competencefantasy's Reviews (912)

It's easy to see why this is one of the classics of the genre. I don't often get into time travel narratives as much as I feel I ought to. Something about the mutability that has to be added to time to support that sort of plot mechanically tends to take away the weight of the story for me and drive down the stakes. Kindred is tight and personal, with the impact of twenty what-if-something-something-world-war-two books. Furthermore this book has the prose and relevance of something that could have been written yesterday, not thirty-six some-odd years ago.

I truly do not understand this genre of book. It seems to lack a purpose, aside from giving one's least favorite relative something to give on graduation, and also seems to carry a blissful unawareness that a graduate might have more than one character trait, enabling one to provide a gift that will still be relevant to their interest tomorrow morning. Oh well, let's give for the occasion not for the person and try not to think about why basically no one ever buys these for themselves.

However, even supposing "grad" books are a good idea, I cannot see the point of this one. It purports to specialize in heavy, highly applicable, life advice, the sort of thing that would make a lot of sense in a handwritten graduation card but is baffling to outsource to a strange author in a faux leather book. Unwanted advice is at least sentimental if it comes from one's grandmother directly; from a self righteous author, it is bizarre. This is especially true given that the advice seems to be to form by sheer will and discipline a God obsession that is nowhere near mentally healthy... ok I guess that's not entirely fair. The sort of attitude the books suggesting could probably work out, if the person arrived at it through their own reflection, agency, and study. What would certainly not work is reading 138 pages on graduation night and attempting to actually follow any of this.

Let's face it, it would not be a good idea to use this as any sort of guidebook to your life. Even by the book's own standards it would be idolatrous to use it as your anchor and not the bible. So why are we setting it up by social context as the advice from the elders that will carry us naive, poor choice making, in with a bad crowd youths through life?

I waited many years to read this because if I decided to dislike it, I wanted to have enough additional life experience not to be the ingrate child who missed the point. Nearly a decade on, my opinion is the same. Give your own dang bad advice, don't buy it from Hallmark.

Oh and there's a homophobic example because of course there is. Dude, tell everyone to reflect on if their falling in love is a godly choice if you must tell anyone. It's either good for nobody or everybody.

Enjoyable enough but I don't think spending so much of the book with so few characters conscious did it any favors.

Fun with a lot of fast plot movement, just like the series.

There is almost no suspense about the mysteries in this series, which is actually fine. The book is relaxing and doesn't make you care too much. It is guilty of throwing the entire plot development which would make up an entire other book into a paragraph of exposition after the climax. Cat Who books really have to be judged against others in the series, as an easy, if not guilty, pleasure. By those standards, this does a better job than a lot of them of justifying the book as relevant to the mystery. However the setting was a bit dull.

The prose is superb, of course. The protagonist is what elevates it for me. He is horrifying and revolting, highly biased and probably mad. However I found him... lovable. How apacalyptic...

I love it. The book leaned into it's delightful premise until a bunch of lovable characters fell out. Then the humorous and personal ("human" would be weird word choice here) drama unfolded.

It's just great fun. Read it on a night when you need to be weirdly cheered up.

A typical relaxing and none too substantial Cat Who. This one was not a favorite for me because I don't find Qwilleran deciding if he's on the outs with his lady friend or not particularly engaging.

It's a cat who book... I honestly can't remember more two weeks out

There are two aspects by which this otherwise excellent concept has aged badly
-large sections of the writing seem to be there for no purpose
-I expect both the intellectual and artistic points of view discussed were a lot more tolerable before the internet did them to death