octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I got an advance reading copy of this, lucky me, so I'm backdating this review to when I did read it.

Hard science fiction is not always my favourite type of science fiction - unless it has a strong biological component. Stories about weird biology will always excite me, and this works really well when the main character is a biologist/xeno-linguist who is monitoring giant zeppelin-like aliens in an attempt to understand and communicate with them. One of the consistent appeals of scifi, for me, is how well it can exploit that sense of wonder that we feel when discovering new things, and Wayfaring Stranger really does this for me. There's a lot of wonder and exploration packed into this novella, and the ending (which I won't spoil) is fantastic, though it does cry out for a sequel, I think. I want to know what happens next! 

Oh, this was depressing. Excellently done, but depressing. And how could it not be? The family history of the author's parents, how they ran and hid and were captured during World War Two, persecuted for being Jewish. The strain of never quite knowing who can be trusted, and how it contrasts with the everyday family experiences of marriage and family, is horrible. The part about deciding whether or not to send their little child away, knowing that the wrong choice will result in their death, and then having them actually die because of it... there's no recovery from that, there just isn't. And then at the end - I don't want to say it's an equal horror, because of course it isn't - the father's destruction of the mother's records, and the author's accusation of murder: impulsive, so wrong, and yet accurate as well in its way. It's just all horrifically painful.

There's something awfully sinister, too, in the decision to use animals as people here - especially the Nazis as cats, always hunting after rodents. I can't say that I was hugely compelled by the artwork here, but that particular decision by Spiegelman was genius. 

I can't say that I've ever seen a film that Hedy Lamarr was in; I was mostly aware of her because of her scientific achievements. I think I'd quite like to read an actual biography of her one day, because she seems an interesting woman, but there also seems to be too much crammed into her life for this particular graphic treatment to do more than skim over the high (and low) points. The most interesting part was the beginning, but once she moved to Hollywood it seemed as if the narrative stuck on her film career and the public perception of her appearance. And fair enough: I understand she was an extremely beautiful woman who was not, perhaps, overburdened with opportunities to display herself in any way other than the aesthetic. It seems critical response to her acting skills was not great, but as I've said: I've never seen a film with her in it, so who knows.

I liked the book. I don't think it was particularly deep, but as a basic overview it works well enough. 

I have to admit, as much as I liked Mexican Gothic, I preferred this. It was just creepier - I stopped reading forty pages from the end because it was the middle of the night and I was about to give myself nightmares. It didn't work; I had them anyway, and then I still had to read the rest of the horrific thing in the morning! I do enjoy fungal horror, there's something so weird and compelling about it. I think because I'm always so tempted to leave the fungus alive... there's always part of me that wants to see it go on and take over the world and fill it with mushrooms. 

I had mushrooms for dinner last night. Thematic, but it probably didn't help with those dreams of consumption and all.

I will say, on a minor note, while reading I thought a drinking game could probably be made for all the times that Easton says "Christ's blood!" I went back afterwards and counted. You'd have nine drinks by the end of the novella. It felt like more. 

I quite enjoy historical fiction, but if there's a genre other than fantasy that likes to drag their stories out for hundreds and hundreds of pages, it's that one. So when I came across this compact little novella, I was instantly curious - and it shows just how effective a story can be when it's told tightly and with concision. I'll have to see if I can find some more historical fiction novellas, because this has made me want to read more of them.

I suspect that one of the factors influencing the length here is that the story is based on a legend, passed down through the author's family. Legends are typically fairly short - because it makes them easier to pass on in oral narratives, maybe? I don't know, but in any case, this story of two old women, left behind to starve by their nomadic community in the middle of a harsh Arctic winter, is a compelling one. It's pretty obvious where the story's going so the end is no real surprise, but that doesn't take away from the value of the message, I think. It's all the more effective because the story doesn't shy away from the realities of starvation in a setting like this - is it right to abandon some members of a community if doing so means that others will survive? There's no easy answer to that question, and despite the happy ending the book doesn't gloss over that particular problem, which I appreciated. 

