Books

The Great Hunt finally allows The Wheel of Time to become its own thing, breaking free from most of Tolkien’s structure that so hindered The Eye of the World. It’s a competent fantasy novel that focuses on fleshing out its world while introducing and developing elements that allow the series to stand on its own feet. As the title implies, …

This review contains spoilers. Falling is a shallow thriller that heavily relies on overused tropes and stereotypes to tell a by-the-books story of a plane being hijacked by terrorists: full of one-note characters and predictable twists, the novel is also marred by a strong reluctance to delve into its own themes. The book opens with a shocking scene full of …

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is a competent, albeit problematic, conclusion to the Millennium 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 Millennium 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 series at its most ambitious and problematic so far. Although the novel more than manages to impress us with its thematic complexity, its fragile structure can at times sabotage the narrative’s strength. The story returns to the desert in the Seven …

The Last Wish marks the first major appearance of Andrzej Sapkowski’s most famous character: the witcher Geralt of Rivia. But Geralt’s adventures only found international fame when they became multimedia, being translated into a video game series and a Netflix show that, with their epic scope and intricate web of political intrigue, little resemble Geralt’s first major adventures, which are …

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 …