Synopsis: I only got 60 pages in, which wasn’t enough to discover the plot. It seems to follow the primary actors in a rebellion against a space empire.
Book Review: This series has been a downward slope for me. I loved the first book, and was kinda meh on the second one, and just found the third one so tedious that I couldn’t even finish it. I think I know why.
The attraction of the first book is the awesome, bizarre world that Lee creates. The laws of physics are shaped by people’s beliefs, and must be reinforced by worship, rites, and ritual human sacrifice. It’s a really cool premise that grabs the novelty-seeking portion of the brain.
However by the time you get three books in, that novelty has worn off. By the time I started Revenant Gun, I’d come to realize that there wasn’t that much being done with this premise, it was basically just another form of Space Magic. Which is fine, there’s lots of great novels with Space Magic, but those novels have other things that carry them once that novelty has worn off. Revenant Gun doesn’t.
The plot is pretty basic where it makes sense (empire is evil, rebels want out), and is often annoyingly disjointed. Problems are frequently solved through liberal application of Space Magic. The atrocities don’t ever make one feel much. We’re told of the nuking of a population center, and that the sacrifice rituals involve “lots of blood,” but come on, that’s not gripping.
Most of the characters are flat. They speak wooden lines and act like they’re there to move a plot forward, rather than be real people inhabiting a world. There is one exception, a character with depth of personality and interesting drives, but unfortunately he has to split screen-time with several other people so I didn’t see enough of him often enough to keep me interested.
Lee switches protagonists in each book, which doesn’t really work in this case. And his habit of keeping things from the reader for a big reveal later on is obvious and hurts the story, rather than building mystery.
Honestly, there just wasn’t much there to keep my attention after the cool concept behind how the universe works is explained. Even that could have kept me going if there was more to it… if something interesting was done with this idea that changed my perspective on the world. Instead everything worked more or less the same, except with magic added. That’s not enough to hold me if there isn’t a cool plot or interesting characters that I care about. I wasn’t sure why I was even reading this after a while, and so I stopped. Heck, I’m even getting bored writing this review. Not Recommended.
Book Club Review: Interestingly, this had a wide(ish) variety of reactions. I say wide-ish because we only had a sample set of four. More than half our book club didn’t come to this meeting, perhaps due to summer arriving, or perhaps because the novel didn’t interest them, or perhaps due to a coincidental confluence of personal issues. This is a strike against the novel for book clubs, as suppressing turn out is the opposite of what’s good for a book club… if that is indeed what happened.
However, among those four, I was the only one who hated it. Another reader thought it was kinda ok, and she got through to the end. One reader was new to the book club and hadn’t read the first two books. As this was his first time in this universe, he was super excited by the physics-manipulation thing and the weirdness of the world in general. He reminded me of me when I read the first book, which makes me think that anyone reading one of these novels for the first time will like the first one due to the great novelty-hook. It was fun going over all the cool stuff that grabbed me the first time again. :)
And the fourth member was a fan of the series, and didn’t particularly mind what I saw as the weakness. He though the world was interesting enough that it was worth reading even if the characters and plot weren’t very noteworthy. This range of opinions did strike up a bit of conversation, and it was a pretty decent meeting over all. I’m still prejudiced by my personal dislike of the novel, and the fact that so few even showed up for the meeting, so I can’t give it an actual recommendation. However, maybe consider it, if this sounds like your thing?
