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C. H. O’D. Alexander (1909–1974)

Autor von Spassky-Fischer : das grösste Schach-Duell der Geschichte

14 Werke 254 Mitglieder 4 Rezensionen Lieblingsautor von 1 Lesern

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1st Edition, Descriptive Notation
 
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marshallchesslibrary | 1 weitere Rezension | Dec 15, 2022 |
 
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marshallchesslibrary | Dec 15, 2022 |
The book's description sounded very fascinating, but it promised way more than the book held. Let's see:

"Dark things. Things that should only live in fantasy. The Nain Rouge was recently sighted in Detroit and a Loupe Garou is rumored to hunt the woods near Mackinaw. A suicide cluster haunts Washtenaw County."
Sounds great? Definitely, but these two sentenced are all there is about those sightings in the book, and that's it.

"Angela is a changeling, fostered by the Fae and recently returned from the Twilight Realm. Raised to fight dragons and still healing from the passage to the human world, she struggles to catch up to the life she never lived."
I have to admit, that part was the best - too follow Angela as she struggles to fit in with the human world, slowly making sense of all the curious things that are new and unknown to her. But dragons? Nope, not in this one.

"Lydia is underestimated by many because of her deformity. Determined and intelligent, her innate skepticism cannot prevent her hobby of stage magic evolving into something more real."
I thought Lydia, or Barnum, as she prefers to call herself, was too whiny. Ok, so she has a deformity of the hand, but that's just no reason to complain all the time about everything. That girl really got on my nerves.

"Bailey is a transgender teen impatient to transition, doing his best to keep a low profile until he can. He is haunted by dreams and premonitions of a menacing evil."
I don't know why the author brought in the transgender subject, it was hinted at several times but otherwise had no meaning for the story at all. I just didn't get it.

"They are drawn together by the collective realization that the apparent suicide of a classmate has a far more paranormal origin than simply being part of a cluster."
Aha! So here is where the action begins, right?

"Hunted by supernatural predators that want to end them before they reach their heroic potential, these teenagers will have to travel to Fairy and back if they want to survive long enough to save the world."
The supernatural predators are a pair of creepy kids with black eyes - OK that really was a scary scene. To escape them, our heroes travel to the Fairy Realm, stay there for some time and then come back at a different place. Only to be faced with those kids again - that didn't quite work out, did it? However, it did fill some chapters with a completely irrelevant and useless detour to Fairy land.

"Skeptical mage, queer seer, and brain injured warrior. They'll save us."
Good to know - because they sure don't save us in this book. After returning from the Fairy Realm, they have to face the creepy kids one more time. They do manage to destroy the kids, but only with the help of their history teacher, who is kind of a guardian for them and comes to their rescue. After that, they go home and maybe live on happily ever after...

The book ended so abruptly, I was sure I missed the announcement that this is the pilot story to a series. I checked again and found that it is not - or not yet? There were so many questions left open, so many explanations missing, so many connections not made. The book combined a lot of different subjects, but missed to connect them thoroughly. E.g. I expected the creepy kids where related to or maybe originated in the Fairy world and that our heroes would find some explanations there which would have given their travel there meaning, but that was not the case. While Lydia and Bailey were perfect specimens of troubled, vulnerable teenagers and thus may be easy to identify with, I found the author overdid it with their problems.

There are so many interesting concepts in this book which are not followed through or appear unconnected that I wonder why they were added at all. Though I enjoyed reading several single chapters I felt disappointed by the book as a whole.

(I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review)
… (mehr)
 
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misspider | Jun 22, 2016 |
Nice little book of interesting chess position and how Grandmasters played them.
½
 
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golfjr | 1 weitere Rezension | Jan 15, 2006 |

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