octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

An interesting book, though it is very sad. This doesn't cover the whole of Edwards' life - as the title says, it's the early years: primarily her childhood, though the last few chapters cover her life as a young adult.

The book is mostly concerned with isolation, from both self and culture. Edwards started primary school in the mid-1920s, I think, at a time when the New Zealand school system tried to squash the Maori language out of its students. Felt so sorry for the poor little kid that she was, getting beaten by her teacher for not understanding English and speaking her own language. But the great tragedy of this can only be seen in the years of aftermath, in Mihi's perspective of herself...

Thought-provoking and sympathetic. I think there's a sequel? Will have to look it up.

There's an underlying streak of really black humour in here that I enjoyed - the air-holes that went through the coffin and into Addie's face, the insistence of the youngest child that his dead mother is a fish, and the introduction at the end (which I will not spoil, but which is absolutely of a piece with the man making it). It's a book that slowly pulls you in, but I'm also deeply grateful that it's relatively short, because the characterisations, while done well within their limits, are extraordinarily narrow. Every member of this deeply unlikeable family is given one character trait to distinguish them from the hydra-like incapacity of their near relations, and Faulkner hammers those single traits over and over... and over. He's so unsubtle with it that I'm sick of them all long before the book is over, and if I had had to read Cash yammering on about coffins and building and wood for a single page more I would have started burning things down.

Really the only impression I'm left with is that Addie is likely glad that she's dead, if only because she's leaving this family of idiots behind her. Also, she is a fish with holes in her face.

I'd never heard of Berrigan before I read this - I was looking for something to read to satisfy the "book written in prison" task for Book Riot's Read Harder 2019 challenge and stumbled across it. Berrigan, a member of the Catonsville Nine, was a Jesuit priest who was jailed for destroying government draft records during the Vietnam War, of which he was a fervent protestor. The poems were written during his stint in jail, and to be honest at first I didn't think they were very good. The collection's structured into three parts, and while the first part has some good poems ("Billy Bones", for one) it wasn't until the long poems of part two came along that the whole thing really kicked up into gear. "For Philip's Birthday", "My Father", and (later) "Uncle Sam, You're a Card" are outstanding. There's such a mix of pulsating rage at the monstrous acts taking place in the war (My Lai is mentioned over and over) along with the absolute disgust at a prison industry which takes advantage of the inmates to manufacture weapons which will kill the economically disadvantaged of another country - getting the poor and desperate to wage war on the poor and desperate, essentially.

Despite the rocky start, the collection becomes enormously compelling. Ugly, angry, but compelling. Very glad I read it.

Oh, I am in two minds about this book. The larger part of mind really enjoys the main character. Aza is suffering from mental illness, and it's not an illness that I'm at all familiar with, really, but the portrayal of it was genuinely affecting. There's an underlying image of a spiral woven through this book and I could feel her thoughts taking on that shape over and over. Everything about Aza herself, and about her illness, is just so well done. It felt believable, and awful, and threatening. It felt realistic, too, in the way that it affected Aza's relationships with other people. In fact, I think my favourite part of the book is Aza's relationship with best friend Daisy, and how Aza's illness can at times come between them but that they're both determined to maintain the friendship anyway, despite any and all challenges and feelings of sometimes resentment.

I wish Green had kept the focus of the book on that relationship. Instead there's also a love interest, which drops this book down to three stars when, without Davis, I think I'd have given it four. It's not that I object to romance in novels, far from it, but come on... the son of a missing criminal billionaire? Everything about that storyline is ludicrously over the top. I can't take it seriously for a minute. To be honest, it reminds me a bit of the only other Green novel I've read. I also loved the main character of The Fault in Our Stars, and I also found her boyfriend/love interest deeply uninteresting. I don't know whether it's that Green is better at writing teen girls than he is teen boys, or if it's the first person narrative that makes the difference, but while I find his voice so likeable to read, he's zero for two on compelling romance, at least for me.

Subtle as a brick to the back of the head, this is still a fun, easy read. Dawson really succeeds at getting the voices of the characters right - I could hear them saying what she wrote. As well, the pacing's pretty good, as the story bounces quickly along, keeping enough interest so that I was able to read it in a single sitting, and every one of the show's main characters get their own plotline so that's nicely well-balanced.

