octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I'm shelving this as "Arthurian" even though it doesn't actually mention Arthur, or much to do with his mythos for that matter. It does very briefly mention the Battle of Badon, however - the first source to do so, I believe - and as a result it seems to be frequently listed as the earliest piece of Arthurian literature. That's certainly why I read it.

Everything else is ranting. Seriously. Gildas was apparently one of those monks who approved of pretty much nothing, and most of "The Ruin of Britain", included here, is precisely what you'd expect from such a title. Things were bad and getting worse, and it was all everyone's fault, moral decay of society, falling away from religion, blah de blah blah. The rest of the sources are pretty much religious in nature - Gildas ranting, still, against corrupt and ineffective priests, or providing instructions on how long they're supposed to starve themselves for various offenses from accidentally vomiting up a communion wafer to bestiality (I shudder to think what went on in his abbey). There's a lengthy panegyric in there about martyrs, of whom he actually does approve, with a strong undercurrent of "You should be so grateful for the chance to be eaten by lions, you hell-bound disappointment", but for the most part it's mainly fist-shaking, and is admittedly quite amusing. If he'd lived today he'd be writing indignant pieces of outraged offense for whichever tabloid would put up with his sneering at their after-work happy hour.

This is pretty amusing, and the illustrations are fun, but I can't help but pick holes in the plot. Miss Nelson, totally ineffective as a teacher because she is desperate to be liked by her class of brats, takes on the disguise of someone mean and efficient to whip said brats into shape. And all I can think is this woman is teaching maths, and she can't figure out how to stop being an outlier and start being a happy medium.

Needless to say, I liked the evil teacher better.

Very long - overly long - story in which the gormless title character pretty much fails at life, over and over again. Born to an impoverished Hindu family in the West Indies, Mr. Biswas - and the book, which covers his entire life, refers to him as Mr. Biswas from birth (which is the most amusing thing about it) - marries at a young age into a family like a hydra: many-headed and suffocating. Mr. Biswas and his equally young bride barely know each other and are desperately ill-suited. Worse, her family is deeply overbearing. In fairness, though, they kind of need to be, as Mr. Biswas is so generally useless, so consistently ineffectual, that if the in-laws didn't overbear his wife and children would likely end up starving and homeless. Mr. Biswas is deeply resentful of this interference, and if there was any part of me that liked any part of him I might care... but there wasn't so I don't. Along with all his other poor qualities he's a mean-spirited, hurtful little man, but frankly pretty much every character in this book is mildly awful, so while I enjoy the thin strain of wry black humour and the cutting observations I'm just not emotionally affected by it in any way.

I'm glad this is the last of the series. I liked the first two volumes but this one, like the third, was getting a bit silly and a lot tedious. The conclusion is one long infodump. 17 years of isolation has no mental or emotional consequences for the king. Daystar - who has the personality and interest of wet cardboard - develops sudden and instantaneous magical powers just when needed. And the constant refusal of everyone around him to give him any information whatsoever was just infuriating. I get the book excused this by having a spell that only works through ignorance, but I've a particular loathing for fantasy mentors who refuse to be plain with their charges. It drives me batty. Not to mention that I am beyond sick of this series' ongoing wizard problem. I wish the humans would leave it to the dragons to solve, because then there'd be less temporary dissolving and more eating and the difficulty would be over sooner. List of complaints aside, however, it's not utterly dire. I mean, it's basically readable, and there are a few good parts - I continue to like Morwen and her cats, for instance. But overall, this series has been pushed about as far as it can go, I reckon.

I read and reviewed each of the books collected in here separately, so this is really just for my own records. The rating - 2.5 stars, rounded up to 3 - is an average of the individual ratings. The first two books in the series, Dealing with Dragons and Searching for Dragons, both earned 3 stars. They were fun (and often funny) fantasies for kids, and their strongest point was their protagonist, Cimorene, who ran away from being a princess to be housekeeper for a dragon, making lots of desserts - particularly chocolate mousse and cherries jubilee - while learning magic and seeing off blockheaded suitors. The later volumes, however, only earned 2 stars each. In Calling on Dragons, Cimorene became a background character, replaced by Morwen. Now I like Morwen, but she was saddled, in this volume, with a transformed rabbit called Killer, who is one of the most irritating supporting characters to ever draw breath. And finally, Talking to Dragons had as its protagonist Cimorene's son Daystar, who inherited not a single scrap of his mother's personality or charm.

