octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

If this were just the stories, I'd probably give it four stars. Even bloody Turin is tolerable here (he's always bloody Turin to me, the least attractive character in all of Tolkien and yet the one we're all supposed to be obsessed with, apparently, given the mountain of appearances of his horrible self in the Tolkien money-making machine). Then there's "The Fall of Gondolin", and I was riveted at that one, the real stand-out piece of the collection; the image of Ecthelion, the Balrog, and the fountain will stay with me a long time.

Unfortunately, weighing down all these wonderful stories are the histories and explanations of the editor. And you know, perhaps from an academic point of view this might be valuable. But reading as a layperson, while parts of it were mildly interesting, most of it was deathly dull, and that largely due to the endless amount of repetition. It's not enough to explain at referential length how the Lost Tales version of story X differs from every other version ever, it all gets quoted, and quoted, and quoted, even if the difference was from a Lost Tales story right before that one and a flatworm could recall it. Interminable.

The earlier issues collected in here are more interesting than the later ones, which don't really resonate much with the idea of Swamp Thing to me (and the less said about the rhymes, the better). The first few issues, though, I really enjoyed. I'd only seen the film, not read any of Swamp Thing before, so this was a good introduction for me. I was particularly caught by the comparison between Swamp Thing and the Floronic Man - the latter is such a sympathetic villain in this book because he's genuinely got a point, and I weep for the story that could have been, because the logic behind how the conflict was resolved was dire. Sloppy, unscientific dire - if you're going to write about ecology, about plants, a basic level of botanical knowledge is a must (says the botanist) - but there was an extraordinary genesis there. It's just a shame the story lost all gumption at the end.

I got a free copy of this from the publisher, as I'm reviewing it for Strange Horizons - review out shortly, this is just a quick comment here for my own records.

I'm a huge horror fan, no surprises there. And this book works off one of the classic horror tropes: teens alone in the wilderness, and something is killing them off. Great! (Especially as some of them seem to deserve it.) And it's set in the New Zealand bush, and I always enjoy speculative fiction set in the surroundings I'm familiar with. I don't want to give too much away plot-wise, though I will say it's rather a complicated plot, though very effectively told. Matuku follows a number of storylines, focusing on different kids and the company working against them, and it's all done so seamlessly that there's never any confusion. I love prose like that, where it looks so deceptively simple but there's so much going on underneath, and she's done really well there. There is one aspect of the story I don't find particularly convincing - I don't believe for a single second that DOC and Search and Rescue would be so easily fobbed off searching for those kids, or that media and the general public would go along with it - but let's face it, I'm mostly here for the horror. And there's a lot of creepy fantastic images in this book to make me happy.

I got a strong impression, while reading, that Flight of the Fantail is eminently filmable, and if it's not turned into a movie at some stage I'll be amazed. I'd certainly go watch it!

I've had a long and difficult history with this book. To be honest, I've spent most of my life thinking that I loathe it. I had a copy as a kid, you see - not the actual book, but a heavily cut-down, heavily illustrated version meant for young readers, and I remember thinking even then that it was the silliest, most boring thing I'd ever read. I moved into the original text as a teen - the book was so famous, there had to be something I was missing - and was confirmed in my opinion. Tried it again ten years later, I'm not sure I even finished it then. It's stuck in my mind, ever since, as the very definition of a tedious read.

Well, I must be a glutton for punishment, because I've read the thing now for the fourth time and I can finally say that I like it. Not enough to ever read it again, but I'm satisfied that I appreciate it for what it is: vicious, biting satire in which Swift took his revenge upon the people he disliked. I'd always vaguely understood the thing was satirical, but I lacked the historical context to really appreciate just what and who Swift was bitching about. (I much preferred his baby-eating pamphlet, which was blatantly obvious and clearly more my speed.) But the copy I've read now is one that's enormously annotated. It's a substantial book, filled with illustrations of previous editions of Gulliver, and each page is split into halves, with one half original text and the other annotated explanation. For someone who had only a very vague idea as to the Whigs and the Tories (and the political machinations in general) of Swift's time, it makes things so much clearer. And genuinely more interesting. The satire has layers now.

I'm still never reading it again. I'm sorry Mr. Swift, I own I did misjudge you, but four times is three times too many.

Words cannot express how much I hate Guy Woodhouse. Apparently there's a sequel, and I can only hope that Rosemary ensures her husband's painful, lingering death because no-one in the whole of literature deserves it like he does. What a bastard. He's the really horrifying thing in here - not the creepy apartment, not Satan's baby, not the smothering old-lady neighbours and their Satan-baby tea. It's Guy Woodhouse, and the way he hands over his wife, totally dismisses her rape and (apparently) dead child - all of which he helps to orchestrate - because it's something that Rosemary will get over easily enough(!) and will make him famous.

And the horrible thing is, he's not the only horrible person in this. It's the coven in general, and the well-meaning doctor who doesn't believe, and the sheer weight of manipulation all building up, and we know as we read that there's no way that Rosemary's escaping this horror that's been inflicted on her. And then there's that ending, because that's the final, awful betrayal, and Rosemary herself has a hand in it. This is such a creepy book - not perfect, because it does stray into histrionics and overdoing it at times, and it might be scarier if it were a bit subtler - but there's a reason it's a classic.

