octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I have to admit that I'm a little torn on the ending to this one. The sudden dropping dead seems a little melodramatic, even for a vaudeville/cruise ship murder mystery, but I'm deeply entertained (and a little disturbed) by I-don't-approve-of-murder Poirot orchestrating a reveal that culminates in the death of his prime suspect. He may not have intended to kill him, but he certainly didn't go out of his way to prevent it! Still, I expect if you're a detective in a time and place where murderers are generally hung for their crimes, it might be easy to shrug off cutting out the middleman.

I do think the characterisation was especially amusing in this story though, which is what brought it up to a four star read for me. 

I didn't get all of the solution to this before the end of the story, but I did get most of it. Not, I must say, because I was channeling Poirot, but because I've read enough of Christie to know that she leans heavily - and far too often, in my opinion - on disguises. Once a reader knows that, they tend to be on the watch out. That being said, as repetitive as her mysteries often are in this regard, this was still a fun story and very cleverly put together. The stuffed cat was an especially nice touch! 

I read and reviewed each of the five books collected here separately, so this is basically just for my own records. I liked them all, but Plum Creek was my favourite, I think, for the grasslands imagery. Farmer Boy would be the runner-up.

I never read these books as a kid, and I wonder sometimes what I would have thought of them if I had. I very much enjoyed the Willow Tree and Cherry Tree Farm books of Enid Blyton, which have a similar sort of nostalgic glow over what must have been a very hard life - harder in the case of Wilder's books than in Blyton's, admittedly - so I probably would have liked them just as well. As an adult, though, that nostalgia is counterbalanced by an awareness of the cost of this sort of settler colonialism. The displacement of the original people, the impoverishment of the affected ecosystems with the loss of animals such as the buffalo and the wolf... it makes them sadder reads, in a way, than they would have been if I'd read them when I were younger. 

Ma's really kind of racist, isn't she? Also something of a killjoy. On the other hand, being dragged from pillar to post by a husband completely uninterested in staying in one place wouldn't put me in the best of moods either. And Mary is taking being blind much better than I would.

Like the last book in this series, I think the most appealing part of Silver Lake for me is the landscape. I'd like to visit a prairie one day... those massive grasslands are beyond my experience, especially given how flat they are. There's a sense here, though, that in many ways their days are numbered: no more buffalo, no more wolves, trains running over everything. I was entirely in sympathy with Laura when she hoped that the wolves would get away. I mean yes, she was lucky she wasn't eaten, but the wolves were there first, and so were the buffalo. 

As sympathetic as I am to Four, the Dauntless worldbuilding, especially, drives me up the wall. I suspect I'm supposed, like Four here and Tris in an earlier book, to feel surprised or shocked at the habit of Dauntless elderly and sick to off themselves, but all I can think is "How has this not been obvious to you all for years?" Hell, I picked up on it long before they did and I don't even live in this stupid world. If you spend years interacting with a group of people - because there is interaction between the factions, in school and so forth - and they skew young in the same way that Dauntless does, surely that should raise some questions in the mind of anyone with a) two brain cells to rub together and b) the tiniest modicum of curiosity.

Also, going to bother people while they're studying is the perfect example of why I have no sympathy for this particular faction. I find them obnoxious. 

Eh - this one's more style than substance, I think. I can't get over how none of the party guests realised what date it was, how they were all together again, and what the flowers meant. Especially considering what a shock it must have been for them all several years back, when the inciting event occurred! Are they all morons? Possibly yes. Similarly, if someone tried to murder me, and may well have murdered my sister, I would not be declining to press charges, Pauline. You idiot.

Poirot is the only sensible person at the table. 

I think this is the most entertaining of the CSI tie-in novels that I've read so far, albeit I've only read a few of them. A lot of the credit for that lies in the fact that Brass is the main character here - I really enjoy his sarcastic, grumpy self, and as he drives a lot of the action in Binding Ties it means that a lot of what's going on takes place outside the Crime Lab. There are advantages and disadvantages to that, of course. I enjoy CSI because of its focus on forensics, so I miss the science when it's not there. On the other hand, a couple of the other books I've read in this series have made the science a little dry, in places, and so a decreased emphasis on forensics means that the pace of the story is a bit snappier than it otherwise might be.

Six of one, half a dozen of the other. I enjoyed it, anyway. 

This is the best of the Captain's Table miniseries that I've read so far - though I think I'm only about halfway through it at this point. Still, Janeway's my favourite Trek character so I was looking forward to this one especially, and it's a great character study of her. Interestingly, she's pretty much the only Voyager character in this, apart from little bits at the beginning and the end - given this book takes place in the Delta Quadrant, I wasn't expecting that. But with Voyager apparently destroyed, Janeway is rescued from an escape pod and taken in by an alien crew who are struggling with challenges of their own. 

I liked the character work here, as I said, and I liked the alien crew - their culture is very clearly different from Janeway's but they're generally compassionate and thoughtful people. The antagonists here were slightly less successful: Carey has devised a culture that is both heartbreaking and desperately cruel, but their lack of focus on the biological sciences makes no credible sense, I'm afraid, given their situation. Still, I enjoyed it. 

I don't know why I like Roth's short work better than her novels, but - small sample size aside - so far I do. I find it more focused and more thoughtful. And honestly, Tobias is more interesting to me than Tris, simply because I find him more intelligent. This short is a case in point. Perhaps it's simple bias on my part, because there's rarely anything appealing about the Dauntless faction for me, but his clarity on the worst part of their collective training and/or character was pretty much exactly how I felt about the lot of them through the whole of Divergent. 

I don't think that I've read a non-mystery short story by Christie before, but this is certainly one. It's a romance - quite a funny one - in which Parker Pyne is caught up, quite against his will, in a middle-aged mother's attempt to end her son's relationship with a young woman she finds unsuitable. I have to say that, unlike many of Christie's mysteries, I saw the twist here coming a mile off, but that didn't make it any less entertaining.