omnitopia dawn by diane duane

This book... I really wanted to like it, but it just felt like so much of it was waiting for something to happen, that huge swathes of the book never actually did anything. It's past the half-way point before even the inkling of something happening happens, and then it really all doesn't come together until the second-to-last chapter. It's got a good idea, but it has trouble getting there, and I wish I was one of her advance-readers while she was writing it-- I think I could have convinced her to shift the focus and it would have been so much better. But maybe that's just my ego talking.

I'll probably pick up the next book in the series, but if it's similarly slow, I doubt I'll care much past that.

Side note:
The cover of the book calls it a 'thriller'. Does that word mean 'extremely backloaded so that most of the rest of the book doesn't really matter when it comes down to it'? Because Impact was also called a thriller, and though I found it almost insufferable, while this one was just dull, they have the same dragging in the plot, the same idea that most of the book is just filler. If that's how it is, I think I don't care at all about thrillers, and they're mostly lazy writing and sort of an insult to the scifi tropes they seem to want to steal all over the place lately.

Official review here.

PS: There doesn't seem to be much sense to where the links go in. I'll have to play around with that, I think...

Dragongirl by Todd mccaffrey

I didn't want to hate this one, but I came very close. It was so hard to read. So very very hard. It took me longer to get through than almost any other book I've read-- I think the only thing I can remember suffering through with such a grim stubbornness was, like, Sphere, which I did wind up hating by the end. That one took me nine months to read. This one only took about three, and I read about four other books in the meantime, trying to escape it.

See, I gre up on the Pern books. They were the first adult books I read, after a ha dful of Victoria Holt novels that I quickly lost interest in, and I've followed the series since. When I turned sixteen, my dad gifted me with the whole series up to that point, and it's one of my favorite memories of that timeframe. All Anne McCaffrey's books affected me the same way-- they aren't the most literary scifi, or the most rigorously scientific, and they're often just thinly veiled romances, but they were interesting and complex and open minded and adult, and they always got me emotionally involved in the characters.

This one though, one of Todd's solo ones... It was like beating myself In the face with bad fanfic a lot of the time, and it was like a bad idea of making it into kid lit, but still letting polyamory be okay. It happens at a time in Pern history when we know things are going to end up pretty desolate, too. And worse of all, it sort of steals Lessa's thunder by making her less rare, and preempting some of the daring things she has done / will do. It makes her seem woefully undereducated. Which makes me very sad.

And then it suddenly gets pointed, the characters suddenly differentiate, the writing clarifies and makes morse sense, and it feels like a Pern book, not a poorly-made imitation of one. That's how it should have been all along. It was so refreshing and life affirming to get through that whole mess and find a good and stirring ending, but it was too little, too late... But it piqued my curiosity about the next book, which has no excuse not to be good after 300- odd pages of set up from this book.

Amaranth enchantment by Julie berry

This is exactly the sort of book I should have loved. Plucky girl overcoming hardship, clever rogue, handsome prince, evil government official, stranded alien, interesting alternate London and England sort of setting... But it comes out feeling flat and dumbed down, and I just didn't like reading it. It felt like a problem: she wanted the characters to do this and this and this, but they wanted to do their own thing, and so she forced them, and sections of the dialog and narrative are so forced I just hated reading them. And throughout the whole thing, I kept wanting to edit it hard- core, until the end, when I wanted to just rewrite the whole thing. It feels like it got lost in it's own setting sometimes, and like it was extremely dumbed down other times, like the whole book didn't trust preteen girls to understand things, while the plot demanded that the lead go to jail and face the gallows.

I can't abide being ken down to, even when I'm not the target audience, and if I was nine or ten, I'd still want more from this book. ::sigh:: it really does ace a great set up, too.