Reviews with content warning for Gore - The Light Brigade

Reviews tagging 'Gore'

The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

19 reviews

caseythereader's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

tsunni's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

This is like a mix of Cyberpunk, Full Metal Jacket, Old Man's War, and time travel; a deliberately confusing mix of the horrors of war and jumping through time and obedience to too-powerful all-surveilling corporations manufacturing reality for their own gain. Expertly written in easy to read prose and bluntly disturbing imagery, the story viewpoint follows the main character Dietz, a poor nobody subcitizen who enlists in a corporate army for a chance to be a privileged member of society in some impossibly distant timeframe, and we watch her go completely mad (or go completely sane) over the course of the book as it jumps between a discordant number of timeframes, scifi tech horrors, and brutal scenes of war.

I didn't find the jumping and out of order timeframes too confusing to follow, but I also think we're not entirely meant to be able to keep up with it; it's not what the book is about. Instead I was hit harder by how much Dietz's world was an extension of our own, how reality was whatever the powerful wanted it to be, how dehumanized and mindless she was deliberately trained to become, how class warfare and misinformation was weaponized, how people are broken down and seen as disposable by the powerful. I think this story emotionally resounded with me because I see so many parallels with the directions the US and other parts of the western world has been going lately (especially today, a day after the US Supreme Court struck down the Chevron Doctrine).

Unlike Starship Troopers, which is the obvious direct novel comparison and a book I'd never liked, the clear message here in The Light Brigade -- one given in an almost direct author-to-reader plea in a forgivable deus ex machina ending -- is that the power to change all this for the better resides in the people, and reality is what we can make it; if we could scrape together the willpower to do it. Whether that's the right answer or not to our societal woes (and I don't expect Hurley or anyone else to have a simple answer, because there isn't one), I really enjoyed this novel and what it tried to do, and I think it's one I'd reread at some point.

Content Warnings

abigail_lo's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

it really was a solid 3 or 3.5 until the last few pages. i could feel how meticulously planned this book’s plot was — if anything, it was almost too convoluted to follow. my critique of the first 90% of the book is that i had to spend quite a bit of my brain cells just figuring out the timeline, which means i couldn’t get invested in the characters. but for the last bit, the plot (and specifically the mechanics) just made no sense to me. the book presents itself as a harder sci-fi book, but then it completely glosses over any explanation of the ending? i get the poeticism of it and everything coming full circle, but like — i’m still a bit annoyed that after wracking my brain over this plot for 300+ pages, it doesn’t even make sense in the end.

Content Warnings

athnyx230's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

pearlbird's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging dark mysterious tense

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes

4.5

A tight time travel plot fuck yeah. Hurley apparently had complicated spreadsheets to keep track of everything and it paid off. It's exactly what it says on the tin: a sci-fi time travel war novel

Content Warnings

sproutly's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging dark tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.75

Content Warnings

tato_gremlin's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous challenging emotional sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

An absolutely riveting ride - I read this in two sittings, unable to put it down. The

time travel timeline

broke my brain a bit before I fully grasped what was happening, so I'm hoping to revisit it soon to savor the prose and pick up on details I might have missed.

Hurley's ultra-capitalist dystopia is a terrifying vision of an imagined future, and the novel doesn't flinch away from everything that entails. There's a powerful anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist critique here, and the book is better for it.

Content Warnings