I can't honestly say that I'm particularly musical. I was made to take piano lessons for a year or two as a child, and even I could tell, at the time, that my sense of timing was abysmal. I know what I like to listen to, and that's the extent of it. But, you know, I'm trying to read more broadly, and about things I'm unfamiliar with, and that's why I read this. I open my review with this acknowledgement of ignorance, however, because there's clearly something I'm not getting. Cage is supposed to be a giant in the field, and that assessment has been made by those more competent than me. But frankly I understood very little of it. I was interested in places, but never very deeply or for very long. It is perfectly possible that, had I more musical knowledge, this challenging book would have left a greater and more accurate impression. Instead, I was left both with an increased awareness of my own ignorance, and an inescapable whiff of the Emperor's New Clothes. Simultaneously, those impressions were an uncomfortable mix. In a nutshell: I'm sure it's not all bollocks, but am simply not qualified to judge, and not interested enough to read further. I finished the thing and that should be enough.

Fast-paced, easy read in which a mechanic-turned-coyote deals with the machinations of the local werewolf pack. It's pretty standard urban fantasy, but Briggs has a fluid style and a likeable set of characters. I'm not particularly thrilled at the incipient love triangle that seems to be starting, and I'm even less thrilled by the fact that Mercy doesn't seem to have any women friends. I find one characteristic of urban fantasy - a characteristic I don't like - is that the protagonist frequently has no mates. The in-universe explanation tends to be that their life is so dangerous, woe is them, that they don't want to drag anyone else into it, but more often than not I end up thinking they've got no mates because they're miserable gits no-one wants to be friends with. When the protagonist is a woman, however, the friends that they do have tend to be men. Just men. Briggs sort-of explains this by all sorts of pack hierarchy bullshit that supposedly justifies why no women like Mercy, but that was a choice on her part and I'm rolling my eyes at it hard. Without women friends, Mercy comes off - even with her other good qualities - as a wee bit off-putting, frankly. Hopefully that's something that will be remedied in future books. I'm also hoping that future books will do a little more to explore her Native American background, because her status as a skinwalker is something that's far more unfamiliar to me than werewolves, and I'm interested to learn more about the culture behind the myth.

In short: fun but slight. Falls into a couple of irritating tropes, but I'm invested enough to read a little further.

An interesting and exhaustively researched account of the beginnings of the Mexican American civil rights movement in south Texas. Orozco argues that this movement had its beginnings in the 1910s and 1920s (it is generally credited as arising in the 1930s, apparently) and she seems to make a good argument for this. As far as I can tell, anyway - this isn't an area I have any knowledge in, so I came to the book as a blank slate. Nevertheless I was convinced, as she very carefully sources and traces both the individuals and organisations involved. It does at times get a little bit repetitive, and in places there was acronym overload, but on the whole it was a readable account.

Most interesting was the ongoing conflict between various identities - what Orozco referred to as "hybridity" - and how this affected the composition and goals of the movement. Tensions (and loyalties) existed between Mexicans, Mexican Americans, European Americans, Latin Americans and more, and what this meant for definitions of belonging - of citizenship, of nationality - can make for compelling reading. It's very easy to see the difficulties people must have had navigating through this network of multiple (often competing) cultures, and the strategies they developed to cope with this comprised the bulk of the book.

I do think, however, that the title is a bit of a misnomer. I came to read this book because it was on a list of feminist writing that I'm working my way through, and though there is one chapter dedicated to the role of women, and a minor throughline on that subject in the rest of the book, I'm not sure it merits title status.

This is one of those books that you admire more than love, I think - at least that's the case for me. Reading it was a bit of an odd experience. It was clearly competent and intelligent but I couldn't seem to connect to any of the characters, and I was thinking as I read that because of this I'd probably give it two stars, but the more I read the more I realised that the whole point was this sense of alienation, of disconnection, and that it was a deliberate choice on the part of the author. And as I realised this I began to appreciate The Ruined Map for what it was: a text more concerned with atmosphere and feeling than with plot. There's a very Kafka-esque vibe going on here, as the detective given the job of searching for a missing man becomes ever more alienated from the world around him. His marriage is falling apart, the case is a total dead-end full of small shifting instabilities, and more and more he comes to identify with the missing man until his final alienation is from himself, and he loses all sense of his own identity. It's a weird, claustrophobic sort of read as the world breaks down and reforms around the protagonist, and it's really cleverly done.

There are some lovely images in this - the bougainvillea in the water, especially - but it doesn't have the creep factor of the novels in the series. Bar the zombies attached to the outside of pirate ships, of course, but I'm kind of failing to see the logic in that strategy. Sure, it threatens land-based populations with infection (if they aren't infected already) but it's got to be easier to loot a settlement that isn't crawling with the undead, surely. Same with the pirate's desire to keep Iza alive, as if a 15 year old girl is necessary to taking over an island refuge that's already shown it's willing to follow force rather than any sense of (however shoddily defined) legitimacy. I don't buy it. I mean, the story's likeable enough, but it's severely undercut by the fact that the zombies are the most believable thing in it.