Take a photo of a barcode or cover
octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)
I got this e-book from the library during the current lockdown (bloody pandemic!) and it's been a fantastic read. It developed from the author's postgraduate research, but thankfully the language has presumably been changed somewhat, as it reads like it's directed to a popular audience instead of an examining committee. Which is not to say that it's not scholarly - it clearly is. But it's also entertaining, which is a lesson some other historians could stand to learn.
Admittedly I'm not hugely familiar with English history, but Catherine Howard was one of Henry's wives that I knew very little about. When I thought of her, which was seldom, it was to consider her young and blindingly stupid. I mean, when you see what happened with Anne Boleyn (your relative no less, Catherine) why, for heaven's sake, did you think adultery was a good idea? You knew your husband was a monster. Well, this sympathetic biography makes it all a little more clear. She was very young and poorly educated, and clearly kind of panicked. Her early adolescent dalliance with Dereham didn't seem so serious, until she came to court and caught the eye of Horrible Henry, and that started an avalanche that was very hard to escape. I mean, what could she say? "Sorry, but you don't want me, I've been fucking someone else?" Bang goes her reputation, her future, her use to her family, and from what Russell argues, she was never at court to seduce Henry in the first place. It all just went wrong and wrong and wrong, and the poor girl - well-meaning, but never all that bright - did the best she could and her best wasn't that much. Certainly not enough.
I just felt deeply sorry for her.
Admittedly I'm not hugely familiar with English history, but Catherine Howard was one of Henry's wives that I knew very little about. When I thought of her, which was seldom, it was to consider her young and blindingly stupid. I mean, when you see what happened with Anne Boleyn (your relative no less, Catherine) why, for heaven's sake, did you think adultery was a good idea? You knew your husband was a monster. Well, this sympathetic biography makes it all a little more clear. She was very young and poorly educated, and clearly kind of panicked. Her early adolescent dalliance with Dereham didn't seem so serious, until she came to court and caught the eye of Horrible Henry, and that started an avalanche that was very hard to escape. I mean, what could she say? "Sorry, but you don't want me, I've been fucking someone else?" Bang goes her reputation, her future, her use to her family, and from what Russell argues, she was never at court to seduce Henry in the first place. It all just went wrong and wrong and wrong, and the poor girl - well-meaning, but never all that bright - did the best she could and her best wasn't that much. Certainly not enough.
I just felt deeply sorry for her.
I really enjoyed this. Three young sisters are sent to stay with their estranged mother in the 1960s, where they get caught up in the Black Panther movement. It's almost a coming of age story, I think, for the eldest sister, 11 year old Delphine, and she is the best part of the book. It's all told from her perspective, and she's an immensely appealing character, weighed down with the responsibility of looking after her sisters and resentful of the mother who dumped that responsibility on her by leaving in the first place. By the end of the book, I'm not sure I can truly say that she understands why her mother left (even the most emotionally mature 11 year old is still only 11) but there is the beginning of understanding, at least, and of awareness - and that awareness comes on multiple levels. It's just all very well done, immensely sympathetic without being cloying, and little Fern's poetic performance is a moment of absolute awesome.
Three and a half stars, rounding up to four. I came across this book on a list of haunted house stories I'm reading my way through, and that was a grossly inaccurate listing I can tell you. This isn't a haunted house story at all, but it is a horror, and a very entertaining one at that. Sort of rural Gothic, but Welsh rural Gothic of all things, with myth and history and murder all tied up in a remote village that's positively seething with nationalism. That was the really interesting thing about this book, for me - the underlying hostility the Welsh have for the English. Living on the other side of the world as I do, the Welsh-English relationship is not something that often crosses my radar, though I'm aware of course, at least vaguely, of the fraught relationship between them, the history of conflict and violence. It doesn't surprise me that resentment remains (although I'm hoping not to the level depicted here!). It does make it a particularly interesting angle for a horror story to take, however... and it also makes me want to find some good basic books on Welsh history to fill in the gaps. Oh well, even more to add to my tottering to-read pile...
