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A review by canaanmerchant
No Country for Old Gnomes by Kevin Hearne, Delilah S. Dawson
4.0
Bottom Line Up Front: I gave this four stars (like a 3.5 but I'm rounding up) but my feelings are a little more complicated than usual. Caveat, I did not read "Kill the Farm Boy".
THE GOOD:
1. There are some good jokes and cleverness afoot.
2. More importantly, the story is good. A lot of fantasy parody usually chooses a joke or a bit over a story (which is usually just ironic retellings of fairytales) and very few (okay, only Terry Pratchett) have really mastered an ability to actually tell a good story.
3. The characters. I like a world with a lot of sapient species and this one has it in spades. Their cultures all feel fleshed out and its neat to see the mechanics of how the world works even underneath the ridiculousness.
THE "I DON'T KNOW":
1. Some of the jokes really aren't going to last beyond 2019. As in, someone 10 or 15 years from now is really going to have to remember some of the minutiae of pop culture from this season to really 'appreciate' the joke. And knowing this made the joke harder to appreciate.
2. While the story is good it takes a while to get going and since the jokes come on so fast and heavy its hard to keep up. Especially since I was in a weird space where I couldn't read more than a few pages at a time and that made the story harder to follow. Ostensibly it's a story about a gnome on a quest but you're 1/3 of the way through the book before the group even meets and actually gets on the road.
THE GOOD:
1. There are some good jokes and cleverness afoot.
2. More importantly, the story is good. A lot of fantasy parody usually chooses a joke or a bit over a story (which is usually just ironic retellings of fairytales) and very few (okay, only Terry Pratchett) have really mastered an ability to actually tell a good story.
3. The characters. I like a world with a lot of sapient species and this one has it in spades. Their cultures all feel fleshed out and its neat to see the mechanics of how the world works even underneath the ridiculousness.
THE "I DON'T KNOW":
1. Some of the jokes really aren't going to last beyond 2019. As in, someone 10 or 15 years from now is really going to have to remember some of the minutiae of pop culture from this season to really 'appreciate' the joke. And knowing this made the joke harder to appreciate.
2. While the story is good it takes a while to get going and since the jokes come on so fast and heavy its hard to keep up. Especially since I was in a weird space where I couldn't read more than a few pages at a time and that made the story harder to follow. Ostensibly it's a story about a gnome on a quest but you're 1/3 of the way through the book before the group even meets and actually gets on the road.