octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I read and reviewed each of the three books collected here separately, so this is basically for my own records. The rating is an average of the individual ratings. The first book in the series, Heartsick, earned four stars from me, basically for the creepiness of the antagonist. Whatever else I may think about this series, Gretchen Lowell is a genuinely compelling character. Unrelentingly awful, of course (she's a serial killer, how can she not be) but nonetheless charismatic. Less compelling is the supposedly twisted relationship she has with Archie Sheridan, the cop assigned to catch her. Archie is traumatised by his experiences with her, but while the relationship is twisted it also becomes more and more irritating, which is why the second book, Sweetheart, only got three stars from me. My dislike for Archie didn't become full-blown loathing until book three, however. That book, Evil at Heart, earned two stars and was lucky to get it. When a serial killer who has tortured literally hundreds of people to death, with zero remorse, is at it again and you are so busy prevaricating and wringing your hands about killing her when you have the opportunity that she gets away multiple times then, you useless excuse for a cop, you are complicit. I cannot stand characters who whinge that stopping absolute monsters by putting a bullet into their immediately-threatening head will make them as bad as said serial killer. I like a lot of the supporting characters, and Gretchen is awful but interesting, but the only murder I'm really hanging out for now in this series is Archie's. Sorry.

Also, Free Henry. Somewhere is a decent intelligent cop that would be happy to have him as a partner.

I read and reviewed each of the six books collected here separately, so this is basically just for my own records. The rating for the collection is an average of the individual ratings: Heartsick and Kill You Twice both earned four stars from me, Evil at Heart was the nadir of the series at two stars, and everything else got three.

These are likeable thrillers. A couple of them are very good indeed, and I never, ever have any complaint with the pacing. They are tautly constructed, with little waffle, and an effective amount of gore and psychological fuckery. However, they have one great flaw, and that is the protagonist. Archie Sheridan is one of the most deeply unlikeable cops I have ever read. He's meant to be a good guy, but his prevarication, his endless hand-wringing, and his complete and total inability to take out one of the most vicious serial killers of all time, on a number of separate occasions when he absolutely could have done so, make me want him dead. Not a glorious death either. Let him choke on his endless pain pills in the shower or something... just get rid of him, and hand over the Gretchen Lowell cases to someone more competent and with more common sense. Reader, I loathe him. I also feel, to be honest, increasingly more irritated with his ongoing not-quite-love-interest Susan, for putting up with all his crap. And even with Gretchen Lowell, monster as she is. What does she see in this fool?

The series seems to end in the middle of nowhere, so I'm just going to tell myself that lovely competent Henry puts a bullet in Gretchen's head, just after Archie's shower accident, and that Susan's mum finally loses her shit and slaps some sense into her idiot daughter, who at Archie's funeral asks his deeply sensible ex-wife Debbie for tips on the art of moving the fuck on, already, because Debbie has that shit locked up.

What a miserable little book! It gets an extra star for making that awful, ridiculous sacrifice be entirely in vain, but as prettily as it's written, all I can think after this and "The Happy Prince" is that Oscar Wilde is in love with dead birds. I'd wonder if his budgie died, but if it did I hope it was from old age and selfishness and not this all-consuming desire to suffer for people who don't deserve it.

I've been reading Oscar Wilde lately, and when the Selfish Giant heard the little linnet bird singing outside his window, the text goes "What did he see?" and I was fully prepared to turn the page and see the little linnet bird dying in hideous fashion, as Wilde's birds seem wont to do, but for once the bird lived. The Giant, however, did not, and he went out in as mawkish a fashion as dead things in Wilde fairy stories tend to do. For all that, it's still a nice little story, although the allegory at the end beats one over the head even harder than Aslan, and I didn't know that was possible.

I came across this on a list of books worth reading, and I'm so glad I did. It's hilarious. It's also hard to classify. I thought about putting it on my "criticism" shelf, because it side-eyes all the things, but I keep that shelf for literary criticism - basically where I keep reference books. I thought about putting it in "politics" because a lot of this is related to activism, or on the "feminism" or "race" shelves because there's some focus on how to usefully interact with people who aren't you. In the end, though, I'm creating a "self help" shelf for this, because if there's anything holding this collection of essays together it's Ajayi's argument for how to prioritise common sense and decent behaviour and self-respect. It's almost like an etiquette book, but it goes deeper than that, encouraging people not to act like fools on social media, for instance. These are things we should all know but frequently forget - as she acknowledges she does herself, there's a sold strain of self-awareness here - and I both laughed my arse off and winced my way through a lot of it.

