? It can be anything just by thinking about what you want it to be. It can do anything. (I'll admit I had some serious issues believing it, but... fictional book. I tried to just accept it and go with the story. And, by the end, I was suspecting that the future books would make me believe it.)

Problem was, the planet had aliens on it, and the aliens kept trying to kill off the humans. For whatever reason, aliens really like children, so the company recruited a bunch of kids to go to the planet and mine the Nyxia. (Again, my ability to believe the story was being stretched.)

The company, being a typical coldblooded, money-grubbing company, set up a contest to see which kids would get to go to the planet. Typical fighting, breaking them, testing them, giving them an okay to kill each other, all that.

I actually stopped reading the book at the 30% point, but I did something I've not done in years: I went back to it and finished it. And amazingly, even though I returned to it after a book I loved (Warchild), I got back into Nyxia and read the whole thing. (I never ever usually like the book I read a book I loved.)

When I finished the book, I was somewhat frowny. There was so much I had a hard time believing (including multiple characters, which is usually the kiss of death for a book), I had felt sure I wouldn't read the rest of the books in the series. But it's been a couple days now, and oddly I cannot stop thinking about this book. I'd read the second book if it were out now. While the book did not end on a cliffhanger (kudos for the author!), it did leave a whole lot of the story left unexplored, including the true nature of Nyxia.

It's rare that I question so hard what to rate a book. There was a lot about Nyxia that didn't work for me, and at the time I was reading it, I wasn't hooked or completely liking it, but it's like it hooked me once the book was finished... I had been pretty certain about ranking it an 'okay' but I guess I'll switch it to 'liked'.

Madness on the Orient Express: 16 Lovecraftian Tales of an Unforgettable Journey by James Lowder (editor)
Rating: Liked (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



I have zero interest in the Orient Express.
I've never read any, and I'm not interested in, Lovecraftian stories.

Then why did I pick up this book? There's an author I love, James Sutter, and he has a story in it. I'm reading everything of his I can get my hands on.

I was surprised that I enjoyed most stories in this book. None of them were outright scary, though a number were creepy and a couple had some gross scenes. Most of them were well written and kept my interest.

Nicely, every story in this book was written by an author in the gaming field. Most of them were traditional tabletop game writers, though a few were videogame writers.

Sutter's story was the third to last one, and by the time I reached it, I pretty much had enough of this genre. I read the second to last one, but gave up in the middle of the final one, ending at the 87% point. It wasn't the fault of the story, I just was at my limit of stories about a subject I didn't really care about.

Point reached in this book: 87%
Previous abandoned book total: 0%
New total: 87% + 0% = 87%

Currently reading: Skullsworn by Brian Staveley.

Before I get to the review: WTF LJ? Under the tag selection window is now "Feel free to use hashtags! The # symbol is precedes the tag followed by one or more keywords that will properly lead individuals to conversations and discussions pertaining to a specific topic or theme." How is that different than how tags work now? Also "is precedes"?

#book review

Edit: AH HA! You can use them in the post now, not just in the tag field. That's pretty cool. (Too bad about the space issue though.)

Edit 2: Oh, it links to everyone's use of that hashtag, not just your use. That's a whole lot less cool. How is one to know if everyone is going to use book_review, BookReview, Book-reviews, or something else?

---

The Last One by Alexandra Oliva
Rating: Loved (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



I'm so glad to be done with this amazing book, because now I can sleep. Every single night since I started it, I've stayed up way too late reading it. That never ever happens! Usually I'm good about getting to bed on time, but this book was so good I just could not make myself put it down.

Set in current times and the real world, a woman gets cast on a reality TV show. One of the "cut off in the wild" ones, like Survivor, but without voting people off. The only way to get off the show is to quit, and so the show was really hard on the players to try to force them to tap out. As reality shows tend to be, the producers not just were hard physically on the players, but manipulated without care to their feelings to get a good show.

The author knows just how reality shows work, that viewers really don't care about the players' names, they just need one defining trait for that person. So the main characters were people like Air Force, Engineer, Waitress, Black Doctor, etc. That alone made me fall in love with the book -- it was so reality TV-ish! They were full, complete, interesting characters, and so calling them by just that one trait further demonstrated how messed up reality TV can be.

So, while the players are all trapped out in the woods, alone except now and then a cameraman, something bad happens in the real world. (I'm not sure if the something bad is a spoiler or not, so I'm going to be vague just in case.) The plot of the reality show alternates with plot about the something bad, and it comes together perfectly to show how a person can mentally break. The show manipulated a woman so badly that her brain started to fool her about what was really happening with the something bad. It was SO COOL, such a perfect, believable, realistic glimpse at how someone can go insane.

For all that seems like a dark story, mostly it wasn't. The first three-quarters of it really weren't all that dark. The end of it got dark and depressing (which makes perfect sense, with the something bad). The ending of the book didn't work for me, but I'm not sure why. I wouldn't at all let that ending stop me from recommending this book though! (Especially since I was exhausted and distracted by RL while reading it, so I might not have enjoyed it for non-story reasons.)