Reviews tagging 'Vomit'

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

37 reviews

davonysus's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0


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vi_king's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

A great heist! Reminds me of Six of Crows, if you halved the cast and doubled the dark and violence. Really caught me off guard a bunch of times.

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kiwij96's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

It took a moment for me to get used to the structure of the book: chapters written in parts with an interlude at the end of each chapter which is like a flashback. Once I got used to this stule of stroytelling, it became easier to engage with, however, there were times when the story was engaging and I couldn't put it down for like 100-150 pages, and other times where I struggled to get to the next part. It also felt like some of the paragraphs had been very heavily attacked by a thesaurus which meant I had to reread sections just to understand what was going on.

Criticisms aside, the story was full of twists and turns and more deaths that a season of Grey's Anatomy. The worldbuilding was full of description and even had its own calendar system. The characters were fantastically written, both good and bad characters. They brought me joy, anger, and heartbreak at times. Locke is an interesting character to me because as someone who is supposed to be the brains of the operation, he sure does make a whole bunch of mistakes and then continues acting like he is the cleverest being known to man.

I am unsure if I will continue the trilogy as this one felt like it could be a standalone, but we shall see.

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ijustreallyliketrees's review against another edition

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challenging dark tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5


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itsdaytime's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny inspiring mysterious tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

The Lies of Locke Lamora pulled me in with an interesting premise and wonderfully describe settings, then held me through the mystery and crude jokes. It had engaging characters, plot twists and murder, and a lot of suspension of disbelief. If you liked the Netflix show Lupin, (and can handle darker books), The Lies of Locke Lamora is right up your alley. 

I really liked the interludes that Lynch included. It gave the reader more information on the world without needed a blatant explanation. The interludes were either stories from the Locke's or his brothers' childhood or stories from their city-state.

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juliabythebook's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional funny medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

Wowza. This is everything I love in a fantasy book: lovable characters, twisty plot, excellent and well-devolved world. Plus, a quick-witted and dry sense of humor that made me literally LOL on multiple occasions. 

The only thing keeping me from giving this 5 stars is the pacing. I think this could have really benefited from being 100 pages shorter. There’s an insane mid-book climax that left my jaw on the ground only to quickly fall back into a long winded and light thieving scene that lasted way too long. I wish we had seen a bit more of the side characters (like The Spider) instead of this. Considering this is a debut (like, literally how?!) I can overlook it more. 

Will I continue? Probably. But I do feel very fulfilled with how this novel finished. It felt like a complete work. 

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emeraldrina's review against another edition

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adventurous dark funny tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.25

I’m honestly really baffled by all the rave reviews of this book… it was a fun heist story in a unique and quirky fantasy world, but nothing particularly special or great. There were quite a lot of major flaws that unfortunately really took away from the book’s highlights.

I’ll start with the good - the world building is incredible. It’s intricate, original, and holds so many mysteries yet to be answered. The descriptions are beautiful and detailed, making it easy to picture this strange world.

But therein also lies one of the major downfalls of the book - there’s far too much world building detail and description throughout the book. Between every chapter there’s an “interlude” - initially these are all flashbacks to the characters’ past to give insight into how or why they’re doing certain things now. But about halfway through the book the interludes just turn into unnecessary world building info dumps that jar the reader out of the story. Many of these are superfluous - the information was already conveyed in a more interesting manner via the main story, as it should be. The rest are just pointless to the main story, and feel more like the author is insisting on showing off exactly how much work he put into his world building.

Likewise with the descriptions - they’re written not as part of the story, but in the author’s voice, butting in between the action to tell us as much detail as he can because he wrote it all and doesn’t want it to go to waste. They’re beautifully written, but they’re not in the POV character’s voice, so they don’t feel like part of the story. They feel like unnecessary interruptions.

As for the characters, they mostly have clear voices and personalities and flaws. However, the main character is utterly lacking in internal conflict. Up until the villain shows up (which is waaaay too late in the book), Locke had no real goal or motivation in life. He has a major flaw, but no related overarching misbelief about the world or fear that’s driving him to act in ways counter to his goal. He’s just … a thief stealing money for the sake of it. He never learns anything, never transforms, never really changes at all. And this is why the first couple hundred pages of the book are such a drag - we don’t care about Locke because he has no internal conflict. We start caring a bit when the inciting attack fiiiinally happens near the halfway point, but this is still just external conflict. So even after that initial attack, there weren’t really any different stakes for Locke than for anyone else in that situation. So we still didn’t care all that much.

The final problem is the schemes. They’re supposed to be genius level clever… but they’re not. They’re quite frankly idiotic. They seem to have been purposely designed to fail easily - which of course they have. But only the author should know that, not the readers! The gaping holes in the schemes in turn make the plot transparently predictable. Which is even less fun than usual in a heist story.

I really didn’t hate the book as much as this makes it sound. The dialogue was amusing, the world was fascinating, and the prose was lovely. It just fell a lot flatter than I was expecting after reading so many great reviews.

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julianavaz's review against another edition

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4.0


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apotheosis's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional funny tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

This is literally my favorite book.

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le_mur's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional funny tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0


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