octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This is certainly a bit pacier than the first volume, which is why I liked it better. There's a lot more to fit in here, though - I get the feeling, to be honest, that the first half was mainly set-up.

In a nutshell: I hate to say it, Isabel, but it does take you a long time to catch on. Perhaps you are simply a significantly less suspicious person than I am, but I clocked the relationships here much earlier than you did. You don't know how tempted I am to say "You've only yourself to blame" because it's not like you weren't warned about your deeply unpleasant husband by multiple different people, but I try to remember that you were very young when you agreed to marry him, and far more sheltered than the women of today. Since the scales have fallen off your eyes, however, I am inclined, as you age, to be less sympathetic. I feel more sorry for Pansy than you, and despite the open ending I unhappily believe that you will return to your husband and do very little other than sink into misery, all the while telling yourself it makes you a paragon. Oh well, on your own head be it. 

I got a review copy of this from the publisher - thank you very much! It has a great concept - I don't want to describe the twist, because that would spoil things for a lot of readers, but suffice to say that it involves a space elevator.

The book is also fairly dystopian, and that's very much reflected in the main character. Often with dystopias, I find, the protagonists frequently feel as if they don't come from a crapsack word. They're too often mentally healthy, are capable of forming solid and rewarding relationships, and so forth. This is not the case with Young. She's desperately fucked-up in any number of ways, which can admittedly be frustrating to read at times except that she is exactly the type of person who should exist in a world as terrible as this one. She gives a real sense of verisimilitude to the story, is what I'm saying, and it's a brave choice to make her so difficult to like. Brave and absolutely consistent.

Finally - and this is skirting around the spoiler again - I liked that there was, at the end, the possibility of a more hopeful future. I won't say for who, but that sense-of-wonder twist brings a sense of expansion and marvel into the text that was much appreciated. 

This novella is a great deal more than it seems. Ostensibly it's a portrait of the author's mother, who married at seventeen and never really advanced emotionally or intellectually beyond that age, shut up as she was in the marital home. She's so consistently naive, so eternally fragile, that Kadare refers to her as The Doll, as if she's a paper cut-out almost entirely lacking in reality or substance. As the book goes on and Kadare recounts his success as a writer, The Doll begins to worry that she is herself unsuitable to be the mother of such an artist, and wonders if he will replace her. This seems a rather odd fear, even for such a strange woman, but it gradually becomes clear that The Doll, and the overpowering house in which she lives, is as much metaphor as woman, and what Kadare is instead (also) exploring is his relationship with Albania and how creativity can impact on one's relationship with the country and community of one's birth.

It's very cleverly done, and I want a copy of my own. I'm also, it has to be admitted, deeply curious as to how much of The Doll comes from a real person, and how much is constructed or exaggerated in the service of metaphor. She's so very sheltered and so very odd that it's tempting to want to poke her to see if her flesh tears, or if she can be folded up into small pieces and stowed away somewhere. 

I feel like I have the same complaint with all the "Young Adult" books in this series. (I use the quotation marks there because these books are more suited for ten year olds, I reckon.) I get that the authors want the teen characters to go on exciting adventures, but those adventures are so ludicrous that it's hard to treat them with any credibility whatsoever. In this one Jake and Nog stowaway on a trip to Bajor, believing (quite rightly, as it turns out) that no one will notice Jake missing for several days because his dad's away from the station. Like Dax and Keiko O'Brien wouldn't be checking in on him regularly!

Anyway, down on Bajor they get involved in a kidnapping and a plot to assassinate a Vedek, and by routinely doing the stupid thing (i.e. not calling DS9 and asking for help) it all turns out alright. Maybe if I were reading this as a ten year old I'd have more sympathy for this type of thing, but I'm not and I don't. Which is a shame, because it seems like there should be plenty of scope for characters like Jake and Nog to have more realistic adventures, but they rarely do. 

It's been a long time since I've read a fantasy - even a historical fantasy - so devoid of female characters. There are a couple here, but the attention given to them is so minimal that Kurtz really might not have bothered.

