mariebrunelm's Reviews (478)

This writing textbook is a mixture of very vague ideas and very specific advice on writing speculative fiction. I haven't read anything by this author, I just knew he was famous, but upon finishing this book I did some research and will not be reading anything by him considering his views. I'm glad that the most helpful pieces of advice I found in the book I was already familiar with thanks to writers like Mary Robinette Kowal.

I read this sweet, sweet book as research for a creative project and it was really lovely. A heart-warming story for middle-grade children celebrating the love of books in all their forms - there's a second character with dyslexia who prefers books in audio format and I thought that was a welcome detail. 

"Here we are, and here is always the place we must start from."
Each time I read this book, and it's been 4 or 5 times, I wonder why I make myself go through all that pain again. Robin Hobb isn't gentle with her characters. She pushes them to their limits, and then beyond, while keeping a firm grip on her story. But she's also a master storyteller, and a queen of character writing. I go back to her books because there are no others I can immerse myself as much into. I know Fitz, and I know the Fool, by some deeper knowledge than just words. I live for the conversations they have in this particular volume. Yes, there's one the characters I hate the most in all literature, but there's also fabulous friendships between people of all genders. It's a truth universally acknowledged that found family is my favourite trope, and I have an inkling that I first experienced its thrill with this series. 

The Wayward Children are back for another adventure in the third tome of Seanan McGuire's series. This one follows the timeline of the first volume, after devoting the second tome to a flashback. I was really glad to be back with a team of characters, which I think McGuire writes really well. There's banter, a lot of respect and consideration for one another, and once more an array of representation that makes my heart happy. Giving the slightest clue about the plot would be spoilers for Every Heart a Doorway, so I'll just say that if you enjoyed that one, you'll also enjoy Beneath the Sugar Sky.

Rep: fat, disabled, trans, black and Asian characters.

Red and Blue chase each other through time and space, sowing letters and poetic yearning in their wake.
This book is bliss. It was everything I'd wanted it to be, as someone who loves time travel stories but not necessarily the ins and outs of it or the mind mazes it can create. In here, you'll find gorgeous prose, sometimes twisting the narration for the sake of beauty, a correspondence bursting with feelings and etched onto any surface available, and time agents with a purpose but also a heart.

This book is a handy checklist of things to keep in mind during every stage of novel writing: from the gathering of ideas to revising and publishing, you have recaps of important points, without fuss. For my personal use, I would have liked more details, but on the whole I can see this handbook being quite helpful to budding writers.

This is the fourth book in the Murderbot Diaries and I certainly don't want that series to end. Just when I thought the beginning of this one was a little long and not as sassy as the others, bam, the author gifts us with a deep passage or a funny conversation and I'm back in love with these books. I'm quite happy with my reading speed too. So far I'm enjoying two of them a month and that way I can read other stories in between while not forgetting absolutely everything about the plot since there is a strong continuity from book to book.
Rep: asexual, aromantic and a gender MC. 

When I decided to gift this book to a friend, I thought I might as well re-read it before parting with it. Dear me, I had forgotten how dark it was! But it's also a very elegant book, for reasons I can't quite point to.
The story is that of Margaret, a antique book seller who dabbles in biography writing for unknown people of the 19th century. One day she receives a very special invitation in the post: Vida Winter, the most famous writer of her generation, asks her to write her biography after years of misleading journalists about her past. There ensues a story about the stories we tell ourselves, those that shape us and those that we hide. It's an extremely dark character study of two women shaped by trauma and grief for things they can't always identify. But it's also a fabulous hommage to the power of literature.
Rep: lesbian MC.

The Clockmaker's Daughter, aka one of the books that almost felt longer than the whole Lord of the Rings. First of all, I want to say that there's nothing inherently wrong about this novel. Objectively it's quite good. The main (as objective as possible) faults I found with it were that some characters felt interchangeable (or even removable), some paragraphs felt like extracts from Wikipedia, and there was a general air of elitism (being rich is good, being poor is bad).

Other than that, it's a good mystery novel steeped into Victorian culture, with a large cast of characters spread out over different time periods, from the 19th century to the present. I loved the Pre-Raphaelite atmosphere and the slow revelations. Most of the male characters were quite patronising towards female characters, but the latter were well-rounded and defied gender expectations. I particularly how Lucy, the teenage sister of a painter, learned to see people for who they were rather than how prejudice makes them look.

The main trouble I had with this book is very personal. I've realised over the past few months that with my PhD, my writing projects, the English lessons I give, etc, I don't really have the mental space for intricate plots and huge casts of characters, which this book has. I also couldn't care less about some of the character arcs and was constantly lost between the different names of one character (says the reader for whom it took 400 pages to understand that Petyr Baelish and Littlefinger were the same person). And finally the ending frustrated me deeply. Sigh. 

This raw and poetic memoir follows a girl growing up in Nunavut in the 1970s and 1980s, weaving in magical realism elements, often verging on the fantastic & spiritual. It's a powerful text, dealing with sometimes really heavy topics (check the TW at the bottom of this post) in an extremely poetic language - half of the chapters are actually poems. In some regards, this book reminded me of Keri Hulme's The Bone People for its deep rooting in the land and its spirituality, its narrative around childhood, and the balance between prose and poetry.
It was an unsettling read, but done on purpose. As a white European woman, I can't know first-hand what Tanya Tagaq tells about in Split Tooth, but I can bear witness, learn and empathize. Some of the discomfort I felt was also due to the topics touched on, sometimes hammered in - see the trigger warnings.
Rep : Inuit queer woman.