I enjoyed reading this book, just as I have done for every previous book in the series. I am not sure if the author is writing more for the YA market, or if I'm just getting older. In either case, I don't really care - I liked it!
This is a very near future story. The premise is that for reasons unknown, anyone who is killed by someone else suddenly has an almost certain chance of coming back to life. A new profession has arisen - dipatchers. Their job is to kill people at the brink of natural death. This gives their 'victim' a sort of reset. They are alive, at home and in the same condition they were some hours before, 999 times out of 1,000.
I've read the book many times, but this is the first time I have listened to it. This review doesn't really cover the book itself, but rather the audio performance and how it made the book different for me.
I listened to this book for free, courtesy of Amazon Prime and their Channels Page in the Audible app for Android.
Lois McMaster Bujold at her very best! This novella is the newest in the World of Five Gods series, and a direct sequel to a previous novella - Penric's Demon. The story is something of a theological mystery, which is very different than it's predecessor. It's a good story all by itself, and since it is a novella, a pretty quick read. For me, it was hard to put down once I started to read it.
I have read this book before. Actually, this was the third time I'd read it. Even so, I found it to be just plain fun to read. That's in spite of the fact that there is plenty of violence, which is sometimes a bit disturbing. The novel is set in Germany, during the Thirty Years War, after all. The premise of the book is that somehow, a small town in West Virginia is scooped out of it's place and time and deposited in the middle of Germany in the year 1631. Europe would never be the same!
It is sometimes hard to give an overall rating to a book that contains shorter works by several authors. This particular book was just plain fun from beginning to end. It is true that the novels do leave things out. They have to, in order to tell the story that is intended. Still, the novels have let us know that there is a whole world affected by the Ring of Fire, It is in these shorter works, and those in the Grantville Gazette where we find the rest of that world. All together, it makes the United States of Europe seem more and more like a real place, even though we can't visit there.
Okay, so I actually finished this book in April. I posted a sort of review on Goodreads, but had a hard time doing it without spoilers. Now it's been a while, and spoilers are no longer a problem for me. I can honestly say that this was the best Jane Yellowrock novel yet. After thinking about it for a while, I realized that what makes it the best, is the growth and development of the characters. Not just Jane, either. All of the people she interacts with are much more rounded characters than they were even one or two novels ago.
A pretty good novella, with a couple of the most interesting characters in the Martins' steampunk series Mitch Storm and Jacob Drangosavich of the Department of Supernatural Investigations. This time, they are up against werewolves and a dark witch. As usual, their boss appears just long enough to give them a little grief. That makes me wonder whether the rest of the work of the department is easy stuff, because these guys get all the hard ones.
For a month or so around the holidays, I was really suffering from the blues, and couldn't seem to focus on a book.
Then came the release of Vendetta by Gail Z. Martin. Wow! What an exciting book. It took me longer than I expected to finish it, because I learned quickly that reading it near bedtime was a bad idea. After I read a chapter or two, I'd be very excited, and not able to sleep. This evening, I started to get to the climax of the novel, and I could not put it down.
I always find it hard to review anthologies. As usual, this one was a mixed bag, although I liked more stories than I disliked. Disliked is probably the wrong word. There was no story I didn't want to finish, but there were a couple that just did not grab me. Still, it was a good batch of stories overall. Now, these stories all had a female character as the protagonist, but that does not mean that all the men were bad guys. Not by a long shot. The women who the stories are based on are not the standard for women in their societies.
