Books

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 …

At the very beginning of The Fault in Our Stars, the protagonist makes a metalinguistic comment about her favorite novel: “it’s not a cancer book, because cancer books suck.”John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars indeed isn’t a book about cancer but a romance populated by characters who must face the prospect of death every day. The difference between genres …

Written by Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere is an urban fantasy novel that can amuse with its whimsical world as much as it can annoy with its unbearable protagonist. Offering a funny but shallow story, the novel is far from being one of Gaiman’s best works. Neverwhere accompanies Richard, a young Englishman who lives a quiet life, pretending to be happy with his …

Written by Michelle Paver, Dark Matter is a by-the-books horror novel that could have used many more pages to develop its characters and themes. The protagonist is Jack Miller, a middle-class young man who hates his job as a clerk and is in desperate need of a purpose. So, when the opportunity of becoming a wireless operator in an expedition …

Written by Raymond E. Feist, Magician: Apprentice is a fantasy novel that presents a familiar universe, built on genre tropes, with a story with wasted potential, suffering from some shallow worldbuilding and a highly problematic climax. The book follows a young orphan named Pug and his best friend, Tomas, who see their lives drastically change the moment they come across …

Memories of Ice, the third volume of The Malazan Book of the Fallen series, further expands the scope of the main story. Although the narrative is less careful about exposition than in previous volumes, it makes up for this with the complexity of its storylines and character arcs. The story returns to the main characters of Gardens of the Moon at …

This review contains spoilers. A crime thriller written by Stephen King, The Outsider has a great start, pushing its characters to their limits while making them face questions regarding the limits of reason and, paradoxically, the terrible consequences of acting based on emotions alone. Its second half, however, brings the pacing to a halt, with the introduction of an uninteresting …

Shift is a pointless prequel to the great dystopic world of Wool, choosing to put its focus on all the wrong places: instead of building on the fascinating discussions of its predecessor and crafting an engaging story, it decides to spend a lot of time explaining pointless things about its worldbuilding and grinding the pace to a halt with fan …

Set during the Hundred Years War, The Archer’s Tale, the first book in the Grail Quest trilogy, is much more concerned with describing the great battles of the time than with telling a proper story, whose main plot is so uninteresting that it gets ignored even by its own characters. Thomas, the protagonist, is the son of a priest in …