What We Weading Wednesday
Jul. 2nd, 2025 02:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_asterNot...dead...yet.
Forget where I was, but here's what I've finished lately.
- Cold Eternity by S.A. Barnes - I liked this! I liked Dead Silence (great vibes) and HaTEd Ghost Station (because so much of it didn't make sense to me, plotwise). I felt this was also in the "fun creepy vibes" category. The resolution was kind of simple, but hey, solid space horror.
- Into the Broken Lands by Tanya Huff - I...am glad I read this. Unsure if I "liked" it, but it was kind of a strange book. Imagine...Murderbot in a fantasy setting, with mages who broke part of the world and left it a reality-challenged wasteland, but not before they left behind a lot of very powerful mage-engineered devices, including some humanoid engineered "weapons". That was the part I liked, because it did have some interesting (though kind of overwrought) things to say about defining personhood, and the "weapon" got much more POV than it usually does (Murderbot notwithstanding). There was also one of the most delicately done and interesting corruption arcs I've ever seen done, and that got it up out of 2-star territory for me, but overall it sat around 3 or 3.5. I felt it touched on things I liked but consistently didn't quite hit the beats square enough to get to 4 stars. It wasn't helped by having a very, very annoying set of characters that I hated having to see so much of.
- The Teller of Small Fortunes by Julie Leong. I liked this a lot. Cozy, but not too cozy in my view: there was tension and problems and emotions and yes, everything worked out, but that's why I'm over reading cozy anyway, so I felt that was fine.
- The Wonder Engine by T. Kingfisher. Solid ending to this duology, though it felt very slow for most of it. The ending was a banger, though, and raised it back up into solid 3.5 star territory for me.
Currently I'm reading Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove, and after a wobble at the start where I was kind of unsure if I was going to like the main AI character, it GRABBED me and I've loved it ever since.