Basically, the series started well but soon began to suffer from repetition and an unbalanced sense of the ridiculous. Quirk became laboured silliness, and the whole thing just sort of ran out of steam and interesting plot. Cimorene deserved better.

A short story set in the Parasol Protectorate universe, in which Alexia's father goes to Egypt, sets fire to an old dead werewolf, and meets Alexia's mother. It's entertaining enough on its own - and gets more so as the story goes along - but I think people who are familiar with the wider story will get more out of it (she says, trying not to spoil things). I enjoy Carriger's writing, for the most part, but the early half of this does fall a little too much into overdone flippancy for my taste. I much prefer the action of the second half. It's clear who Alexia gets her personality from, though.

The blurb for this book says that it's based on a folktale from Zimbabwe, but it reads as a fairy tale to me. I know that's a difficult distinction, sometimes, and there's a lot of crossover, but still. Two sisters, one kind and one unkind, face the same challenges and respond to them differently, earning different fates. The challenges seem like the typical fairy tale ones - helping strangers when on a journey, for instance. There's no toads falling out of mouths or anything, but there's a magic shapeshifting snake, so the fantastical element exists. It's an enjoyable if unsurprising story, but what bumps it up to four stars are the illustrations, which are outstanding. Really, really gorgeous.

This is Goodreads review #1000 for me, and what a great book to mark that milestone with! I do love a haunted house story, and this one is so simply told, and so compact, that it's a pleasure to read. The horror just slowly creeps up and creeps up, and if the identity of the woman in black doesn't really come as much of a surprise, the end itself is a shocker. But most of all this book succeeds in the atmosphere of its setting - isolated Eel Marsh House, out on the shifting sands of the marshes, surrounded by sea and sand, at once both beautiful and terrible. Only accessible by causeway, Eel House is attractive enough to lure in visitors, while the locals know enough to keep away, because something that beautiful and that starved is fertile ground for drowning, and the quicksand around it is always hungry.

This book, well-written as it is, is such a slow motion train wreck. It was originally published in 1960, I believe, which is about when it's all set, so it's apparent early on just where the story's going. You can see the disaster coming. Vic and Ingrid are both very young and sexually inexperienced, in their first romantic relationship, and of course Ingrid gets knocked up. Of course she does. Both kids do the expected thing and marry, but they're deeply ill-suited and it's all a horrible mess they can't get out of. Truthfully, the relationship should have fizzled out long before it did - they don't know each other that well, and after the first initial flush of infatuation Vic, who is the narrator of the story, figures out that he doesn't actually even like Ingrid that much. He's at pains to point out that it's not because she's a bad person; they just have nothing in common. With a baby on the way, though, that doesn't matter, and they have to rely on maybe developing, in the future, a kind of love to get them through.

It all sounds a bit grim, and it is I guess. What saves it, and makes this book a genuinely likeable read, is that both Vic and Ingrid are decent kids. They've fucked up their lives good and proper, mostly because they're both completely incapable of negotiating an end to a relationship that wasn't really working for either of them, and that relationship dragged on until the point of pregnancy, when it was just too late to turn back. Neither of them are demonised, is what I'm saying. I feel desperately sorry for both of them, and this relationship, though it ends with reconciliation, is clearly on the rocks for the foreseeable future. It's doomed, frankly, but by the final pages it just seems possible that when their marriage truly ends, one day, they'll both still have their self-respect.

The conclusion of the Parasol Protectorate series, and I like it as much as I like the rest - as a fun frothy thing that entertains while requiring very little effort on my part. As with the rest of the books in the series, I think the most entertaining part is the supporting cast. I'm frequently more interested in Biffy and Lyall and Ivy and the rest than I am in Alexia, and that's not because I dislike Alexia. It's because the supporting characters are allowed to have their own strengths and storylines, which unfortunately is not as common as it should be. Spreading the focus gives depth to the world-building - it's not just a heroine with a shifting array of backdrops. In this case, that backdrop really is shifted, as a lot of the action takes place in Egypt... Alexia's after mummies again, and I really do enjoy that such an old device has been given a new twist. I've never found mummies particularly interesting in fiction, but here they do genuinely interesting things, so that's nice. The less said about the amazing recovery after being shot twice and falling from a balloon the better, though.