Scott Hawkins

This wasn't NEARLY as weird and incomprehensible as I was led to believe, and I'm only a little bit dissapointed.
Mostly very impressed by the characters, who I liked, and the world, which was interesting in a ha-ha kind of way. Has a good sense of humor without making itself a joke; some of the character moments in the first two-thirds or so were really touching, and there was clearly a lot of compassion for all of the characters, including the awful ones, which I appreciate.
The only real problem I had was the pacing, which wasn't bad in and of itself, but the part that I thought was going to be ending happened, inexplicably, halfway through the book. It was, I think, mostly a problem of expectation—the plot as described on the back cover is not the real plot, and therefore when it ends, the story, you know, keeps going except with the real plot. The real plot is also unexpected in the good way, insofar as it deals with problems that another (worse) book would ignore. So...basically I liked it. Yeah.… (lisätietoja)

I honestly didn't know what I was getting into picking up this book but when I did, I didn't put it down. Hawkins put together a truly crazy universe and then didn't feel the need to explain any of it to the reader. It reminded me a little of a Dan Simmons book, in which the author just whispers "trust me, just go with it" and for no reason at all you do, all the while asking yourself "why in gods name does this work?". I guess that one of the exiting things about this is that you can honestly throw all your expectations out the window and "just go with it". Hawkins found this balance in which you can imagine all sorts of things about his world at which he just hints instead of handing it to you in its entirety.

There must be some things I disliked about this book, but I can't remember any of them. It is very gruesome though, which I normally don't particularly care for, but for some reason it only contributed to the feeling of awesomeness in the book.… (lisätietoja)