What’s this? It’s a review for the Fair Review Project. Since this is meant to be a review of a blog itself, I’m not doing a Well Read review, but I figure it’ll be a good place to find victims suggested sites for reviews later.
The Gospel According to Rhys is a blog that I’ve seen around quite a few places, but never had occassion to take a closer look at before. Now that Rhys has opened the Fair Review project, I figured it would be nice to take a look at his own blog for my review.
Design: Okay, I must admit I’m a bit unimpressed by the design here. It’s really crowded, featuring three columns, two large ads, all kinds of widgety “latest” updates, large buttons for bookmarking and subscribing to the blog… and a fairly small logo after all that. The fact that the title’s way over to the left and the actual blog entries are way over to the left lead my brain to ignore the right half of the page entirely — though after I scrolled back up and looked more carefully, I realized there actually was non-ad stuff over there too. The basically clean design would be perfectly good if it weren’t so crowded, and if it’s going to host that much information, it needs to be a stronger design. As it is, I’d probably close the tab pretty quickly if the blog headline didn’t catch my eye.
Entries: Luckily, the blog headlines did catch my eye. In addition to the entry promoting the Fair Review Project, his post on the value of reviewing big-name bloggers (or lack thereof) is really well-written, with just enough informality to be fun, but enough serious discussion to be worth reading and make a good point. Going further back, his entries generally seem to achieve that good combination of humor and point that makes for interesting blog reading.
Overall: I gotta say, Rhys, your blog is perhaps not one I would check every day, but it’s definitely the sort of thing that ends up in my feed reader. Quality content makes up for what lacks in design.
this morning, and ripped through a novella in the same universe as well.
, is actually one I’ve owned for several months. It finally worked its way up to the top of the pile of books I read before bed. At first I dawdled through it, as it starts off like a fairly standard coming-of-age fantasy story (albeit in a very interesting world). About halfway through, I realized I’d been up for an hour reading it and I gave in and took it to work the next day. The metaphysics are well done; Sabriel is an Abhorsen, someone who can walk in both life and death and whose job is to make the dead behave themselves. I never doubted the geography of death that Nix describes, and the magic seemed both fresh and internally consistent. There were elements of the ending that genuinely surprised me, always a nice change in YA fiction.
, just in time. I was initially unsure about it because Nix decided to skip close to twenty years between the first and second books, but the titular heroine, Lirael, was a strong enough character that I didn’t really mind after the first few chapters. To a large degree, the book is about Lirael’s search for a place for herself in the world, and in that respect it succeeded very well. Lirael was both strong and sympathetic, and I found myself respecting her a great deal. I was less pleased with the secondary narrative, which follows Prince Sameth, Sabriel’s son and the apprentice Abhorsen, in his own journey to define himself. Sameth is the sort of character who often makes me cringe when they are the stars of novels — the kind that make you wince because you can watch just how badly they’re screwing everything up with every step they take and make you want to shake them firmly. Luckily, the writing quality and the A-plot were enough to make the book as a whole enjoyable.
put me off. I won’t tell you why, as it’s a major spoiler, but suffice to say that shocking things happening in the prologue tend to disrupt my interest in a book. It recovered well, though, and I was able to identify much more with Sameth in this book. It’s here that he properly comes into himself as a character and as a young man (and it was about time, too). The ending was more than satisfying.