thegooddoctor
8/22/2023
Very very poor - I had to drag myself through to the end. I was very tempted to abandon it earlier - but (unfortunately) talked myself into continuing on.
We had great hopes after the excellent "The Raven Tower" - but this was a huge let-down. Vastly the very worst of her novels. This novel had far too much whining, hand-wringing, dithering, worrying over the whining (and dithering etc., etc., etc.). Oops - sorry - were those spoilers?! Those aspects certainly spoiled my appreciation of the novel.
I am also not impressed with printing format - endless wasted full pages, pages that are mostly blank (because they have a few lines of text at the top. How many trees were squandered because of the exceedingly poor choices made by the publisher. Shouldn't we be trying to save the planet - instead of printing books with endless wasted space??? One wonders, with all of that wasted space, was this actually a novella that was padded out to novel length by all of the pointless white space?
I have read all of Ann Leckie's novels - and this is the absolute worst by a long shot. She is a great author, and both "Ancillary Justice" and "The Raven Tower" are highly recommended.
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My rating system for this website (I have done reviews for over 85 "books" (including short stories, novelettes and novellas, as well as novels).
Their system is out of 5 stars, and allows you to use half-stars, so highest rating is 5 full stars, next-highest 4 ½ stars, etc. - and lowest is ½ star. I did NOT want to space these ratings equally, giving just as much precedence to low-quality mush as to really good works. For that reason, I laid out my system as follows:
My rating system: I begin with one star being equivalent to a rating of "C -". Progressing upwards, I add ½ star for each step, up to the maximum 5 stars, which is equivalent to a rating of "A"+. I reserve ½ star for BOMBS, there being no option of zero or negative stars. As a result, I maximize my rating space for good books, and don't squander half or more of that rating space on books that are of marginal quality.
Since I rated this book C - (which might even be a bit generous), I only gave it one star.