Smashbomb

Search

Search results

All (803)

Content

Atlas 2016

Travel and Reference

(0 Ratings) Rate It

App

View Quality Up-to-date World Maps conveniently and easily on your iPhone/iPod Touch. Carry your...

Atlas 2017 Pro

Education and Reference

(0 Ratings) Rate It

App

*** NEW RELEASE *** *** 50% OFF For a Limited Time! *** View Quality Up-to-date World Maps...

Awayland: Stories

Ramona Ausubel

(0 Ratings) Rate It

Book

Acclaimed for the grace, wit, and magic of her novels, Ramona Ausubel introduces us to a geography...

Goddess in the Stacks (553 KP) rated Beasts Made of Night in Books

Apr 19, 2018

Beasts Made of Night

Tochi Onyebuchi | 2017 | Science Fiction/Fantasy

5.3

(3 Ratings)

Book Rating

Pretty cover. (0 more)

Terrible characters (3 more)

Lack of explanation of terms

Stupid cliffhanger

Confusing geography

So this Nigerian-influenced fantasy made enough of a splash when it was released in October that I JUST got it in my hands from the library. That long wait....was not actually justified, sadly. The cover is GORGEOUS and the concept is really, really cool - the execution is lacking. I can tell that the author had the world pretty fleshed out in his mind, from the geography to the vocabulary - but he didn't actually pass that knowledge on to the reader. Kos is a walled city, but I'm not sure whether the Palace is within the walls or not? In one scene our protagonist LEAPS out of the castle and runs back the city - but in another scene he mentions that looking out the castle wall, Kos fits behind his fingernail. Kos is made up of several neighborhood plus a market - it's not small. So either his fingernail is HUGE or Kos is a pretty decent distance away. But it's written as if it only takes him about ten minutes to run there? Not to mention that he cracked a rib in the room that he leaped from (which is never mentioned again).

Oh and he winds up landing in an ivy maze out of nowhere - he couldn't see it from the palace? Let's see....the King regularly bombards neighborhoods with catapults in what's called a "baptism" but the people haven't revolted against this, for some reason. They talk about something called a "kanselo" but never define it. I -think- it's like an organized group or coalition, but I'm really not entirely sure.

The male protagonist treats every woman his age as a potential love interest, debating whether to give them his heart-stone, or whether people will think he's already given one girl or another his heart-stone - but never stops to ask if the girls are interested in HIM that way. Because of COURSE they would be, right? He's the Sky-Fist! The Lightbringer! The one whose tattoos never fade! (Eating sin-beasts causes a black tattoo to appear on your skin - on most sin-eaters these fade eventually.) Also he's just DUMB. He recalls that the sin-eater who ate his mother's sin had a certain tattoo, and when he runs across her years later, it takes him three or four encounters before realizing it's the same sin-eater. (The tattoo is a spider. Covering her FACE. It hasn't faded.) He makes stupid decisions - after nightmares of one love-interest being attacked by sin-beasts, he LEAVES HER SURROUNDED BY THEM to go run out into the city. He has at least FIVE love interests in this book. And only ONE of them seems interested in him in return.

I really wanted to like this book. The concept of sin-eating is great. But the main character and all the one-dimensional characters that surrounded him, along with the confusing geography, just turned me off. And I'm not even getting into the "ending." Yeah. Definitely throwing quotes on that because that was not an ending. The book just stops.

Skip this. It was a terrible book wrapped in a deceptively pretty package.

You can find all my reviews at http://goddessinthestacks.wordpress.com

Kudos

Mind the Buzz

Games and Entertainment

(0 Ratings) Rate It

App

Mind the Buzz is the most educational trivia game for iPhone and iPad with more than 12,000 original...

Nicole Hadley (380 KP) rated Trail Blazers: An Illustrated Guide to the Women Who Explored the World in Books

Jun 18, 2018

Trail Blazers: An Illustrated Guide to the Women Who Explored the World by Lisa Graves is a picture book full of famous women explorers. I found it interesting and educational. There’s not a great amount of information, but what’s here is enough to give a sense of these women’s accomplishments, as well as their determination, in just enough detail to whet the reader’s curiosity.

Graves introduces readers to thirteen women who were influential explorers. Each woman gets one spread with a column about their life and most famous accomplishments. Further textboxes on the spread highlight major accomplishments, places travelled, etc. Some of these women are well known names, like Nellie Bly, Amelia Earhart, and Sacagewa, others are not so well known like Ida Laura Pfeiffer, Harriet Chalmers Adams, and Gertrude Bell. They explored any time between the mid 1700s to mid 1900s, used different methods of transportation, explored different areas of the world, but all were intrepid adventurers and left their marks in society, literature, science, archeology, geography, and more.

I received an ARC from Xist Publishing via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.