Book review correction & 2015 book
Correction: I feel silly for having gotten this wrong, but I actually mis-remembered about why I took the Thistle-Chaser name. In my review, I wrote that I liked the name even though I didn't like the character, but the next day I realized that was wrong: I took the name based on the first book, when Thistle-Chaser was a cub/unknown character. It was only in the third book where we learned about her character that I discovered I didn't like her much. How did I forget? I took the name in the early 90s, so it was a long time back!
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Obsidian Sky by Julius St. Clair
Rating: Hated (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)
I started out very excited about this book. I have a bunch of books on my Kindle, and sometimes one sits there so long that I forget everything about it, other than I was interested enough to buy it. I love going in a book blind like that. Was Obsidian Sky YA or adult? SciFi, fantasy? Set in space? I had no idea! Even the cover gave no hint! (Okay, here in the post you can see a sword in it, but on my kindle the cover is about an inch by an inch in size.)
Turns out it's YA dystopian. That would be fine, I like those, except this one had way too many issues. I only got maybe 4% into the book, but in that time:
- 'Human' was spelled wrong multiple times ('humin').
- The plot made just no sense. A meteor hit the earth, destroyed half the planet and most of the people, and somehow that made all future people born with 1-3 wishes that would come true. The number of wishes they got appeared as a tattoo on their arm, and the tattoo vanished after they made a wish. The wish could be anything, some people used a wish to create a village, and another made a wish to have the village always be safe. (So... why did no one wish for the world to be fixed?)
- The wishes were called Yen, so you'd get sentences like "He was born with three Yen" and "She valued her Yen". I couldn't help but read that as the Japanese money.
More than those things, it was just so by-the-numbers YA dystopia. Average writing, bad editing, unoriginal plot.
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Obsidian Sky by Julius St. Clair
Rating: Hated (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)
I started out very excited about this book. I have a bunch of books on my Kindle, and sometimes one sits there so long that I forget everything about it, other than I was interested enough to buy it. I love going in a book blind like that. Was Obsidian Sky YA or adult? SciFi, fantasy? Set in space? I had no idea! Even the cover gave no hint! (Okay, here in the post you can see a sword in it, but on my kindle the cover is about an inch by an inch in size.)
Turns out it's YA dystopian. That would be fine, I like those, except this one had way too many issues. I only got maybe 4% into the book, but in that time:
- 'Human' was spelled wrong multiple times ('humin').
- The plot made just no sense. A meteor hit the earth, destroyed half the planet and most of the people, and somehow that made all future people born with 1-3 wishes that would come true. The number of wishes they got appeared as a tattoo on their arm, and the tattoo vanished after they made a wish. The wish could be anything, some people used a wish to create a village, and another made a wish to have the village always be safe. (So... why did no one wish for the world to be fixed?)
- The wishes were called Yen, so you'd get sentences like "He was born with three Yen" and "She valued her Yen". I couldn't help but read that as the Japanese money.
More than those things, it was just so by-the-numbers YA dystopia. Average writing, bad editing, unoriginal plot.