Audio DNFs and continuing family saga
Oct. 13th, 2024 07:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearI really enjoyed Gwen and Art are Not in Love by Lex Croucher, which I got for Christmas last year, so I thought I'd try another book by the same author. Reputation was initially quite promising - a fun, Regency romp, admittedly with modern sensibilities, but I didn't have a problem with that. It was particularly amusing when the previously strait-laced protagonist met the love interest when she was high... But, as the story went on and she kept hanging out with the disreputable and dissolute crowd of friends she'd fallen in with, they became more and more annoying and she became less and less likeable. And eventually I decided I didn't really care and gave up.
I also gave up on The City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which started out quite amusing and intriguing - but, after about 10%, I was struggling with identifying the throughline of the plot and wasn't remotely interested or invested in any of the characters. So, another DNF...
Something Dangerous by Penny Vincenzi is the second instalment of her Spoils of Time series, the first of which I very much enjoyed recently. I also enjoyed this one overall, though I did have some issues with it. I love a lengthy, involved family saga that takes place over several decades, and this certainly delivered that, following on with the younger generations from the first book. But it was very choppy. It jumped around a lot across many different viewpoints (sometimes every paragraph), seemed to skim over quite a lot of things, had several unspecified time jumps that made it hard to keep track of everyone's ages, and often started a new section with a lot of 'he' and 'she' but without identifying which characters the narrative had switched to. All of which was quite annoying. It also stared to get a bit wearing that nearly all of the male love interest characters turned out to be absolute arseholes for one reason or another, and it seemed like the female protagonists were being very stupid or unnecessarily forgiving of their partners' behaviour.
"If he truly couldn't see how wrong it had been, was she right to blame him?" YES!!!
I still devoured the whole 880-page book in less than a week and went straight on to the next one, though...
I also gave up on The City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which started out quite amusing and intriguing - but, after about 10%, I was struggling with identifying the throughline of the plot and wasn't remotely interested or invested in any of the characters. So, another DNF...
Something Dangerous by Penny Vincenzi is the second instalment of her Spoils of Time series, the first of which I very much enjoyed recently. I also enjoyed this one overall, though I did have some issues with it. I love a lengthy, involved family saga that takes place over several decades, and this certainly delivered that, following on with the younger generations from the first book. But it was very choppy. It jumped around a lot across many different viewpoints (sometimes every paragraph), seemed to skim over quite a lot of things, had several unspecified time jumps that made it hard to keep track of everyone's ages, and often started a new section with a lot of 'he' and 'she' but without identifying which characters the narrative had switched to. All of which was quite annoying. It also stared to get a bit wearing that nearly all of the male love interest characters turned out to be absolute arseholes for one reason or another, and it seemed like the female protagonists were being very stupid or unnecessarily forgiving of their partners' behaviour.
"If he truly couldn't see how wrong it had been, was she right to blame him?" YES!!!
I still devoured the whole 880-page book in less than a week and went straight on to the next one, though...
