more dyyyyyystopia
Jul. 16th, 2014 08:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahn...And visiting my sister means more exposure to wacky YA-dystopia hijinks!
Mind Games 3/5. Two sisters, a blind seer and an assassin, are forced to go to Evil!School to learn villainy. I am a sucker for assassin-school stories. And this one had some great ideas and it had an entertaining ending, and of course I always love sister stories. I liked a lot of things about it, but I could not get past the point where the blind sister was as dumb as rocks. Basically, her lack of learning from her mistakes, thinking things through at all, and steadfast lack of communication were the plot drivers for the entire book, and that annoyed me.
Vicious (Schwab): 3+/5. Okay, this one I liked. It's a dark take on superheroes (called EOs -- ExtraOrdinaries -- in the book). It suffers from the same problems I had with Soon I Will Be Invincible, which is that when your characters are a bit on the cartoonish side, even a grim cartoon, it's hard to be all that sympathetic. But the writing is good, the action ramps up well, and some of the sly tropes really amused me (such as how all the characters are centered around One Town even though they clearly had the whole world to play around in). One minor note: I found their university extraordinarily unconvincing. Everyone -- of different disciplines -- has to take a thesis prep class where each person announces the proposed thesis subject? Is this a thing in other universities that I don't know about? Or a superhero trope I don't know about?
Mind Games 3/5. Two sisters, a blind seer and an assassin, are forced to go to Evil!School to learn villainy. I am a sucker for assassin-school stories. And this one had some great ideas and it had an entertaining ending, and of course I always love sister stories. I liked a lot of things about it, but I could not get past the point where the blind sister was as dumb as rocks. Basically, her lack of learning from her mistakes, thinking things through at all, and steadfast lack of communication were the plot drivers for the entire book, and that annoyed me.
Vicious (Schwab): 3+/5. Okay, this one I liked. It's a dark take on superheroes (called EOs -- ExtraOrdinaries -- in the book). It suffers from the same problems I had with Soon I Will Be Invincible, which is that when your characters are a bit on the cartoonish side, even a grim cartoon, it's hard to be all that sympathetic. But the writing is good, the action ramps up well, and some of the sly tropes really amused me (such as how all the characters are centered around One Town even though they clearly had the whole world to play around in). One minor note: I found their university extraordinarily unconvincing. Everyone -- of different disciplines -- has to take a thesis prep class where each person announces the proposed thesis subject? Is this a thing in other universities that I don't know about? Or a superhero trope I don't know about?
