Sunday, October 17, 2021

The Black Tides of Heaven by JY Yang

Rating: WARTY!

This was a mess, and not even a hot one. It was so boring that I twice tried to get into it and failed in short order both times, ending up DNF-ing it. There was nothing to hold onto, nothing drawing me in, nothing that that stirred my interest. I resent that I paid for this. I think I'm going to flat-out quit reading any story from now on that features twins.

The very short novel, which I encountered in audiobook form read by the sadly unengaging Nancy Wu, is supposedly about Mokoya and Akeha. The former has a gift of prophecy, the latter an ability to see motivations in people, but in the portion I could stand to listen to, they never really used these gifts to much effect. It seems they were involved not in a story but in a succession of cameos fighting fantastical monsters, and then boring would happen for a while, until the next monster presented itself for extermination. The story was rambling and tedious, and once I realized it really wasn't going anywhere, I had no interest in continuing with it. I can't commend it based on what I heard.