Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Horizon Alpha: Predators of Eden by D. W. Vogel. Ever read a book that basically has no plot? Well pick this one up and then you'll be able to, too.

The backstory (info dump at the beginning) was the most interesting part of the book. Earth was about to be destroyed (Jupiter was going to suck it in somehow...) so humanity had only 80 years to get off the planet. Somehow the nations got together and built four huge starships and sent humans off towards the most likely planets.

The story opened as the first ship, Horizon Alpha, reached its planet. Something happened, and the ship exploded. (You get used to that in this book. It's a lot of "something happened, somehow" with no information on how or why it happened.) So the humans ended up on the planet with none of their gear to keep them alive.

And guess what, the planet was (somehow) full of dinosaurs. Okay, they were not exactly dinosaurs but they were (somehow) really close, and the characters all called them dinosaurs (t rex, etc).

The entire book was nothing but a small group of characters running through the jungle away from dinosaurs. One by one they died. Really, that's the whole story.

It wasn't poorly written, but it just felt pointless to read. (But then I'm not an action movie fan, maybe it's good for people who want all action and no plot.)

DNF #142: Havoc by M. L. Williams. After finishing (and loving) In Real Life, I wanted another professional esports book. But how many of those are there? Turns out I had another on my Kindle already!

The man who wrote In Real Life knew what he was talking about -- his son was an esports professional. Unfortunately I don't believe Williams ever played even a most casual video game. Nothing at all about the gaming part of the story was believable, but most of the story was about a preteen girl's social life, so there's that, I guess? Just a big disappointment all the way around, sadly.

DNF #143: The Grace of Wild Things by Heather Fawcett. A retelling of Anne of Green Gables, but with witches. I've never read Anne, so I'm not sure why I picked this book up... The main character came off as really, really young (younger than preteen) and I just wasn't connecting with her character at all. Funny thing is, I connected more with the witch (an old woman who was just barely shapeshifted from a horrible monster, you could see the monster around the edges) than I did with the main character girl.

DNF #144: Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds. I've loved other books by Reynolds, so it made me sad to DNF this one. The main character's voice just kept putting me to sleep though (literally to sleep, I kept falling asleep while reading it, which is unusual for me). Someone on Goodreads described the main character as "Ben Stein the boring teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off", and that really hit it on the nose.

DNF #145: The Slave of the Sea by Dawn Dagger. Ugh. Typical bad self-published book. I swear to god, I don't think the author even reread this once. It was more like a first draft than anything close to finished. Missing words, basic misspellings, missing punctuation. Ugh.

DNF #146: Stone Spring: The Northland Trilogy by Stephen Baxter. After a string of DNF books, sometimes I stick with one longer than I should to try to break trend. This story felt like a mess. Set on Earth back in the ice age-ish times, the plot followed a bunch of different groups trying (and muchly failing) to survive. All the male characters were generally horrible and there was more rape than I would have liked. But mostly the plot was just a muddy mess, following a bunch of different groups in a rather confusing way. (Edit: He's the same author who wrote Silverhair, which I DNFed last month. Guess the author just doesn't work for me.)

DNF #147: Guild of Tokens (NYC Questing Guild Book 1) by Jon Auerbach. Another bad self-published book. Set in the real world, a guy finds a quest in his day to day life and says what the hey and just does it. "Kill two pigeons", "gather three black rocks", whatever. He does it for a full year. Then he meets the person giving the quest (the most beautiful woman he's ever seen...) and they go on adventures. But the author just says that "They went on a raid", "They robbed a store". No info or description more than that.