octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I'm sad to say that this is the last in the series, and it's just as good as the first one. There's a competition between the different lands as to who will win the Warrior Games, and Claudette is desperate for it to be her and her mates. Given that one of those mates, her aspiring-princess friend Marie, is the daughter of one of the over-protective judges, however... suddenly the Warrior Games becomes less about facing monsters and more about safe and boring tasks like churning butter. (My very favourite part: the panel where the team from the Sea Kingdom is trying to milk the cow and it's not producing milk fast enough for them: "Hurry up, land manatee!") But all is not as it seems, and there are, luckily for Claudette, dastardly plots afoot. The three main kids team up as usual, and the focus is back on how they pool their own particular strengths: Claudette's murderous nature, Marie's gift for politeness and diplomacy, and Gaston's talent for magic and gelato. Special commendation, too, goes to the Sea Queen's twin bitch daughters, who are evil and hilarious.

This has been a delightful series. I'm so pleased I came across it.

In 1991, Sara Henderson was named Australia's Businesswoman of the Year, for her efforts to turn an outback station, Bullo River, into a going concern. The place sounds like a millstone, frankly - Henderson and her daughters work their guts out, for many years with only the most basic of amenities, staggering under enormous debt. Far more debt, really, than they knew, because when Henderson's husband Charles (a war hero who spent most of his time having affairs and behaving like an autocrat) died, it was discovered that his spendthrift ways had run up enormous sums of money that needed to be repaid, further debts that none of them had ever known about.

With a choice to sell the station her family had laboured over for decades - and to perhaps break even, walking away with nothing - or to turn the place around, Henderson plumped for the latter. It comes across as a backbreaking struggle and I think she is underselling just how hard it was, but you have to admire her gumption. I would have liked to see more of the business side of things in the book, as there are times this aspect of it can be pretty light, but all in all it's an interesting and sympathetic read.

I've read and liked other books by John Green, but this one didn't do it for me. There's nothing wrong with it, exactly - I just found it a little dull for my taste. Basically, I wasn't interested enough in any character to care what happened to them. Also, let's be honest, Margo was insufferable. I'm not surprised her family locked the doors behind her over-dramatic arse.

You know, I really enjoyed the first half of this. I expected to give it four stars, but it went on and on and, with the best will in the world, I do not give the tiniest shit about the various methods of dating Easter. I especially do not care when the bunfight of who is dating Easter better is elucidated, over and over again, in excruciatingly painful detail. (I can't believe people actually cared about this. No, scratch that. I absolutely can believe it, but it doesn't make me any more sympathetic. Surely the point is that they're celebrating it at all?)

Bede deserves credit as one of the great chroniclers of the time, and one who determined to do his best to make an actual rigorous history, rather than a poorly researched collection of myths. I'd say that it was hardly his fault that his history became so repetitive, but then he is deciding what to leave in and what to leave out, as well as the general focus of the Ecclesiastical History overall so he does bear some responsibility. People fight and convert and die, or fight and backslide and die, on a numbingly frequent basis, and by the end of the book I just wanted it to be over. I think it's fair to say, too, that the second half is less well put together than the first, which helped to lessen my interest I think.

I seem to be on a roll of fungal reads lately! And I've enjoyed them all, which is encouraging. Weird botany will just never be unappealing to me. To be honest, for most of these types of stories, it's the setting and the creepy mushrooms that interest me more than the characters. (Well, what can you expect from a botanist.) But The Dawnhounds bucks that trend a little, because the characters are a big part of what makes this such an interesting read. Yat, in particular, is extremely likeable - which helps as she is the protagonist of the piece. Yet the supporting characters are nearly all likeable as well, and that's more unusual. More importantly, they feel like they have lives and motivations of their own, outside of Yat. I get the feeling she's a bit player in their lives, most of them, which of course she should be. (Rarely do I find characterisation more irritating than when the supporting cast seems not to exist when they're not interacting with the hero/ine of the piece.)

There are some beautiful passages in here too. I tend to read for prose, and there are some lovely turns of phrase: "The stars are in their houses, the seas are drawing back - the walls are coming down, and magic is again in the world." There's the odd hint, too, that the author is from New Zealand - the yeah nah yeah, the kaka birds... it gives it all a sort of skewed familiar flavour, and I smiled each time to see it.

