Small Mountain

Cartoonish House Built Upon a Solid Foundation

Revisado: 03-30-23

This story features a trio of amateur sleuths solving multiple-murder puzzle, and incorporates a relatively minor thriller element. The language is overall fairly clean, with a few vulgarities thrown in. The descriptions are not inaccessibly grotesque. The work does feature constant blatant sexism, though, so I don’t recommend the story be experienced by children. Actually, I overalls don’t recommend the story.

The murder mystery itself was interesting and kept me thinking; this is the solid foundation upon which the story is built. The performance of the narrator was solid, too.

Many of the details, though, make this story one that I decided was not worth the credit. The main character is off-putting, which is charming on occasion but ultimately proves to be a big disappointment. Also, nearly every male character, or which there are many, is described as neglectful, incapable, lecherous, and/or evil, which may be a fine characterization of much of the human population but is certainly not limited by one’s birth sex. The constant targeting makes the setting feel artificial, and causes one’s eyes to roll on occasion. Then again, I have never been to the UK, and so maybe things are different there.

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Way Out There

Revisado: 01-26-23

This work may be appealing for a cult following who identifies with the protagonist and his quirky habits, but it wasn’t appealing to me. I was hoping for an engaging mystery with a set of complex characters, but instead I powered on through the immature & blundering inspector’s ridiculous habits/affair at 1.5x speed to get the story over with. The conclusion of the mystery was not nearly as revelatory or satisfying as I was hoping for, given the detective story setting. This story is not a keeper.

The narrator was alright, though.

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Adventurer’s Delight

Revisado: 03-26-22

Moeller and Brand capture the spirit of adventure and epic heroism in this series. There are many ideas about magic, good/evil, knights and thieves, prophecies, etc that have been seen before, and some of the exposition sounds like a Dungeon Master explaining the rules, but the old ideas and the original story all fits together in an iconic swords-and-sorcery adventure. I like Moeller’s Child of the Ghosts series books a bit better, but this book was definitely worth the credit. Maybe even worth two credits.

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Pleasant with Fun Characters and a Lot of Humor

Revisado: 11-05-20

This is one of those triumphant set of stories with mostly believable three-dimensional characters that battle internal and external challenges at a satisfying pace. The tension cycle is well-managed most of the time, and the characters are fun to imagine. The narration is appealing; this plays right to TGR’s strengths. There is creativity and world-building without being over-complicated or absurd. Given the audio length, this is an amazing value, too. I haven’t looked into it but I’m hoping there will be more JA Andrews and TGR combinations to listen to in the future.

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Trail Mix: Better as an Essay

Revisado: 11-02-20

I have mixed feelings about this book. It is kind of like trail mix; you have to work your way around the nuttiness to get to the sweet parts. There are important facts in the book that help inform a reader’s opinion about education reform in the US, as well as a good number of useful (though often vague) solutions offered. These gems of information are buried in a field of tired-feeling leftist jabs and an almost comically outraged narration. I couldn’t take it after a while, and listened on nearly double speed to seek out the bits (usually right in the beginning of each chapter) that had useful ideas and facts. If you like being outraged at stuff, you are sure to like this book. If you like collecting informed opinions about educational reform in the US, you might feel this book is about eight times longer than it needs to be.

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Energetic, but Feels Dated and Hard to Believe at Face Value

Revisado: 10-08-20

Trying to write a concise review of this book is challenging. On one hand, the anecdotes within are well-written and interesting, and the problems faced by students in those anecdotes are stark. On the other hand, the assertions behind why those situations occur does not agree with personal anecdotes. This book is about segregation in schools, and how having schools that have a near-100% proportion of non-white students is leading to a cycle of a certain segment of the population being cut off from the mainstreams. Being family of teachers and students of integrated classes, though, makes me wonder how much a role the look of the student body really plays. Integration is fine, but I don’t think changing the look of the student body would reduce situations like the ones described in Kozol’s anecdotes, at least not much. It looks to me like the allocation of public resources needs to be improved as the top priority. Kids get stressed and stress reduces their ability to develop skills and relationship; a lack of basic physical and emotional needs is about the most stressful deficiency one can imagine for students, and the issues in Kozol’s anecdotes mostly seem to boil down to that issue, even past the issue of integration. That issue, as well as the emphasis on school geography, is why the book feels dated at this point as well. My children and many others are in a virtual schooling setting due to the pandemic, and the classrooms are largely integrated in our area; the integration, though, does not seem to solve a bunch of problems all on its own. The children themselves do not seem to care much or even notice the looks of the other children; they do care about physical and emotional stressors, though, like the pandemic, food security, parental attention, etc. Kozol’s book is interesting, but it just does not seem like his primary solution to the nation’s education disparity would actually fix the problems he implies it would.

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Surprisingly Well-Developed and Accessible

Revisado: 10-08-20

LitRPG-style stories can feel like a bit of a grind sometimes (pun intended) due to corny-feeling rank and experience systems, but this story of Holt and Talia is well-rounded with the intriguing and exciting story and likable characters being prioritized well above LitRPG elements. The world feels rich and deep as well, with a larger challenge overlaying smaller obstacles that range from political intrigue to personal loss to courage in the face of disability to a straight-up terrifying local invasion. I will definitely listen to the next installment if/when it becomes available.

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Good Start, but then an Extreme Drag

Revisado: 10-01-20

I made it about halfway through this complete series before I realized I had no motivation to continue the story. This listening experience started out well; the voice acting is very good, and there was an imaginative world plus a sorcery-driven murder mystery.

Sure, the people in this world were probably descended from bunnies since every character that has a name in the series is mindlessly horny all the time, but at least there was a good mystery to catch my interest. After the initial mystery was concluded fairly early on, though, the story became staler and the bunny-people became less believable with less interesting (and mostly predictable) things to do.

I hung on through the first book and tried the second, where again it started kind of interesting and then things started dragging, followed by some action that made little sense. I could no longer suspend my disbelief and was fed up with the strangely acting bunny-people and their lack of terribly interesting things to do. I exchanged the book.

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Not Much of a Story

Revisado: 10-01-20

I have listened up to chapter 24 so far, and so far there is no story beyond “a female born in exceptional circumstances joins a previously male-only group that does not do anything”. The maturity level seems along the lines of the Descendants series by Disney. I was really hoping for more substance here, but am too bored by the book to continue.

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Smooth Ride with Balanced Action and Intrigue

Revisado: 09-09-19

As usual, Drew Hayes and Audible delivered a very good experience. The world building here could be fairly minimal since this takes place in the modern world, but the events and characters were intriguing enough that I had a hard time putting this down and was able to get through it in less than 48 hours. As far as Drew Hayes settings go, this one felt simpler and more straight-forward than others, but each challenge to overcome was enjoyable and the tension cycle was well-managed with doses of hope, character growth, triumphs, and humor to mix in with the challenges and tense moments. I admit that a couple of the challenges the protagonists faced were a little hard to swallow, but still this book was worth the listen and I look forward to the next book.

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