octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

3.5 stars, rounding up to 4. I gobbled this down in a day, it was such an easy read. Though when I say 'easy", I'm not referring to the subject matter, which was pretty grim, but the nice smooth prose and the compelling storyline, which made me keep just keep turning pages.

Anyway, there's an interesting premise here: a serial killer comes into possession of a house which allows him to travel through time. Concentrate when he leaves and he's in the 1930s, concentrate again and the next time he leaves he's in the 1980s, and so forth. Said killer is sadistic and more than a little insane and he bounces about the timeline, linking his victims in a number of ways... until he botches a murder. Kirby survives, thanks largely to her poor, doomed little dog, and she begins to hunt in turn. It's sort of cat-and-mouse through time, and it's really interesting to read. I did, to be honest, get a little tired of all the depictions of the different murders - if there's one thing that's hammered over and over again in crime fiction it's the tortured death of women - and the reliance on that trope is what's keeping this from an unmitigated 4 stars. All the victims are given some sense of life by the text, but it's a brief sketch for most of them, and to be honest I'm failing to see why this story had to focus on the determined butchery of women as opposed to a broader victim set.

You know, I handwave a lot of stuff away about these books. (Well, not really, but I've come to accept that Benny will always be obnoxious, that these kids are nosy and spoilt, and that Grandfather is really quite a disturbing figure.) But why, why, why does everyone around them have to be so stupid? Apart from Carter, of course, but he's on retainer so he doesn't count. It's like the whole world is full of incompetents and they barely muddle along with life until the Aldens come along to set them straight. And yeah, this is a function of juvenile mysteries - I grew up on Trixie Belden - but still. Anyway, in this volume the family go off on a whim to a small fishing village, with the stated intention of poking round until they find something to investigate. And, quite coincidentally, the village is full of people being cheated by a smuggler and children being deprived of education... despite the fact that a rich old writer owns the schoolhouse and has donated a town library and helps schools all over the country. But that writer is a woman, and in this series that means situational incompetence, so the kids of the village can't read, and their parents aren't lifting a finger to teach them.

The stupid, it burns.

It's taken me a while to get to the concluding volume in this series, but it was well worth it: the best of the lot. Arendt is at her most readable when she's talking about people instead of theory, and Totalitarianism is, at its heart, a book about people. About how they can be made into murderers, about how they can be made into victims, about how they can be convinced to live in a state where they could be either at any moment. It's terrifying reading, really, plotting out point by point how secret police and concentration camps and getting whole communities to conspire together in literal fictions combine to form a society of utter ruthlessness, and utter shapelessness.

Really, although I have the collected work in front of me I'm glad I read it in the three separate parts. The concluding volume, at least, should be compulsory reading for all, because it's hard not to read the manipulations of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and see their small counterparts today. Absolutely chilling.

Although I have this edition sitting in front of me, I read The Origins of Totalitarianism in three separate volumes - these have been reviewed separately, so this is basically just for my own records. (It's a dense and enormous book, and it was easier both physically and mentally to split it into three reads.)

This rating is an average, basically. Antisemitism, the first volume, was theory-heavy and a bit of a slog. I gave it three stars, because although I enjoyed it and found it valuable it was honestly clear as mud sometimes, improving somewhat when Arendt moved to concrete examples. Imperialism was a dramatic improvement at four stars, with a really interesting exploration of colonialism and an extensive case study on South Africa which matched up theory and history in a much more successful way than the first volume. Totalitarianism, however, was excellent. A five star book, and one which should be compulsory reading I think. In some ways, the first two volumes were sort of background information for this last volume, which could stand on its own and which is a ruthlessly clear look at the manipulations and violence and fictions of totalitarian regimes. Thoroughly recommended.

