octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

Likeable little picture book about two kids who discover a very lifelike game. It's basically similar to Snakes & Ladders, only set in a jungle, and every square comes to life when their counter lands on it. Hence a lion chase, a rhino stampede, and so on. And it's entertaining enough, but I can't say the same for the illustrations. There's such a vivid potential for imagery in the story that the art comes off as simply bland by comparison. It's all shades of monochrome and painfully realistic in that lots of them are the kids at the game board or the park or so on, and only some of them have elements from the game intruding into real life. I mean, there's nothing wrong with them exactly, other than simple dullness, but they didn't quite stack up to the text.

Brian, on the way to spend the summer with his dad, is the sole survivor of a small plane crash. There he is, alone in the Canadian wilderness, a city kid with no survival skills, and a hatchet. Don't ask me why he has the hatchet. It's a present from his mum. No, I don't understand it either. But that's not the point. Of course he's rescued in the end, but that's not the point either. No, what this story's about is transformation - turning into something else, developing in a way that fits your environment. Brian rather realistically makes mistake after mistake, and some of those mistakes nearly kill him, but he perseveres and thinks and learns, finds a way not only to adapt to his environment but to appreciate that adaptation, and to see the value in the close relationship he's building (albeit by necessity) with the natural world. It's an appreciation story as much as a survival one, and I like that.

What a horrible little child Harriet is. I love her. She feels like an actual child too - noisy and energetic and distracted at the drop of a hat, interested in her friends and yet entirely selfish. So often kids in literature seem sanitised, and if they have flaws they're sort of minor and easily fixed, whereas Harriet, in every sense of the word, is juvenile. There's nothing saccharine about her, or her friends (I think Janie was my particular favourite, awful in a completely different way). The kids are all done really well. There's not one of them feels like a cut-out, even the antagonists seem like solid little things.

I like too that the story is so sly and subversive. I mean, I read the blurb on the back and thought I had it: Harriet spies on people, writes down her too-truthful and absolutely unedited observations in a notebook, loses notebook, friends read notebook, oh what will she do to make it up to them? I won't spoil it, but I laughed my arse off. Because it's so very obvious, and so very tailored to the horrible child that she is. Anyway, it was deeply entertaining.

Oh dear. I'd initially planned to read this as part of Book Riot's Read Harder challenge for 2019, as a way to tick of the "book of humour" task, but thank goodness I went for A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole instead because that was hilarious and this was just stupid. In fairness, the introductions (one by each author) were actually funny, but, unsurprisingly, limericks soon get old. Especially when a) they're just not very good - lots of them didn't scan well and if you've got to change words or spellings to force a rhyme don't bother, and b) they're all on the same quickly well-worn topic. Perhaps there are some genius comedians out there who can produce 200+ limericks on sex without degenerating into dullness but these men are not them. Really enormously repetitive.

Mildly entertaining, but not as interesting as Christie's full length works. (Not that I've read more than a handful, but the opinion holds for what I have read.) I think what caused me to lose interest was the amount of repetition. It felt like the bulk of the stories collected here relied upon substitution. Either someone was impersonated by someone else, or some object had been swapped with another object. When this is the solution once or twice, it's clever. When it happens over and over again, however, it begins to seem like laziness... a sort of mystery themed cut-and-paste. No coincidence that the two stories I liked best, "The Chocolate Box" and "The Case of the Missing Will", had different solutions. Those were solid three star reads, but they didn't make up for all that sameness, or for the casual racism scattered though the book. Also, Poirot comes across - even more than usual! - as enormously smug. It's entertaining, but I'm undecided as to whether this (genuine) character flaw makes me like him better or worse.

The first in the New Frontier sub-series in the Star Trek universe, and it's clearly a set-up novel. Nearly the entire first half of the book is taken up introducing three new characters, giving them all separate origin stories. The second half is all plot set-up. Spock is shoe-horned in, I assume for the sake of ratings, while Picard and other Enterprise characters decide that, for humanitarian purposes, a starship needs to be sent into a war-torn region of space. Together, they need to find a captain to take on this likely disaster. Now, credit where it's due, I thoroughly enjoyed the TNG characters in this, and I think the mission itself has the potential to be interesting, although it hasn't started yet. Presumably that's what book #2 is for.

