octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

Um. I'm just not sure what to say about this. My experience reading it was pretty choppy, and at the end all I can think is that this is a book of two halves. I loved the first half - really sincerely loved it, gobbled it down in one sitting and was expecting to give the book five stars.

I did not enjoy the second half, once Patricia and Laurence had grown up. It took me days and days to read this half because I kept stopping and starting, it just didn't hold my interest. I didn't care about older P. and L. or their communities, I thought the schism between magic and science was ludicrously stereotypical (especially the scientists - no scientist I know would ever act like this, they're absolute caricatures). And I was profoundly irked by the absence of the cat. I know that sounds silly, but child-Patricia was thinking at one point that it might be her life's achievement to keep the mog safe from her animal-abusing sister, then she finds out she can go to witch-school and the cat's never mentioned again, because on a dime Patricia apparently stops giving a shit and characterisation is thrown out of the window.

Strong start, and I appreciate the experimentalism of it, but ultimately this fell flat for me. Wish it had ended halfway through while I was still in love with it.

A well-written, quiet metaphor of a story - very simply told, which works well here as the subject matter is so disturbing that any sort of gilding the lily would lessen the impact, I think. Becca's very relatable, and her family relationships, while not perfect, add a grounding touch and moments of recognisable humour. Her relationship with Magda was also enjoyable.

I didn't connect with Josef's story as much as Becca and Gemma's, though it was still interesting. But because Briar Rose was so clearly a fairy tale metaphor, the whole mystery of Gemma wasn't really a mystery at all, at least to me - it was clear what it would turn out to be. Still, I kept reading because I was interested in Becca's reactions to Gemma's story. That reaction was a little muted, but then I can't praise the overall quietness of the story and complain about it at the same time, so I'll take the muted reaction over melodrama every time.

This is based on one of my favourite ever fairy tales, so I was predisposed to like it and I did. The world building here is done very well, I think - it doesn't overpower, but gives depth and context to the original fairy tale. I also liked Sorcha and her brothers, who were relatively well differentiated (something that I imagine was difficult to do, given that there's six of them). But Sorcha is of course the stand out characterisation here. Her agency is front and centre and the text never shies away from that. It's a hideous situation to be in, but I never got a sense of sickly martyrdom or anything of that type - just an exceptionally strong and flawed young woman doing the best she could in a near-hopeless situation. I liked her very much.

I did find the book slightly overlong, however, and I was disappointed at the rape insertion. I am sick of heroines being raped for evil colour - the curse that the family finds themselves in is horrific enough without relying on that tired old trope.

Not quite as good as Herland, but I do appreciate future-world narratives where life is better rather than worse - though the self-satisfied destruction of big, "useless" animals such as tigers is where Gilman and I differ severely. Valuable primarily on the product-of-its-time level - it's interesting to see an early feminist utopia, but one can't overlook some of the more unsavoury elements (euthanasia of undesirables, for instance).

As in Herland, the breadth of thought given to the elements of the new society is impressive and refreshing - Gilman is always very concerned with educational reform, and the focus on schools is an interesting one. Where it stops being convincing for me is where is stops being convincing for the narrator - isolated from his former society by decades lost in Tibet, he returns to a new world and can't comprehend the relatively small time frame in which this massive social/political/economic change has taken place.

Frankly, I cant fathom it either.

I am reminded of that old saying of law and sausages, and not wanting to see how either is made. I felt that way periodically while reading this. While I was interested to see how the different narratives developed, and while I did enjoy those narratives, some of the commentary was a little too detailed and abstract for me - I really do not care to read endless notes on minor spelling changes, for instance - and it's hard to deny that there's a lot of repetition here.

As always, the sheer depth of Tolkien's imagination is a delight. I am forced to conclude, however, that he's just not that great a poet. Yes, come at me with your pitchforks, but I genuinely think his prose is better. He does enjoy the rhyming form, and in order to force the rhymes his sentences are twisted to fit and the results aren't fantastic - for this reason I much preferred the alliterative Children of Hurin parts to that of rhyming Beren and Luthien. Still, on a macro level if not a micro, this is an interesting read if perhaps one more directed towards academics than people who just want to read a good story without being interrupted by sausage-making.

I wanted to like this better, I really did. But honestly it felt less like a story than a series of authorial lectures funneled through various character mouthpieces. The one high point of the piece was when Beatty was finally made to shut the hell up. Listening to him was like being trapped in a room with a drunk person who's only got one topic of conversation - rambling, incoherent, and not nearly as profound as he thinks he is.

I've been trying to think why this left me so cold - because there's some good ideas in here, there really are, and that's what's saving it from a single star - and I think I finally have it. It's the over-the-top melodrama of it all. The blurb above calls it terrifying. It isn't. And when I compare Fahrenheit 451 to Orwell's 1984, I can see why my tastes have diverged. Orwell's future is a chilling, mostly stripped back account focused on limiting thought by limiting language. Bradbury's future is hysterical over-reaction all the way. It's not rewriting a past article and slipping the original version quietly down the memory hole, it's flamethrowers at night to heighten the dramatic effect of all the book-burning. With the best will in the world I cannot take it remotely seriously.

The poems in this collection are undoubtedly well-written, the language is smooth and clear. But despite feeling as if I should, I didn't connect emotionally with a lot of them - they were poems to admire rather than love. Even the libretto on a horrible (true) tragedy in El Salvador was something I knew to be horrifying rather than felt.

Perhaps it's because so many of the poems are religious? I'm a fairly hardened sceptic myself, and though I certainly can have emotional reactions to lovely religious verse, there seems to be a higher bar there for me. It's no coincidence, I think, that my favourite poem of the lot, "In Tonga", was about bats. I tend to respond better, in poetry, to descriptions of the concrete - and especially of the natural world - so that may be something of an explanation. Other readers will no doubt differ in their preferences, so if you particularly enjoy spiritual poetry then a lot of this collection will likely resonate well for you.

... because they are whining whiners who whine, and cannot be trusted behind the wheel! I think parents probably enjoy this one as much as kids, if only for the opportunity to say "This is what you sound like!" And it's a cute little book - the illustrations are fantastically simple, and it's amazing the range of expressions on that pigeon's face even so.

This didn't do a whole lot for me. The rhymes were cutesy and occasionally strained, and for all Madeline is supposed to be a towering figure in the picture book world I don't much care about her. I liked the illustrations better than the text; there were visual details of wry humour in there that I appreciated (the little girl up on the chair avoiding the kitchen mice was my favourite, I think).

Quick, fun story about a boggart who gets accidentally transported to Canada, and the kids who help him get home. It's not nearly as good as anything from Cooper's The Dark Is Rising sequence - the more atmospheric bits here are confined to the Scottish setting at the beginning and end of the book - but it's still an enjoyable read. I'm not sure that I'm overly thrilled by the intrusion of computers into a fantasy story, but the theatre parts were more to my taste, and I liked the throughline of Labradors!