books

<p>Reading <a href="https://www.librarything.com/work/11269424" rel="nofollow">Cold Days</a> by Jim Butcher, the 14th book in Dresden Files series.</p><p>Another super busy week, so pretty much still at the same place as last week.</p><p>What about all of you? What have you been reading or listening to lately?</p><p>For details on the c/Books bingo challenge that just restarted for the year, you can checkout the initial <a href="https://threadiverse.link/lemmy.world/post/28953205" rel="nofollow">Book Bingo</a>, and its <a href="https://threadiverse.link/lemmy.world/post/28953205" rel="nofollow">Recommendation Post</a>. Links are also present in our community sidebar.</p>

<p>With the release of the Netflix series adapting Bardugo’s Grishaverse (side note, I kinda hate “verse” terms) to the screen, I had been reading a lot of praise for the world and the written series, in particular the Six of Crows duology. Sure enough, popular review sites seem to back that hype up. It is very well reviewed.</p><p>After trudging my way through the Shadow &amp; Bone trilogy, I thought I would finally get to the payoff: Six of Crows, pretty much universally praised fantasy heist book with a great cast of characters. What’s not to love?</p><p>Well… A lot, I found out. I acknowledge that I’m probably just not the right audience for this, I guess. I know it’s targeted at YA, but the praise is so universal, even my like-aged fantasy reading nerd friends recommended it. But it fell so short of expectations for me.</p><p>Now, I didn’t hate it. I’ve read worse. And there’s definitely things I liked about the book, and Bardugo’s world. But not nearly enough to like as much as everyone else seems to.</p><p>I constantly found it very difficult to believe, even in a world of fantastical magic, that a group of 15 to 18 year olds had the breadth and depth of skills and knowledge the main cast do. And found myself constantly asking in the second half of the book how this palace could possibly be described as impregnable as it had been when the crew seemed to pretty much have the run of the place.</p><p>The timings of the flashbacks were jarring to me, the romances were shallow and unbelievable, and for probably half of the chapters I asked myself, “did we really need to change character POVs for this?”</p><p>I ultimately landed on a 2.75/5 - still above average, but a far cry from the consensus. Ultimately I was disappointed that this was a teen drama with a flimsy heist backdrop rather than a heist with background romance.</p>