This started really well, with a road trip to an interesting destination - the Slabs, near Salton Sea in California. The end, however, was a shocker, and not in a good way. I've said in reviews for previous books in this series that one of the reasons I like Kinsey is that she's practical, with a commonsense approach to her own safety - but here, her absolutely moronic decision-making almost gets her killed, and honestly: she would have deserved it. If you find a body in someone's back shed, with suspicions that there are more, you call the police instead of poking around for half an hour and putting yourself in a position where you're about to confront a killer and no one knows where you are. Admittedly, the killer's an ancient old man and can easily be defended against, but then there's the hitman after her and she blows that off too.

My only consolation is that she had a head injury early in the book, and this explains her subsequent behaviour. I'd say nice things about the violently practical Rochelle, except her inability to be that violently practical earlier on gets her brother killed, so you know what, this one's a dead loss. Use your brain, Kinsey. You're supposed to have one. 

I've read and reviewed these books separately, so this is basically just for my own records. Postmortem got four stars from me and Body of Evidence three, so the average comes to three and a half.

When I first read these books, back as a teenager, they were the first mysteries I'd read (and I hadn't read many) that focused on forensics. The first book made a real impression with all the science, which is why I rated it so highly, but it seemed as if there was substantially less in the second book, which didn't grab me as much. I think, too, that part of the difference is not only the amount of science present, but what type it is. Biology will always be more interesting to me than the other scientific disciplines, and that most of what forensics there was in the second book had to do with different types of nylon rope... well, I was less than riveted. Still, an interesting series, and I'm coming back to it now so am excited to get past the first few books, which is where I stopped last time. 

It's funny how your reaction to books changes over time. I remember reading the first few books in this series when I was a teenager, and Lucy was the most interesting character for me then. Now she's a pain in the arse that irritates me with her sulky, self-destructive drama every time she's on-page. I'm sorry to say that in The Body Farm she's absolutely taking after her aunt, whose boring romance with the married Benton kicks off a book-long tantrum from Marino that had me rolling my eyes at all of them. Scarpetta's constant looking-down at her (admittedly awful) sister because of that sister's poor behaviour with men is just flat-out hypocritical at this point.

Please just give me the crimes and the science... and the cooking. If Scarpetta has to work through her issues outside of the morgue, I'd rather read about her delicious food than this trainwreck of relationships. The crimes, here, were the most interesting thing: the slow unveiling of the antagonist's dreadful behaviour was genuinely disturbing. 

Oh, this is outstanding. I knew I'd like it from the first chapter, which is narrated by a swamp - my wetland-loving self could not have had a happier opening. Compelling hook, gorgeous language, but then came the relationships between three sets of neighbours, and the characterisation here is just incredible.

Sera and her family are climate refugees recently settled in New Zealand and struggling to adapt both to a new country and the loss of the depressing and terrifying old. Sera forms a close bond with Keri, a single mother trying to raise her kids with limited resources - the two women are both marginalised in a number of different ways, including race and poverty - and Keri's teenage daughter has an uncanny connection to the swamp that once underlay the land they're all living on. As appealing as the two women are, however, the third house in this little community houses Janet and her red-pill, white-supremacist, attempted-terrorist son Conor. It's Conor who is particularly well-drawn, in an absolutely noxious way: his spiral into right-wing extremism is chillingly portrayed.

In the end, however, water overcomes all. I won't say how, as I don't want to spoil anything for anyone, but the ending is extremely satisfying, and connection, resilience, and basic human decency win out. This is a confronting but ultimately very hopeful book, and I'm so glad to have read it. 

I've been meaning to read this book for a while, as I've heard such good things about it! And it's a likeable read. I particularly enjoyed all the cultural elements - I know very little about Latinx culture, and everything around the Día de Muertos here was fascinating. Part of that, I think was the gorgeous imagery: everything to do with marigolds, especially (one of my favourite flowers!). Cemetery Boys is filled with really beautiful images, and I think that was my favourite part about it.

I was less convinced by the romance. This has nothing to do with the protagonist, Yadriel, who I found both sympathetic and convincing. I just couldn't get into Julian... people who are this frenetic in real life exhaust and irritate me, and apparently it's no different in fiction. He's very clearly a decent person, but still: exhausting. I understand that there's a sequel to this, which I will certainly read, and maybe now that the two boys are together they can chill the fuck out a little. Unless there's another supernatural jaguar emerging from a sacrificial pool, because that deserves every bit of screaming that it gets.