octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This is an enormous, complicated, sprawling piece of literature that is mostly fascinating. The two young cousins of the title, one a Jewish escapee from WW2 Czechoslovakia, find that together they have an amazing talent for comics. One an artist, one a writer, they create a superhero called the Escapist, who takes on killing Nazis when his two creators cannot. It's hope and wishful thinking and provocation rolled up into one, and while the stories they produce are pretty silly (and I say that as a fan of comics) their motivations - their desperations - are not.

The strongest part of this, by far, is the relationship between the cousins. It's one of absolute loyalty and liking, and as a reader who was cringing in advance for the (inevitable, or so I thought) blow-up and betrayal I was glad it never came. Estrangement, yes, but one caused by trauma and isolation and war rather than anything else, and even then their love for each other shone through.

Honestly, I can see why this book has the reputation that it does. It's extraordinary - or at least the first half is. The second half is merely very good. Perhaps it's a function of length - at 600+ pages of tiny font I was flagging by the end of it. But, as I said, the strongest part of this book is that central relationship, so for me when they're split up the book suffers. Kavalier's lengthy stay in Antarctica felt like filler, and Clay's equally lengthy camouflage as family man - while absolutely believable for the character - wasn't nearly as interesting as his comic-hustle of the first half. Had the book managed to keep the power of that first half, this would be a five star read for me for sure.

Easy to read thriller that I gobbled down in a day, notable for the fact that (for once!) the creepy serial killer is a woman. The relationship between Gretchen Lowell and Archie Sheridan is a complicated one - he was the detective tracking her down, before she captured and tortured him, and even released from her clutches Stockholm Syndrome abounds. That central relationship is both the best and worst part of the book. Gretchen is so clever, and so manipulative, and so flat-out creepy that, much like Hannibal Lecter, every page she's on is compelling. But I end up wanting to smack Archie across the face (even though he'd probably enjoy it) and tell him to get his arse to therapy because I'm just not really buying this weird twisted love he seems to have for her.

This... is not your typical mystery. I'm not sure it's actually a mystery at all. Poirot is in it, of course, being his usual smug self, but honestly you could swap him out for James Bond and the story would be no different. It's all evil masterminds in secret mountain lairs, with gas bombs and faked death and kidnappings and someone actually tries to kill Poirot by dropping a tree on him and really, I think dear old Agatha must have been experimenting with her smoking material because the whole thing is just batshit insane in the thriller model. Fun, but insane, and all that insanity piled on top of itself tends to distract, I think, from the fact that the plot is not all that well hung together. It seems to rely on a series of coincidences and off-screen shenanigans, and it's nowhere near as complete and as intelligent as some of Christie's best works. Entertaining, though.

Fascinating setting, and I love the fungal imagery that permeates this text. The idea of two cities, one underground and full of spores, and the other atop it, with two populations in various stages of conflict and denial is fantastic. The imagery really is the strongest thing here, mutations and colour and mushrooms transforming both individual bodies and entire urban ecosystems. Not quite as strong, perhaps, is the central relationship. Or maybe that's not quite accurate... the relationship between the Shriek siblings is interesting, and it is affecting and layered, but the (fake) editorial comments at the end show an editor wondering if he'd let things run on too long, and the fake editor is right. I can't help but think (as I do so often in fantasy) that this could have been cut down substantially and not much notice taken. Had it been a hundred pages shorter at least I might have had more time for Janice and Duncan, but there's only so many times you can watch a couple of people fuck up when the setting is more interesting than they are.

Likeable enough YA read, although I say that with some reservations (more on that below). Basically, it's a story of two young mutants who meet and fall in love while trying to mitigate the depredations of the local vicious kings. Particularly, they need to rescue the ten year old heir to the throne of the worst king so she can take her father's place and stop the abuse of the local populace. Katsa, the heroine, is born with a Grace - in this world, a magical power marked by mismatched eyes - and her particular talent is known to be killing. This naturally does not make her generally popular, a state of affairs that is exacerbated by her royal uncle's tendency to use her as enforcer. He's trained her as an attack dog since Katsa was a child, and she's very good at it... until she just can't do it anymore, and starts her own particular brand of resistance.

