octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

Honestly, this is not all that great. I like the main character, Marianne, and I like that the author has made a woman in her sixties the romantic heroine of a story, but Marianne doesn't make up for the rest of the characters, who are legion. I consider myself a moderately intelligent person but half the time I couldn't tell them apart - there's so many of them, and their presentations are all so superficial, and their problems are all the same. Everyone here has romantic woes, each more dramatic than the last, and I might have been able to deal with it if they weren't all tarred with the quirky brush. They don't come across as people to me, more a collection of supposedly interesting characteristics walking around in human form... the sculptor obsessed with stone; the former air hostess with Alzheimer's who takes in stray cats, names them after French royal mistresses and sets out food for them on expensive china; the restaurant owner who keeps a room like a shrine, full of clothes from the time, thirty years back, when she was in love... I suspect it's supposed to come across as magical, but mostly it just seemed forced.

I'm quite surprised at how much I got into this. Many years back I forced myself to read the Iliad, and the endless repetition of slaughter made it something of a chore. Perhaps I'd think differently if I read it again today, but for now the The Aeneid is as far as I'm going.

It's the sheer breadth of it that I found most exhilarating, I think. Not so much the characters, because they're fairly thinly drawn and I'm dreadfully unsympathetic to their glory-hog motives anyway (nine times out of ten, whenever a character's doing something in this book, it's for self-aggrandising reasons - and the gods are even worse about this than the humans!) but the scale of the story and the language used to describe it was excellent. How much of that language is down to Mandelbaum's translation I don't know, but I was pleasantly relieved at just how accessible the thing was.

Fun YA graphic novel with a bloodthirsty young protagonist who is not what she seems, and who is possessed of a burning desire to be a minion. A minion to an arch-villain, no less, but that villain is far less villainous than he appears, preferring to go through the motions of evil behaviour while enjoying himself with science. My favourite moment? Nimona sneaking an ad for the science fair under the door of said villain, who is brooding sadly after a fight with his nemesis-slash-love interest. Because science fairs make everything better, and she's prepared to endure it to put a smile on the face of her mentor (and because he'll buy her junk food while they're at the fair).

Not gonna lie, the end was a little more downbeat than I would have preferred. Yes, the stereotypical happy ending would have been just that, but there's such a heavy emphasis on feel-good bubbling under here that the novel could have borne it, I think.

Mervyn Peake may be my favourite author. His "Gormenghast" series is outstanding, and if Peake hadn't succumbed to neurological disease he would have continued to write. "Titus Awakes" is the work of his wife, Maeve Gilmore, extrapolating from the thinnest of fragments left behind, and it is proof positive that one can marry a genius but not continue on for them.

I wanted to love it. But the characteristic grotesquerie of Peake, the Baroque prose you can drown in, just isn't there. Gilmore tries, and the mimicry of style is in some places clever, but compared to the immensity of Gormenghast castle she has produced a scaffolding at best - the same sense of shape, with none of the depth. "Titus Awakes" feels like stepping stones, an episodic skipping of here-to-there that doesn't have the cohesion, the interconnection, of Peake's previous works.

This isn't surprising. Gilmore isn't so much writing a continuation as she is an exploration - what life is like without her husband. It is hard to read the final parts of the book and not recognise Peake himself as the patient in the sanatorium, his mind and intelligence failing as his wife sits beside him and waits for the end. It's not just the patient, of course - Peake appears in the book, unnamed, a couple more times after that and it is unutterably sad - but sad because of context, and not because of text. One can't blame Gilmore for reaching out, for trying to reconcile her husband's greatest work with the ending of his life - but it's not "Gormenghast", not even close, and I wonder if the fragment should have been left well enough alone.

I've always thought sequels wend their way slowly downhill and this is no exception. Decently written, as always, but by this time the Foundation series is highly repetitive - how many times must we (and every other non-Seldon character) be told that psychohistory is hard, hard, and will likely never be practicable? Because in the last few books I have the impression that's all I've been reading. (And the few occasions on which psychohistory does manage to achieve something seem indistinguishable from common sense.)

And yet, the end of "Forward the Foundation" skips over from "hard, so hard" to "all done!" It doesn't say how, the difference is too jarring, and I'm left with the impression that the book is there pretty much solely to wrap up the series and be done with it. Getting on to blood from a stone levels of how-much-more-can-be-wrested-from-this-series level of exploitation, I think.

I've spent a ridiculous amount of time wondering whether to give this four or five stars. Clearly I have too much time on my hands.

I nearly settled on four. I reread "The Hobbit" regularly, so obviously it holds my interest, but it doesn't evoke the same emotional reaction from me that, for instance, "The Lord of the Rings" does. And I find it very hard to get past "tra-la-la-lally, down in the valley". It's like the elves have been dropped on their heads. I can never read it without feelings of horror and second-hand embarrassment.

And yet, and yet... I think all these things, and then I remember "Riddles in the Dark". What may have been the seminal scene in twentieth century fantasy lit. That is greatness right there, and it covers a multitude of sins. Five stars it is.

I don't know why I'm not warming to this book, but I'm just not. It's competently written, stuffed with the staples of epic fantasy. Not hugely original, of course, but these days so little epic fantasy is.

I hesitate to use the word "bland", because I really don't think that it is from an objective viewpoint, but I couldn't warm to any of the characters. I think Harold is meant to be witty and cool. I just find him irritating and, crucially, don't care if he dies. This is a problem for a protagonist. That being said, this would still earn an average three stars if it weren't for the fact that Harold's occasional dream/flashbacks are so much more interesting than the rest of the book that I end up irritated when they're over!

One might think that pockets of interest would raise a rating, but I'm afraid I'm just frustrated by the constant reminders that the bulk of the book doesn't live up to these few bright spots. I'll read the rest of the series because, well, I hate being beaten by books, so hopefully it will improve. Besides, my Dad recommended it and we usually agree on fantasy, so he might prove right yet.

Thin story that goes off on strange tangents (Red and the Huntsman, really?). Artwork iffy - half the time it doesn't even resemble the characters.

I can never decide which suicide amuses me most - I think today's favourite is the unsuccessful attempt at death by fox-hunt, only to be devoured by the fox. The bunny just looked so dejected to have failed...