This one's going to be hard for some folks. All the characters are generally unlikeable and a lot of pages were spent advertising the author's seemingly vast knowledge of the NY art scene which I couldn't really care less about and had little to do with story. I mostly stuck it out to see if the Wangs would be forced to come to terms with their own hubris and maybe come out the other side changed if not better. Result: disconnected and contrived.

Time travel books are always a little tricky for the more pedantic science minded folks like me. Chu does a good job of skirting the various paradoxes though only the future books in the series will tell for sure. ;p

Sure it's a little tropey-guy saves girl who saves guy's soul, corporate greed destroys planet, blah, blah--and somewhat predictable, but satisfyingly so and aided by Chu's writing style which I enjoy. I'll probably read the sequels.

I really wanted to like this book. So little is out there that offers such an intimate view of Aleppo in what would ideally be an easily accessible format. Was it a failure of translation? I suspect that some fault may lie there, but issues such as seemingly random appearances of unexplained yet obviously important characters can't be the work of shoddy interpretation alone.

No reader should have to work so hard to find the story.

In light of our current political predicament, this was particularly...er...poignant.

What a fun read! Kept me in suspense for the entire read and I can't recall a single moment where it got bogged down by pages and pages of exposition. I got just what I needed to give the story some ground to run around on. It'll be fun to see where (who I assume is) the main protagonist will go from here; I'd be fairly disappointed if it was nowhere. Think pre-"Firefly" meets "Alien" crossed with a team-building version of "The Martian".

'Cause who reads a book with the dust jacket on?

I love military scifi. I love it even more with a female protagonist. This installment of the series moved a bit slower than the previous. A good chunk of it made it imperative that you'd recently read or could easily recall the events from the previous book from nearly a year before. Not much in the way of development as far as the main character, but does give a better view of the world she inhabits.

My first Erdrich book. The writing, without a doubt, is spectacular. This particular novel was written as a series of little vignettes that were sometimes a bit jarring in their abruptness. My favorite was the middle when the reader gets some history surrounding the painted drum. Good pick for folks looking for some light magical realism in addition to a bit Native American lore, but I'm told, a departure from the author's normal style.