octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

The last issue of God of Thunder is a sort of mini-anthology, with Thor's grand-daughters in a library, reading stories of what came before. Literally in this case - one story's about Malekith, another's a return to the godawful Roxxon story and there's also Young Thor fighting the giants. It's all wrapped up with a teaser for what I assume is the next set of comics. The stories themselves are entertaining enough, if not especially wonderful, but the real standout here is the art. The style's so different from all the issues of God of Thunder that have gone before - a stronger palette, a distinct sense of style, and it makes me think what a shame it is that all the previous ones didn't have this level of vision and flair, because it's fantastic. All credit to the artist, their work is exceptional.

I read and reviewed each of the seven issues collected here separately, so this is basically just for my own records. The rating's an average of the ratings given to the individual issues - a rating pulled severely down because two of them (#21 and #22) were dreadful. Issue #23 did its damnedest to stem the rot, but The Last Days of Midgard just doesn't stack up to the three previous volumes of this series. You would have thought I'd have been more sympathetic to an eco-focused storyline, but the presentation was in places so idiotic, so lazy, and the villain so stereotypically evil, that with the best will in the world I could barely keep my eyes from rolling out of my head.

Stick with The God Butcher, you'll get a better story.

Roald Dahl is such an entertaining writer - and an easy-to-read one at that. His prose just slips down, it never feels laboured, there's never a place where it stutters and chokes. And as is expected under such circumstances, this is an extremely readable collection. Dahl's got a special gift for writing about nasty people, particularly the mildly nasty, and it's always entertaining to see how cutting all that stripped-back prose can be. There's one story, the one everyone knows, that's a particular stand-out. I'm talking about "Lamb to the Slaughter", which I've read countless times and which I never get tired of. None of the rest quite match up, and there are a few here that cut off a little early for my liking - "Beware of the Dog", for example - but even those are still fun. It's a great collection.

The third in the New Earth series, and it's one of those books where I say "There's nothing wrong with it, exactly..." And in all fairness, there were likable things here. I enjoyed that the focus was entirely on Uhura, Sulu, and Chekov. I really liked the idea of the Carsons, and wished that organisation had held a more central position in the narrative. But mostly this was like a sci-fi version of a western. There's illegal mining and dust storms, a fight between greed and survival, and it's just all so stretched out. There were a lot of scenes of flying shuttles in storms, or the three main characters just missing each other, or, interminably, Uhura's efforts to get a working communicator. I wonder if Graf was going for the effect of recreating Uhura's frustration in the reader, building empathy for her that way, but to me it only felt rather crushingly repetitive. And, crucially, all just a little bit dull.

What a genuinely horrible protagonist this book has! The titular Flashman, who was apparently a bully in Tom Brown's Schooldays (which I have not read) has been repurposed by Fraser into the anti-hero of a series of historical novels. This is the first.

There's really nothing redeemable about him. Flashman is a violent, cowardly bully, a rapist, a liar, a hopeless, selfish hypocrite. What saves it is that he knows what an awful person he is, and Fraser knows it too. An unlikeable protagonist can sink a story for me, but almost invariably when they do it's because the author either doesn't realise how unlikeable they are, or makes excuses for them. But the narrative here doesn't do that, precisely because the purpose of that narrative is satire. Flashman, clearly unsuitable for army life, somehow comes up trumps in a story that skewers every possible puffed-up ideal of military life, focusing as it does on the British Army's retreat from Kabul (and subsequent massacre) in 1842. Flashman is made as horrible as he is to really emphasise the rotten, superficial society that supports him - one that privileges absolute incompetence over decency and aptitude. And all credit to the author, I was simultaneously disgusted and entertained, because there's a streak of very bitter humour woven all through this that shows just how cuttingly observant Fraser is being.

