@dominish_books

3.5 stars. 

Bookshops & Bonedust is the kind of follow-up, kind of prequel to Legends & Lattes which was a surprise for me when I read it last year. That was because I really enjoyed it—it's not really my usual sort of thing, but it was just a nice comfortable read. This one was in many ways the same, but it was also very different at the same time.

I don't think it was as good a book as Legends & Lattes. Part of that might have been because the novelty, for me, wore off—I knew more what I was expecting going into it—but also, as it was a very different book, you've got a different theme to it, and I did feel at some times that it was almost like it was trying too hard to recapture the magic of that first (in publication order) book.

It just didn't quite reach those same heights for me because it almost seemed forced at times, a bit like the author was taking his experiences as a published author and writing about t...

DNF @ 14%

Details to follow.

I thought the first book, Shards of Earth, was just a little lacking in a couple of places in terms of the progress of the story. We were introduced to new things at various points and then there would be little flashback chapters that told us a little bit more about them and I didn't like that so much. I didn't like the way that it broke up the storytelling as I was going along, but the audio narration really helped to tie it all together quite nicely.

In this second book we had less of the looking back, it was more to do with looking forward, or I guess the present as the story was being told, and I really appreciated that. It definitely felt like we were well into a series rather than having all of those little introductory elements brought into it, so it was definitely an improvement for me over Shards of Earth.

I loved some of the elements of the storytelling in here but it's the characters that have really driven this series for me so far....

I really enjoyed the story here. I'm enjoying the development of the characters where we're starting to see some new things with Holt and Ash—there are some interesting story lines opening up there.

I enjoyed the side characters as well and what I also liked is that I read Last Stand of the Stone Fist immediately beforehand, which is a novella set some time before Unbound. It features one of the characters from Ascendant and in here we see the tendrils of that story, so I think that was a nice accompaniment that enhanced my enjoyment of Unbound.

This was a very enjoyable audiobook, as well—I'm enjoying the narration of the series overall and can see it being one of the highlights of my reading year. 

This novella is labelled as book 0.5 in Songs of Chaos, but I was advised it might be best to read it before Unbound, book two in the series. Happily, I’d already read Ascendant and was gearing up for Unbound, so this fit in nicely for me.

This one is a bit of an origin story, essentially. We follow one of the characters from Ascendant during a specific set of events in his younger life, and those events come up in Unbound, so the novella gives a good bit of background information for when you get there.

It was a good story and I liked being able to see more about what happened rather than just having it referred to in the second main book of the series. Being able to follow along gives you more of an understanding not only of the actual events, but of the feelings involved as well. It makes what happened hit a little harder and it means something to you when those events come up again later, rather than just being told that they were important...

This is a book that I'd had on my shelf for quite a long time and just never got round to, but I'm really glad that I eventually picked it up. I took the opportunity to listen to the audiobook and it was a really good narration which obviously helps quite a bit, but I really liked the story and the worldbuilding elements as well.

We've got a couple of wars that are going on on different fronts and we've got some of your typical tropes with a wall and a fortress up north and an incursion from beyond the wall. Then down south, the other side of the wall, you've got people who don't believe the stories, so the defenders are calling for help, saying that there's an upcoming invasion, and the politicians are saying they’re not going to send anyone to help because they're fighting this other war and they don't believe the claims.

Then you learn that it's not actually all about that. There are more sinister elements at play, and I really liked that. Th...

I felt like book two of Fractured Orbit, Chimera, was just missing a little something that made Eclipse such a joy, but in here, a lot of that was back. We were more ship-based with a few different characters on different ships and I enjoyed that. It’s basically that's what I look for or more from a sci-fi rather than being planet-side most of the time, so that definitely helped.

I liked the storyline here, there was a bit that slightly mirrored the story of Eclipse where you've got people essentially trying to figure out what's going on and potentially escape a space station. Here it was a ship rather than a space station, but it had a similar vibe, and that was what I really enjoyed about Eclipse. This was definitely a step up for me from book two, although book two was still a good book, and I'm looking forward to the next one whenever it comes out.

By this point, I'm used to Adrian Tchaikovsky. I know what to expect from him, and this didn’t disappoint. There's even a little bit of the typical Tchaikovsky creepy-crawly in here although it is mechanized rather than actually insectoid—although there are some alien species who have some creepy-crawly elements to them as well.

As far as the book itself goes, and the audio book, I had a pretty good time with it. The narration was solid and I thought the character voices were really good. Some of the characters in here I felt a lot closer to because of the narration and the voice that those particular characters had, so that was a good job.

I did feel initially that there was a lot to get into. There were a lot of events and a lot of characters and although I was having a good time with it, I felt like I didn't really know what was going on for a while and I was just piecing it together as I got further into the book. That's not necessarily a b...

The storytelling style here is not unique but it's one that I don't generally tend to come across too much in the books I read. It's told in the first person by the chronicler, or the annalist, of the Black Company. It was maybe a little bit strange because as we're going through these chronicles, it took me a little while before I realised that he's actually reading the chronicles of the company as opposed to just telling his story in a regular first-person manner.

You do have time jumps where you will see a key event and then you'll see another key event but you miss out the couple of weeks between them as they go in from A to B. That's good in a way because you don't necessarily want all of the in-between, but it did make me feel like I was maybe missing out on something.

The Black Company is a company of mercenaries and they are affiliated to one side of a war and we follow a large part of their campaign. There were some interesting element...

I've seen a few people who have assumed that this is a fantasy romance based on the cover, and it does have some romance elements, but from reading it, I wouldn't call it a fantasy romance as one of its main selling points. A new cover is intended to distance the book from that presumption, so it will be interesting to see if more readers (or just a different type of reader) pick it up once that launches.

This one surprised me a little because I went into it mostly blind, but my friend Esmay read it shortly before I did and said that she didn't think it was going to be a book for me. We have very different tastes but we do align quite well with our fantasy and over the last year or so I think we've got quite good at judging each other's fantasy tastes, which is really good when it comes to recommending books. I'm pleased to say though, that Esmay was wrong with this one as I did have a really good time with it.

The main element for me is the wor...

This is a review that I’ve had a hard time putting together. The way the book was written, and the way it progressed over the course of its 640 pages, made it very difficult within pretty much all of the individual sections I usually look at (overall enjoyment, worldbuilding, characters, plot, writing style, pacing) and certainly difficult to compare against any other books that I've read.

First of all, this one is not a unique story, it's kind of a retelling of a certain period in Chinese history, and one way I’ve seen it described is as a reskinning of that period, a retelling of it with a new veneer over the top, and that veneer is basically a fantasy setting. There are new names for the characters and the places and so forth, but having looked over the history briefly, I can definitely understand that description.

I am no historian, I'm not going to pretend that I know all of the Chinese history that this is based on, but I do have an interest w...