Books

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is a competent, albeit problematic conclusion to the Millenium series, written by Stieg Larsson. The book brings together the trilogy’s best features, with a narrative that is socially engaged and deeply concerned with violence against women, but also many of its worst flaws, such as useless plotlines and dialogues full of exposition. The …

Brandon Sanderson’s first published novel, Elantris, fares much better when it comes to handling the twists and turns of the story than when it’s time to develop its characters and social discussions. The book’s main setting is the city of Elantris, a place wrapped in an aura of mysticism. Its inhabitants, once powerful, shining, and immortal, now find themselves cursed, …

Expanding even more the world of this already mammoth of a series, The Malazan Book of the Fallen‘s fifth volume, Midnight Tides, is an epic about zealotry, suffering, lack of compassion, and the intrinsic problems of a capitalist culture. Steven Erikson continues to build complex societies and tragic characters, cleverly mixing humor, drama, and action with social criticism in a …

The first volume of the Millenium trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was very successful in being both an engaging thriller and a relevant social critique of the status of women in modern society. The Girl Who Played with Fire, however, despite keeping the social aspect intact, presents a very slow-paced narrative that doesn’t know which characters and threads …

The final chapter of The Divine Cities trilogy, City of Miracles treads a familiar path, putting an old side character, Sigurd je Harkvaldsson, under the spotlight, who once again must deal with a divine threat and, worse still, humans who yearn for violence. Although it never reaches the same heights as its predecessor, the novel represents a solid conclusion to …

Written by Steven Erikson, the fourth installment in The Malazan Book of the Fallen, House of Chains, is the most problematic book so far. Although it still manages to impress us with its thematic complexity, its fragile structure can at times sabotage the strength of the novel. The story returns to the desert in the Seven Cities at the time …

The Last Wish marks the first big appearance of the most famous character of Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski: the witcher Geralt of Rivia. Geralt’s subsequent adventures became so famous internationally that even a video game series called The Witcher was created to further develop them. But unlike the videogame – which has an intricate web of political plotlines – the …

The Water Knife, a sci-fi thriller written by Paolo Bacigalupi, presents a dystopian world that is disturbing in its verisimilitude. The novel, however, is ultimately dragged down by shallow main characters, having to resort to shock value to hold our attention. The story is built around three main points of view: there’s the journalist Lucy, who needs to find out …

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is both an effective detective story and a powerful cry about the situation of women in modern society. Stieg Larsson creates, in the first volume of the Millenium trilogy, a fascinating cast of characters and an engaging plot, but really excels when putting at the foundation of the story the problem of how women …

Unlike its predecessor, Magician: Master, doesn’t suffer too much from the split of the original novel into two books. Its problems are mostly its own, with a narrative that is unable to justify the strange focus on some of the supporting characters while failing to conclude any plotlines in a way that is not anticlimactic or arbitrary. The story of …