octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

Mildly enjoyable, but not really my thing. I did appreciate that it was relatively short for epic fantasy, and that its pace fairly zipped along instead of continually bogging down with world building and back story; I also liked Polgara. But the horrible prologue (a sort of mythological history of gods) nearly put me off entirely, and if I never read another story wherein peasant-boy-turns-out-to-be-something-else-entirely it will be far, FAR too soon. Unfortunately that trope is reinforced here when half the other characters turn out to be royalty in disguise. I mean there's a token normal person in the mix but that's about it. At some point it's hard not to just roll your eyes and sigh and move on.

I found this more entertaining than the first one, though I'm not entirely sure why. Perhaps it's the lack of godly backstory cluttering things up, or perhaps it's that it feels like there's a bit less focus on Garion here (he is, sad to say, the least interesting of the characters). I'd like to say it's because there's more women in it, but Ce'Nedra and Salmissra strike me as walking stereotypes - though to be fair, it's really only Polgara who doesn't fit the stereotype mould for me, regarding the characters of this series, and I continue to enjoy her.

Overall, the book rollicked along well, the pace (as with Pawn) being one of the book's most attractive qualities. The other is the humour. I wouldn't describe any of the Belgariad books as funny books in the way that I'd describe, for instance, Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, but it's clear that both Eddings and his characters possess a sense of humour. That appeals to me. I recently forced my way through the first two books of another famous speculative epic (Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun) and I just could not get on with it due I think (in retrospect) to the fact that both the series and the protagonist were so deeply and crushingly humourless. I far prefer Eddings' approach.

A classic collection of robot stories, though I have to admit for me the attraction is often less the robots than it is Susan Calvin. I find her hugely entertaining, and it's always slightly disappointing when I come across a robot story that stars Powell and Donovan instead. The stories themselves are always enjoyable, and it's really interesting to delve into the psychology of robots - at least, the psychology of robots who are imprinted with Asimov's Three Laws. It's the tendency to instability in case of conflict that's the most fascinating, as I think is well illustrated in the best story of the piece, "Little Lost Robot". But in the runner-up story, "Evidence", is I think the flip-side: a stable robot, advanced enough, is plainly superior on every level to its human creators... even morally. That tension in the text never fails to give interesting results.

A hugely varied collection of writings by women of colour, concerning feminism and the racial currents inherent in the feminist movement. When I say "hugely varied" I mean it - there are formal and informal pieces, poetry, letters, every type of style and tone. And while the authors have a wide range of backgrounds, there's no denying that this is an America-centric book - there's acknowledgement that feminism is a global phenomenon, but the experiences of these writers exist primarily in an American context.

Given the subheading ("Writings by Radical Women of Color") I rather expected the pieces themselves to be radical as well. But that is, I think, a perspective coloured by history - from my position in 2017 what's being said here seems eminently sensible and often mainstream now, but I can see that at the time of writing (in the late 1970s, very early 1980s) it was not so at all. I was particularly taken aback at the recounting of a Black nationalist pamphlet of the early 1970s that was really explicit about the inferiority of women, but a bit of thought on my part showed how much the writers in this anthology had to struggle with the problems of intersectionality, and the problems they had with both racism and sexism - there was an ongoing observation from many about the racism they experienced from white women, for example, and that's something that's still a problem today.

I suppose the fact that some of these ideas have become more mainstream is encouraging and speaks of progress, but it still seems pretty plain to me that there's a long way to go.

Really interesting sci-fi novel about the end and potentiality of humanity. The idea behind this is fascinating, and there's clearly been a lot of thought put into it - for a story of alien encounters, evolution, and the destruction of planets it's remarkably cerebral. That said, it does sag in the middle a trifle - I found the beginning third and the final quarter the most interesting, and I'm not entirely sure this story wouldn't have worked better as three separate, collected novellas/novelettes. It's close enough to being that anyway, but a more condensed, better-shaped narrative would have avoided that problem of the middle.