That said, though the problem of racism this story explores is particularly well-suited to this iteration of Doctor Who, it relies on that old heavy-handed chestnut of history or scripture misinterpreted to build an unjust society, which realistic as it may be I feel I've read approximately three thousand times before. Also, and I know this is picky, but so much of the imagery of coming together here is in the cross-species relationships, as the canine Loba interbreed with the human colonists of their world, and I know this is a metaphor for inter-racial relationships, and still my biologist self can't stop thinking "but it doesn't work like that!" Nitpicks aside though, this is, as I said, still a fun read. I haven't read Dawson before but I hope she's writing more books for this franchise because I'd happily read them.

This is not the first time I've read Gormenghast. It will not be the last. I adore everything about it - the imagery, the plot, the language. The utter ridiculousness and tragedy of the characters. True, I am less interested in Titus than I am in everyone around him - the most compelling of the characters in this volume is surely the Countess Gertrude, with a strong supporting role going to the comic hideousness of Irma Prunesquallor - but Titus is there to represent a feeling, a desire for escape, a way out of monument. Because that's what Gormenghast Castle is: a monumental beast of a place, one which looms and smothers and covers everything over with the dust of centuries.

I'd still give my eye teeth to be able to explore it. Or to be able to write like this. Oh, Mr. Peake. How sorry I am for what happened to you. It was cruelty worse than Steerpike.

Fun and entirely frivolous story of a woman who neutralises supernatural power with a touch, and the werewolf who's in love with her. It's all set in an alternate universe Victorian era where vampires and werewolves are an accepted part of life, integrated into social circles and the like, and it's interesting to see how society has changed because of that. Also interesting is the tone, and here I use the word "interesting" advisedly. It's very attractive - a sort of humorous, flippant, chatty voice, but it's also so very consistent that it becomes at times unbelievable and inappropriate. Kidnapping, murder, torture, and that tone remains unvaried. It's like seeing Elizabeth Bennet bounce her way through Mr. Darcy's awful proposal, giggling all the way. Well, maybe not that bad, but the style of writing, unusually, works both for and against the story at the same time. I mean, I enjoyed reading it and it's very easy to swallow, but with the best will in the world I couldn't take it at all seriously, and everyone's so buttered over with this same glossy finish that I couldn't catch enough on any of them to really care.

If only all philosophy was written so clearly. (Well, except for the paragraphs that would go on for pages, that is.) Even so, Mill's work is not only clear, it's concise, and his argument for individual liberty and the restriction of state power is a convincing one. The second chapter, "Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion", was particularly excellent, the high point of the book. The discussion therein, tracing all the ways in which the repression of questioning and alternate opinion has degenerative effects on both individual and society, left me in no doubt as to why this book has the reputation that it does.

I do think that, overall, there could have been a bit more practical example in here, though. The final chapter did go some way towards this, but it was the least well-written and the most inclined to wander in its focus. That goes some way towards the lost star, as does the streak of racism which appears in parts of the book. The argument that "barbarian" races needed to be supervised rather as children are, to gradually earn their liberty in some nebulous and better-educated future, seems to me to be part of the unquestioned beliefs that Mill argues so carefully against in chapter two, referenced above. Which goes to show that everyone has their blind spots, I suppose.

This is the second book from Walter I've read (and the second I'm reviewing for Strange Horizons - review to come) and I like it as much as I liked the first. In some ways the books are similar - apocalypse comes to Australia and people have to cope. In this book, however, it's not a long slow drought that's the culprit. Giant, freakish monsters are hauling themselves out of sea and going on the rampage, and there's genuinely nothing that can be done about it. The armed forces try, scientists try, but humanity is enormously overmatched and going down. I love that the book makes no bones about this. There's no last minute magic save, it's extermination all the way. Yet what I enjoy more - and what seems to be a feature of Walter's work, what I've read of it anyway - is that it's filled with decent people doing the best that they can for themselves and for each other. Apocalypse is a genre that often wallows in the worst of humanity - we're running out of people and resources, let's resort to evil acts to hoard and reproduce! - but he steadily refuses to fall into this particular pit of misery, preferring to present people as their better selves.

I so enjoy that.

A collection of essays about science, that while covering a wide range of topics is still clearly set at time of writing (the early 1970s). Science moves relatively fast, so it's inevitable that some of what's written here is out of date, but a lot of it still holds up, being concerned with, for instance, developments in the history of science as well as predictions for the far future. In general, I found the future-focused essays more interesting than the science-past theme. Partly this was because a lot of the ground covered in the latter was already known to me, and partly because the former had two areas of interest. There are the predictions themselves, and then there's the more distanced, reader view of looking back at how those predictions match up with the world of 50 odd years ago. Would our view of the amusement parks of the future be any more accurate, I ask myself? I suspect not, but those views would say something about us to our descendants...