This book went from interesting concept, to "12 year old that doesn't understand sex but really wants to also has no idea how women actually are in real life / sterotypes found in 1980's soap operas" in just a few chapters and I can't get that part of my life back ever again. ( )

I picked this up as part of a returning-to-YA-classics because I was looking for something lighter to read while falling asleep. Geomancer is unfortunately less good than I remember it being. The characters are almost unanimously unlikable, have no arcs, and don't actually learn anything in the hundred thousand pages that this book feels like. Irvine's plot points out lots of odd things --- most notably a character's father being in bed with another man, at which our narrator is "disgusted!" --- and then doesn't do anything with them. The 75% of the book is long and slow, and spends a lot of time with our main character dealing with an addiction, that she never solves, and is repeatedly used against her, by the same people, to accomplish the same goal. And then the last quarter goes SUPER FAST where everyone manages to cross the whole damn continent on foot in a few pages and then open up a damn hole in the universe and get her sister killed and then be betrayed and sell out humanity. All in like 100 pages. My guess is that this guy didn't have an editor.

All in all it's an OK read. The story is pretty interesting, but would be much better if it were 1/5th of the length. ( )

Tiaan lives in a world that has known nothing but war for 150 years. Humanity's enemy are the Lyrinx, huge, powerful and highly intelligent beings who are capable of flight and are very hard to kill. They seem to have appeared out of some alternate universe at some point, but that bit is never explained very well. Tiaan works in a grim factory, where she is a virtual slave, making the vast war machines that are mankind's only hope against the Lyrinx. She is an artisan, the most highly skilled of the workers at the factory, making the controllers that somehow harness the power of the natural world and channel them into the machines. No one takes the time to explain how this works, and indeed the characters themselves don't really seem to know, least of all Tiaan, but she is very good at it nevertheless. Life is hard for Tiaan and her fellow workers, but it is the only life she knows, and she's happy enough, until one day something happens that will set her life off on a radically new path.....taking her on an epic journey...harnessing powers she would never have believed it possible to control.....forcing her to travel to the very heart of the enemies' fortress....before her ultimate encounter that will change everything.....

Perhaps a bit harsh on the scoring, as it did carry me along nicely just when I needed something distracting and not too challenging. It was quite nicely written, and despite my sarky comments above, is quite original within the confines of this sort of narrative, plus it had some well drawn, complex characters. On the down side, the story sometimes lacked momentum - it had all the ingredients of a really cracking yarn, and several times it felt like it was ready to kick into a higher gear but then.....just fell short. It's really very violent, not something I would always take issue with, and I think the author perhaps included it here to show that although this is a fantasy novel, it's very much an adults only fantasy novel, but I just couldn't get past some of the deaths of key characters. The death toll in general was very high, and sometimes unnecessarily so in my opinion. There's one death right towards the end that just doesn't make any sense from an ongoing narrative point of view, and which annoyed me enough to lose this book 0.5 all on its own. This is the first part of the trilogy, and I'm currently undecided whether I care enough about the few remaining characters left alive to investigate parts 2 and 3. Perhaps, if like this one, I run across them in a charity shop at a bargain price, but otherwise perhaps not.... ( )

WELL OF ECHOES