octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

A close-up description of life in a single platoon during the conflict in Afghanistan. The author was an embedded journalist and his approach is really interesting. He focuses less on the cause and effect of the war than he does on the psychological toll it takes - and the changes it makes - in the young soldiers around him. There's an impressive list of psychological studies in the back of the book, and he refers to these throughout in trying to explain the effects that war has on the individual soldier, and on small groups of such.

It's kind of a depressing read, in that I ended wondering just how any of these men could possibly integrate back into society once they left the military - but they're wondering too, and not at all confident of their ability to do so.

Well this is monumentally depressing. It's been on my list of classics to read for a while now, though I've been put off slightly as, even though I didn't know the story, the book has a reputation for being, well, monumentally depressing. Poor Tess. Everything that can go wrong for her does, and the beauty of Hardy's prose, and the genuine sympathy he seems to have for his heroine, doesn't make up for the emotional train wreck that is reading about her life.

In many ways, Tess of the D'Urbervilles is an unflinching illustration of why feminism is necessary. Forced through economic necessity to work for a man she does not trust, who routinely harasses her, Tess is eventually raped by him and has, of course, no recourse. Oh, he offers to marry her but if it's a choice between the respectability of marriage to a monster and going home to bear an illegitimate child in shame, well. It's a brave choice, but one no victim should ever have to make. Of course all the blame and notoriety is hers, and just when she makes a new life with an apparently decent man, he finds out what happened to her. Angel Clare unbends enough to comment that she's "more sinned against than sinning" (big of you, you unbelievable prig) and we see in the wreck of a marriage just how belief in the necessity of feminine purity has undermined the sense and dignity of both husband and wife. Essentially abandoned, the worst is yet to come for Tess, because her rapist is back, apparently in love and blaming her for all his lack of self-control, and I don't even want to describe the rest of it. Safe to say that it's no surprise the ludicrous melodrama of an ending comes as something of a relief to our poor heroine.

Hardy's criticism of the judgements and moral choices of his characters is painful and accurate, and that last groping towards moral evolution in Clare, at least, shows how very badly the entire society portrayed in this giant heap of unhappiness needs such a development. Had Tess been treated, at any point, as a person valuable in her own right rather than the eternal victim, much of the worst of this could have been avoided. But she's not a person, not to the people around her. Not really. She's a woman, which is less - an empty vessel for unrealistic expectation and entitlement, and even the girls who are her genuine friends aren't enough to counter the crushing weight of religion and patriarchy that destroys her. I say it again: monumentally depressing.

There's a lot to like about this book, and that's mostly to do with the narrator. Laura-the-character is immensely relatable, and Laura-the-author writes in accessible, evocative prose. She's particularly good at describing the natural world, for instance the wildlife that lives on the prairie. It's all done from a child's point of view, of course, and from a reader's perspective it's clear that more is going on than that child understands, but this sort of dual vision is done very successfully, I think.

However. This book is genuinely racist. I know, product of its time and so forth, but still. As happy and hardworking and otherwise admirable as Charles and Caroline are, it's damn hard to like them given they're so very frank about stealing land from the native Americans. (Laura raises the odd good point about this, but is basically told to shut up with her questions.) I was really quite delighted when the family had to leave at the end - what goes around comes around, eh? But still, as a snapshot of the good and bad of settler life, it remains an interesting one.

This is a simple, well-told little story about Laura's life on a frontier homestead, in Wisconsin of all places. The book basically spans an entire year, mostly I think to show the wide range of seasonal tasks; each part of the year has its necessary jobs, and although Laura is often on the sidelines of these because of her age, it's still an enjoyable read that gives a real flavour (albeit I suspect a little idealised) of what her life was like. Being mildly food obsessed, the chapter on maple syrup tapping and preparation was my favourite, and I was also delighted to discover that there's such a thing as a vinegar pie. Which sounds dreadful at first glance, but I've just looked up the recipe and it looks alright actually! I'm genuinely interested in giving it a go so thanks, Laura's Ma, because more pudding is exactly what I need from life.

Mixed feelings about this one. It took me an age to get into it - the second half is much pacier than the first, which has a kind of slow soporific effect that I suppose mimics Emma's stultifying experience of domestic life. As the story went on, though, I began to enjoy it a lot more. Much of that is down to tone. Flaubert is clearly a snark of the highest order. I mean, this book is technically a tragedy, as Emma ruins her own life, the lives of everyone in her family, and ultimately dies horribly, but even so it almost rises to the point of being bleakly funny. It seems to me that the author's absolutely aware of the potential for sly humour in his heroine's ridiculousness, although the introduction to the edition I read says that Emma is, in part, based on a cherished sister of his who died young, so maybe he's not deliberately making fun, I don't know. He's certainly got more sympathy for his heroine than I do. I had a bit of pity for her at first but Emma was so effective at sabotaging herself at every turn, so over the top and overwrought and, let's face it, such a complete and utter nitwit, that I was kind of glad she kicked the bucket. It was very much "Yeah, you've hit rock bottom, just get it over with so I don't have to slog through another hundred pages of you". Which, considering Flaubert's genuinely admirable and frequently cutting prose, is perhaps an ungenerous estimation.

