saguaros's reviews
917 reviews

I hesitated between 2 stars and 3, tbh. I should have loved this. It had everything I tend to love: brave heroines, fairytales, fairies and demons, and bargains, and winter, and magical kingdoms. I loved the themes: about work and family and tradition and the act of giving--gifts and gratitude.

But.

It was just too slow and long. Bloated. Too many POVs. Too many asides. I don't know. It dragged for me, in places it felt like a chore reading it.

I loved absolutely everything about this book--the characters, the setting, the relationships, the magical realism, the folklore. I'm so happy.

I read this book for the first time ten years ago almost to the day, and found it delightful and heartwarming. I'd had the thought of re-reading it in recent years but never got around to it, but then I saw it was available as an audiobook on my library's app and I thought, now was the time. I'd say this time around it was probably more a 4 stars experience than a 5 stars--the rating I gave to it 10 years ago--but it's still such a great, little, Middle Grade summer read that I'm not changing it.

3.5

It was really fun to go back to that world and those characters (I'm definitely gonna try and read the companion book about Felicity soon), and I liked that the author continued to explore Monty's insecurities and growth.

Fail sex is fun and there should definitely be more of it, but this should have had more sex, period. It did feel like it wanted to be the explicit fanfiction it couldn't be :D

oh, I love Murderbot.

I'd say that the first third of this novella was pretty dry. There's always a certain amount of... infodump, for lack of a better word, with Murderbot stories because it is telling its story and how it achieved they things it's done, but it often just works with the voice because, well, it's a robot. It thinks like that and sees the world like that and so it makes sense. But I found that it was more than usual at the beginning of this, and I even had a moment where I thought maybe I just wouldn't like this one--too many 'I hacked this' and 'I blocked' that, and the nature of this being a novella came into it where for certain things to work, Murderbot had to tell us several things it had done in scenes we hadn't read and it all just felt sort of easy and too competent and convenient. There was a nice line about how it was able to do more now than it used to, like it was truly learning, which I thought should be more explored.

But then the humans showed up, and the action picked up and it was a fun ride to the end. I think Murderbot just works best when it has some foil so it can let out its funny and relatable sarcasm and anti-socialness. Things got a bit more difficult (even though I still think it was surprisingly able to do everything). I was laughing and having fun and even relieved since I'd loved this series. I definitely just think the beginning was a bit too dry and things were a little too convenient.

But then again, hacking is what Murderbot does best, it's not really what's difficult for it. What's difficult is figuring out what it wants, and social interactions, and learning how to accept that it has friends and people who care about it as a free thinking individual with free will and not as a pet or something to be owned. And I love that. I love stories about robots/android developing in that way and learning those things, and I definitely had strong feels towards the end at all those humans who just wanted to show it they cared.

I'm very excited for the novel coming out in a few months.