octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

Horrifying. Absolutely bloody horrifying read in which the history of the US government's attempts to control the reproduction of black women is made abundantly clear. I was ignorant of most of the stuff in here - being neither black nor American a lot of this passed beneath my radar - but in this exhaustively researched and well-written study, Roberts builds her argument brick by brick to a conclusion that's very hard to ignore.

This is a difficult read. Given the subject matter, it simply cannot be anything else, but it is certainly a necessary read. It's all too easy sometimes, I think, to see an isolated policy and hand-wave it away as isolated, as a strange and doubtful thing that is not indicative of the whole. But studies like this, in which the apparent isolation of dozens of different policies are brought together, give a picture of a society which has so internalised racism, which has made it such a substantial part of culture, that it is indivisible not only from government policy, but from what the general public is prepared to tolerate and support. And the result is gut-wrenching.

I enjoyed this, but as is nearly always the case with epic fantasy, I would have enjoyed it more had there been less of it. 900+ pages, and the story just went on and on and on. In many ways it felt like a trilogy mashed up into one book, with three distinct sections, and that length plus those sections did make me think there was a problem with the pacing at times - I felt as if I were slogging through the middle section in particular. But I liked the characters, and I really liked the emphasis on politics, and I really liked that because the protagonist was a courtesan she was essentially on the outskirt of any battles, which made them brief and even skipped over in the text. I don't know what it is about epic fantasy authors that makes so many of them think I'm hanging on every sword thrust of every tedious battle, but I'm not. The battle scenes bore me, and I'd much rather read political espionage and behind-the-scenes plotting. So kudos to Carey for her emphasis on that, because it was the best part of this story, and had the book been half the length it might have gotten 4 stars from me. What can I say: I value brevity in my fiction.

Parts of this interested me. I'm never not going to like stories about possession; I'm too much of a horror fan for that, and having the possessed kids at the centre of the narrative be Vulcan is a nice twist. And I enjoyed that the young reporter was from a small colony, had only ever seen humans before, and was genuinely a bit bigoted about alien species - clearly she was always going to Learn A Lesson about that, but it's an interesting take that doesn't come up often in this franchise. Shame it was the only interesting thing about her - I don't buy for one second that she was able to get through to Corona when none of the others could. And I really don't buy the very silly subplot about installing computers that can take over the Enterprise if they think Kirk is commanding it wrongly. Starfleet would never be so foolish as to test that bit of kit for the first time on what's essentially the fleet's flagship. That bit of idiot plot induced so much eye-rolling even Vulcan-child-possession couldn't save it.

I love the basic idea of this - and how the hound is created is absolutely fabulous. I won't give details so as not to spoil people but full marks to the author there! And if I only really care about the hound, the rest of the book's enjoyable enough, though I did see a couple of the twists coming. Seeing as I'm usually hopeless at mysteries I was quite surprised about that, but if I'm not a huge mystery fan I do know my gothic horror tropes, so I reckon that's what I was picking up on. And it was fun, but I can't say I'm raring to go out and find more Sherlock Holmes stories to read - though I suppose that, as a main character, he's off to the side for most of this. It's really more of a showcase for Watson, the doctor who apparently can't recognise Charing Cross Hospital from its initials and who's content to inflict a violent murderer on South America just so long as he isn't killing in England, which I side-eyed pretty bloody hard I can tell you.

The crew of the Enterprise gets brainwashed and mutinies. With a description like that it should be exciting, but my reaction is pretty much "eh". There's nothing terribly wrong with this, and to be fair there are some interesting parts. I particularly liked the planet that was a single living organism - that's a concept compelling enough to build an entire story around, and not just a relatively isolated excursion. But for the most part I found this book pretty unconvincing. I don't find Lorelei that believable, nor do I think it credible how very easy her takeover was. I think perhaps this story suffers a little from loss of focus - it seems like it should have been a tightly focused psychological piece, concentrated by a sense of claustrophobia slowly growing aboard the ship. Instead it wavers off to the interesting planet, and spends too much time on the travelling ambassadors, who seemed fairly unbelievable themselves. A case of trying to fit too much into a relatively short novel and not really doing any of it justice, I think.

