octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This was a fantastic read! I have to admit that the prose is fairly workmanlike, but the scientific intellect behind it is compelling and enormously influential. Kalema-Zikusoka, who is Uganda's first wildlife vet, began her career working with the gorillas of that country. It soon became plain to her, however, that disease could cross over from human to gorilla and back, and so - to be an effective environmentalist - she had to find a way to merge conservation and public health. By the end of the book, she's spent some thirty years with this as her focus, and it is the best illustration I've ever read about the importance of breaking down barriers between conservation and other economic and social practices.

The Ugandan gorillas mean tourist dollars, and so there's an economic incentive to protecting those animals - which means that issues of infection, agriculture, birth control, education, and business come into play as supporting pillars in conservation. It's clear, too, that although gorillas are Kalema-Zikusoka's primary conservation focus, that the interconnection of human and nonhuman that she explores here can be applied to other species. The brief example of the hippos dropping dead after contracting anthrax, for example, was shocking. 

This is going on my list of books to buy (as this one has to be returned to the library today). What an excellent argument for conservation, and what a fantastic scientist Kalema-Zikusoka is! 

Again, I've read and reviewed all the novels collected here separately, so this is for my own records. All the books got three stars from me, and hence the collection does as well.

I'm reading my way through this series at a very desultory rate - each volume is self-contained, so I don't need to remember much of what went on in a previous book, which is honestly quite nice. Don't get me wrong: I like the more interconnected series as well, but sometimes you just want to pick up something with characters you've read before and not have to think too deeply about what you're reading.

Of the six Kinsey books I've read so far, I think D Is for Deadbeat is the best. I probably won't read any of these again, but if I did it would be that one. It's pretty grim, but it's got a very affecting ending. 

I read and reviewed each of these separately, so this is just for my own records. I gave both books three stars, so the average isn't hard to calculate.

I've commented before, on this series, that it moves from mystery to mystery-thriller, depending on the volume. Both these books fall towards the latter end of the spectrum, and E Is for Evidence in particular really leans into the melodrama. I tend to prefer the Kinsey books that are straight mystery, but even so it's not a strong preference: I've given them all three stars, I think, no matter their position within genre, so it clearly doesn't make that much of a difference. They're popcorn reads and if I don't expect much from them, they're still enjoyable. I like the protagonist, so I'll keep reading. 

I liked this, but I do think it fell apart a little towards the end. While some of these Millhone books are straight mysteries, some add thriller elements in and this is one of those, except it doesn't quite hold together for me in that respect. I think Kinsey made it harder for herself than she needed to, and it might not have gone into thriller territory if she'd kept her head and not run haring off. I began to wonder if she was a little - not addled, but still affected by - the explosions of the last book. She felt jumpy, which is fair enough under the circumstances, but only if the story is aware of her jumpiness. It's one thing to present a character as making hasty decisions as a result of lingering trauma, and it's another to have the trauma and the hasty decisions and have the story not make the connection, averring that this is business as usual.

What I tend to like best about this protagonist is her sensible practicality, so I hope she goes home, gets hold of herself, and comes back in the next book a bit less jittery. 

I have to admit, the first half of the blurb made me think this would be a little more climate focused than it was - it speaks of melting permafrost and the secrets exposed thereby. It is hardly Mettner's fault that my mind immediately turned to mammoth carcasses and viruses!

Instead, what's unearthed is the secrets that exist in the relationship line of things - friends, lovers, politics - and the resulting poems are full of feminism and humour. I really enjoyed it. This is Mettner's second book, I understand, and I want to go and find the first one now because the poems here are so relatable that it's easy to miss how polished they are. It's a lot more difficult than it seems to produce poems that are both incisive and approachable, and I wasn't more than a few pages in before I'd entirely forgiven the lack of mammoth.

This is going on my get-a-copy-of-your-own list, given that this one has to be returned to the library. It was a pleasure to read. 

