Overall Reading Experience
This was a book I read for my book club. This was preceded with All the Stars and Teeth making it our second book. I wasn’t present at this meeting when we chose the book so I can’t say I was super thrilled when I saw the cover.
I’m not a scrooge but I don’t like Christmas stories.
At least I don’t enjoy the overly sappy and sweet ones where we teach Christmas lessons because it’s Christmas. You shouldn’t just do good things because it’s Christmas, you should just do good things no matter the reward or the day. The former ones just get so boring and repetitive after a while. They lose my interest quickly. And please don’t let there be singing. I will rip my face off if it’s a musical Christmas movie. I’d love to see a movie where good things are continuously happening because they are good people and don’t need to learn a lesson to appreciate what they have. I’m sure there’s movies out there but I haven’t seen them.
It’s also a Science Fiction novel.
I love fantasy. I’ve always loved it. It’s my favorite genre outside of romance. I find it harder to have a willing suspension of disbelief when it comes to this specific genre. I also don’t enjoy space from a science side of things. It’s never been my strong suit. I can understand why people want to write and explore it, I just personally don’t have a real interest in it. Aliens are cool though.
With fantasy, I don’t need to shed so many layers of disbelief to get behind what they were showing me. The technology aspect of this genre also just confuses me. Whenever they start talking about ships, mechanics, or weapons I start to tune out real bad. It sucks because it really takes away from the story when I struggle to understand how things work. I already don’t know much about machines myself, I literally just learned that all your tires don’t move when you’re driving not too long ago.
I like my fantasy with whimsy. It’s not that science fiction doesn’t have that; I just prefer to read about things like witches, magic, fae, werewolves, vampires, mermaids, etc.
I was more than apprehensive to read this but the whole point of a book club is to read and read titles you’ve never seen before. It did take me a while to actually start this book. I knew I should’ve started sooner; I actually wanted to try and take notes on what I was reading so I could have better discussions but I procrastinated too hard. I slacked big time on getting a physical copy of a book. I get physical copies of mostly everything that I read. I don’t mind epubs but my eyes get tired and phone screens are so small. But it was like a week before our book club meeting and I hadn’t made any moves. I very quickly signed up for a free week trial for Audible (shoutout no sponsor tho).
Still I ended up tapping out around 75%. I was pretty close. I had spent the entire night before the meeting binging the book like it was a paper due by the time class started. I’ve never really spent too much time with audiobooks. I certainly prefer physical copies but I do like the ease of convenience that came with it. Plus it was nice to have sound affects. Some VAs do a great job at bringing the book to life. I actually I enjoyed this book more than I would have because I read it as a audiobook. The story was much easier to follow and the book has a lovely cast of characters and the different voices helped me figure out who was talking in certain confusing scenes.
I liked the story a lot more than I was expecting. I thought the characters were nice and had depth to them. They weren’t whiny and they actually impacted the plot in meaningful ways instead of the events just happening to them. This book is written in 3rd person omnipresent which was perfect.
The humor was great. Some of it actually made me shake my head and laugh. It was very on the nose but tastefully done type of humor. It added to the story and made it more digestible. Now that I’m looking back on this book, I find that I really enjoy his writing style, such a shame it’s science fiction. It’s such an interesting voice that he has when he writes. He’s great at weaving a story and throwing in important topics and elements with a flair for dramatics.
The Abode 