A lengthy, sprawling poem that is two-thirds endnotes. Written by Auden during WW2, it seems to be a way for him to work out the threats and philosophies of the time, and credit where it's due, the thing taken together is enormously impressive. The endnotes are the highlight, really, if one can refer to the bulk of any text as the highlight - they jump about from quotes to extracts to more poetry, a modernist reaching for meaning. But as much as I enjoyed the sheer gumption of the scope of New Year Letter, as poetry the best part of the actual verse ends when the prologue does. That prologue is astonishingly lovely - "none / are determined like the tiny brains who found / the great communities of summer: / only on battlefields". What follows is merely clever.

This is such an interesting - and such a frustrating - book to read. It's well-written and well-researched, not really popular science but an exploration of how a group of people (specifically mothers) react to science... or don't. We've all heard of those parents who are determined to believe that vaccines cause autism, or that pharmaceutical companies are in cahoots with the government for financial gain because the money they earn from vaccinating a child is clearly more than what they'd earn from a lifetime of billing for care after that child comes down with polio (yes, I'm being sarcastic) and so on. And I'm trying to be open-minded, really I am, but Biss' story of how she had a child and basically started running about like a chook with her head cut off is in some ways very hard to sympathise with. I tend to think that if you've spent decades of your life not-dying from smallpox and diphtheria and the like you might want to give vaccination some credit in keeping you alive, but apparently motherhood makes logic die. (Seriously, I've never seen much appeal in having a kid, and this book underlines yet again how unattractive the prospect is.)

But credit where it's due: Biss is aware that her risk-assessment was off and that her fears were often trumping good sense and science, and she works through them carefully and with empathy for mothers like her. (In this she is better than me. When she writes of how she went to her child's paediatrician to ask, for instance, what the purpose of the Hepatitis B vaccine was, I actually bellowed at the text "SO YOUR CHILD DOESN'T GET HEP B!") And the exploration of science history, of health practices, is genuinely interesting... even if sometimes you want to reach through the page and shake both Biss and the mothers she hangs out with - like the woman who is genuinely astonished at the thought that her unvaccinated Petri dish of child could pass on diseases to other children. Or the one handing out lollipops infected with chicken pox. (I feel like offering up lollipops laced with contraception after this, myself.)

Very interesting collection of various essays and speeches by Lorde. It covers a number of different topics - the US invasion of Grenada, visiting the Soviet Union as a professional writer, raising a feminist son... and such a broad range might be expected to come across as bitty or scattered, but the underlying theme of how black women and other women of colour relate to each other provides a compelling connection between the pieces. While Lorde spends time on the challenges raised by black women's experiences with black men and white women both, her main interest seems to be relationships between black women: how they are undermined, and how they can be strengthened. It makes for painful reading, sometimes, and confronting reading at that, but it does strike me as necessary. She's so angry, and there's such justification in that anger - who, in her place, would not be angry also? - that it demands a similar anger in us. Well, so be it. Anger can be a hugely useful emotion, and should be reclaimed as such.

I love novellas, I really do. All of the story, none of the padding. Although I hesitated a bit as I typed that last line, because Rain could, I suppose, technically be shorter and tighter. Plot-wise, it could be condensed down to a short story... but the purpose of a novella, I think, is to explore emotion and mood and the small places of ambiguity in ways that an even more limited word can't always achieve. And Gunn succeeds in that very well here, both in what she writes and what she chooses not to write. Her wording is so compelling, and the repetition of all that water imagery provides thematic emphasis without becoming tiresome or laboured. Really it's just beautifully told. The sadness and shock inherent in the story - and it's certainly a confronting narrative in a number of ways - is sanded down into restraint and allusion, turning firmly away from melodrama. It's lovely, quiet, and polished.

This play about an English professor dying of cancer is astonishingly good. It's biting and bleakly funny and heartbreaking, and when I got to the back and read in the "about the author" section that it was Edson's first play I nearly threw up my hands and gave up writing altogether, because it's just plain horrifying to be so good on your first shot. The combination of Donne's sonnets and biochemistry, the jumping back and forth between English and science, between past and present, is done so easily. So easily. I'm sure it wasn't anywhere near effortless but Edson makes it look that way. And the main character is so compelling, so uncompromising and so brutally honest in her reactions to what is happening to her.

There's nothing about this that I don't love.