octavia_cade's reviews
2611 reviews

There's a very interesting mix of genres going on here - it's part alternate history, part urban fantasy, a little bit steampunk, and has a heaping dollop of mystery. I liked it; that blended approach was my favourite thing about the book, actually. I think, though, that I might have liked a little more horror in there. There's certainly opportunity enough, what with vampires and serial killers and ghostly werewolves and the beast of Gevaudan. (I've seen a couple of horror movies about that last one and always find it entertaining.)

I liked the characters, too, but this is one of those rare books where I'm more interested in the worldbuilding than the cast. That cast is all competently rendered, but none of them really compel me as much as the setting and the political backdrop. There's not a lot about a world-weary vampire that especially excites me, I'm afraid; I feel as if I've read that particular take fairly often. I prefer Abigail Irene, if only because it's nice to have a deeply competent middle-aged heroine in fantasy, for once. 

Who would have thought it? A New Frontier novel which is actually good. I'd say I don't know how it happened, but I do know. For one, it's told in first person, so the slavering depiction of Mackenzie Calhoun which so drags down the other books is necessarily absent. It has to be, else he'd come across as so up himself he'd be intolerable. Secondly, he's on a different ship with a different crew and they come across as people, all of them, instead of a walking collection of quirks that's turned the New Frontier bunch into caricatures. And finally, this story is a tragedy and it's treated as a tragedy, which means the tone is far more believable than it is in the other books, which often undermine the seriousness of events with a very uneven voice in that regard.

Why David's written six volumes of that dreck when he can produce work of this calibre is beyond me. This is light years ahead of the rest of the New Frontier series. 

It's a very odd experience, reading this. As a novelisation it's extremely slight, however as a long-time fan of Buffy I can hear every line as I read in the exact tones of the actors. The adaptation is a barely fleshed-out transcript, and so it ends up being less a reading experience than it is a recollection of the episode that the adaptation's based on. It was a fantastic episode, to be fair, but as much as I enjoyed the memories this book inspires it does make me wonder what the point of the novel is. Why bother turning a great, fun episode into an average read? I don't know. I suspect money. 

It does make me want to go back and rewatch the series, though. 

I've never thought of myself as a particularly brave person, but I read this book and was reminded of just how much gumption I do not have. Am I sorry about that? Honestly, I don't know. 

The thing about extending media tie-ins beyond canon is that sometimes you have much less to play with. Here, many of the TNG crew are off on other postings, so it's just Picard and Crusher, really. There's advantages and disadvantages to this approach of course: part of the appeal of the tv series was in the characters and their interactions with each other, but there's something to be said for forcing them (and the readers) out of their comfort zones. 

Fittingly, the tone of the book is fairly melancholic, and that's mostly centred around Picard. He's about to have a new ship, but his life is looking very different. I quite enjoyed that very quiet storyline, which has something meditative about it. I think I would have liked it to be a little more of the book's focus - most of that focus is given up to an adventure story centred around plague and rebellion and Romulans, and there's nothing wrong with it, that particular storyline's decently written, but it never grabbed me as much as the internal stuff. The change, here was more interesting to me than the more-of-the-same, if that makes sense. 

I don't know why, but I think of paranormal romance as a very contemporary genre. This was first published in 1945, I think, and yet paranormal romance it is, and it feels very modern despite its historical setting.

That modernity, I think, comes almost entirely from the depiction of Lucy Muir. A young widow with two children who has spent much of her life being controlled by her (no doubt well-meaning) husband and in-laws, she uses her widowhood to escape with her children to a small house on the coast. That house is haunted by a sea captain, and as the years go by Lucy begins to discover herself. She is, when she allows herself to be, extremely clear-sighted about the disappointment she felt in her marriage and, occasionally, in her children (particularly her little prig of a son), and her growing ability to stick up for herself and her right to happiness is thoroughly supported by the sea captain, who sees her potential and doesn't want her to waste her life.

It's a very slow-burn romance, and one in which the protagonists can never actually touch, but it's still just plain charming. Lucy, especially, is enormously sympathetic. 

This is a fantastic and wide-ranging collection of nature poetry by African-Americans. Given the authors, the focus is on North American nature, which is to be expected, but there's such a enormous variety in approaches here that - the ten themed sections of the book aside - every page has something new and different. A lot of the poems are political in nature, as nature is linked to history and conflict and landscape, but then I've always thought of both poetry and nature as inherently political things anyway, given human creation and interaction, so I find that appealing.

There are simply too many poems here to mention by name, but three of them stood out to me as favourites. The first was "Ambition II: Mosquito in the Mist" by Tim Seibles, which was written from the point of view of a mosquito and was surprising and delightful. The second was "Swimchant of Nigger Mer-Folk (An Aquaboogie Set in Lapis)" by Douglas Kearney, which had a particularly interesting structure and topography. The one that really affected me most, though - I must have read it a dozen times now, and plan to hunt down the author's books so I can find and buy the collection that it's in - was "Emmet Till" by James A. Emanuel. A horrendous topic, but an absolutely gorgeous poem. 

I read and reviewed each of the two books collected here separately, so this is really just for my own records. I did not like either of them - I can't get on with the characters, and because of that I don't care about anything else.

The unfortunate thing is that, over the years, I've read a number of Star Trek books by this author and I've enjoyed them... but all that liking goes straight out the window with his New Frontier series. Oh well. I can't like everything, and a number of other reviews rate NF highly, so at least some people are enjoying it. 

As much as I love Star Trek, I am really struggling with this series... and with my goal of reading all the Trek novels I can get my hands on.

The problem, I think, is that I just don't care about any of the characters. There's a small number I'm indifferent to, and the others I actively dislike. I was so close to giving this book two stars, on the grounds that it hardly had any Calhoun in it and was therefore automatically two hundred percent less insufferable. But I can't get past the soap opera ending, or Commander Shelby actually pulling aside an officer to question them about whether the crew thinks she has a crush on the captain. How old are these people?! I compare it to TNG, for example, which was crewed by adults, and the difference is fucking baffling. 

This was honestly pretty dreadful. A lot of it makes no sense whatsoever - the Klingons attack a colony and force the inhabitants to mine for them, and Kirk and company capture the leader and take him back to a star base for trial, while leaving the rest of the Klingons there, because clearly job done. There's a myriad of stupid things here, and it would be a one star read for me if one of those stupid things didn't start me cackling every time I saw it. The Klingons - who look exactly like humans, to the point that the Klingon leader doesn't recognise Spock as not-Klingon until he sees Spock's ears - are all in bathing suits. Oh, they're supposed to be uniforms, but they're cut so high it might as well be sci-fi Miss Universe at the mining colony. 

Every time I looked at them I pictured Worf in a similar costume, and the amusement value of that alone was worth an extra star.