What's causing this to get a two star rating is the new characters. Of those three, I'm afraid I'm only interested in Dr. Selar. The other two just make me want to roll my eyes. Soleta is deeply annoying just on the face of her. I rather suspect I'm supposed to see her as spunky, whereas she really just comes across as rude. But the bigger problem is the chosen captain. Mackenzie Calhoun, once we get rid of all those bloody apostrophes... boy rebel genius turned adult rebel genius, apparently, albeit this constant state of rebellion is against two different institutions. Well. Like most people I have a streak of perversity, and you can only tell me so many times just how edgily fantabulous some character is before I start thinking bollocks to that. Picard's constant slavish praise does not help. I get that it's authorial manipulation: You trust Picard, and Picard says Calhoun is the best thing ever, therefore you'll think Calhoun is the best thing ever. Well I don't. I'm quite prepared to be manipulated for the sake of story, but this is just too damn blatant. Maybe it'll improve. I hope so, because right now it's all subtle as a sledgehammer, and about as realistic.

And, finally, if any Trek author feels the need to write about Orion slave girls ever again, they should put down the keyboard and go have a nice lie-down until the upper brain reasserts itself, because there is only so much eye-rolling one girl can reasonably be expected to perform in a single sitting. That is all.

Everyone in this is either an arsehole or a ninny. I had hopes for Isabella, and she is the best of the bunch, but she lost me entirely when she asked for forgiveness for the man who a) raped her (so he thought) and b) murdered her brother (so she thought). There's turning the other cheek and then there's being the biggest doormat in Vienna. I can only hope that ambiguous ending means she's ditching these foul people to go back to the convent, but, as I said, doormat. She's probably going to end up married to the Duke, with Fucking Angelo simpering at her over the dinner table while he tells her how doing his level best to ruin her life has made him a better man.

Angelo, let's face it, is only believable when he's being the puritanical, repressed, sadistic villain that he is. His pretend remorse (because I cannot take said remorse seriously given that it instantly appears at the very moment he's caught out by someone with the power to execute him for his actions) is deeply, deeply unconvincing. And as genuinely compelling as the fifth act was (despite all this bullshit, before this last act the play was risking single stardom) it doesn't make up for Shakespeare thinking people should be able to swallow that turn-on-a-dime tripe like his ridiculous characters do.

This isn't the first time that I've read this, but as is always the case I give a quiet groan at the length of it and then promptly get so swept up I no longer care that it's 600+ pages. (Which doesn't stop me groaning again the next time I read it, the prejudice against length being more firmly seated than individual recognition, apparently.) But it's just very, very compelling - even though you know exactly what you're going to get. Look, this is a haunted house story. Things start out okay, then get mildly creepy, then turn to custard, and finally Chekhov's Boiler does it all in. Even if you haven't read it before you know what's going to happen.

Thing is, the Torrance family is living a quiet little suburban nightmare long before they get to the Overlook. Alcoholism, family violence, and though they're dragging themselves up out of the pit and into functional happy relationships again, a haunted house (hotel) is not a place in which to build a home. And watching Jack Torrance, especially, unravel in all the ways he's quietly been terrified that he could, is riveting. And all the while his wife and son are struggling to separate what-could-have-been with what-is, which is also what-could-have-been in another life, or in mirrors. Redrum indeed.

The Shining isn't my favourite of King's books. That will always be Carrie and, my love for haunted house fiction aside, that bloody clown is still scarier than the Overlook, creepy as it is. (Although, to be fair, if The Shining doesn't have a clown it also doesn't have that god-awful pre-teen gang-bang, so it's six of one and half a dozen of the other there.)

This beautifully illustrated book contains one of my favourite poems ever, "The Raven", the creepy cadence of which more than compensates for the purple sentimentality and old fashioned language. Poe's other poems don't fare so well, but his short stories age better, I think, at least some of them. With all the good will in the world I can't take "The Tell-Tale Heart" seriously (it must be the most sudden loss of control to madness in all of literature; from collected murderer to shrieking loon in less than a page) but I will never not find "The Fall of the House of Usher" disturbing - and on multiple levels.

A collection of journalistic essays that are really linked only by being horrifying and dangerous. Most of them are related to war in some way (like Junger's investigations in Kosovo or Sierra Leone, for example) but a small number are entirely different. The title, for instance, refers to the opening essay on fighting forest fires, and there's another piece on whaling. Junger's extremely easy to read - this is the second book of his I've read and he manages to be intelligent and informative without being wordy or judgemental. That being said, you wouldn't catch me wandering around a civil war being shot at for a story. It's a necessary job, I grant you, and fascinating to read about but I reckon there's got to be something that attracts a certain type of person to danger and that person is not me.

Best entry here, I think, was the one co-written with Scott Anderson on the political stalemate going on in Cyprus. Really, really interesting stuff, with a conclusion that does its level best to wrench the potential for hope out of determined misery.