Scotto Moore (1)

Having been underwhelmed by Moore's "Battle of the Linguist Mages," which passed the fifty-page test but went radically off the rails, I approached this book in the spirit of "impress me." That I finished this novel and have basically positive feelings about it demonstrates that I must have been impressed; it was a near run thing though. For the story that Moore is telling this novel is really about 100 pages too long, and does get bogged down in it's overlapping plots to no real point. Also, many of the characters are just place-holders to actuate plot points, and inspire no affection, anger, or even have much of an impact as allegorical symbols. That said, the characters that Moore actually does seem invested in developing did inspire caring, and the narrative payoff did feel like it was worth the investment of time. What this book demonstrates is the limits of cool ideas as a justification for reading genre fiction, but I do expect to be giving Moore's next novel a chance.… (mehr)

I was uncertain to begin with whether this would be all manic sparkly quips in lieu of character/storyline. It wasn't, and it drew and held my attention - for most of the book. The power morphemes were cool (I mean the linguistics rapidly got very wacky but hey, so did everything else, so it fit); the intrigue and revelations were compelling; the main character was fun but not shallow and despite her initial cynicism had a strong moral core; the game setting was quirky and not my kind of game but I can see the appeal and enjoyed the descriptions of its internal mythology.

But... there kept being more revelations, more levelling up, more and more massive melees against the Big Boss, and as I type this I realise this is 100% in keeping with game structure so if you like games then there you are, but at a certain point I was so overstimulated that I started getting bored. Not my kind of game, I guess.… (mehr)