Marcie Pretends to Read reviewed The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi (The Interdependency, #1)
Eh
3 stars
(OLD REVIEW FROM WHEN I FIRST READ! I'm transferring over my GoodReads stuff into BookWyrm, slowly but surely.)
This review is not written to be used as a recommendation, but rather for my own purposes to look back on my thoughts on this book immediately after reading.
Eh, it's alright. It's exciting, I think, but it's very "literal," I would say. Like, the action is just right there in front of you. Obviously a huge part of this is the political intrigue, but I feel that it's written almost like a means to a bombastic end, rather than for its own sake. This is kind of like the Avengers of Scalzi's books; kinda dumb fun. It's not bad by any means. In fact, towards the third act, I was really enjoying reading it. But it wasn't anything that left me wanting to tell someone about this awesome book I just …
(OLD REVIEW FROM WHEN I FIRST READ! I'm transferring over my GoodReads stuff into BookWyrm, slowly but surely.)
This review is not written to be used as a recommendation, but rather for my own purposes to look back on my thoughts on this book immediately after reading.
Eh, it's alright. It's exciting, I think, but it's very "literal," I would say. Like, the action is just right there in front of you. Obviously a huge part of this is the political intrigue, but I feel that it's written almost like a means to a bombastic end, rather than for its own sake. This is kind of like the Avengers of Scalzi's books; kinda dumb fun. It's not bad by any means. In fact, towards the third act, I was really enjoying reading it. But it wasn't anything that left me wanting to tell someone about this awesome book I just read. It's a bit of a coin toss on whether I'll read the next in the series. If there's one thing I think Scalzi is good at, it's making you wanna read the next one, which I think is a skill different to writing a captivating novel. Not that he's any bad at that, just that I don't see that skill as prevalently in this book as his others (Lock In, Old Man's War + Ghost Brigades). Admittedly I was in high school when I read those books, so maybe a reread would produce different opinions.
One more thing: I both love and despise the way Scalzi names his characters. Some are like "oh, that makes sense," and others are like "did he just take an existing name and change a letter?" There was literally a character named Goerk. Like, what? How do I even say that? Minor nitpick there.
Solid 6/10.
