octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

Fast-moving fantasy, in which a dismissed fiddler meets up with a princess in disguise in order to win back the kingdom. While I was reading I thought that the one word to best describe this would be "rollicking" and I still think that's the right one. Lots of action, a bit of humour, a side-kick cat and the title's correct, lots of misadventures - Sebastian has a positive genius for them. All in all a quick fun read, like eating popcorn: enjoyable enough while it lasts but not a lot of substance.

I've just finished rereading this, and I think I appreciate it so much more now as an adult. I mean, I liked it when I was a kid though it never really grabbed me then the way it did a lot of people. But now I find it charming.

I think what I most like about it are the illustrations by Garth Williams. I don't say that as a denigration of the text, but because this book is one of those rare instances where the illustrations and the text are an absolutely perfect match (Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake are another example of this). I'd forgotten details of the story, but the pictures of Templeton after his gorging at the fair, of Wilbur getting a buttermilk bath and doing a flip and trying to look Terrific, of Fern walking him in the pram, have stuck with me for decades and I was delighted to see them again (the look on the face of the geese as Templeton takes away their egg! it had me laughing my head off).

It's still not quite five stars from me, mostly because I just don't find Wilbur himself that interesting, but even so it's pretty wonderful.

It is safe to say I did not like this one bit. Maybe back in the day it was cutting edge fantasy (though I highly doubt it) but today it's absolutely painful.

I'm not sure what's worst. The fact that all the women (the few that there are) are stupid or evil. Or that all the black people, as far as I can tell, are the evil minions of the evil woman sorceress. Or that far too many men move with "catlike" grace. Or is it the most dreadful poetic prophecy I've ever come across in decades of fantasy reading? (Seriously, leave poetry alone if you can't do it; bad poetry is infinitely worse than bad prose and this is dire.) Maybe it's the sudden, consistent appearance of previously unsuspected and helpful magical powers when one of the protagonists is in a bad spot. Or the related implication that most things require little effort and can be learned easily, or recovered from in bare hours. (The example that had me rolling in my airplane seat? "Morgan .... had gone through virtually every book in Brion's private collection, and most of the general reference in the public section". It took him half an hour. I can only imagine that this private/public library consisted of the complete works of Beatrix Potter, and even then Morgan was speed-reading.)

But no. No. I know what's the most cringe-inducing aspect of this book. It's the fact that the evil sorceress is, more times than I can count, referred to as "my pet" by the slack-jawed yokel that is her chief patsy. If the appearance of "my pet" were part of a drinking game I'd have been plastered halfway through the book. Why didn't I make this a drinking game?

Anyway, God help me, I read this because it was on the shortlist for the 1971 Mythopoeic Award, which thankfully it did not win.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is the first book I really remember reading. The Last Battle is the first book I really remember hating. I think child-me actually threw it across the room, and I'm not sure if I've done that with any book since. I can still remember the sensation of revulsion and disgust, and reading it again, just now, my opinion has not changed.

This is a deeply, deeply terrible book.

Let's start with that vicious, pernicious ending: the one where the reward for being a friend of Narnia was to die horribly in a train crash, and to have it presented as the best possible thing for them. This life-hating rubbish is actually dangerous, in my opinion.

And then there's Susan, poor Susan, who is left behind for trying to move on and for whom no-one seems to give a shit. Interested in lipsticks and stockings, because it's terrible to be an adult woman - though not if that woman is entirely asexual, as for instance Polly seems to be (no husband or children for her!). The contempt she is held in, the disregard, by her own family, even! I always thought Lucy was a self-righteous little prig and this confirms it. If Aslan will reserve the magic of Narnia for little kids and then boot them when they begin to develop, he can hardly be surprised when those children grow up and look for new countries to be at home in.

That's what this book leaves me with. The image of Susan, left alone to identify the bodies of all her family, siblings and parents and friends, mangled in goodness only knows what way by the train crash that killed them. And this is supposed to be a good thing. The happy ending, where everyone gets what they deserve.

Thirty years later, this dreadful piece of crap still fills me with absolute rage. Mean-spirited, vengeful, death-glorifying, uncompassionate tripe, prettily coated in poisoned sugar.

This series is lucky to rate as high as it does from me, given that I've just finished my reread with The Last Battle, which sent me, as always, into paroxysms of absolute rage. I have fond childhood memories of Narnia, but no matter how much I love The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or The Horse and His Boy, no series ever containing that execrable piece of crap will ever get five stars from me.

As a whole, the series had some extraordinarily good moments but it could also be fairly uneven, with some of its parts being significantly better (or worse) than others.

