Reviews and Comments

I’m also a millennial, about a year off from Gladstone’s age, so I get that this is a very personal and heartfelt outpouring of his feelings about Black Lives Matter, flowing from having been through the Occupy protests and electing Obama and feeling like maybe we’d done things right but then nothing was fixed and things stayed dark. I get that. 

But I also wish a brave editor had been willing to cut like…30% off the long internal monologues of each of the characters. There’s a lot that’s good in this book, and a lot of wonderful ideas and images, but… it’s so bogged down and repetitive that it’s hard to enjoy the ride.   

This was extremely disjointed especially near the end, it really felt as if the author was making it up as he went. It had some interesting ideas packed in there, and I do like a non traditional narrative structure usually, but it’s hard to get around the sexism and like, the main character having sex with a teenager while envisioning his own preteen daughter. 😬 yeah I finished it somehow but this is the end of the series for me 

Well, I learned some things about the history of Goa. I can say that about it. 

I’m a big fan of surrealism and weird fiction, so I was pretty disappointed here. The most interesting parts for me were the descriptions of historic Antwerp in 1957, and the protagonist’s recollections of being part of the resistance during WWII in his youth less than  12 years prior. 

<spoiler> Also it turns out to be about Jesus, which is the biggest disappointment to me. Ugh. </spoiler>

I will read anything Jennings writes from here on out, this book was inspired from front to tail. Wonderful. 

<spoiler> I almost never DNF but I just really wasn’t enjoying this. For something that was billed as a science fiction murder mystery series similar to Midsomer Murders (or if that wasn’t the intent, calling the series Midsolar Murders was a huge misstep) there was a distinct lack of on-page murder mystery solving or intrigue. Instead it’s just backstory, 1/3 of a book spent  freaking out about humans moving to the space station, and then after the halfway point new backstory for new point of view characters. It felt like the entire book was basically being used as setup for the intended series without including enough plot or forward movement to make me at all interested in continuing. Or even finishing it, obviously. 

The aliens really bothered me too, they kept making throwaway comments about how humans are fragile bags of water walking around and then themselves turning out to …

I’m a huge Kelly Link fan, and honestly this might be my favorite collection of hers yet. Eminently haunting

I thought it was an excellent continuation of Sasha’s journey of self, and I cried during the acknowledgment at the end. I think it was implied that Marina and Sergey were working on plotting a third book about Sasha, and I hope I’m right. I want to see her finish this

The soldiers who spend months on end there among the coats themselves end up looking more like coats than people, and their thinking is more like the thinking of coats (for instance, they spend hours on end thinking about a city, where there are houses, monuments and streetlights on springs, and through whose streets there walks a solitary pony).

This book is absolutely as strange as I could possibly hope a book to be, and yet entirely comprehensible and with a strong plot and message. A+, will be reading it again and again in the future. 

I loved it, and I will take a long time to recover from it. 

Like any short story collection, there were ones I enjoyed more than others, but the pervasive sense of strangeness was consistent and I appreciated that. “The Hospice” was my favorite. I will look up more of Aickman’s work 

I get so tired of the narrative that humans are always going to choose the worst and most selfish means of planet stewardship, and this book is tired of it too! It’s one of those novels I put down and immediately begin longing for its vision of the future’s so badly it feels like I’ve lost something tangible. How much time do we have to get the watershed networks and dandelion networks underway and beat back the corporations? I’m ready to meet some aliens.