In fairness, this is a vast improvement on the first book in the series, which I thought dreadful in every respect. The dialogue is still clunky in a number of places, but I did like the political emphasis and the focus on the conflict between magic and religion. I read it for the same reason I read the first one... in an ongoing effort to read my way through the shortlist of the Mythopoeic Awards, but it's still not grabbing me I'm afraid. It just seems a very old-fashioned sort of fantasy, and not in a good way. Still, hopefully the last in the trilogy will continue to improve. 

This is only the second of the Alex Cross books that I've read, so I'm working from a small sample here, but what I'm liking about the series so far is the main character and the pacing. These are quick, fast-paced books with creepy antagonists and lots of action. I enjoy reading them. That said, I enjoyed this one less than the last. For one, my tolerance for mystery-thrillers that rely on brutal sexual violence and torture of women decreases with every passing year. But while that particular reason can apply to a number of books and authors, the second reason is particular to this book: the series of extremely stupid decisions made by both Cross and the main survivor, Kate. If you've escaped a serial killer and he's on the loose and still hunting, Kate, maybe don't go back to living in the house that he's already taken you from once before, yeah? And as for you, Alex, you may have been brought in as an outsider, but if you could stand to tell people what you're doing and where you're going once in a while, you wouldn't be caught out so fucking often.

I love the pacing of these books, but common sense is not too much to ask. 

I do like geese! They can be a pest here in NZ, but I enjoy their grumpy, scrappy ways and their smooth, pretty feathers. They're one of my favourite birds. This little picture book follows a family of geese as the young hatch and make their way through the first months of life. The illustrations - as always in the Smithsonian Backyard books - are appealing, and one of them (the mother goose turning her eggs) is so detailed that for a moment I thought it was a photograph. 

I would have liked a little more explanation as to why the nest was built atop a muskrat house - is this normal? we don't have them in NZ so I'm not familiar - but maybe this is common knowledge where muskrats are found. Still, it's a cute little book. 

I read and reviewed the three books collected here separately, so this is just for my own records. They were all three star reads for me - the characters are largely sympathetic, and I like that they're often prickly and depressed and even sometimes unpleasant, because who wouldn't be in a situation like this. I also think that the pacing's very good; probably the most appealing part of this series, because it's very easy just to keep reading and not get bogged down. Given the subject matter, I think that's an achievement, as wallowing in narrative misery can often slow things down in stories like this. 

Likeable as the books are, though, I do feel they're a bit repetitive. Oh well, only one to go, and I expect I'll enjoy it just as well as the rest. 

I'm zipping through this series at a fast clip right now - it's a very easy read. Not in the subject matter, which is uniformly depressing, but in the language and the pacing. It just slips down very easily... I started reading earlier today and before I knew it half the day was gone.

As much as I'm enjoying reading it, though, there's part of me that's glad there's only one more book. I expect that one to be fairly depressing as well - how many more characters can die tragic deaths? - and there's a limit on how much misery and sadness I want to read right now. I'm unsure if there's a story to be had in this series that isn't misery and sadness, and while that can be cathartic I think I'm about done with that for a while. Once this series is over it's time to read something happier for a bit.

As for this particular volume, I liked it. I do think, though, that Miranda and Alex is one of the most unconvincing romances I've read in ages. Granted, it's probably desperation attracting them to each other but even so, it's the least appealing part of this series for me. 

I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of this for review. Before anything else, though - isn't that cover amazing? I can't stop staring at it. Love it.

It's a fantastic cover for a fantastic book. I'm sure that most people have been part of a relatively small organisation at some point, whether it's a neighbourhood group or a hobby group or something that like, and I'm equally sure that most of us can recall a time when everything in that group turned to custard because of infighting between the members. Doesn't matter if the issue was large or small of even if it was completely irrelevant, it got people up in arms.

Such is the case with the Alpaca Breeders Organisation of NZ. A rigged election in the ABO sparks off a bitter quarrel of corruption and rebellion and it's shockingly compelling. I wish I could say that I couldn't see parallels and inspiration in real life, but this reads very much like an extended metaphor for what's going on in the world today, and it's simultaneously fascinating and depressing. Just very, very well done. This is the first book from Sarkies that I've read, and I'm going to have to go out and read more of them, because I thoroughly enjoyed it.