Amy 
fantasy, action/suspense
The Lies of Locke Lamora bored me until I got about 40% of the way through—I almost stopped listening to it a couple of times but persisted due to its high Goodreads rating. There were some long, overly-detailed unnecessary sections and boring setting description sections. Finally, about 50% of the way through, I was looking forward to every opportunity I had to listen. I was hooked. Too bad it took that long, really. Locke’s character was unique and endearing and many of the other characters were, likewise, enjoyable. I loved Scott Lynch's use of European-sounding names for people and places. They were wonderfully creative and fun to consider!
This novel is classified as fantasy when, really, it’s not VERY fantasy. The people are living in a fantasy world that was somehow left behind by some prior non-human life forms. This history was never explained nor much-discussed by the characters. And there are alchemical inventions which might be construed as fantasy yet they seemed plausible--more like science fiction. And, that’s all the fantasy in this novel. It has a historical feel to it. A personal annoyance is that the character Sabitha is mentioned several times as a person in their past but is never well-described, never comes into the timeline of the story, and her earlier absence/departure is never explained. I’m sure that’ll happen in a sequel. I’ll probably read the sequel to this novel eventually but won’t be rushing out to get it.
The narrator of the audio book, Michael Page, reads this novel like he’s a Shakespearean stage actor, overacting to the point that I felt stressed listening to him. I attribute much of my dissatisfaction with the first half of the novel to his narration. However, his male character voices and accents won me over because they were all wonderfully unique and some were hilarious. I got used to him eventually. I appreciated his pronunciations of the European-sounding names. So, I’ll give him a B+.
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