firstfrost | (Reply)

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Hey, for one I've read a couple of things on the list before reading your reviews of them! :)

I liked A Half-Built Garden, but I wished the author had known/cared a little more about the science and the how-did-we-get-from-there-to-here worldbuilding. It wasn't meant to be the focus of the story, which is fine, and I enjoyed the stuff that *was* the focus of the story, which was really fleshed out and nuanced. But there was just enough science and worldbuilding that I kept tripping over "wait, how are they affording to ship all that sugar and power all those electronics, and what are all the people in the US who aren't in watershed communities doing, and what power do the nation-state governments have, and how did all this get put in place apparently comparatively peacefully despite then-powerful people/institutions objecting?"

Nona the Ninth made me realize that a thing all three books have in common is not only is the narrator unreliable/doesn't understand a lot of what's going on, but a a lot of the important and exciting stuff occurs off-screen, not even in front of the unreliable narrator. Which, when I think of it that way, seems like an odd stylistic choice, but clearly the author is fond of it. (Also, I read the first two books back-to-back less than a year ago and was struggling to remember what had happened in them and who all the people were. On the other hand, I felt like reading Nona mostly gave me enough prompting to remember the important stuff.)