Lovely little chapbook of poems that are specifically about science - often about scientists themselves, particularly those who have been historically marginalised in some way. Included as subjects, for instance, are Alan Turing and Lise Meitner, along with a number of lesser known scientists, many of whom I'm going to go and look up now. It's a short collection, only twelve poems (though some of these are fairly long) and I wish there was more of it because everything in here was well worth reading. It's taken some doing, but I think I've finally decided on my favourite: "noble, nobel" by na'amen, about three women who didn't win Nobel prizes. Mostly because I've written a novelette recently with the exact same premise and two of the same scientists, though where na'amen uses Jocelyn Bell Burnett I used Rosalind Franklin. Fascinating to come across something so similar and yet so different!

I don't want to think of this as Journey to the Centre of the Earth with a Squid, but I do. It's a comparison that's only mildly accurate. Casp and their cephalopod sidekick are squeezing a living out of cargo runs, when the scientist daughter of an extremely rich man hires them and their vessel to explore a network of underground tunnels. It's essentially a cave system, going deeper into the earth, and of course they discover new and exciting things, because that's what happens in exploration adventures. There's a reason it's a popular genre!

Anyway, I really enjoyed the world building and the characterisation. Being raised on Star Trek has left clear imprints though, because with this established world of interplanetary travel and multiple species living and working together, the diversity factor has a clear and positive impact - except that Casp, our protagonist, is non-binary and this is somehow seen as exclusionary and causing family problems in a universe defined by different identities. Science fiction has always been metaphor, and I suppose it's a comment on the longevity and hypocrisy of prejudice, because there's something very dispiriting about a community that's able to accept any number of alien species but no divergence from gender norms in their own. It's an interesting perspective, watching these two facets of the society rub up against each other. By far my favourite part of the book, however, was the world building at the end. I don't want to spoil or give things away, but in the explanation for the title of the book Buchanan hits that sci-fi sense-of-wonder button hard. I actually got chills, which was delightful.

Not a one-star read, but not very far from it. I just can't with this series. I know some people love it, and I've slogged my way through it in my ongoing attempt to read through the backlist of Mythopoeic Award nominees, but something about it just rubs me the wrong way. Which is a shame, as I loved Stiefvater's The Scorpio Races, but there it is.

The reasons I feel about this last volume are the same reasons for the way I felt about the previous volumes. I do enjoy the imagery. Stiefvater has a real ability to produce stunning, evocative images and all credit to her for that. It's just overshadowed by the characters, who I mostly can't stand and who I can never take seriously. The enormously pretentious, enormously overwritten characters, who never feel like actual people to me. They're melodrama forced into human form. It's there in the supporting cast as well, but the main characters are the biggest offenders - Gansey and Ronan particularly. Four books of prophecy says the former was going to die, but he's just so unlikeable to me I knew I was never going to get that lucky. In fact, the whole slavish, obnoxious prologue dripping on about how kingly and wonderful he was might have been neon signage for plot armour, because we were never going to be shot of him. Frankly, I resent that the only character I really warmed to in this entire purple prose of characters come to life, Cabeswater Forest, has to be done away with to save his tiresome arse.

Rarely have I come across stories with a cast I roll my eyes at so much. God, they're awful.

Honestly, I was expecting a little more from this. From the most literal perspective, I suppose it does what it says on the tin. This small anthology, consisting of six stories and a poem, is indeed a collection of sci-fi stories set in the future, and they are all written by women. That said, when you have a title like that, you are given to expect, I think, some sort of reason behind it. The introduction is all about encouraging diversity in tech, in getting more women into STEM, so you would think that the stories would have a strong focus on gender, on how women authors and characters both interact with potential futures; how they are affected by them, how they come up against expectation. And a couple of the stories - by Khaw and Ashby - do do this, but the rest are a little more mish-mash, and a little less concerned with theme. (This doesn't necessarily make these other stories bad. The one stand-out of the collection, "Chrysalis" by Becky Chambers, was excellent, but it was also a story where genders could have been changed without any impact on plot or theme.)

Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed the anthology, but if you're going to set up an anthology around a central conceit, as this does, don't go milquetoast on it... go the whole hog. An anthology like this should have been innovative and cutting and confronting, a range of stories with the punch of Khaw's... but it wasn't.

This was excellent. A mythological, feminist retelling centred around a side character of The Odyssey, it puts forward, among other things, an alternate interpretation of Odysseus. I mean yes, he's a hero who lives by his wits, but he uses those wits to do some pretty terrible things, and it's no surprise really that the man who comes home to his long-suffering family isn't someone they really want around. But as much as I'm leading with him, Odysseus is really only a side character himself here. The primary focus is the nymph Circe, a divine and eternal figure who's extremely low down the godly hierarchy, and is used by pretty much every other divinity as some sort of kicking ball. It can get a little frustrating, how she falls over and over again for the idea that they've got any skerrick of interest in her other than what she can do to further their own ends, but the fact that she's frustrated with herself over this failing gives a self-awareness to the narrative which is perhaps its strongest point - knowing your flaws doesn't automatically fix them, after all. And Circe's fundamental realisation of her own helplessness - underlined by a really unnecessary rape scene which knocks this down from five stars for me - is the impetus for her deciding to go in another direction.

I'm not sure how much of what happens here is actually mythological, and what's made up out of whole cloth. I believe that, in the mythology, Circe had three sons, but Miller sensibly reduces them to one, which is I think a good choice as he borders on irritating. But the mix of fact and fiction (or should I say fiction and fiction) still works really well. I gobbled this down in one sitting, it was so entertaining and smooth to read. Both Circe-the-character and Telemachus were particularly well drawn. Highly recommended.