For once I'm finding the love interest, Po, far more interesting than the protagonist. Katsa isn't always pleasant - her tendency to misuse horses is played for laughs, mostly, but is frankly deeply unattractive - but given her upbringing one can't really expect a whole lot of compassion for others when that character trait has been deliberately ground out of her. What is likeable about her is her determination, her willingness to think for herself, and the bravery she ultimately shows in protecting others and learning to open up emotionally. As with many, many martially-inclined young heroines, however, there's the lamentable tendency to show absolute disdain for anything feminine (we get it, Katsa, you hate dresses), which is further underlined by the fact that she doesn't have any female friends. Granted, she doesn't have many friends full-stop, but all the people she chooses to spend time with are male. There's a very minor supporting character who takes on a briefly maternal role, and she's very kind to young Bitterblue (who is unreservedly awesome) but still. No girls her own age seem to exist anywhere in her circle - and this is something that I always, always find disappointing.

Interesting and well-illustrated overview of how Laws' 50 selected plants have impacted on human history. Being a botanist myself, and therefore inherently interested in plants, there's honestly not a lot in here that was new to me, but even so I enjoyed reading it. I can't help but think, though, that I'd be more interested in reading a book-length history of each of the plants represented here. That's not what Laws is doing, and I'm not faulting him for it - this is a book that gives a little information about a lot of plants, not the reverse, and it fulfils its brief well. It's just not in-depth enough to cater to me personally.

This is outstanding. Original, periodically and bleakly funny, deeply sad and yet ultimately hopeful, I don't even care that it's the size of a brick and I had to prop it up on a pillow to read because its gargantuan hardback self was too heavy to hold up for hours at a time.

I think what impresses me most here is that despite the potential for melodrama this never really goes over the top - mostly because every single one of the characters who is worth anything (either as a person or as a narrative driver) is fundamentally decent. Two eleven year old boys are best friends, and when one of them, during a baseball game, hits a ball that accidentally kills the mother of the other, their relationship - and the relationships of everyone around them - stays solid. It's a clear accident, and the temptation for any other writer would have been to plunge that friendship into a push-pull of ambiguity and liking and resentment, yet it never happens.

Owen, the boy who hits the ball, is such a fascinating character. Humourless, dictatorial, deeply religious, and yet capable of both extraordinary goodness and extraordinary friendship, he's the most entertaining character I've read for ages. (His manipulation of the Christmas pageants had me cackling with laughter.) His best friend John, the orphaned and perennial Joseph, is, if not quite as compelling, possibly the best narrator Owen could have had. And the way their stories come together, how they build up to that awful ending that could not have been anything else... it's so clever, and so affecting.

This is only the second book of Irving's that I've read. The other was The World According to Garp, which had flashes of genius but which was, overall, fairly average, I thought. It did, however, give the sense (through those flashes) that something incredible was going to come from the author one day. And it has, and I'm so glad to have read it.

This is utterly brainless, and a total popcorn read, but it's still fairly enjoyable one you get past the terrible beginning. That beginning really made me think this was going to be a two star read - Han and Chewie go on shore leave and hire a fancy bus, essentially, to show off to a couple of girls, and there's an entirely-irrelevant-to-the-rest-of-the-plot bus-and-limo chase that goes on for an entire chapter. In a book this short, a chapter should not be wasted in this way, especially when the material in that chapter is stupid and boring. Thankfully, once they find themselves teaming up with an old friend to go in search of lost treasure, the plot picks up. It never gets very complex, and Daley's character work in these books is always painfully thin, but the pace is good and the setting interesting and there's a genuinely likeable supporting character who sort of inches about in larval form on his escape from academia, and I wish there'd been more of him. Still, I'm not entirely sorry this series is over. I didn't love the Thrawn books like a lot of fans seem to, but there's no doubting they were on another level of complexity and intelligence in comparison.

I read and reviewed the three novels collected here separately, so this is basically just for my own records. The rating is an average of the individual ratings: I gave the first book in the series, Han Solo at Stars' End, one star, while the others earned two stars each.

Basically, they're popcorn reads. Action adventure that bounces along and requires absolutely nothing from the reader by way of intelligent input. Look, I'm not knocking it, sometimes you just want escapism and there's nothing wrong with that. I do think that Daley can push his action sequences to lengths so ridiculous they become both boring and eyeroll-worthy (blasting a tower into space in volume one, or the enormously tedious bus-and-limo chase of volume three), but when he's not trying to splatter special effects all over the page, and concentrates instead on plot, these books become basically readable.

Yeah, this was a bit of a slog. There's nothing wrong with it exactly, but it just didn't hold my interest - it's taken me months to wade through what is a relatively short book because I kept getting distracted by more interesting reads. It's action-packed, I'll say that for it, but my impression afterwards is of escape after escape and not a lot of character-building or anything of any depth to tie the story together. And eventually even the escapes occur on such a scale as to become a bit ridiculous - the less said about an entire tower blasting into space the better. Popcorn fare at best, and that's from someone who likes popcorn.