attackrat's reviews
153 reviews

Your Shadow Half Remains by Sunny Moraine

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

4.0

I can tell this was hugely inspired by the pandemic and the isolation and loneliness epidemic that followed, but it actually served as an effective story rather than some of the other too-on-the-nose COVID books i’ve seen.

I do think that this was a bit too internal for me to enjoy that much. It was in service to the narrative to be an ungrounded and sort of cerebral experience but a lot of the narration is just her asking herself rhetorical questions to get us questioning what’s real and that was just a cheap shot. The narration is effective in doing that in other ways so it was an odd choice that started to grate on me.

But in the end, I did think this was a good story. The theme of isolation and the near psychosis that can come from it worked really well.

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Aliens: Earth Hive by Steve Perry

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slow-paced

Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.5

I’m torn about this one because it models itself after Aliens well, in that it’s an action sequence with too much bravado and not enough suspense. But the book itself is not good. The “romance” is just thrown in with no care or buildup, and there is only one good bit of horror in the entire thing. And they end up just moving past it. Most of the story is just politics and build up, then the real meat happens in a few pages. My saving grace is that there were a few lines that went particularly hard, but on one page I did mark every time a man called someone “the wh*re.” I’m not impressed, it’s pretty much what I expected to read.

Feed Them Silence by Lee Mandelo

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4.25

This was really good. Writing characters who are wrong and sometimes bad people is hard to do while creating a compelling narrative around them (imo) and this book did that well.

My only comment is that something about it didn’t fully click with me. I enjoyed the book and the writing, and the main character was interesting to follow. But I feel like there was some kind of message in this book that just didn’t come through for me. You could say I didn’t really “get” it, though I still enjoyed the book. Idk, maybe it didn’t fully get where it needed to. Nevertheless, a good read.

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