Books

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 …

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 …