octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I don't know how many times I've read this book, but it's a lot. I've just done so again, so thought it was time to log it here. I always got on better with this book than Sophie's World, because as clever as that is in talking about philosophy, I get more of that speculative staple, the sense of wonder, from Solitaire. And it's structured so carefully too, stories within stories wrapped up in a pack of cards, with images and relationships echoing each other across generations. Young Hans Thomas, off on a road trip with his dad to convince his mum to come home to them, is given a miniature book that's baked into a sticky bun by a baker who is far more than he seems. In that book is history and mirrors and magic, shipwrecks and goldfish and the most marvellous drink in the world... and a joker who, like the baker, knows more than he's letting on.

It's all deeply imaginative and utterly delightful.

I ended up feeling that this was a little sillier than the earlier books in the series, but it's still basically okay. Best part of it is that the dragons are utterly sick of the wizards and have just started eating them, which seems infinitely preferable to banishing them with dish soap and lemon juice. I mean, I'm sure it's fun to see them melt but they reform in a matter of days and go straight back to their destructive ways so really, a permanent solution seems sensible. If you'd only grasped that, Cimorene, this book wouldn't have ended the way that it does, but then I expect you're restricted by the target audience. Your child readers probably aren't up for murder, but like Kazul I'm getting fed up with wizards in this series... it rather feels like the same problem every book. I did like the addition of the talking cats, but Killer the rabbit/flying donkey became very tedious very quickly.

Oh, this is a weird and creepy little out-take from the Gormenghast series, wherein a boy who is clearly Titus runs away for a day to have an adventure. He comes up against the Lamb, a blind, terrifying figure who lives underground and who through force of will changes (mutilates) humans into the bestial equivalents of their character. The Lamb's cringing, violent henchmen, Goat and Hyena, are equally frightening, and once the boy falls into their clutches he risks being changed as well. There's just so much packed into this novella, and even were it handed to me with all the cover and front pages ripped off I'd know it for Peake, as vivid and grotesque as the language and images are. It's wonderful and terrible together.

Well this is super-cute. Mr. and Mrs. Mallard find an out of the way place to raise their ducklings, but as the kids get a bit older they decide to move to the public garden. There's a lot of roads between the garden and their island home, and a lot of opportunity for squashed duckling, but thanks to a number of friendly policemen who clearly have nothing better to do than to stop traffic for wildlife, they all get there safely. It's kind and very mildly quirky, and the simple pencil drawings are both realistic and effective. I'd say it's a very old-fashioned type of picture book, but I remember a news article from the end of last year here in New Zealand, where police stopped cars on the Auckland motorway to let a family of ducklings cross, so good nature continues on much as it always has, I reckon.

Whenever I read Roald Dahl I'm struck by the images of his illustrator, Quentin Blake. Rarely has there been a more perfect merger between writer and artist; they are utterly inseparable to me. I have to say, though, when I think of Matilda (and this is far from the first time that I've read it) the image that comes to mind is not that of the title character. Instead, it's the Trunchbull about to crack a plate over the head of Bruce Bogtrotter. That drawing cracks me up every time I see it. The dopey, satisfied beam on poor wee Bruce's straining face... I find it hilarious. And the rest of the book's pretty good too. I always enjoy how Dahl is absolutely willing to skewer horrible children and their equally horrible parents, and Matilda - the cuckoo in the nest of her vacuous, criminal family - has the intelligence to realise just how unlike them she is, and to navigate a way out. She's such an appealing heroine, and I wish there'd been more of her adventures with Lavender and Lavender's newt, and maybe their friend Nigel as well, because he had gumption too.

Unrelentingly dreary.

No, that's not quite accurate. Every few pages there is a sentence of considerable power (my favourite being "She thought maybe he lived in a kind of time that had no narrative quality") but for the most part, I didn't find the prose enjoyable. It reminded me a little of Lolita, actually, not in style or content or anything like that, but because it has the same quality of unremitting consistency, the droning of a single note. I did like the idea behind the story, but perhaps it's my own preference for speculative fiction that caused me to find the presentation of that idea so muted, so closed in on itself, that it stifled most of the potential wonder and horror it could have had.

2.5 stars, rounding up to 3. I want to like this better than I do. I enjoy the fact that this is a book of poems about friendship between girls. The relationship between them is warm and supportive, and even though they fight occasionally they always come back to each other. That this friendship is so successfully sketched out in just over a dozen short poems is genuinely impressive. That said, I didn't think the poems themselves were that great. They're likeable enough, and maybe it's just that I tend to find rhyming poems a hard sell at the best of times, but there were a few places where it all just felt a bit clunky to me. The illustrations are absolutely beautiful, though.

This collection of short fiction from Mervyn Peake has three forewords and six stories, which is an amusing ratio. The bulk of the collection, though, is made up of the novella "Boy in Darkness", which has previously been published separately (I read and reviewed one of those separate editions just recently). It's an outstanding piece of work, and I gave it five stars, so it's mildly unfortunate that it gets dragged down a little here by the other five creative pieces. All short stories, there's a couple that didn't really work for me - "The Connoisseurs" is non-genre and very slight, with an ending a blind man could see coming, and despite Peake's always interesting prose I simply couldn't get into "The Weird Journey". Of the rest, the other general fiction story here, "I Bought a Palm-Tree" is autobiographical and at least mildly amusing. However both "Danse Macabre" and "Same Time, Same Place" are excellent, being both tinged with the bizarre and just flat-out creepy. Given that "Boy in Darkness" is as much horror as fantasy, it seems to me it would have been more sensible to pair it with stories like the last two, rather than diluting the emotional effect with palm trees and old vases.

This is lovely. Fantastic illustrations, fantastic story. Unsurprisingly to anyone who has them, multiple cats can be evil little terrors. They squabble and gorge, and sending a pet hoarder off to the local cat hill to choose one is a recipe for disaster such that even the hoarder comes to see the error of his ways. One cat, however, treated well and looked after, is the happy pet the hoarder and his wife were looking for, and the whole thing's presented with such good humour and such a sense of the ridiculous that it's a pleasure to read.

For the first half of this novella, I confess I was ready to award two stars. The protagonist is a teen surfer called Ward, and I did not enjoy the language. (When I say that I'm not referring to swearing, but the fact that every other sentence felt like, you know, I mean like, yeah? And I've never seen so many run-on sentences in my life, although admittedly they gave a sense of rhythm to the text.) Thank goodness in the second half the descriptions of water, of the ocean, took over. In fairness this was a strong feature of the first half too, but the hammering informality of the language, echoing teen boy patterns as it did, just overshadowed everything else for a while.

The book's really more prose poetry than prose, very loosely structured and shifting out of first and third person, exploring Ward's relationship with the sea and with his father. Like many novellas, it's less about plot than image and emotional resonance, and for me the first was the most successful here. Novella or not, Ward spent so much time moping over his family circumstances that I spent a good part of the book hoping he'd be eaten by a shark.