Short novel about young, slum-dwelling Liza, who gets involved with a much older married man when she shouldn't. It doesn't end well for anyone. Maugham wrote this when he was a medical student, doing his obstetrics rotation in Lambeth, and there's a very sort of Call the Midwife undertone to a lot of this. Only an undertone, because a lot more emphasis is given to Liza's relationship and how it impacts on others, but it's there.

Coming from first-hand experience, there's a lot of verisimilitude here, but it doesn't quite have the character-building that Maugham is so excellent at in his later work. You can see it coming - Liza's mother, I thought, was particularly well-drawn for the relatively minimal page time she gets - but it's not a patch on The Painted Veil.

Very interesting and highly intelligent read, although I did think it ended abruptly and I was not that convinced by Connie's final choice. The exploration of women's bodies as the subjects of science was well done. The distinction between doctors/scientists was particularly apt, I thought, if somewhat wince-inducing at the historically bitter truth of it. Yet my real hatred was reserved for Connie's brother, who didn't do (or plan to do) near the amount of damage as the doctors. Funny how that happens...

Utopian fiction is an interest of mine, and I've got to say that the time Connie travels forward to is perhaps the only example of a utopia that I'd actually want to live in. I think this was because Piercy focused so much on the relationships between people, and on the relationship between people and the environment. It had a sense of holism much attempted by other utopias but never quite achieved, in my reading experience. The society of Luciente and co. is not a sterile thing, it's very inter-connected. Of course it's not perfect, and I don't know if one can actually call a society engaged in sporadic border fighting actually utopic, but it's a good-enough description I think.

Much better than Parts One and Two! Granted, it's mostly a series of murders, but it's a series of murders with some really affecting speeches in it.

Acts 1, 2 and 5 were excellent. I got bogged down in the middle though, where it was very much reduced to "My throne, mine!" Having slogged through this series I was just hoping they'd make a decision, any decision, and get it over with. I've spent ages reading these plays thinking Henry VI was an utter fool, and so he is, but I find when Edward takes the throne he's not much better! Having seen the disaster one thoughtless royal marriage has been for the realm, he promptly makes his own - equally stupid - one. The idiot.

And on another point, let's be honest: if you have the rival claimant to the throne in your power, and have already gone through wars to get him there, just kill him already and end the conflict! I mean really. How is this rocket science? Richard may be evil but at least he's practical... though I suspect, according to pattern, that once he sits his arse down on the throne in Richard III he'll promptly lose every ounce of intelligence he has.

Still, at least I'm done with Henry VI (who I've taken to calling "the ninny"). Somewhere in the afterlife, Henry V was watching and face-palming hard.

Don't get me wrong. There are flaws in this story that, in any other book, would see me giving it less than five stars. Primarily the treatment of Victor F., who is as whiny and self-aggrandising and up himself as he can possibly be while still attempting to lay claim to the title of World's Biggest Victim (seriously, even the teenage girl hanged for a murder she didn't commit, who he refuses to even try and save, has it less bad than him - according to him, anyway. I disagree). Certainly at the end there's clear authorial intent to show Frankenstein as the most excellent of men, but then I remember 18 year old Mary, hanging out with her own set of hopelessly self-obsessed men by the lake, and I can forgive her stumbling there.

But still. Still! Frankenstein's creature is one of the most absolutely terrible, pitiable monsters in all of literature. He has shaped a genre, and the monumental influence of this text is deserved. For all Frankenstein is flawed, his monster is a work of literary art. How he developed intelligence and conscience, only to lose the last out of crushing loneliness and neglect, is really extraordinary - and extraordinary on a level that overshadows all the flaws in the rest of the text (I always end this book in wondering what, exactly, the creature is going to build that Arctic pyre from. Geography, Mary! Learn to love it, cause there's no wood growing at the North Pole.)

I first read this book in my very early teens. I wasn't that impressed; all it did was leave me with a vague sense of uneasiness which I didn't quite understand. It was not the only thing I did not understand.

I read the book again, some ten years later I think, and was considerably more affected than before. Now I've read it yet again and it seems to me that this is one of those books that gets more horrifying each time. The worst part of it for me, the very worst, is the scene where the Commander smilingly tries to explain to Offred that change means breaking eggs (not his, of course) and that better for some (him) doesn't mean better for all (every her in creation). The level of dehumanisation is appalling and - crucially - terribly accurate. We've all seen people who think this way. We've all heard them pontificating and watched them scratch their way to power. I think we've all just seen an election result where the victor would happily have found himself at the hotel party, grabbing at the imprisoned whores, admiring their awful costumes and smugly congratulating himself on being there.

This whole thing is just shudderingly awful. A vivisection of fear and temptation and the desire to put down the other.

I may not read this again for another ten years. I'd like to think that if/when I do, it'll have somehow become less recognisable. But I doubt it.