octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I'm sticking with this series because I've set myself the challenge of reading through the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award nominees/winners, but two books in and it's just not doing anything for me. I feel I should like it, as it's got that mythological backdrop that so often appeals to me, and I've a mate who's very fond of the series and their taste is often a match for mine, but the most I can rise to is a very mild interest. This volume in particular has amazingly little plot, because most of the page space is given to endless character angst of some of the most irritating, unbelievable teens I've read in ages. As in The Raven Boys, Adam is the only one I can barely tolerate - Ronan and Gansey continue to feel as if they're plastic pieces of absolute ridiculousness, and Blue's hardly in this at all, and when she is it's more whining about her boring kissy destiny. I can't help but feel that I'd like this more if it were just Adam and Chainsaw the bird, who is one of the few things here I wholeheartedly enjoy.

A lot of the early Star Trek novels are really quite short, and that has both advantages and disadvantages. Personally, I tend to enjoy shorter novels - there's frequently far less waffle to get through - but they do run the risk of skimming over a lot, and that's what happens here. There's an interesting idea at the bottom of this - the conflict between the sea creatures of one world and the land creatures of another, and the medical staff of the Enterprise come off very well. Both McCoy and Chapel are outstanding, and Chapel's temporary inclusion as part of a symbiotic organism (something she takes on willingly in order to treat it) is genuinely compelling, and I think deserved far more focus than it got. Engineer Scott also uses his brains, but most of the rest of the crew are functionally useless, and the entire problem of Kirk losing his ship to begin with is idiot plot, as the entire security team of the Enterprise - which both Kirk and Dvorkin are at pains to tell us is the best available - are absolutely moronic. (I've been reading these novels from the beginning, and it's come to my attention that the more time an author spends telling me how elite the ship's crew is, the more the text belies that assertion.)

But for all that, the rating had edged up to three stars up until the end, where storylines are ignored or tied up in bare paragraphs. Chapel's enormously affecting experience barely rates a few sentences. The issue of slavery is solved ridiculously quickly, and given that McCoy discovered that the people of Trellisane were eating the slaves - and that he'd eaten murdered sentient creatures as well - it's frankly staggering that this had not so much as a sentence of follow-up. What this book needed as a closing chapter was not Kirk feeling smug about his poor performance, but McCoy and Chapel working out their traumatic experiences together over a stiff drink.

No wonder the cat wants to sleep with Alexander's brother, because this child is the biggest whiner in the world. (Half the illustrations are him bawling over something or other.) I feel I should perhaps be sympathetic because everyone has bad days, but I read this book and sympathised with his mother. I suspect with this child she has more terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days than he does.

I'd like to think of this as malicious compliance meets housework, but let's face it, Amelia's probably not bright enough for that. Not really that entertaining, and stretching credulity at points I think (putting the lightbulbs outside, for example), but two things redeem it: the lemon meringue pie, because no-one who bakes well can be all bad. And the drawing of the dressed chicken in its little box, which got a genuine laugh out of me. Also, what lazy-arse employer can't measure 2 cups of rice on her own?

This is outstanding. I've just read it for the first time, and I'm tearing up in the public library. It's so affecting, and so clever - the book's entirely visual, lacking text because the immigrants at the centre of the narrative lack the language to communicate with the people of their new home through anything other than drawings and gestures. And while the book follows the splitting and reconciliation of a single family, there are a number of supporting stories of other immigrants who have had to make the same journey, albeit from different places and for different reasons. And for all the grimness of the story - and parts of it can be very grim - there's still a sense of kindness and hope here and it's just so wonderful I'm going to have to find a copy for myself.

A tightly written story about a man who undergoes hypnosis and develops an unfortunate side-effect - a facility for telepathy that exposes the dark side of his normal suburban neighbourhood. It's simply told but genuinely compelling; I read the entire book in a single sitting because I kept wanting to know what happened next. There's a tangle of motivation and resonance and ghostly recrimination, and I liked that although Tom's marriage to Anne staggers under the weight of his horribly disturbing new talent, they're both decent people who find a way to love and support each other regardless - it's pretty much the only warm spot in what turns out to be a rather nasty setting. Nasty not only in the presence of actual murder, but in the mundane petty behaviours of silly, selfish people who are good at covering up what they are for public consumption. Just imagine how uncomfortable dinner parties might be if you could see beneath the surface... Tom gets a series of nasty shocks, and so do we.

This is the first volume of the series to feature Aubrey above Maturin that I've given more than two stars. After the reviews I've given the previous volumes, it's clear that I far prefer the latter character, and his supporting role in this was disappointing. I think it's fair to say that I didn't enjoy this as much as its immediate predecessors, but I did still enjoy it, and a low three stars remains three stars. Part of it is I think that politics continues to be a strong focus, and I find this sort of manoeuvring far more interesting than that of ropes and sails. Aubrey doesn't enjoy it so much, and he doesn't have much of a talent for it, which I don't mind - characters who are good at everything are dull - but I think I have slightly kinder feelings towards him this time because of Graham. This new character is so utterly humourless that his dislike of Aubrey is, perversely, making me feel more for him out of pure spite.

This was written near 50 years ago now, a series of short chapters - almost columns - by a young critic on the development of pop music. It's pop criticism for pop music, essentially, and not objective at all but that's the charm. Cohn's focus is always brought back to how pop music has affected him, how it makes him feel, and his judgment of the various successes and failures of groups and songs is intensely personal, and often has nothing to do with how well they've been received by other people in general. The book can in some places feel like a fleshed-out list rather than a sustained argument for anything, but the real appeal of this is in Cohn's voice, which is just so accomplished. It's a mix of passion and cynicism and really biting, skewering wit, and it's very entertaining to read.

I enjoyed this much more than the last one - it lacked the vicious, undermining ending that I so loathed about Dragon Tattoo, and if the unconvincing exit from the grave wasn't particularly plausible here it at least didn't make a mockery of everything that came before. Like the first in the series, I found the middle of the story the strongest part, with the beginning a bit slow and the ending, well. I've commented on that (those) already. As for the subject matter... Larsson continues to focus on crimes against women as a measure of social and national dysfunction. I did find the sustained misogyny of so many of the characters hard to take, especially at first, but I came to understand that Larsson was making a point at just how embedded this particular toxicity is in the society he was writing about, so while I can't say that I particularly enjoyed that aspect of the book, I did learn to appreciate it for what it was. Far more enjoyable to me was the increased focus on Lisbeth over Blomkvist - he's a decent enough character but she's far more compelling. A bit less believable, too, to be honest, but her function as a character isn't to be the pinnacle of realism; she's closer to a grimdark superhero really, and it's very satisfying to read.

A collection of seven short stories (a couple of which I believe are actually novelettes). For the most part they're fairly interesting and I enjoyed them, although the robot stories I prefer from Asimov star Susan Calvin rather than the continually complaining duo of Donovan and Powell. Still, the three robot stories here are likeable enough, certainly better than "Death Sentence" (only marginally robotic) and "Marooned off Vesta", both of which were pretty average. The real stand-out, though, is "Nightfall". This was eventually turned into a novel, if I recall correctly, and it's a really fascinating thought experiment about a society that evolved in a multi-star system and subsequently never experienced darkness... except in times of periodic eclipse, which every few thousand years is the cause of mass psychological breakdown and apocalypse, essentially. The collection's worth reading for that story alone, I reckon.