The Insides

It's not really like either of these things, except maybe a little, but somehow it reminded me of both Charlie Huston's novels and Lev Grossman's The Magicians. I read a book a few months ago--The War Against the Assholes which had some of the same feeling, but didn't work as well. This is dark, gritty street magic with sleazy track-suit mafia types and hipster farmers and foodies and it manages to be both satire and entertaining urban fantasy at once. ( )

Not a huge fan of audiobooks in general. I find the reader to always be fairly monotone and quite boring. This honestly was not a whole lot different for me, although I'd be remiss if I only judged/reviewed the book mainly by the narrator and not the actual content...and that wouldn't be fair to the book or to the author. Without doling out any spoilers, I will say that I surprisingly quite enjoyed the actual story. I'm not a big fan of fantasy, but this book is humorous and has some good twists. Overall, I'd say it's definitely worth the read, just maybe not the listen. ( )

THE INSIDES by Jeremy P. Bushnell came as a very great surprise to me. I hadn’t read about the book before reading it except to learn it had something to do with working in a professional kitchen. After reading this I know that is like saying Moby Dick is about fishing.
This is a book about magic that doesn’t ask you to suspend belief. It just assumes you will read the next page and then the one after that, and you do.
This book is about a knife that isn’t a knife. It is about a butcher who covets the knife of an inferior butcher but finds herself at a loss to explain why that guy cuts both faster and neater than her even though he appears to go so much slower that she.
This is about a magic hunter, a finder of things, about human evil and greed, about the loss of things we loved to the need for other things we want.
And finally it is about the love between two people, and two others and… well this book is in so many ways a love story, and the heartbreak that comes upon the realization that you are the cause of your own misery.
This is a wonderful, engrossing read by a storyteller who only asks for your attention for a few moments, just long enough for him to cast his spell.
Oh, and there is another world, or place here, that is referred to as the Insides, so don’t thing is about offal and entrails and such. This is a good/bad place where nightmares live, and also hope dwells. ( )

Well, I have mixed feelings about this book. I do like books where multiple characters are after the same thing, but I am not really a fan of magic.

I got the audiobook as an Early Reviewer and was very excited about it. The premise sounded great!

Sadly, and I don't know whether it was the person reading the book or the book itself, but I couldn't get more than 10 minutes in before shutting the whole thing off. The language felt clunky and crude, and I thought that even the narrator was uncomfortable with the curse words. The characters felt completely unrelateable and uninteresting. I'm not normally against cursing in literature, so I was surprised that it bothered me so much in this book. Sadly, I don't think I'll get back to listening again, though I may pick up the print copy sometime and see if that is better. ( )