This is a likeable little story about a brat mouse who gets cross with her teacher after he stops her showing off and interrupting the class. Her behaviour, unsurprisingly, improves as the story goes on and it has the requisite happy ending, but the main point of interest here is the illustrations. These are often very tongue in cheek, with little background details emphasising the fact that all the characters are rodents (lesson posters on types of cheese, for example). It's cute while being only a little saccharine.

Continuing my read through the New York Public Library's 100 Great Children's Books List, and this little picture book is really quite lovely. It's not very complicated - few picture books are - just a small story about a house and the city that grows up around it over time. As is frequently the case with good picture books, it's the illustrations that really make it. They're simple, and slowly changing, but you can pick out the details of years passing as you read through the book, in small ways like the different types of carriages, or farm buildings appearing in the background. It's a shame the house can't find a single thing to enjoy about living in the city (and it eventually gets shifted back to its preferred country setting) but the way Burton writes about nature indicates that the house has taken on the preferences of the author. And there's nothing wrong with that.

It's been a while since I read the first book in this series - I kind of got sidetracked by Carriger's related Finishing School series - so it was nice to get back into it. I just felt like something fun and flippant to read today, and this fit the bill. I continue to like Alexia, despite finding her a wee bit smug, and as with the FS series I really do enjoy most of the supporting characters. Ivy, especially, I find hilarious, in a trainwreck sort of way. I thought the plot was a bit stronger this time as well - certainly it was more focused - and the idea behind it all was really interesting: a weapon that could temporarily neutralise both vampires and werewolves. What that weapon turned out to be, and what it means for future instalments in the series, was fantastic.

The only downside for me was Maccon, who I've never found all that attractive, and whose character, never very thick in the first place, has become paper thin. All he seems to do here is roar and flirt, and he's not interesting enough at either to care about. I sincerely hope the next volume sees Alexia, Ivy, Madame Lefoux and Lord Akeldama politicking on their own and without too much drama from Alexia's tiresome husband, the Werewolf Stomp-A-Lot, as I've taken to calling him. Carriger's characters always seem to have much more appealing friendships than relationships...

I think I'm just going to have to accept that Carriger and romance don't mix well for me. I enjoy her writing, I enjoy the world that she creates, and I enjoy her characters... but over two series now I find the romantic elements are easily the weakest parts of her stories. I just don't care - not about Maccon, and not about Alexia when she's with him. She's far more entertaining running around Europe with her friends, troughing down pesto and tackling both the Templars and the infant-inconvenience that is her pregnancy. The politics of how this world holds together, vampires and werewolves and state secrets, religious fanaticism, supernatural weaponry, and etiquette, is just so much more interesting than this one-note relationship. Was genuinely disappointed when they made up at the end.

This fairy tale retelling is the Chinese version of Little Red Riding Hood. While I've not read the Chinese version before, if Young's retelling is accurate there's some definite crossover (this must be an old story). There's still very much the "what big claws you have, Granny" effect going on, although the wolf dies in a very different way, with the three young sisters in no need of a huntsman when they've got their own brains to save them. The illustrations are attractive and dreamy, but none of them have the strength and punch of the cover image - primarily, I think, because it's in shades of red and orange and the illustrations inside tend more to pastels. I wish that cover aesthetic had stuck through the whole story!

I actually read and reviewed separately the three books collected in this volume, so this is really just for my own records. The rating for the collection is the average of the individual volumes - in this case a very simple average, as I gave them all three stars. This is a fun and absolutely frivolous series, and I say that not to put down the frivolous... sometimes you're in the kind of reading mood where only frivolous will do, and this is the literary equivalent of a big pile of whipped cream with some little biscuits to dunk into it. I enjoy the alternate universe that's been devised here, where vampires and werewolves are part of the established social and political system of Victorian England; it's entertaining to see them all play off against each other. Less entertaining is the romance, but after the first volume the romance sort of becomes a mild background to the plot rather than paranormal romance proper. The strong cast of supporting characters more than makes up for it, although I'd love to see more of Ivy, who I find absolutely hilarious.