octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

What a compelling story this is! Sheba, who teaches pottery at a trashfire of a school, has an affair with a 15 year old student. It doesn't end well, as you would expect, and the whole thing is chronicled from the perspective of an older teacher, Barbara, who is horribly, cuttingly observant, and who has a nastily clear-eyed view about everything except what her own loneliness has driven her to. Barbara's a fantastic, awful, cynical character, insinuating herself into the scandal for her own satisfaction. She's the modern-day version of Mrs. Danvers, fascinated and jealous and almost sexually obsessed with Sheba, and how she contrives to manipulate their relationship is terrifying reading, filled with black humour and fixation.

2.5 stars, rounding up to 3. It's still enjoyable, but of the series so far this is the worst, I think. The problem lies not with the plot, nor with the supporting characters, who are as enjoyable as ever. I particularly liked the extra emphasis on Professor Lyall, for instance, and Ivy is always a treat. It's Alexia who's making me roll my eyes. Her soulless capacity has tended, over the series, to damp down her emotions and that's fine, but the use of this as a driver for humour becomes honestly a little bit laboured here. For instance: trapped in a hive house that's disintegrating around her, surrounded by hostile vampires and being attacked by a friend in a giant mechanical octopus, what finally causes Alexia to flip her lid is the overturning of a tray of treacle tarts. The loss of the tarts is the final straw, she shrieks, and I expect I'm supposed to find this funny but instead I'm rolling my eyes as Alexia goes from soulless to just plain silly. There's a tendency, in these books, to maintain an emotional smoothness of tone - a sort of overarching narrative smugness - and while it's entertaining to read there are points when it's plain inappropriate, turning character into caricature, and that's what happened here.

This was one of the major texts recommended to me when I first began to study algae, and it was old then. (I believe it first came out in 1982.) Often science books, particularly textbooks, become obsolete quite quickly but I've just read this again and it's as useful as it ever was, which was very. It's so useful because it's not cutting edge. I mean yes, Dring was using the most up-to-date studies available at the time when he wrote it, but this is a general, introductory text that covers all the phycological basics - for instance seaweed zonation and geographical distribution - and this is the stuff that essentially doesn't change. It's also very clearly written (at least mostly, the chapter on photosynthesis is less accessible than the others) and full of tables, figures, and illustrations to make things easier on the reader. All in all, an extremely useful reference text, even though it's closing in on 40 years since its first publication.

Pinkney's retelling of the Aesop fable is really beautifully illustrated. It's also wordless, or very nearly (little squeaks from baby mice and the hoot of a hunting owl maybe don't count) so can be enjoyed no matter the level of literacy or language held. I saw a brief YouTube interview of him a few minutes ago, after reading the book, in which he said that he did the illustrations first, planning to add the text later, before realising once the pictures were complete that the book didn't need anything else, and I thought that was interesting. It doesn't have the knock-out wow factor of some other wordless stories I've seen (I'm still blown away by Shaun Tan's The Arrival), but I enjoyed it even so.

This is a really interesting poetry collection - one that's more on the narrative side of things than is typical for poetry. 11 year old Lonnie is in foster care, separated from his little sister after their parents die suddenly in a fire. He's (understandably) very closed in on himself, and then a school teacher starts encouraging him to write poems. They're not in any sort of linear order - past and present experiences are all mixed up - but over the course of the book, the poems do form this overarching sense of hopefulness, as Lonnie bonds with his foster mum and foster brother, works through his emotions about his parents' death, and finds a way to reconnect with his sister, even though she's fostered in another family. All credit to Woodson, this must have been difficult to write. Poetry's challenging at the best of times, and trying to write poetry from the perspective of a traumatised pre-teen just increases the difficulty level. You can see the adult judgement coming through in the structure of the book, but the poems themselves seem convincingly and touchingly young.

Another great annual collection from Shimmer, though admittedly I say that with bias as one of the stories in here is mine ("The Atomic Hallows and the Body of Science"). Shimmer has a very distinct aesthetic, sort of gloomy and sad and lovely, and the stories here live up to that, though I did feel this volume had a little less horror and a little more sorrow in it overall than the 2018 volume I previously read. Still there are some fantastic stories in here... I think my favourites are "The Cold, Lonely Waters" by Aimee Ogden, "Extinctions" by Lina Rather, "Dandelion" by John Shade, "Salamander Six-Guns" by Martin Cahill, "Hare's Breath" by Maria Haskins, and "The Weight of Sentience" by Naru Dames Sundar. Lovely work, all of it, and I think it just edges out the 2018 collection for me.

