Reviews and Comments

Tomasino

tomasino@bookwyrm.tilde.zone

Joined 2 years ago

I love to read and sometimes write. I'm active on fedi mostly as @tomasino@tilde.zone. I've been using Goodreads for the past bajillion years and will try to transition here. I run cosmic.voyage and a bunch of fun projects like @SolarpunkPrompts@podcast.tomasino.org

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Review of "Ivan's Warped Mind 2" on 'Goodreads'

1 star

The writing isn't very strong. The characters are shallow and the movie buff quirk feels less a character aspect than a trick to hide a lack of personality. My worst complaint is for the audiobook reader, however. Just atrocious work. His women's voices are not just bad but unfitting to their characters. Everyone else is a caricature.

Colleen Hoover: Verity (2021, Grand Central Publishing) 3 stars

Lowen Ashleigh is a struggling writer on the brink of financial ruin when she accepts …

Review of 'Verity' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

That was pretty messed up. :)

This is a departure from my usual genre fiction, but was recommended by someone with excellent taste. The amount of sexual focus threw me off at first and I wasn't sure if it was something coming from the romance background or not, but by the end of the story it was fully justified. Given such a small setting and the few characters it had a remarkable amount of tension and thrill. I didn't expect the ending either!

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky: Monday Begins on Saturday (1977) 2 stars

Review of 'Monday Begins on Saturday' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

Well this is embarassing, but I don't think I "got" the majority of the references in this book. From page one it felt like we were spoofing something, but I don't have the cultural background to know what. Names were said in a joking way, childrens stories littered throughout (I did catch Baba Yaga), and the colorful characters felt like they were stand-ins for ideas or perhaps stereotypes of unfamiliar things. This is the favorite book of a friend and I feel bad being unable to fully appreciate it.

Benedict Jacka: Fallen (Paperback, 2019, Ace) 5 stars

Review of 'Fallen' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

One of the dangers of long book series is when the fall into the trap of episodic TV where things end pretty much where they started. Maybe a new character is introduced, but the protagonists have grown only in experience and nothing really changes the status quo. The Alex Verus series feels a bit like this early on. Books progress and the list of Alex's enemies grows. He's forced to make hard choices and walk a difficult ethical path, but he himself remains basically the same for it. That is, until Fallen.

This book goes up there on a list of series favorites like the Wheel of Time's Lord of Chaos. Things happen and nothing will be the same. That commitment to step off the ledge is thrilling for the reader, especially 10 books in. There's only two more in the series as of this review and I'm really curious …

Logan Bonner, Stephen Radney-MacFarland, Mark Seifter, Jason Bulmahn: Pathfinder Core Rulebook (Hardcover, 2019, Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, Paizo Inc.) 5 stars

Advance Your Game

This comprehensive guide to the Pathfinder roleplaying game provides everything you need …

Review of 'Pathfinder Core Rulebook' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

I love the rules changes. They've managed to simplify a lot of things, kill off areas that were black-holes for investment in PF1, and still kept a fantastic amount of customization. I'll be starting a new campaign for my crew in a few weeks and I'm so excited to see how these changes work in action.