There's also the fact that telepathy is treated as a consistently non-scientific phenomenon. Partly this seems due to Clarke's own bias in favour of the supernatural (which he describes in retrospect in the forward, having become somewhat less credulous than he was at the time of the novel's writing), but it's a wee bit jarring for a more modern reader like myself. Science is method, after all, and there seems no reason why phenomena previously thought of as "supernatural" can't be eventually explained via rational exploration. Granted, there's the possibility that one day something may not be explained this way, but this is a tension that Clarke really doesn't explore, preferring to take the idea of the supernatural as an accepted and certain thing. This does make the story seem a wee bit dated, as do some of the racial and gender aspects, but there's an ambition to the story still that's really compelling, and the ending is amazing.

Nine year old Ling lives through China's Cultural Revolution, in a story that's informed by the author's own experiences as a child during that time. It's not an autobiography or a memoir, though because of Compestine's history there's a genuine sense of realism here, and a convincing depiction of the confusion and sense of constant, uncomprehending threat that she must have felt herself. Books like this, told from a child's perspective, must I think be very difficult to write because the author has to balance the naïve and ignorant perspective of the child with undercurrents that older readers will pick up on. In effect, it's almost two stories told in parallel, and it's really very well done here. I gobbled it all down in one sitting and was sorry when it was over.

Oh, the nostalgia! I've had this book since I was a kid, and I've read it a number of times. It's the mental equivalent of warm, self-saucing chocolate pudding on a cold winter's day - a comfort read, where everything turns out well with the world thanks to ridiculously contrived coincidence. I do enjoy the fact that it privileges kindness and is so completely unashamed of doing so, but it hammers home wee Cedric's sweetness and light so heavily that it's saccharine enough to give an elephant diabetes. My favourite book of all time happens to be another of Burnett's books, The Secret Garden, and I have to acknowledge that in comparison to that Fauntleroy, while very well-written, just doesn't stack up. It's sickly sentimental and lacks the verve and bite of bitchy little Mary, but I enjoy it anyway... just like I enjoy that chocolate pudding.

My favourite book of all time! I can't count how many times I've read this since my grandparents gave me a copy when I was a little girl, and I picked it off the shelf again tonight, not planning on reading the whole thing though again but ending up doing so anyway. I just love everything about it... but mostly, I love Mary, who is an unrepentant horror for most of the book, an absolutely monstrously self-centred brat who uses her powers for good when she stumbles across an isolated relation who's even more horrible than she is, but can be bullied into better behaviour because even Mary can't put up with the spoilt sourness of her own mirror image. I love that the book never glosses over both how awful and how pathetic she is - she knows it, everyone around her knows it, and once she gets to Misselthwaite there's no catering to her awfulness one way or the other, she's just ignored and left to her own rather pathetic resources until, against all inclination, she's forced into taking an interest in life. Just fantastic.

The story's getting darker, what with the whole evil-henchman-and-reluctant-ally-both-being-fed-to-lions, but I enjoy darkness in my fiction and to add to that, the pace here is picking up. The ending, in particular, is breaking out of the expected mould at last. The splitting up of the Baudelaire siblings has been coming for a while - Olaf is always saying he only needs one of them, but I'm at a loss to figure out why he never makes it clear that one should be Violet. After all, the surviving child only has to survive until their 18th birthday in order to inherit, and if he has Violet that's only another 4 years away. So of course he plumps for Sunny, sticking himself with childcare for the best part of two decades before the cash comes in, but then no-one ever claimed logic was the high point of this series. At this point I'm just going along with things for the moderate level of enjoyment it brings.

The plot thickens! The series continues to improve, having gotten away from the useless-guardian format, and the tone is much more even here. I mean, it's still a finely balanced ridiculous, but the characters are acknowledging the ridiculous, which is good enough for me. By which I mean Klaus finding it hard to believe that the people around them are stupid enough to fall for his and Sunny's lame disguises, as opposed to the Sunny-swordfight of The Miserable Mill, which remains the low point of the series for me. Intriguing, too, is that the Baudelaires are actively choosing to do morally grey things - albeit on a minor level, and for the purposes of survival. It makes them more interesting.

Best part, as usual, are Sunny's continuing cryptic remarks, and the sly references of the author. (I laughed my arse off at the patient Clarissa Dalloway staring vacantly out of the hospital window, for instance. The patient names alone earn this volume an extra star.) I'm quite sure I've missed some of the references, but that's half the fun.