YA Sci Fi. Virus leads to a quarantine area. Over time various sections war with each other. Then one day a VIP son is kidnapped and dropped into the area. He makes friends and changes things. so so

While this is not my genre and while I did not love this book, It does do an excellent job of portraying the conflicts and challenges faced by gay men in the 1050’s in France. Baldwin’s central character brings to life the dichotomy of emotions faced as he struggles to come to terms with his undeniable attraction to men while harboring an understanding of society’s expectations for traditional marriage and family. A well written and thoughtful narrative.

One of my favorites

I understand that this is one book in a series and so I don’t know well all the characters, but this book is just not believable. From what I gather, this is a group of people, some of whom have military or special services training and some who do not, but all of whom work together to help people. But you have people who one minute make a strong decisive move, and the next minute are walking around shouting” Oh my god, Oh my god!” The plot was shallow and the characters actions were just not believable.

Although some of the references in her funny stories are dated, I had no difficulty finding her humor to be as witty as it was years ago.

What a great book! And what really make it interesting is the way it is set up. It starts out as the beginning of an MFA grad student’s dissertation but then evolves into the book itself. And while it starts off as third person narrative, at some point it becomes first person, which just adds a whole new layer to the story. And to say that the story is about a man cheating on his wife and the wife maybe cheating on her husband (you’ll have to read in order to make sense of that) does not begin to do it justice.

This book was a quick read. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the series.

In my opinion, this was a terrible book and after I finished it and saw that it was a book of some acclaim, I was shocked. The writing is very stiff though that may be because it is told by the central character who comes across as a socially and psychologically disturbed person. The way I read it, his behaviors and thoughts are supposed to be considered normal but come across very damaged. He doesn’t care if he loses his job, gets married or not, or even goes to jail. I just could not get past the disturbed behavior in this book.

Absolutely amazing second book in a series, set up the political intrigue for the second book. Very dense, but once the drama gets going, OH BOY is it GOING. The twists and turns and (slight hints at a spoiler)

Highly recommended