Very average little story about a young Beverly Howard (one day Crusher) at Starfleet Medical. She was always fairly thinly characterised in canon, but honestly: the protagonist here could have been anyone. Blandly pleasant, and that's about it. The story, as is so often the case in these Academy tie-in novels, is basically about ineffectual adults and the teens who solve problems for them. Which is presumably the brief, given that the series is aimed at kids, but still. It's hard to take the teachers here seriously. 

There's nothing else especially wrong with it, bar the fact that it's mildly boring. 

I know that I read this book as a kid, because there's a chapter in here that I remember more than any of Durrell's other stories. I don't remember much else about this book, enjoyable as it is, but the chapter where Gerry - promised an injured barn owl - goes for lunch with Countess Mavrodaki engraved itself upon my childhood memory. Partly because of the meal itself, which was this litany of deliciousness that very likely opened my eyes to the pleasure that could be derived from food writing, but partly because it was just so ridiculously funny.

"Owls and Aristocracy" it's called. The Countess and her butler are an elderly couple who live to good-naturedly squabble with each other, and the image of them stuffing and carping while Gerry sits there, dreaming of his owl and half stupefied with food and wine, covered in mud from falling off his donkey, and surreptitiously undoing the buttons on his shorts so as not to appear rude by gorging insufficiently, is an absolute delight. I was so glad to come across it again! 

I have to admit that I've read very little Philip K. Dick before - only Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - and while I was vaguely aware that he wrote short stories I don't remember ever reading one. Now I want to read them all. They're very, very good. In a way he reminds me a little of John Wyndham in that many of his stories fall back onto ordinary people and domestic life, as well as a sort of general sense of the humane. (Otherwise, they're quite different writers.)

It's that domestic element that most appeals to me, and the two stories that got the biggest reaction from me - "Foster, You're Dead" and "The Days of Perky Pat" - represent this in spades. The former is one of the most horrifying stories I've read in ages, as a little boy is terrified by the fact that his dad can't keep up with the Jones' when it comes to safety measures at home in case of war. It's clear that the father is right, in that it's all just a big con to sell more useless crap, but the manufactured threat of war is enough to drive that poor child out of his mind with fear. What a fantastic, awful story that was; I'll be thinking about it for a long time. You can keep your "Minority Reports" and "Adjustments Teams", compelling as they are. "Foster" is the pick of this bunch. 

A lot of these stories, to my mind, aren't really science fiction, for all they are fictions about science. I'm not entirely sure it matters, because they are fantastic stories. There's a very strong reflective effect here, both within and between narratives, and that mirrored technique is excellent. It's one I often use myself, because underlining science with human life makes it more approachable. It also makes the presentation of that science flexible, which is how you can get excellent stories about Antarctica and amorous mice and x-rays.

Anyway, I've just written a 2300 word review of this for Strange Horizons, which will - once the review has wended its way through the editing process - better illustrate just how much I like this collection and why. Subsequently I'm quite bloated with reviewing today... hence the shortness of this one. Suffice to say: You should read it, and if you have a friend named Elise/Lise/Lisa or a similar variant thereof, this might be a suitable Christmas present for them. It's just very well done. 

This is a short, gentle collection of stories featuring characters from other books in the Mangoverse. I've only read one of the novels of that series, and that was a slight disadvantage, I think - although each story had a note saying which book the characters had come from, I was clearly missing background context. That wasn't a big deal for most of the stories, but "Every Us" in particular made me feel as if I needed more information to really appreciate it.

That being said, what I most like about this collection is how kind it is. The stories tend to be stuffed full with goodhearted people doing their best to think of others and treat them well, which results in this really optimistic, friendly tone. That doesn't mean a lack of conflict - and my favourite story of the bunch, "No Whining", illustrates this when a restaurant owner is torn between finding a more reliable wine seller when doing so means letting go of a helpful young delivery driver - but it does mean that resolutions to such conflict tend more towards the conversational.