I love this author.

Normally, I love this woman’s books, and one of her series is on my final list of books I’d make other people read. Her descriptive narrative is wonderful, and gives you a real sense of time, place and setting. Her characterizations are simple yet engaging.

It only stands to reason that anything she writes badly would be just as good, but in reverse. In this book, the descriptive narrative is painful, setting the story then taking you along a terrible, sorrowful, tragedy-laden road. The characterizations are fraught with doomed spirit, and even before you realize this story ends very, very badly, you definitely get a sense of every character’s ultimate futility.

This is not a badly written book. It’s well-written, well-researched and well-described. But I hated this book for its pointless (to my mind) depressing storytelling, the interesting but unlikeable characters, and the horrid fate of the people of ancient Britain at the brutal hands of the Roman Empire.

Maybe I’m too sensitive; maybe I miss this author’s usual lightness of love for her normal stories about the peoples of Ancient Egypt. But it hurt me to finish this book, and I hope someone else will have more success liking it than I did. Because I really tried.

Perhaps there is something wrong with me.

Yes, I know that this author is loved round the world, despite her self-professed dislike of children. Anyoen who reads her books should be able to clearly see how much she dislikes them; deaht, suffering, torture, and sadness strike every character, in every book, and it actually gets WORSE as the story wears on.

As far as I’m concerned, you’d have to be a full-blown sociopath, incapable of any human empathy for the characters of this series, not to be profoundly disturbed by the awful, hideous fate the author delivers onto her main character. If you think Dumbledore being tortured to retrieve an ultimately useless relic is fun, please avoid me. If you think you’d like to live in this world, you require psychological help. This tale is a grim medley, punctuated with hatred, bigotry, racism, abuse of pretty much every kind, neglect and murder.

Oh, but it’s all set in the wonderful world of Chaotic Neutral magic, so it’s fun all ‘round!

For some reason that escapes sanity, I watched the Staw Wars films on TV, then had the inspirational desire to read the story after the last movie. I randomly picked up this book at a used store and paid for it, not believing my luck in finding what I thought I wanted. Little did I know that Star Wars books, especially, perhaps, the older ones, are little more than terrible fanfiction published, no doubt, to capitalize on the world’s most popualr (at the time) franchise. This story has elements that would normally make it interesting; but the author is balless and falls far short of the bold adventure the orginal movies embodied.

This deadening restraint also muddies the character portrayals; each one is represented woodenly, with so little genuine emotion or evidence of human psychology one questions if this was written by a particularly clever Commodore 64. Frankly, I’ve endured movie videogames with more depth and feeling, and they uniformly SUCK as a universally-accepted rule.

This story has information on the continued storyline, so if you love Star Wars and have no discerning taste in what you get of it, this book will make a nice addition to your collection. If, however, you desire to read something written like a book with characters and plot that are represented as something more than binary on a page, avoid this mulch-destined piece of crap and stick with the nouveau comic storylines.

A close friend harried me to read this under recommendation. He said the first 1/3 of it was painful, and he was right. I had an easier time slogging th rough those parts once I let go of the idea of trying to memorize everyone’s names; they all have at least 3, and people call them by each one differently, making conversations, actions, and anything involving the characters hard to follow at first.

This book has a ridiculous amount of historical detail. I appreciate it, but would have preferred more about the people and how they lived. Unfortunately, it is of necessity a long book that sacrifices time with the characters to explain the situations that arise and the political and military manouevrings that are part of the story. This is more for history fans than for people who think this will be like watching Rome. (Though to tell the truth, this is more realistic, whereas Rome is sleazy and panders to the porn- and violence-watching proletariat, the willfully ignorant. :P)

This book will take you a while to read, but the story is very detailed and will therefore paint itself a very clear picture in your mind of a setting in time where some important shifts in the world’s greatest empire started occuring. I ahet to say this, but I’m actually looking for the next part of the story. It must be worth reading, if this book made me want to learn more.

If you want a movie you can talk through with predictable suspense and zombie-nomming action, this movie is for you.

Though this woman’s values are outdated and sometimes weird by our standards, and her meanderings include people most middle-aged humans will only have heard of, the advice given is interesting and of some interest and value. Opening yourself up to the opportunites to expand your horizons of taste is never a bad idea.

The ending theme, “Still Doll”, pretty much encapsulates the delicate, gothic heart of beauty and darkness in vampire fiction, goth culture and anime. Close your eyes to the light and listen then tell me I’m wrong.

This is where I learned to define the importance and relevance of “restraint”.

Amateurish effort that is, good lord, apparently part of a series. One can only hope the other books are better. If you’re looking for selfish, immoral and unethical characters who abuse and manipulate their powers for their own dangerous, deadly ends, pretty much entirely without punishment or backlash, this wanly-concocted trip is for you. All in all, it might be better than waiting in the dentist’s office with nothing but the sound of drills to pass the time.

There are movies that deserve respect not for being great, but rather for not pretending to be what they aren’t. This is not one of those movies.

Anyone who actually respects the original Transformers concepts and story will not be treated by watching this confusing, unfocused and irrelevant story. Those of us who were the target audience for the original translated Japanese show felt the keen of doom from the following quote taken from one of the producers when the concept was first confirmed as being made into film:

“This film will focus on the ‘human element’. Because no one wants to watch a movie about robots fighting in space.”

NO ONE WANTS TO WATCH THAT? WHAT THE HELL WAS THE FIRST TRANSFORMERS MOVIE? WHERE THE HELL DOES THIS DOUCHEBAG THINK THE POPULARITY FOR THIS SHOW, THE VERY SAME SHOW HE’S PAYING TO HAVE MADE INTO A MOVIE, CAME FROM?

I do NOT want to go to a movie called Transformers and spend 85% of the time watching a thinly-woven story taped together with, surprisingly, badly-executed cliches, about some whiny, spoiled asshole kid that I’d cross the street to punch out. First of all, I can’t think of anything more tedious about the “human element” to explore. Second of all, I feel I speak for all of Generation X when I say, “WE DON’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT THE HUMANS. BRING ON THE ROBOTS FIGHTING IN SPACE!!”

This movie is called Transformers. Could we please spend some time developing them – please? Could we explain the story, make it interesting, dedicate time to the actual robot vs. robot storyline, develop the main characters, perhaps? Those of us not distracted from the lack of plot by Capoeira/breakdancing racial stereotypes, millions of needlessly moving robots parts, and some moron continually shouting “No, no, NO!!” as his only major emoting, can look at this pasted-together corporate PowerPoint presentation and see that beyond those elements, it is a terrible collage of mixed-up crap, stuck together with moving, shiny shit, terrible performances and a tired, wasted-sounding Optimus Prime spewing retread quotes from the original series in a necrotic attempt to try and associate something with content and depth with this purely anti-art marketing tool masquerading as a film. It’s an insult to the orginal story, an insult to the quality therein, and an epic slap in the face of the intelligence and rational minds of its target audience, us, the exploited children of the 80’s cartoon generation.

Makes you excited for the release of the G.I. Joe this year, doesn’t it?