Crystal Singer
Anne McCaffrey
Killashandra Ree dreamed of being a diva after ten years of concentrated training. In her final presentation, she’s told she’ll never be anything but a backup singer – so instead she decides to become a Crystal Singer. Few people that land on Ballybran leave, but Killashandra doesn’t care – she just wants to keep singing for her career.
Sitting here reviewing this in fact months after I have read it, I am tempted to read it again. It’s like a much better version of another set of singing novels I attempted a long, long time ago. I don’t seem to have reviewed it, but I think the author was someone Modeste?
Killashandra is a powerful heroine who takes what she wants, even if she tends to be a bit blindsided sometimes. As usual, the protagonist is strongly gifted in something else to make the world revolve around her. She has to work for it though sometimes.
I found the character development in this novel very powerful. I think that without it, this novel would have fallen flat on its face. The environment/world building is quite good, but there is only so much description that you can take about rocks. I also thoroughly enjoyed the descriptions of her training – I only wish I could sing rocks!
I confess, this is the first McCaffrey novel I have ever read! And here I am loving dragons. I will now try to make time to get my hands on her other novels and read them. This novel receives 4 stars from me.
It had the potential to be a thriller, but thanks to 
I was glopping through the mud and becoming numb to the spectacle of adults mapping the ground blindly right from the beginning. I could feel the fear sweat running down my spine. Plus, I loved that joke ‘Rain can only go in one direction – down!’. The the two brothers turn out to be the most hardy of all of the child survivors, but they don’t really know why.
“Deliciously dark prose”? Try incomprehensibly dark plot line. I tried desperately to connect with any of the characters, but instead found them falling out of my mind faster than a Drifter forgot their families. Skipping around different perspectives gives this novel nothing worthwhile, and just left me confused and irritated. There seemed to be no forwards plot that I could identify in the first half of the novel, and after that I gave up.
Wren is a plucky heroine that seems to be afraid of nothing except perhaps another betrayal. Alec on the other hand seems a bit wussy to me (which is perfectly ok), but he toughens up and becomes a character you can empathise with. They don’t really know what to expect next, and so neither does the reader.
This is a usual good-quality Garth Nix novel that didn’t disappoint me. The main character Khemri certainly develops as a character, and it is interesting to see his progression/regression from Prince to person. Basically Khemri is ripped away from everything that is familiar, and then thrust into a world that not only does he have faulty information about, but also is out to kill him. The ending really came as a surprise to me. Wow!
Hmm, I really wasn’t convinced by Munro’s story about Eve’s death, particularly as it was interspersed with the flashbacks he was having. I also felt that he was suffering from PTSD – why wasn’t anyone helping him with that? Yes, getting away from a situtation will help, but as Munro learns, it can’t fix all the problems.
I’ve spent the last 4.5 years (let’s be honest, probably my whole life) being completely stressed out by completing my PhD (you may now call me Dr. Rose). Now I have a summer ahead of me that seems pretty empty at this point. I think I’ll be practicing Slow living without trying. It’s sort of regressing to an old style of living, which I have always supported. If you enjoy making your own bread, take the moment to do so, and enjoy the process. Be mindful the whole time.
I’d like to know, even with Wanda’s magic, why Verity is up and about after such a traumatic birth pretty much 2 days later. Any baby that comes out in the space of an hour is going to rip some serious damage. Or maybe the time passed faster than I thought, which it might have because I had no sense of timing throughout the whole novel.