Fulfilling a promise to @stealthmunchkin

[miss_s_b]

I can't sleep, so I downloaded a book to my kindle app and read it. I did this by searching for free kindle books with high ratings and picking ones that looked vaguely interesting. Then I remembered that I promised Andrew that if I got a new book, I would review it. So I did. This is the book, and here is my review:

I'm not going to say that this is the best book I have ever read, but it's better than many. The present tense narrative grated at first, but you soon get used to it, and the story drags you in pretty quickly. There are a couple of scenes in the book that some people might find upsetting, and the language and concepts are definitely not for the faint-hearted. It's also mildly disappointing to discover that even a couple of hundred years into a dystopian future the gender roles are still fairly intact, and all the powerful characters (chief of police, president, etc. etc.) are male, even while the protagonist is female.

All that said, the world-building is competent, the characters are engaging, the story rattles along at a fair pace, and there are a couple of neat narrative touches subverting the genre (the cliche of violet eyes among them).

There are certainly worse ways to spend a couple of hours than reading this book, and I'll probably pick the next in the series up at some point, if only to find out what happens to Alice.

Comments

[blazingskies]

I'm guessing you already know about this, but if you need free ebooks there's always the Baen Free Library. It contains loads of books by well-known fantasy and sci-fi authors like David Weber and John Ringo.

They usually have the first couple of books in a series - to sucker you in. That's how I got into the Honor Harrington series.

[miss_s_b]

Oooooo thank you!

[jo]

Thanks for that link! I've mostly been downloading ebook torrents from Pirate Bay (of actual books I own but haven't gotten around to reading yet), so this is cool.