octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

The Ingram family moves to a new town in an attempt to start again after their oldest child dies in an accident, and the effort's all for nothing as their new house is haunted. Increasingly, the family begins to believe that it's haunted by the ghost of their dead son/brother, which makes little sense to me as the ghost is clearly and viciously malevolent and the dead kid was very much not, but they're all so gullible (or, if you're more charitable, so grief-stricken) that they go along with it anyway. It doesn't end well.

There's some effectively creepy imagery here, but I think what doesn't really work for me is the pace. This is a novella and so there's a limited word count to work with, but things degenerate very quickly... so quickly that I didn't find a lot of it all that convincing. Yes, Justin's death has left his surviving family vulnerable, but I found their collective descent into lunacy to be far too accelerated. 

I'm not entirely sure whether to shelve this as paranormal romance or not - the two main characters are entirely human, they're just engaging in a romance while sharing a house with an annoying poltergeist. Still, I think it's close enough.

I enjoyed this one more than the first book in the series. I think that's because the emphasis is more on the main couple, and there's not so much going on with the wider circle of friends; it just feels more focused to me. The hero was a little too consistently bad-tempered for my tastes, but the leads were still two decent people trying to help the ghost reconcile with his estranged daughter, even if he was too sulky and racist to really deserve it. 

I think the thing that I like most about the Miss Marple mystery solutions, as compared to Christie's other detectives, is that they're frequently very domestic. By that I mean that they involve things that professional investigators - who were, at the time, frequently middle-class men - are simply oblivious to. Such is the case here. The solution involves a disguise, which is device that Christie tends to overuse, in my opinion, but the disguise is one that's designed to go unnoticed by anyone who might reasonably investigate the case. Unfortunately for the perpetrator, Miss Marple is an unreasonable investigator and so it doesn't get by her... but then not much does. 

I'm reading this novelette (novella?) after I read the novels, and I enjoyed it more than any of them. Partly, I think, because the world-building is so limited; that was the aspect which really didn't work for me in the novels, so its absence is an advantage. Instead, this is a story based in character and emotion. If I don't find the wider world of Divergent that credible, the story of a teenager wanting to escape the abusive parent that he's terrified of, and taking desperate measures to do so, is far more believable. The unwavering focus on that particular story element made Four seem more relatable than he has been before. 

I love this series! I've been getting it from the library, and I have to get my own copies of it now because I know I'll want to read it again in the future. It's fantastic, a mash-up of Russian history and fairy tales. 

I read and reviewed each book separately, so this is basically just for my own records, but I think what I liked best about the series overall was how hard and brutal it could be. That's unusual for me: I generally think, in historical fantasies, that the so-called realism of their crapsack world presentations tends to be unbalanced and highly gendered. As such, I have little patience for it. Here, however, the violence and threats against the characters feel less targeted. They also feel as if they've been presented in a way that emphasises the difficulty of moral choices and the cost of action (or inaction), instead of as a way to shock the reader. The story can be cruel in places but it never comes across as edgy or explicit, I think is what I'm saying, and it's always balanced very well with Vasya's compassion and the certainty she has in her own right to agency.

If only more fantasy epics were so well-considered. 

I've finally got around to reading the last book in this series, and it's as good as the others. I love the main character, but what I really love is the setting - of course, it's a historical fantasy that includes actual historical events, but everything here is just so embedded in landscape that it gives such a sense of realism. Even the purely fantastical scenes, such as the land of Midnight, feel like actual places, populated with mushroom spirits and bird-horses as they are. It's such a clever mash-up of history and fantasy, and the care given to the setting really underlines both aspects of the novel.

I admit, I was even happy to see the awful priest reappear. I get a lot of enjoyment from loathing him; he's such a terrible person that he makes a genuinely compelling antagonist. There are a number of antagonists in this story, really, and Vasya's story is ultimately one of negotiation with all of them, trying to balance competing interests and her own sense of identity and agency. It's really so well done. 

This is one of those bodies-stuffed-in-a-trunk stories, and there's always something horribly entertaining about those, especially when there's no way to see how it could possibly have happened. It's a little like a locked room mystery where there seems to be no opportunity for anyone to have done it. Naturally, there is an explanation and while it's very convoluted the villain clearly intends it to be convoluted, simply because no one in their right mind would suspect it. Enter Poirot, who is rather more twisty than most people in his thinking. I enjoyed it, anyway. 

This is a short little book, fifty pages or so, on the construction of the Divergent series. There's an interview with Roth, a discussion of the faction system, inspiration and influences when writing - things like quotes and music that the author listened to, and that remind her of the characters - that sort of thing. The interview's the most interesting part; I always like reading about how authors work and what their inspirations are. The rest is pretty slight.

It's really only for hardcore fans, I think. 

Just a few minutes before I started this, I read the version of the story starring Parker Pyne instead of Poirot. Maybe it's just that I found the mystery a little less convoluted on second read, but I think the extra star for this version is more likely down to character: Poirot is simply more entertaining than Pyne. Perhaps it's not a fair comparison, given that I've only read one short story of the latter, but the fact remains: the smug, compassionate little Belgian improves the story for me. 

This is the first of the Parker Pyne stories that I've read, and honestly - he's not that interesting compared to Poirot, or at least not so far. The mystery itself is alright, though very convoluted for a short story, to the point where it feels a little laboured. I had to page back and forth to keep the timeline worked out.

I understand that the first version of this story featured Poirot instead of Pyne, so I'm going to read that next. I wonder how different they'll be!