Huh, I DNFed Service Model at somewhere after 50%, don't recall exactly, I just got bored with the road trip. If you think the last 5% made it worth it, I might pick it up again. (Or maybe not!)
I liked The Ministry of Time but mostly because of Margaret Kemble.
I really like Bennett's work for the most part, and I think that one of his hallmarks is that his male characters and female characters are mostly completely independent from being male or female - that is, you can imagine swapping them out for the opposite sex without changing anything in the narrative other than pronouns. What I mean is, they are very much individual people, and gender is mostly irrelevant. You will not get any romance, and certainly no romantic happy endings in his books.
I liked the Divine Cities trilogy a lot, mostly because I adored the character of Mulaghesh, but also because asshole gods is a genre I enjoy. Each book is pretty much self-contained and is centered on a different character (though the major characters appear in all three) and take place over a long timespan.
I liked Foundryside a lot, but the rest of the books in the trilogy were a little on the weird side for me. The industrial magic premise is one I really love, but the asshole gods here were a little too powerful and bizarre, and the ending left me unsatisfied in many respects.
I felt as though American Elsewhere (one of his earlier novels) leaned a bit more into the horror than I personally enjoy. It was also very bizarre and ended up going in a very different direction than I expected it would.
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Date: 2025-06-20 05:07 pm (UTC)I liked The Ministry of Time but mostly because of Margaret Kemble.
I really like Bennett's work for the most part, and I think that one of his hallmarks is that his male characters and female characters are mostly completely independent from being male or female - that is, you can imagine swapping them out for the opposite sex without changing anything in the narrative other than pronouns. What I mean is, they are very much individual people, and gender is mostly irrelevant. You will not get any romance, and certainly no romantic happy endings in his books.
I liked the Divine Cities trilogy a lot, mostly because I adored the character of Mulaghesh, but also because asshole gods is a genre I enjoy. Each book is pretty much self-contained and is centered on a different character (though the major characters appear in all three) and take place over a long timespan.
I liked Foundryside a lot, but the rest of the books in the trilogy were a little on the weird side for me. The industrial magic premise is one I really love, but the asshole gods here were a little too powerful and bizarre, and the ending left me unsatisfied in many respects.
I felt as though American Elsewhere (one of his earlier novels) leaned a bit more into the horror than I personally enjoy. It was also very bizarre and ended up going in a very different direction than I expected it would.