octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I liked this, for the most part - there's a lot of good stuff here. Even with the US focus, there's still a sense of global scale that's very effective, and I enjoyed how the multiple perspectives explored different aspects of the zombie war.

My main quibble, as I was reading though, was where were the women? There were dozens and dozens of people interviewed by the narrator, and what, 4 or 5 of them were female? The first one didn't show up for 60+ pages... I was actually beginning to wonder if all the women were dead. I kept expecting some scientist or other to be interviewed halfway through, recounting how, I don't know, women were infected via airborne virus while the men had to be bitten - or something, anything, that would account for the disparity in a way that wasn't the narrator's determined bias. Then I remembered the throwaway remark about the report chairperson in in the prologue, and how she'd told the narrator to sod off with his stories and write a book. At the time I thought that was shortsighted of her, but now I'm prepared to accept that part of it was she was just utterly sick of a historian who, with so few people left, still only cared about half of them. Honestly, that's what kept it from four stars for me - the idea that half the population is a token character, and that the important personal histories of the human race during a time of uniquely devastating conflict are almost exclusively masculine.

Reading this, I was planning to give it three stars - and then I got to the end, and found the same issue that I noted in the last book: the inability to sustain an effective villain. Dominga is genuinely creepy, Dominga is genuinely scary - then Dominga, with a lifetime of skill and experience, Dominga who so overshadows the protagonist in talent and power, makes a mistake so unintelligent, so incompetent, that a graduate of the first day of villain school is shaking their head in disbelief. This, unfortunately, undoes in retrospect her creepy-scary factor. From there, Blake's victory is both certain and hollow, though it does have a undeniable whiff of justice about it.

The lesson to remember here is that when programming anything to do your evil bidding - from abacus to animator - it is garbage in, garbage out.

This book is not garbage. There was a lot to like about it - Anita Blake seems to be a bit brighter this time around, which I appreciate - but that ending. Again.

Fun steampunk novel of a mining machine gone berserk, leading to a walled-off Seattle full of poison gas and zombies. It's a ridiculous premise but an entertaining one, as the setting is fantastic - creepy and claustrophobic, but full of little niches for speculators and inventors to turn a profit.

For the most part the characters live up to this mad world, but the primary focus is on Briar and her teenage son Zeke. They're separated for much of the novel so it follows them separately, and the risk of split storylines is what it always is: one is frequently more enjoyable than the other. I would have preferred to stick with Briar all the way through, as she's far more interesting (and had the more interesting plot) than her son.

The twist at the end - what really happened to Leviticus Blue - is not that much of a surprise, however. It's been fairly telegraphed all the way through, and the refusal to directly address it earlier does seem a bit like stretching out the story for the sake of it. But it's still a likeable read, even so.

This is delightful. Not so much because of the text - each of the animals featured has a short paragraph devoted to it, describing how the animal appears in the Bible - but because of the illustrations. I don't think I've ever come across Howard Berelson's work before, but he is a marvel and I want a copy of this book for my own now, solely so that I can look again and again at his rendering of the hippopotamus. All the drawings here are stylised, done in various shades of red only, and they are fantastic.

Lavishly illustrated book for kids that provides a fairly comprehensive overview of Greek mythology. It covers pretty much all the main figures, from deities to heroes to non-human creatures, and it's all told in easy-to-digest stories, all of which are related in a relaxed and often humorous tone. I was surprised by how much it covered - this is far more akin to an encyclopaedia than a picture book - yet it was such an easy read that it didn't feel nearly as long as it was. Likeable and thorough, though clearly edited to remove the more disturbing elements of the myths.

Enjoyable new superhero, and I say that as someone who's not that drawn to the endless superhero comics. I might stick with this one, however. I did think it took a little long to get going, but the characters in here are what drew me in - even with the whole origin story/learning to use superpowers, which, as I said, is not particularly my thing and didn't appeal to me nearly as much as Kamala's struggles with her own identity. But I like Kamala (and I especially like her family) and I'm interested to see how this series will explore identity issues in the future.

I just picked this up at total random from the comics shelf at my local library. I've never read any Thor before, and to be honest my expectations weren't high. From what little of him I've ever been exposed to, he's struck me as a total meathead (I was delighted to see that the librarian in this shared my opinion!) and so I was prepared for some vacuous punch-fest, albeit with hammers. Well, when I'm wrong I don't mind admitting it. This was fantastic. It was creepy and sad and the structure of the story was genuinely complex, but handled for the most part extremely well. There's something odd going on with Shadrak, though, because what he's the god of exactly seems to change - waterfalls one minute, then when faced with a fire it's something else. I don't trust him, is what I'm saying.

And apparently the library has the rest of the series - I've just checked - so I'm going back tomorrow to get them.

I read The God Butcher, in which this is collected, earlier today, and after I'd reviewed it I found that Goodreads also lists comics on their own, as single issues! I am clearly late to this discovery but am excited nonetheless, and because I have a hopeless bent to completeness I'm rating and reviewing them all separately, as well as collected.

This particular issue opens this, well, mini-series I suppose you'd call it, and I was initially sceptical. It starts with a younger Thor, who is pretty much everything I am not interested in reading about - the phrase "drunken whoring battle yokel" sprang to mind - but it very quickly became clear that this is a story with three different versions of Thor - young, current, and the lonely, dying old - and it promises an interesting structure and character development, which are things that I love and that makes young Thor seem like a promising beginning instead of a bore. When this issue really caught my attention, however, was the storage house of dead gods hanging from meat hooks like sides of beef in a butcher's. The image is incredible and, like the gods, I was hooked. (Sorry.)

I'm a total sucker for interesting structures, and on that account this issue doesn't quite live up to the first. There's a little bit of time-shifting going on here, but for the most part this issue follows the younger Thor - my least favourite iteration - in his first encounter with the God Butcher. Said Butcher is a creepy looking beastie who pretty much earns my undying enmity by killing the pretty horse. (I don't mind that he smacks around young Thor nearly as much. Characters that up themselves deserve a good smacking.) There's no stand-out moment here as with the hanged gods in issue 1, but it's still an entertaining enough action piece that moves the story along.

This is without a doubt my favourite of the first five collected issues. A little more of the interesting structure was back, but the parade of dead gods was sad and horrifying - genuinely affecting. The panel with Falligar the Behemoth is the best, and it gives a sense of the sheer waste of what's going on here. Not that the gods are particularly decent individuals - for the most part we don't know, but I can't imagine trusting a god as far as I could throw it - but the sense of wonder that's such a staple of the speculative genres is here in spades, as is the idea of a universe impoverished by the death of wondrous things.

Also a welcome addition is the librarian, who clearly has a very low opinion of Thor - he met him as a child, and quickly assessed him as not a reader - and I enjoy that he's so open with his unflattering judgements. I don't expect every character to be a genius, or even averagely intelligent, but I'm far more likely to tolerate those who aren't when the narrative doesn't bend over backwards to try and tell me they're smarter than they actually are. So good choice there I thought.