Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.63 AVERAGE
3.63 AVERAGE
I wanted to like this book... I wanted to like it so much! I still really like aspects of the plot. The subject matter is dark, sometimes darker than anything else I've read, but that isn't what bothered me. Every aspect of the description was appealing to me, honestly, which made the actual book all the more disappointing.
It was so tedious.
The writing is sometimes brilliant and sometimes funny, but so much of it is so wandering and tedious that it's painful to read. One sentence feels like an entire page, and definitely not in a good way. The reader has to painstakingly unearth the narrative from the writing -- only to be disappointed, because the narrative and the characters are both weak.
I agree with another reviewer who said this book is unnecessarily crass. Crudeness isn't something I'd automatically consider a fault, but this book will literally beat you over the head with it, often to the detriment of the plot.
I gave up after a couple hundred pages. Maybe one day I'll go back and finish it, but for now, I couldn't stand it.
It was so tedious.
The writing is sometimes brilliant and sometimes funny, but so much of it is so wandering and tedious that it's painful to read. One sentence feels like an entire page, and definitely not in a good way. The reader has to painstakingly unearth the narrative from the writing -- only to be disappointed, because the narrative and the characters are both weak.
I agree with another reviewer who said this book is unnecessarily crass. Crudeness isn't something I'd automatically consider a fault, but this book will literally beat you over the head with it, often to the detriment of the plot.
I gave up after a couple hundred pages. Maybe one day I'll go back and finish it, but for now, I couldn't stand it.
I liked this book a lot! The protagonist was unlikely: plain name (Awa), homosexual, yet humble and motivated mainly by love and guilt over her mistakes she makes (out of love), or so it seemed to me. I liked that about her and it made her interesting to read about. Plus her friend Manuel was a great character as well, with his unorthodox marriage and his artistry. All of the characters, the good ones anyway, were so interesting that I couldn't help but want to be immersed in their world. Which, incidentally, is a world of necromancy and witchcraft and... the Spanish Inquisition. All this combined with gratuitous gore and sex. Wasn't bad, really.
Jesse Bullington's follow-up to The Sad Tale Of The Brothers Grossbart is just as energetic, muscular, horrific, violent, inventive, fast-paced and icky as his debut. What wrong-footed me slightly was the sympathetic lead characters when I had mentally braced myself for more in the way of entertainingly sociopathic monsters wreaking havoc on the innocent and the guilty and the spectacularly evil alike. Instead we get Awa, an ex-slave forced into an apprenticeship by a necromancer, as nasty a piece of work as any Bullington has yet invented, and Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, an artist turned mercenary who, against his better judgement and self-interest, rescues said trainee necromancer from the attentions of some of his fellow soldiers. The unlikely pair become friends and, with the aid of a another mercenary, a female gunner, set out to thwart the ultimate and extremely horrific schemes of the necromancer. Touring the battlefields, graveyards and whorehouses of a war-torn Renaissance Europe, pursued by a rogue witch-hunter, the ambulatory corpse of Awa's former mistress, a doctor of questionable ethics hungry for hidden knowledge and a particularly horrific corpse-hungry monster.
With corpses galore, in various degrees of decomposition, the grue and gore and ghastly fluids are plentiful, and with war raging all around and the inquisition in full flight there's violence and injustice and poverty and inhumanity to spare, but the warm heart of the book is the friendship between Deutsch and Awa and the things they do to help each other find some measure of redemption and salvation in a savage world. A strong, satisfying second novel that manages to revisit many elements of the Brothers Grossbart and yet remain utterly different. Recommended.
With corpses galore, in various degrees of decomposition, the grue and gore and ghastly fluids are plentiful, and with war raging all around and the inquisition in full flight there's violence and injustice and poverty and inhumanity to spare, but the warm heart of the book is the friendship between Deutsch and Awa and the things they do to help each other find some measure of redemption and salvation in a savage world. A strong, satisfying second novel that manages to revisit many elements of the Brothers Grossbart and yet remain utterly different. Recommended.