Jessie S.

brilliant

Revisado: 12-24-22

I wish the narrator had a more emotional delivery, rather than spatting out everything in a snide way, otherwise A+

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privileged and unrelatable

Revisado: 04-18-21

why do so many motivational books focus on people who are already reasonably successful?
"X owned a multibillion dollar company but was having intimacy issues with his wife"
"Y was a stay at home mom who didn't think she had enough time to write while home alone"
"I turned down a fifty thousand dollar endorsement contract because it didn't fit into my zone of genius"
where are the struggling students? the clinically depressed working two jobs? they can't afford to consult the counselor who's writing this book and that's why they don't show up in it

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too many issues

Revisado: 06-12-20

I started keeping track of all the things I felt didn't work about this book in part 1 and by the time I got to part 2 I'd given up. Plot holes significant enough to take away from the story, incomprehensibly unappealing characters, no sense of setting at all... and the level of absolute shock I felt when I learned the author was female?? The way she writes women and children made me believe the person responsible had never in fact even MET a woman or a child.
Also what the heck is the narrator doing with Victor, does he have an accent or not? Was it a directing choice to make him sound like a drunk friend pretending to be from another country? And why does the detective sound like he's from stereotypical New York??

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If you can get past the first chapter...

Revisado: 04-02-20

...then you'll be rewarded with a sweet, wholesome story. Don't know why they're so fixated on disgusting eating noises though.

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narrator made getting through this annoying

Revisado: 01-20-20

don't get me wrong, the narrator is clearly skilled and has a fun voice - but wow, she sounded angry and irritated the entire time. this would be great for character dialogue, but even when when it's just pure exposition it sounds like she's delivering the most obnoxious of tirades. I might continue the series of I knew she wasn't like this in future books.

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just wow

Revisado: 01-04-20

I could write a hundred page essay on how awful this was, but frankly if I'm going to write that much I'll write my own fantasy novel because if this can get published, anything can.

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so disappointed.

Revisado: 10-20-19

My hopes for the Book of Dust series were quite high given how important His Dark Materials is to me. This doesn't come close to meeting them. It's so poorly written, and does not relate in any way to the exceptional world Pullman created in his earlier books, it almost feels like it was written by someone else entirely, for an entirely unrelated series.

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I won't be getting the next book in this series.

Revisado: 09-04-19

Not a single likable character, each is simultaneously boring in their one dimensionality and irritating in what little personality they have.
Twice the narrator asks why a more powerful woman defers to a man and twice we get NO ANSWER. Is this a lame attempt at feminism? oh also all the women in this story are supposedly powerful but really completely useless and need to be saved by the self professed weakling main character.
What could've been an interesting story lacked anything resembling depth.

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good concept poorly executed

Revisado: 08-10-19

Cool to have a narrator with an accent but at times it was distracting, for example it took way to long for me to realize that when I heard the word "posing" what she was actually saying was "pausing."  Additionally she makes little attempt to differentiate between character voices, which makes conversations sometimes confusing.  It's also hard to tell when a character is thinking vs talking, which gives the illusion of everyone being psychic and answering questions that were apparently only thought, not spoken.

Early time skips are frustrating - should be using those passing months to develop character, show struggle or improvement, rather than just "six months later I was casting spells."  And suddenly she is sculpting oxen out of mud and literally breathing life into them?  When the heck did she figure out how to do that?

Lacking personal insight all around.  Should've done more with her family, more about how our main character interactions with her parents, siblings, neighbors, ANYTHING.  We need some background.  First time she sees violent death there is zero reaction.  We never get a sense of how anyone is feeling once the action starts.  More detail is spent on the inevitable sex scene than in the entirety of anyone's character development.  I don't care about any of these people, the only ones with an ounce of personality are the antagonists.

The world only exists within the limits of the story, I don't get any broader sense of life outside this contained universe.  Never once did my imagination have the chance to get off the path of the narrative.  Should've been more concerning Agnieszka's connection to Yaga.  We get references to churches and people crossing themselves but no further insight into religion, nor how magic relates to the religion, if at all.

And forgive me for saying so but Ag should definitely have ended up with Kasia.

Overall, I'm pissed, because I love the idea of "the Wood" being an all consuming villain, but good grief its story is terribly written.  I hear they're making a movie of this?  I hope they can fix its flaws.  There's a lot of potential here, but as it is, it needs help.

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couldn't get through it

Revisado: 05-25-19

At first I thought maybe it was just the lackluster narration that was making me believe this book was no good, but the more I listened the more I realized it is just poorly written. I hope this is the author's first novel because that's what it feels like. There might've been a good story in here somewhere, but I'll never know because it was so hard to listen to. Get this author a better editor and beta readers.

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