As a followup to my pre-beach post about summer reading, I wanted to say that I chose Under Heaven as my "yearly" novel and it served the prupose well, though the plot promises to achieve greatness early on, and doesn't quite live up to its potential. The problem here is that the story has fantasy at its heart and develops toward fitting climax, but then unravels without an equivalent resolution, much more like the ending from a historic fiction couched in realism. So much so that I had about 15 pages left when it was due back at the library, and I didn't bother to ask Brooklynne to renew it. I will never know what those last 15 pages held (and perhaps someone will tell me I should regret this) but I'm confident I had already passed the ending 50 pages before. That sounds harsh, but I did really like this book, I recommend it, and I think I'll read more of Gavriel's stuff. I'm just not the kind of reader that "needs" to slog to the end after taking as much satisfaction as possible from a story.

Here's another take on the book with a rationale for why it's ok for the story's ending to seem so unfitting.

Now Reading: The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People who Read Them (totally nerdy, I know, but I can't help it.)