I have to admit, I was hoping for a little more. There are some genuinely interesting chapters in here - the highlight being the excellent "Maiden, Mother, and Crone: Motherhood in the World of Ice and Fire" by Marta Eidsvag - but I'm left with the inescapable impression that this book was a rush job, and that some of the authors are fans of the book/television series but are not necessarily able to contextualise it within the fantasy genre as a whole. In her chapter on Daenerys, for example, Rikke Schubart states "Martin's novel is, as far as I know, the first text to establish a positive relationship between a heroine and dragons" (120), and I would imagine that anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of fantasy lit would be able to gainsay this almost immediately (Anne McCaffrey's Pern series is the obvious - but certainly not the only - counterexample).

Furthermore, there's just a number of low-level errors throughout the book - the assertion that only Arya and Brienne have named swords, the assertion that Arya's sword is called Pin, the assertion that Daenerys' grandfather is at the Wall... it's all a bit sloppy. But this doesn't really compare to the giant gaping hole that is the absence of any chapter dedicated to Sansa Stark. There's the odd paragraph about her, but no chapter focus. Given that she's one of the main characters of both book and series, this is a giant omission... one not helped by the absence of any focus on, for instance, Margaery Tyrell or her grandmother Olenna (not Oleanna, book). It's honestly baffling, and underlines the impression that this book was pushed out before time.

Despite my unending love for this series, I have to admit that Titus Alone is not quite as brilliant as the first two volumes. Peake's descent into mortal illness is all too apparent, and he simply didn't have the time to create something with the depth and breadth of Titus Groan or Gormenghast. It's one of the great literary tragedies, I think, that he died so young and so horribly, unable to truly finish what is one of the finest fantasy series of all time. But despite the lack, much of which, it has to be said, comes from the absence of Gormenghast Castle itself, there's still moments of real power here. Cheeta's recreation of Gormenghast at the Black House is both chilling and genuinely horrific, and Muzzlehatch is one of the few characters drawn sharply enough to compare with earlier inhabitants. And Titus himself, who has always been less than what was around him, begins to understand just what it means to have walked away from Gormenghast, what he has given up and will forever yearn for.

Because this series ended before its time we'll never know the ending Peake had planned for it - how Titus reconciles himself, if he can, to Gormenghast and destiny. But the sense of that great castle, crouched and waiting, survives... it permeates the text, making it something that Titus can never truly escape, and I like to think that, in the end that might have been, he never really wanted to.

I love the Gormenghast books. As far as I'm concerned they might very well be the best fantasy series of all time. Gothic, grotesque, bizarre, desperately original... they're a delight to read.

I read and reviewed the three novels collected here separately, so this is mainly for my own records. This particular collection, however, I'm also reviewing because of the included critical material, which I've just finished reading. Packing in two introductions and thirteen critical essays, they stuff this already gargantuan book to a monstrous size that is absolutely indicative of its castle setting. This critical material is nearly always interesting, but the standout piece is Hugh Brogan's essay "The Gutters of Gormenghast", which looks at how Peake's background as an artist impacted these novels. Special mentions should also go to Margaret Ochocki (for her essay "Gormenghast: fairytale gone wrong") and Laurence Bristow-Smith (for his essay "A Critical Conclusion: The End of Titus Alone").

This is a really interesting study of how women are represented in science fiction films since, essentially, the birth of that medium-genre. Unsurprisingly, that representation is either absent or minimal at first, and over the next 120 odd years its main feature is oscillation. Conrad makes the argument that progress towards realistic, diverse roles for women is both impacted by historical events and non-linear. For instance, there's a surge in female representation prompted by WW1, that not only gives women greater roles (aiding in the defence of country, for example) but also holds them up as potential victims of military invasion in a sort of now-you-have-it, now-you-don't granting of agency. Such brief steps into prominence rarely last, however, as conservative backlash returns women to supporting or stereotypical roles. This alternating effect is noted in a number of eras, with a number of different characters, and is especially noticeable in franchises like Planet of the Apes, where the initially impactful Dr. Zira is watered down or replaced entirely in the later films. It's very much two steps forward, one step back, but overall positive change is apparent, and Conrad's tracing of all the undercurrents prompting this evolution is both convincing and compelling.