octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

Well-written story about Gwyn, a girl who is Not Like Other Girls, and normally that is a trope that I disdain, but the story here isn't exactly what you'd call triumphal. The happy ending is happy enough for Gwyn, but she's still living in a crapsack world, essentially, albeit one stocked with people who are far more than ciphers, which I appreciate. Voigt is careful not to let even her supporting characters fall into stereotype, and her largely sympathetic, if still realistic portrayal of a community in trouble is really what makes this book as enjoyable as it is. Small acts of resistance can - and do - help some individuals in that community, but others are beyond help, and the enormity of social inequality, of poverty and the risk of starvation, remains.

If anything, it's a thoughtful response to the idea of the hero in disguise. They can't help everyone, and sometimes the help fails, but sometimes the trying is enough.

My sister and I both had our Beatrix Potter favourites when we were kids. She loved Squirrel Nutkin, but all my devotion was reserved for The Tale of Samuel Whiskers. No surprise that I grew up to write horror stories of my own, then - for this is a horror story and no mistake. The image of that monstrous rat and little Tom Kitten rolled in dough for dinner, squalling through his own culinary preparation, caught my attention no end. (A few years later, when George Orwell came into my reading bailiwick, my horror of rats was cemented. But I'm sure it began here, with cats and pudding.)

I read and reviewed each of the four stories in this collection separately, so this is really just for my own records. Normally, in any Beatrix Potter collection, I would say that the stand-out feature is the artwork, and Potter is undoubtedly a highly talented artist. The pictures are so detailed, and so charming, that they're a pleasure to look at. In this collection, however, it is overshadowed - at least for me - because included in these tales is my most favourite Potter story ever, the deeply creepy Tale of Samuel Whiskers, which will never get anything less than 5 stars from me, ever. Miss Moppet and Squirrel Nutkin both earned 4 stars, and The Fierce Bad Rabbit 3, as it was fun but rather slight. Collection rating therefore averages out to 4 stars.

Alright, so this is pretty much a disaster. On one level it's not Foster's fault: Splinter was published after A New Hope was released but before either Empire or Jedi were out, and plot points from the last two are obviously not included. This means that here we get an undercurrent of romantic tension between Luke and Leia which is now just icky. It also means that Vader finds out who Luke is but simultaneously doesn't, if you get my drift, which makes no sense in retrospect. As I said: not Foster's fault.

What is his fault is the hideous portrayal of Leia. In fairness, I do appreciate his attempt to show her trauma after the torture session of A New Hope though the associated trauma of seeing her planet blown to smithereens gets nary a mention and that seems almost worse. But Leia here exists primarily to scream, be beaten, and need (multiple) rescues. She has essentially no other skills, and every skill she plausibly should have is taken away and given to Luke. Let's be realistic: Leia is the daughter of a senator, and is involved in politics herself. Her education and training in politics, history, and diplomacy is likely to be extensive. Yet when faced with a species unknown to her (the Yuzzem) she cowers and panics while Luke, who has been all of six months off Tatooine, recognises them and can speak their language because he read some books back on the farm. I am all for self-taught education, but come on. This tendency becomes particularly egregious later on, when Leia has another screaming fit because she can't swim - AND LUKE CAN!!!! Luke, who has spent his entire life on a world so devoid of water that his family business was moisture-farming, dragging water molecules out of the atmosphere because there's so little on the ground, learned in this desert hellhole to swim. And the highly educated daughter of a planet that we can see from A New Hope has plenty of ocean, cannot. This is just ridiculous elevation of one character at the expense of another. Foster's description of her as a "steel kitten" says it all really. *gags*

And just in case I wasn't irritated enough, this throwaway line was the final straw. "Grammel eyed the man [a stroppy miner] the way a botanist would a new species of weed". As a botanist: fuck off. One, "weed" is a cultural construct. A plant called a weed in one context might be a wildflower or a valued resource in another. "Weed" is not stamped on leaf or stem so the plant can be so classified at the moment of discovery, and the reaction of any of my fellow botanists on discovering a new plant would not be contempt. It would be OMG new plant! OMG new paper!!! What name can I give this awesome new plant in my awesome new paper?!!! In short: fuck off again, and this is the kind of thoughtlessness that absolutely permeates this book, with its "as you know" infodumping and unnecessary attempt at sexual assault (on Leia, OF COURSE) and so forth. I have read good books by Mr. Foster, but this is not one of them.

