Reviews and Comments

I will preface this review that I am a huge fan of Daniel Polansky, so it will be biased in his favor.

M is an ageless, misanthropic wizard, living in NYC for about a year, and just trying to keep his head down--unfortunately the universe has other plans for him.

Do you like surreal stories? You'll probably love A City Dreaming, which dances on the line between abstract art and compelling storytelling. The stories themselves--the shape of things, the characters generally, are pretty well grounded in reality. The world building, and specifically, the magic of the world, is where things get trippy. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes abhorrent, always strange, the magic in A City Dreaming will challenge readers and reward the ones willing to wrap their minds around it. And the way New York City is portrayed is a mirror of that strange, surrealist world running parrellel to reality.

M as a character is somewhat hateable, somewhat relatable, and very very funny. The people he surrounds himself with (willingly and unwillingly) are often people you might know or have heard of in reality, taken to their extremes.

Each chapter is a month in M's life, and each story is largely disconnected from the ones before (though the connections M has with other characters are the enduring lines that stretch between chapters, a setup I highly enjoyed.)

This one goes on the favorites shelf for me.

Agnes Aubert's life running a cat shelter is turned on its head after a magical duel in the street wrecks several buildings, including her own.

This was very good Cozy Fantasy fare. I quite enjoyed it! I've always enjoyed Heather Fawcett's prose, and was able to sink into the story easily. The characters were memorable and enjoyable as well. I also sometimes enjoy a book where there's some fantastical world building but the point of view character is just a normal person.

This is a book about books and knowledge and libraries - those kinds of meta stories can be really hard to pull off I've found, but he did a solid job.

It's also got time travel shenanigans which I love. He pulls that off well too I think.

Lots of good twists even in this book.

I cannot wait to read the rest!

I really waffled between giving this 3 stars or 4. Consider it a 3.5.

There were parts of this book I really enjoyed, and there were parts that felt like misses. I will say the ending felt very solid and I was actually pretty happy with it. The world building was very good, and I wish there had been a bit more of it.

Some of the prose felt a little stilted. Other parts felt heartfelt and beautiful. It's hard to quantify any particular areas as being weaker than others, it was just a feeling that cropped up from time to time while reading.

I did quite enjoy the evolution of the relationships, and Zyll the goblin was an especially interesting character, but it was hard for me at times to like Fern. Being accused of being 'chronically dissatisfied' felt apt, and I don't entirely feel like that description was ever really fixed. The ending/epilogue tied off some of the emotional loose ends, but I feel like a bit more could have been done to show Fern slowly coming into what it is she truly wanted instead.

Not at a bad read at all; not something I'll probably re-read though.

What a fantastic book. I am biased in that I really love Robert Jackson Bennett's writing, but this was definitely a good story. Very weighty. I've criticized other books for bringing up philosophical questions and not answering them but that's because those books literally bring them up, using characters as a mouthpiece to just point blank ask questions which is unsatisfying. This book makes YOU ask the questions. It has a lot to say about religion and bureaucracy, about history and truth, and about generational pain and trauma.

Amusingly, if the Shadow of the Leviathan series is about trusting the system, then the Divine Cities series (or at least this book) is about bucking establishment and rules in an effort to do good instead of serving the status quo.

This wasn't anything to write home about. I get why it might have broad appeal but I've definitely read better romantacy books--and worse. I have some general criticisms on why I didn't enjoy this more. First, the protagonist started off very interesting and then got very un-interesting. I liked learning about her and her world and how she saw things, but as the story wore on, she became flatter and more of a trope than a unique person.

Secondly, the writing is just overly dramatic at several points. To the point where it grated (though sometimes it looped back around and just flat out became funny.) Some of the things Feyre says are so overwrought, which only further contributes to my previous point.

She also seems to suffer from holding the Idiot Ball several times. I couldn't tell if we were supposed to think she was clever or not. Sometimes she was, and sometimes she wasn't, and it always whatever was most convenient to the plot at the time.

Finally, I really didn't care for the set up of a love triangle. Having an anti-hero in the mix is fine--I tend to like those characters--but holding up a neon sign that says "Secondary Love Interest" just diminished what would have otherwise been an interesting character.

In a fantasy world where God has been killed and eaten and his angels hunted down for the same fate, a young girl from a backwater village finds herself on an unexpected quest to set the world right.

The world building in this is fantastic and the premise is an extremely compelling one. What if God was known to have existed, but was killed? What if feasting on an angel's flesh gave you strength, longevity, and powers? But it falls extremely short of delivering on that interesting idea for several reason.

First, and one of the most obnoxious parts that seems to be agreed upon by many, was that this book was an absolute slog to read. It wanted for an editor so badly. It needed to be trimmed. It feels like it wants to be Lord of the Rings, but there's so much redundancy at times. I frequently see "about 200 pages" as what is quoted to be removed and heartily agree. If this had been a shorter book, my review would have been more forgiving. It also had way more typos than any other book I've read lately.

Secondly, most of the characters are not that likeable. The main character is so naive that the charm wears off and it just becomes irritating. The book is also full of her constantly questioning things--things that are happening and philosophical questions, and it feels like at no point do answers manifest themselves. But neither does she make any effort to find those answers. She is one of the most passive protagonists I've met in a great while. Infuriatingly, at one point, she even takes note of this and... just wishes it were otherwise? None of the supporting cast are that great either.

There's some interesting philosophical questions to be had in here, but they feel shallow. The author seems to be asking you to ponder on these questions but then never really offering a solid in-universe or narrative viewpoint to contrast against. It has all the depth of someone posting to social media, "Does anyone really have the right to judge another? :think::think::think:"

There's also a twist and it's the kind I hate the most: important characters feel shocked and hoodwinked but so does the audience. The narrative goes out of its way to trick you. Hell, at one point, I was going to complain about how much it wink-wink-nudge-nudges the reader over points of dramatic irony--which was all in service to tricking the reader. I'm not a fan of that, personally. I can recognize some people might be, but I despise twists that have almost no way of being puzzled out by a keen-eyed reader.

The book is meant to be the first in a series (a trilogy I believe?) and despite being left with an enormous lack of answers to questions raised in this book, I don't intend to read it. Fool me once.

Pirate Amina al-Sirafi finds her and her crew on 'one last adventure' whether she wants it or not, and winds up quickly in over her head.

I preface this review with that I generally do not like pirate stories. If I did, this would be a solid 5/5, no notes sort of deal. But since I don't, it had a higher bar to clear, and clear it did. The narrative structure is interesting at the start, the characters are almost immediately compelling, and it was enough to keep me turning the pages despite being ready to dismiss it. I'd say the book really hits its stride about 40% in at which point I couldn't really put it down.

Extra bonus points for LGBTQ+ representation.

In this book, the Hexologists are on the trail of a mystery. But each time they draw close, the answer seems to shift out of their grasp.

I'm a huge fan of Josiah Bancroft in general, so more of his writing just makes me happy. I think objectively the plot of this one may be weaker, but it's hard for me to give an unbiased review since I enjoyed myself too much. Not to mention, I do really love time travel stories. We also get an advancement of the meta plot of Isolde's father!