Book #18: The Windup Girl, Book #19: Clan Lord
I've been going through my old reviews to add a new tag, and noticed I had originally been posting images of the book cover with my reviews. That was a nice touch, so I'm going to try doing that again.
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
Rating: 2/disliked (1-5/hated-loved)
Remember two reviews ago when I said that I liked worldbuilding and getting to know the characters best? That plot slowed things down for me? Turns out I was wrong.
Last year I read Ship Breakers by Bacigalupi, and I called it the best book I read all year. After reading it, I bought his other books, and was saving them for when I needed to break out of a string of bad books.
I can't believe how different The Windup Girl was than Ship Breakers. Oh, at first I loved it. The world he had created wasn't unique (distant future, all gas/oil gone, plagues killed off lots of people), but he had a lot of interesting touches. While the oil was gone, technology wasn't. Genehacking (genetic manipulation) was a big thing. Genehacked animals were used for a lot of things (like hacked elephants for hauling big loads), but more important was that crops and insects were hacked and because the balance of things was thrown off, most plants had died off. The world was starving.
But then nothing happened. 10% in and I was ready for some plot. 20%, no plot. 30%, no signs of a plot. 40% and we finally got hints that something might be happening. What happened in the 40% of the book up until that point? Nothing. Descriptions of factories, of men sitting around drinking, just day after day of life in that world. Well written? Sure. I loved a lot of the elements. For example, Cheshires: Genehacked cats created for a very rich man's daughter's birthday party, based on the Lewis Carroll story. Cats that could fade into the background. From the book:
The child guests took their new pets home where they mated with natural felines, and within twenty years, the devil cats were on every continent and Felis domesticus was gone from the face of the world, replaced by a genetic string that bred true ninty-eight percent of the time.
All the little details were so believable ("calorie companies" named AgriGen, PurCal, Total Nutrient Holdings), problem is, there was hardly a single character I liked. There was one minor character I was interested in, but that wasn't enough.
No plot, no connection with the characters, this book just didn't work for me at all. I stopped at the 50% mark.
---
Clan Lord by Joel D. Babbitt
Rating: 2/disliked (1-5/hated-loved)
(Book received free for review from Warhorse.)
Clan Lord had almost the opposite problem of Windup Girl: There was plenty of plot, the story took off from the first page, but the issue was the writing.
I have two different ways of reading. The first is the most commonly used: Reading for enjoyment. Books, blogs, whatever, just reading to read. The second is the kind used when I'm editing something. When a book or story has enough poor wording, typos, and spelling mistakes, I can't help but slip into that second kind of reading. Clan Lord made my hand itch for a red pen.
I had to reread the very first sentence of the book to figure out what the author was trying to say:
We call those who give us life yiziri, for they are to be protected; women in the speak of the star-people.
Italics or single quotes would have made that so much clearer:
We call those who give us life yiziri, for they are to be protected; women in the speak of the star-people.
I've never said this of a book before, but there was way too much hyphenation. Star-people, mid-night, hu-man, clan-less. That last one was used a number of times per page, and it was the one that bothered me most. It was a term the characters used, everyone was a member of a clan or not, so they'd likely think of it as a word, clanless.
Unfortunately there were many typos and grammar issues. Fir instead of fur, "enemies wings" instead of "enemies' wings", missed commas in dialogue tags, and other such things.
There was one sentence that amused me and for a moment I thought the story was going in a whole different direction:
The larger warrior looked down on my young body, already hardening with the hormones of adolescence, assessing me, judging me for my fitness for such a thing.
The author meant his muscles hardening over time, not *cough* something else.
I only reached the halfway point in Clan Lord as well. I couldn't concentrate on the story at all, though I was enjoying editing it in my head.
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
Rating: 2/disliked (1-5/hated-loved)
Remember two reviews ago when I said that I liked worldbuilding and getting to know the characters best? That plot slowed things down for me? Turns out I was wrong.
Last year I read Ship Breakers by Bacigalupi, and I called it the best book I read all year. After reading it, I bought his other books, and was saving them for when I needed to break out of a string of bad books.
I can't believe how different The Windup Girl was than Ship Breakers. Oh, at first I loved it. The world he had created wasn't unique (distant future, all gas/oil gone, plagues killed off lots of people), but he had a lot of interesting touches. While the oil was gone, technology wasn't. Genehacking (genetic manipulation) was a big thing. Genehacked animals were used for a lot of things (like hacked elephants for hauling big loads), but more important was that crops and insects were hacked and because the balance of things was thrown off, most plants had died off. The world was starving.
But then nothing happened. 10% in and I was ready for some plot. 20%, no plot. 30%, no signs of a plot. 40% and we finally got hints that something might be happening. What happened in the 40% of the book up until that point? Nothing. Descriptions of factories, of men sitting around drinking, just day after day of life in that world. Well written? Sure. I loved a lot of the elements. For example, Cheshires: Genehacked cats created for a very rich man's daughter's birthday party, based on the Lewis Carroll story. Cats that could fade into the background. From the book:
The child guests took their new pets home where they mated with natural felines, and within twenty years, the devil cats were on every continent and Felis domesticus was gone from the face of the world, replaced by a genetic string that bred true ninty-eight percent of the time.
All the little details were so believable ("calorie companies" named AgriGen, PurCal, Total Nutrient Holdings), problem is, there was hardly a single character I liked. There was one minor character I was interested in, but that wasn't enough.
No plot, no connection with the characters, this book just didn't work for me at all. I stopped at the 50% mark.
---
Clan Lord by Joel D. Babbitt
Rating: 2/disliked (1-5/hated-loved)
(Book received free for review from Warhorse.)
Clan Lord had almost the opposite problem of Windup Girl: There was plenty of plot, the story took off from the first page, but the issue was the writing.
I have two different ways of reading. The first is the most commonly used: Reading for enjoyment. Books, blogs, whatever, just reading to read. The second is the kind used when I'm editing something. When a book or story has enough poor wording, typos, and spelling mistakes, I can't help but slip into that second kind of reading. Clan Lord made my hand itch for a red pen.
I had to reread the very first sentence of the book to figure out what the author was trying to say:
We call those who give us life yiziri, for they are to be protected; women in the speak of the star-people.
Italics or single quotes would have made that so much clearer:
We call those who give us life yiziri, for they are to be protected; women in the speak of the star-people.
I've never said this of a book before, but there was way too much hyphenation. Star-people, mid-night, hu-man, clan-less. That last one was used a number of times per page, and it was the one that bothered me most. It was a term the characters used, everyone was a member of a clan or not, so they'd likely think of it as a word, clanless.
Unfortunately there were many typos and grammar issues. Fir instead of fur, "enemies wings" instead of "enemies' wings", missed commas in dialogue tags, and other such things.
There was one sentence that amused me and for a moment I thought the story was going in a whole different direction:
The larger warrior looked down on my young body, already hardening with the hormones of adolescence, assessing me, judging me for my fitness for such a thing.
The author meant his muscles hardening over time, not *cough* something else.
I only reached the halfway point in Clan Lord as well. I couldn't concentrate on the story at all, though I was enjoying editing it in my head.