This was simply outstanding. The language is just so beautiful! Usually when I come across language like this, I always feel slightly despairing that I'll never be able to write this beautifully myself, but the truth is I was so besotted by the prose that jealousy didn't even get a look in. Macdonald's writing is just glorious, and the narrative itself is a complex and many-layered thing. It covers the period immediately following her father's sudden death, when in an attempt to refuse the reality of mourning she takes on the training of a goshawk. This isn't as random as it sounds - Macdonald has been mad on raptors since childhood, and was certainly no novice when Mabel came along. Woven throughout the development of their relationship, however, is that of T.H. White and his goshawk, which had a far less positive result. White wrote a foundational text on the subject of training hawks, although it apparently covers more not what to do than the reverse, as he was for the most part a failure (with his goshawk at least).

It's a sad and hopeful and immensely sympathetic memoir. I've been reading a library copy, but I'm going to have to insist on getting my own, because it's just that good.

This is an extremely well put-together book. Beautifully written, which helps - positively poetic in places - but the disparate parts are held together very cunningly. In the first section, Leopold collects observations and mini-essays about the wildlife on his farm over the course of a year. Affectionate, observant, and quietly compelling, studded with illustration, this section nudges the reader into sympathetic feeling towards the plants and animals he describes. That sympathy is underlined in the subsequent section, which collects similar sketches over other American wild spaces, though the tone here is more elegiac. The stories of the enormous bear living on a mountain and subsequently killed for efficiency's sake, and Leopold's own slaughter of a wolf and the regret he felt watching her eyes as she died, are genuinely affecting. Together, these sections set up the reader to get through the quite different final section: a series of short essays on the ethics of conservation. I certainly found these interesting, particularly the argument for "land ethic as a product of social evolution" and the evolution of such an ethic as "an intellectual as well as an emotional process," but I'm not sure that readers, in general, would approach these essays with such enthusiasm had they not been primed by the loss of what came before.

It's very, very cleverly structured. And the illustrations are delightful.

4.5 stars, rounding up to 5. I have to make a confession, here: this is the first time I've read Bradbury. I know, I know. I'm a science fiction writer myself, and he's one of the canon, and so forth. But the truth is there's an awful lot out there in the world that I want to read and I hadn't got around to him yet. Well, it was worth the wait. Some of the stories are a little dated, of course, and that's hardly to be avoided considering, but the language here is so beautiful it more than makes up for it. The prose is just gorgeous - full of colour and imagery and that sense of wonder that's (supposed) to characterise the best science fiction.

And when you have prose that lovely, it works even better in service of something sad. These are not happy stories. They're stories of bigotry and destruction and invasion, the long slow disappearance of a civilisation, and humans are the bad guys. It's awful. The stories here are awful. Painful to read, many of them, but really just so good. And that final story - these two families planning to repopulate the planet, when of course they can't. Genetics are against them, but they're too short-sighted to understand that; they don't know and don't care, are just grabbing at the possible escape. Which is absolutely characteristic of the rest of the book. Humanity has ruined Mars, and has learned nothing.

This is a likeable little book, but there's no getting away from it: Olivia's the reason I don't have children. Well, not exactly. But given the dedication, it seems as if she's based on a real little girl, a child who does her best to wear her parents out. That's not exclusive to Olivia, naturally, but the thought of being stuck with any child who is this exhausting is enough to turn my uterus to dust, and I understand that they're all like that.

There's not enough coffee in the world to make me want to keep up. No matter how charming the illustrations are...

I'm reviewing this for Strange Horizons, so the full review will be up there eventually, but I really enjoyed this. Pandemic has played havoc with my reading, but this is the first book since it's begun that I've just swallowed down in quiet happiness. The stories are all about killer plants, as you can probably surmise from the title, and admittedly the anthology can tend a little to the one-note. The Venus fly-trap, and various carnivorous relations, play a large role in many of these stories, for instance. But slightly repetitive as some of these choices are, the stories chosen are nearly all well-written and enjoyable. Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" is I think the best, but the prize for loveliest prose certainly goes to Abraham Merritt's "The Woman of the Wood." It's a shame, in a way, that this is a complete volume. The stories here date from the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries, and it would be interesting to see how perceptions of the botanical Gothic have changed when it comes to more contemporary horror. There needs to be a follow-up anthology, I think!