Alan Coffel

Mechs, Monsters and Menaces

Revisado: 05-23-23

A little less mech combat than the summary implied, but an overall enjoyable plot with a satisfying conclusion.

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Awful Performance

Revisado: 04-28-22

Is the narrator actually a human being? It sounds like it is a not-quite-right machine reader. It is not listenable. I am returning it!

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This is NOT epic world-building or story telling

Revisado: 01-17-22

I enjoyed the first book, but found this one to be tedious small fluff. All of Talamh is a small place. Everything happens very fast. A few hours to "the south" and a short horse ride to the capital is not a realistic world. Even in Ireland, it would take you a week to walk from someplace like Cork to Dublin. The capital has five wells? It has a monstrous big and rich castle, but not the town or population or industry to support it. The idea of a barter system with no money may seem like a perfect society, but it probably wouldn't work beyond a small village. How does a person whose specialty is hair-dressing barter for things she needs that are more than one or two degrees of separation from her? And Marco falls in love and into bed in a day with someone he's spent about 4 hours with? Yeah, maybe it's a quick hook-up. It's also a sign of limited vision and thinking. It's a story. It would be OK to take a week to get somewhere or build a relationship. It would be better for there to be a hint that Talamh world and society is rich, robust, and complicated.

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Great book!

Revisado: 05-26-21

A great twist on the classic exploring the Amerivan west novel. Now including invisible foxes!

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12/10

Revisado: 01-05-21

A great ending for an awesome series. I'd reccomend it any day to someone who loves kickass heroines and great magic systems.

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Not Sure I Can Finish This One

Revisado: 09-22-20

I've very much enjoyed the stories so far, but I'm not sure I can finish this one. The "Skippy is an Asshole" theme is funny, but has gone a little over the top with the Broc Steel line and the man cave. Earlier in the series, Joe held his own, but now seems to be constantly on the losing end of the exchanges. The "sex bot" was also funny (for a while), but has gotten to be an annoying distraction. I'm rooting for the hero, Joe, and am getting tired of him being the brunt of this joke. The dramatic format is difficult to follow. There is a lot of extraneous background noise that makes the dialog hard to make out. The AI in the Dagger is especially painful to listen to. I would skip this performance entirely, but I expect there will be frequent references to it in the future.

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One of the best of a great series.

Revisado: 06-08-19

This is definitely one of the best of these books. Always enjoyable, this one offers great history, violent conflict of the St Mary’s kind, and wonderful snark. Good Choice!

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Wonderfully Enchanting Tale

Revisado: 08-27-18

I really loved this story. It was complex, intriguing, and completely satisfying. Naomi Novik tells a wonderful tale, just enough rooted in Slavic peasantry and eastern European Jewish history to make me go looking for Litvas. I enjoyed the narration as well. Lisa Flanagan did a great job of conveying the Slavic and Jewish voices. The only fault I had with the audio book is that the frequent narrator changes sometimes confused me. I don't think this would be a problem with the text, with chapter headings or some symbol to make the switch, but in narrated form, it was a little hard to catch when the point-of-view changed. I'd find myself a few sentences into the chapter before I understood who was talking.

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Truly painful to hear

Revisado: 06-20-18

The reader is not a native English speaker. The words are clear, but the cadence and inflection are badly off. It sounds like it is being read by a 1980’s text-to-speech program. The “story” includes long passages of dry recitation of facts.

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Disappointing

Revisado: 06-17-17

This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?

Fifty years in the future, the Solar Union is an alt-right paradise, Earth is a social justice warrior epic failure, and military basic training will teach new recruits how it all happened and why Liberalism inevitably failed. Several minutes into Nutall's second sermon on why liberals are stupid, framed as a basic training "class", I was skipping ahead in 30-second hops trying to find the story again. It went on forever! Now I'm just trying to figure out how to get my money back.

Would you recommend Hard Lessons to your friends? Why or why not?

No. It's just a vehicle for Nuttall to preach his wife political views.

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