There are two things that really stand out for me in this book - the characters and the language. A lot of the dialogue here is based (at least I'm presuming it is) on Caribbean speech patterns, and being unused to those it took me a while to fall into the rhythm of the words but when I did it was fantastic; very different from the NZ English patterns I'm used to, but aesthetically compelling all the same. I really like books like this that expose me to different types of language use, I find them so enjoyable! But Brown Girl in the Ring has more going for it than language, and the main strength here I think is the characters - particularly the granddaughter and grandmother duo at the heart of the book. The relationship between them is so flawed, so marked with pitfalls and resentment and love, that I would happily have read a story about them alone, even without the creepy skin-flaying antagonist who, for me at least, makes this story as much horror as fantasy. (The scene with Melba is going to keep me up at night, I just know it.) But I love too the sense of community underpinning the world here - and this is especially clear at the end - all these small people living in the deserted disaster of the city, and gradually turning it into something beautiful and growing again, turning it from "other" and into "home". Which is probably the theme of the book in a nutshell, now I come to think of it.

This is one of those children's fantasy classics I'd heard of but never read before - and having read it now, I can only think how I would have loved this as a kid. It's very reminiscent of Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series, if it doesn't quite have her depth, but it's still an extremely enjoyable read. The characterisation is a little thin, and the end is strangely abrupt, but the real shining strength of this book lies in its sense of place. This is tied very cleverly into plot, using local legends and industry to shape the story. (There's one long section where the kids are stuck in the abandoned mines that is just excellently written and is I think the story highlight for me.) Weirdstone is clearly set in a part of Cheshire that Garner knows extremely well, and I can easily picture fans retracing steps and visiting the landmarks he's written about here - I may have been Googling pictures of places mentioned as I read. Clear too is that Garner not only knows this setting in his bones but also loves it, and his passion for it makes me love it too.

I am genuinely delighted. And taking a copy of this book to one day wander around Alderley Edge myself is the latest entry on my bucket list.

For a series that's essentially about sailing ships, it's sadly amusing that I prefer everything that happens on shore. Like the last volume, this is an enjoyable read, and the continuing emphasis on politics makes this series more and more entertaining. As such, this volume sagged in the middle a bit for me, when the politics got taken over by the endless sailing around and storms and so on - though I did notice the odd place where Maturin notes a sailing difficulty, goes to bed, and wakes up with everything solved, which I was always grateful for! I have as little interest in the mechanism of sailing as he does, and it strikes me that positively the best use of Aubrey is having him sort that all out offscreen, while Maturin mulls over the interesting bits. And on that subject this volume, together with the last, has actually succeeded in making me invested in Diana, which is nice, as Sophie's a total non-entity. I don't expect this series will turn into the Political and Natural Adventures of Stephen and Diana, alas, but it's when it does, in small episodes, that I am the most attached.

The slow, nasty dissolution of the relationships between a number of people - two noxious couples and a parade of extra-marital love interests - and it's a bit like watching a train crash in slow motion. Part of that sense of slow inevitability is down to the narrator. The story's told in first person by the least interesting member of the quartet, a stolidly wet individual of surpassing unawareness. At least, he's meant to be surpassingly unaware, although his (and by inference Ford's) understanding of character and motive is so precise that the total misunderstanding of his wife's character and actions - while the horrible woman is alive at any rate - makes him not quite consistent, I think. I was reminded a little of Somerset Maugham, who's one of the finest character writers I've read - although Maugham has an understanding of subtlety, I think, that Ford lacks, and certainly more capability for pace and tone. The Good Soldier is monumentally consistent, a sort of dull drone of quiet, repressed desperation, and while it's certainly compelling in its constant neurosis there's something still about it that's a little flat for me, like eating white bread alone for a week on end.

"Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?" There's no-one like Dickens for talking about poverty, at any rate - his rant on the subject in Bleak House is what makes that book my favourite of his work, and the sheer volume of anger and pity in A Christmas Carol is enormously and similarly affecting. The two little figures of Ignorance and Want, especially, tucked starving into the robes of Christmas Present, are particularly awful. Altogether they're the largest part of why this book is such a deserved classic, I think. For while it's chock-full of blistering one-liners, from a modern perspective at least there are parts that I find purple and over-written.. but the combined emotional effect, the stand on social justice and responsibility to others, makes me just not care about the minor quibbles. It's lovely the way that it is.