sadpear's reviews
467 reviews

Star Wars Visions: Ronin by Emma Mieko Candon

dark mysterious fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

The most delightful sort of Star Wars novel, one that takes characters who do not factor into the films and builds a rich history of the galaxy spanning conflict with opportunities for age old tropes to tell classic stories of love and loss.

Translation State by Ann Leckie

dark mysterious tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Leckie is my favorite contemporary SF author for writing about the alien experience and providing a more interesting far future embracing the complexity of life and personhood. A beautiful story that could take on so many interpretations, it gives you characters to root for and love in a dangerous adventure.

Table for Two by Amor Towles

medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

Amor Towles can write a heartbreaker of a sentence. 

Deliberate Cruelty: Truman Capote, the Millionaire's Wife, and the Murder of the Century by Roseanne Montillo

informative sad slow-paced

3.5

Interesting parallels but so little time really is spent on Woodward and Capote's interactions, or how he directly impacted the trajectory of her later years.

Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez

challenging dark emotional reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

Beautifully crafted dual narrators, some magic, will definitely give you some feelings if you were a brand new college student in the late 90s tired of hearing people complain about everything being "too PC."

The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo

emotional reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

The alternating perspectives made the story richer, and I enjoyed the foxes.

Night Film by Marisha Pessl

mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

I wanted to love this because the elements are all things I love and the premise is a good one. But I could never figure out if the main character was meant to be genuine or a parody of a noir detective. Ultimately I never cared about the characters and so never felt any anxiety or tension for them. Also, it felt like a slog. It's not a slow paced story, things are constantly happening but it took me forever to get through it. I constantly wanted to skip pages because I was not invested. 

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

challenging mysterious fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Loveable characters? N/A
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

It's hard to pull off a book with this complicated timeline and yet this works. It's such a magnificent, strange book.

Annie Bot by Sierra Greer

dark tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

This book kept me guessing up until the final pages about where it would land. Definitely one of the better novels about AI/human relationships in that it does not pretend that Doug is a good dude at all.

tw domestic abuse

There is a scene where Doug abuses Annie in a way I found personally so horrifying that it made me queasy, and I spent the latter half of the novel reading in intense anxiety waiting for him to do something horrible again. I imagine this in some small way mimicked the struggle happening within Annie during that in the book.

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Domestic abuse and Confinement

The Witches Are Coming by Lindy West

challenging funny inspiring fast-paced

5.0

Lindy West is right about all this shit and she should say it!!!!!!