This is a weird one to classify. It reads like a memoir, and it's apparently based in part on a period in Millman's own life, but his website calls it a novel and there are significant parts of it that read like fiction, so that's what I'm going for. Heavily massaged fiction, constructed for the purpose of creating a self-help book based around some amorphous sort of spirituality that basically boils down to being aware of the world around you and your place in it. At the back of the copy I read there was a significant list of books, tapes, and courses you could buy to continue the journey, as it were, so it shills like a self-help book. There are some nice passages and the writing is clear and easy to read, but I couldn't take it seriously. The construction behind it all felt far too obvious, and far too pat.

Honestly, the most interesting part of it was the gymnastics.

A mixed bag here I think. Oscar Wilde has written some amazing stuff, but I tend to find his fairy tales have the tinge of saccharine, even if everyone tends to end up dead or miserable in them (especially the birds). The main story here, however, "The Canterville Ghost" is really closer to a novella and manages to stave off overt sentimentality for much of the story. It is, though, a piece of curious halves. The first is an almost farcical ghost story in which a new family is most certainly not frightened of the ghost that comes with their stately pile, and drives him into a state of despair and distraction. There's an odd tonal change part-way through, and it changes into a story where the innocent young daughter redeems the soul of the ghost (who once upon a time murdered his wife, I have no pity). It's not that great, to be honest - not when compared to the stories of princes and nightingales and giants that follow, which are admittedly sad and pretty things, if over-sugared.

A background guide to the first two seasons of The X-Files, a show which I adored as an adolescent and still enjoy today. Given that, I'd hoped to like this book more than I did. It's a good idea - taking one or two aspects of each episode and giving a potted history, such as the history of circuses for the episode "Humbug," or the development of handwriting analysis for the episode "Young and Heart." It can get a little dull, however - something which is not helped by quite a lot of useless padding. For instance, do we really need a timeline where at least half the entries are dated as "EXACT DATE UNKNOWN" or a list of potential colleagues for Mulder and Scully (where most of that list appeared briefly and then died, rendering them useless as potential colleagues)? It's filler, and boring filler at that.

More concerning, to the meat of the background material at any rate, is illustrated in the entry for "Ice." This describes an Antarctic ice borer, discovered by scientist Aprile Pazzo, which has a hotplate on its head to more easily tunnel through ice and hunt penguins. It's concerning because Genge apparently doesn't realise that this was a practical joke run by Discover magazine ("Aprile Pazzo" translates to "April Fool"). It makes me wonder how much of the rest of the background information is equally ill-researched.

Oh, this is really fun. Bloodthirsty little Claudette is disgusted to hear the story of the evil giant who threatened their town, and how he was banished to a nearby mountain instead of being slaughtered by the townsfolk. "That's irresponsible!" she cries, of the general lack of murder. So she gathers up her best friend Marie, who is studying to be a princess and is clearly the brains of the bunch, and her cowardly little brother Gaston, who is a truly excellent chef (on their trail through the Forest of Death and up Giant Mountain he's whipping together "Crispy pork paillard with roasted cauliflower and spicy mango sauce, and a hazelnut side salad. Sorry I couldn't do anything fancy"). The kids are all likeable and very funny, and no actual murder takes place, as the evil giant is significantly less than. There's still danger in the world, though, as Claudette's dad used to fight monsters until he lost his sword, his sword arm, and both legs going up against a dragon - his daughter has clearly inherited the dumb-arse gene - and the book ends with the intimation that there's more and worse out there.

But it's goodnatured and charming and a lot of fun. The library has the sequels and I want them!

Not quite as good as the first one, but still a fun read. Claudette's grumpy dad has gone off to retrieve his sword from the dragon that ate most of his limbs, and the kids trail after him. As do a collection of princes who are after Marie's hand in marriage, given her increasing fame as a potential princess. And it's all very entertaining, but with so much going on (and with the book only three-quarters of the length of Giants Beware!) there's not as much focus on the relationship between the three main kids, and that was the best part of Giants. Claudette, Marie, and Gaston remain the highlights, but the friendship between them is generally funnier and more interesting than any number of panels with attacking dragons, so it's a little bit of a shame that the focus has shifted.