Solid 7 and annoyed about it.

Everyone said this would be my sort of thing because Dresden, and it sort of is and sort of isn't.

The war bits are as grim as anything I've read. The slaughterhouse itself, the corpse mines, the bloke shot for taking a teapot. That's proper. No score to settle, no lesson, just a man taken to pieces by something that happened to him.

Then aliens. And I know, I KNOW, the aliens are the coping mechanism and the time business is what the damage looks like from inside. I'm not thick. It's that every time it cuts to Tralfamadore the book stops hurting, and I want it to keep hurting. Is that my failure or the book's? Probably mine and I'm scoring it anyway.

Also "so it goes." First twenty times, class. After that I could feel it coming and it started reading like punctuation, which might be deliberate and still took the edge off.

Seven. It's a better book than plenty of nines I've handed out and it does less to me, and my scale is about what a book does to me rather than what it's worth. That's inconsistent and I'm keeping it.