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sophia_sol) wrote2021-11-21 09:54 am
sophia_sol) wrote2021-11-21 09:54 am
The Last Graduate, by Naomi Novik
Well....I liked it better than the first book in this trilogy. Unfortunately still not my thing though! Like, is it doing lots of things that SHOULD be my thing? It is!
It contains:
- really competent people
- people trying their best to do what they think is the right thing
- a belief in the importance of community to help each other out, even if they don't like each other personally
- someone who hasn't had a lot of experience in friendships learning how to have friends
- weirdo outsiders finding a place
- fighting against what seems like fate/destiny or inevitability
- a nonhuman inanimate entity that is its own person with its own priorities
HOWEVER. Even with all these elements, in a book written by a very competent writer who knows how to put a story together, I just.... wasn't there.
I wonder if it is that I just cannot make myself take the premise seriously. The level of danger posed to all magical children in this world is so outrageously over the top (outside of the magic boarding school, 95% of magical children die! inside, your chance of survival goes up to 1 in 4!) that it just feels silly to me. I can't believe in the danger. It felt obvious at all times that I was reading a made up story about a made up world and made up people, instead of being able to sink into the reality that the narrative was attempting to create. And that kept me from emotionally connecting with things, beyond a few moments here and there.
Also: I just don't care about monster-fighting? and there are a lot of fight scenes of people fighting monsters. It really bogged me down in the middle of the book and made it slow reading for me.
It's really too bad! Because the themes the book's exploring ARE good ones! Sigh.
(also the book ends on a cliffhanger gdi, I hate when books do this)
It contains:
- really competent people
- people trying their best to do what they think is the right thing
- a belief in the importance of community to help each other out, even if they don't like each other personally
- someone who hasn't had a lot of experience in friendships learning how to have friends
- weirdo outsiders finding a place
- fighting against what seems like fate/destiny or inevitability
- a nonhuman inanimate entity that is its own person with its own priorities
HOWEVER. Even with all these elements, in a book written by a very competent writer who knows how to put a story together, I just.... wasn't there.
I wonder if it is that I just cannot make myself take the premise seriously. The level of danger posed to all magical children in this world is so outrageously over the top (outside of the magic boarding school, 95% of magical children die! inside, your chance of survival goes up to 1 in 4!) that it just feels silly to me. I can't believe in the danger. It felt obvious at all times that I was reading a made up story about a made up world and made up people, instead of being able to sink into the reality that the narrative was attempting to create. And that kept me from emotionally connecting with things, beyond a few moments here and there.
Also: I just don't care about monster-fighting? and there are a lot of fight scenes of people fighting monsters. It really bogged me down in the middle of the book and made it slow reading for me.
It's really too bad! Because the themes the book's exploring ARE good ones! Sigh.
(also the book ends on a cliffhanger gdi, I hate when books do this)
no subject
Huh, I wonder if one of the reasons I was able to take it seriously is that I've... had a lot of practice. My sister used to feed me metric tons of YA dystopia because she was seriously into it, and they were very frequently quite nonsensical in this way, and they were also frequently... not great (but I'd try to make my way through them for my sister's sake... of course this was when I had fewer demands on my time than I do now, lol). (And then there was that year the Lodestone had all those YA dystopias, wasn't there one where all the 18-year-olds went to some goblin world and died, or something?) So I sort of feel that the nonsensical numbers are kind of making fun of YA dystopian numbers, and also it's kind of a relief to read something in the genre that also is well-written! But I can see why people who haven't had my previous rich experience with trying to connect YA dystopia aren't able to connect with it.
(But also I mostly skipped the monster-fighting bits.)
no subject
The monster fighting bits are SO uninteresting, and Novik does not have what it takes to write exciting battle scenes that are easy to follow, imo. I had this problem with the fight scenes in her Temeraire books too, I always got bogged down in them, and the books with the most fighting were the ones of least interest to me.