I enjoyed this more than Wagon Train - it was pacier, zippier, and had an antagonist that was far less irritating. That antagonist happened to be an exploding moon, so this was more a of natural disaster story than anything but I like those so it worked for me. The tension level was pretty high throughout, so this was a single sitting reading; it really kept me hooked, with two exceptions. I did not care at all about those stupid children (natural selection at play I totally think), and the Blankness seemed like it belonged in a different story altogether. An interesting story, and one that I'd quite like to read, but it dragged away from the main storyline here in a way that did not best serve the Blankness itself, I think.

3.5 stars, rounding up to 4. My favourite of Walton's Mabinogion retellings thus far, I think because the conflict here is primarily internal rather than a series of battles in which relatively unsympathetic characters take part. There's still plenty of action, but the action here is more metaphorical - when Pwyll is fighting the bird-demon, for instance, it's clear that the bird is representative of self-doubt rather than a straight-up feathery monster. And because the story is so focused on Pwyll's internal journey, I ended up feeling more for him than I do for most of Walton's other characters - while realising that this series is well-written, I've felt little emotional response to the previous books. I actually cared about what was happening here (on top of admiring the technique of it all) so that was an improvement.

It's still a quick and zippy read, but it's just not as good as the first two. This is basically down to the episodes covered here which, with a couple of exceptions, are as a whole not particularly strong. There's "The Trouble with Tribbles" and "Mirror, Mirror" which are the stand-outs, but they can't really make up for "Assignment: Earth" or "Friday's Child", which were painful even in the original form. With the best will in the world Blish can't make them seem any less stupid, though in fairness he does try.

Mildly enjoyable but pretty basic, with a paper thin plot you can see a mile off and the barest of character sketches. I'm not entirely sure if it's a YA or a children's book, either. I'm plumping for the former, as the characters, a group of cadets starting at Starfleet Academy, are presumably all 18-ish, but it reads more like a book for much younger kids. I went into it expecting something a little more sophisticated - it's superficial even for the age group - but that being said, I do like Worf and the Academy teachers. The strongest point here though is the pacing: it's a quick zippy read and I tend to appreciate those.

The second volume in this trilogy sees the cadets of Worf's First Adventure on an arbitration mission to a human/Klingon colony world where everything has gone pear-shaped. On the bright side, the story continues to zip along and on the very bright side, Worf meets K'Ehleyr for the first time and I always enjoyed the pair of them, so points for that. It's a shame, however, that the plot relies on adults being idiots. The colony is struggling, mostly with race relations, and the best solution Starfleet can come up with is to send first year cadets to arbitrate (admittedly under the supervision of an experienced officer) - as if a high-tension population that values its independence is going to appreciate being told what to do by a bunch of kids. But of course it all works out, because the adults are brain-dead until teenagers are there to fix their lives for them - the engineering student, Tania, solves the ongoing power problems by realising that some power couplings are defective, for example. Which, great, but this seems like basic stuff the colony's scientists could have checked for themselves, had they had the two brain cells necessary to run a simple diagnostic...

2.5 stars, rounding up to 3. The last of the Worf-at-Starfleet-Academy trilogy, this is also the best of the bunch. Partly because I have a fondness for stories where people are marooned, and partly because of the focus on Soleta, who's fantastic (she more than makes up for Mark, whose airy strangeness is painfully belaboured - he's not remotely believable). Have to say I've never had much patience for coincidental contrivance, either, and the fact that the colonists built their colony right on top of a secret base made me roll my eyes, hard. But, as I said, there's still Soleta, who gets the best lines of the entire book, having smacked down an attacker of monstrous proportion: "I found his ship. Then he found me. Then I found his shoulder." Don't tell me Vulcans don't have a sense of humour, because I refuse to believe it.