I remember reading the first book in this series and liking it, and I like the sequel just as much. Talia has nearly completed her Herald training, and all that's left is an internship where she and an older Herald patrol the border regions, keeping lines of communication open and meting out justice and doing all the usual Herald things. And it's all enjoyable enough, but it does seem like marking time - a series of episodic events that don't move the larger story forward any. I don't know that there is a larger story, to be honest. I know this is a trilogy, and that the first volume felt like an extended introduction, but if this is a long middle it ends almost exactly where it began. The one through-line here is that Talia is having real problems controlling her magical powers, but again - she ends the book in the same state of control as she has in the beginning. The one thing I do like, though, is that she's allowed to have a no-strings attached sexual relationship that both parties know isn't going anywhere. They're friends (with temporary benefits) and that's it. Which is refreshing to read after so many young adult books where the first love is the only love, and they're stuck with each other for life. And though there's a possible hint of love triangle, Lackey moves firmly away from it by the end, thank goodness.
This, like the Histories of Middle-earth, reminds me of law and sausages. Which is disappointing, as I'm a huge fan of Dracula and wanted to find out more, but there's a lot of repetition here and some of the critical stuff just isn't put together very well.
Basically, the idea of the book is that some of Stoker's notes were discovered, notes he made while researching and writing Dracula, and they've been transcribed and collated here, with some attempt at editorial footnotes - some of these are more helpful than others. And the whole should be interesting, but honestly... is anyone really that interested in train timetables jotted down on scrap paper? Or the permutations of name that Peter Hawkins went through before Stoker finally decided? I know that I am not. Still, if my own academic focus were on the development of the book rather than the final story I might get some mild use out of it, so no real problems there.
As I said, the way the book's put together is a bigger problem. There's a huge amount of repetition, and a number of quotes from various critics/academics turn up more than once. (If I did this in my papers, peer-review would shred me.) The text also appears to have the odd mistake. It claims, for instance, that Stoker's grandson was Noel Dobbs, and that he was named for his father (Stoker's only child was a son called Noel). Granted I do not know the family tree, but a son named for his father should share the same last name, right? So I looked it up, and there's a number of sources saying Dobbs is the great-grandson of Stoker, and therefore named for his grandfather Noel. Which, if true, seems petty and picky to bring up, but also raises questions in me, at least, as to the accuracy of the rest of the information. Especially as parts of the book disagree with each other. The first appendix, for instance, gives a timeline which states that in 1897 Whitworth Jones becomes the first actor to play the Count (i.e. Dracula), but earlier the book describes an 1897 production - which occurred before Jones came to work at the playhouse involved, in which said Count was played, the editors suppose, by T. Arthur Jones. Similarly, the book argues more than once that Stoker was the first author to show a vampire transforming into a bat, while that same appendix-timeline refers to Burton's Vikram and the Vampire (1870) and Georges Méliès Le Manoir du Diable (1896 - aka The Haunted Castle), both of which came out before Stoker's masterpiece in 1897, and both of which had a bat-link in them, as I understand it. Now you could cavil that both Burton and Méliès were not referring to vampires as we understand them today, but that seems rather a circular argument, as vampires-as-we-understand-them-today are heavily influenced by Stoker... and it also takes away from the fact that B&M have been understood and/or interpreted as vampire narratives by other sources. The Kevin Dodd paper, "Blood Suckers Most Cruel: The Vampire and the Bat In and Before Dracula" might be helpful here. It led me to the 1863 short story by William Kingston, which has vampire-women transforming into bats - Kingston is not referenced in Drafts of Dracula, but his story was collected by one of the editors in one of his other books, Vintage Vampire Stories, published in 2011 (eight years before Drafts of Dracula) so he should have been aware of that particular precedent.
One to skim over, unless you're rabid in your fandom, I think.
Basically, the idea of the book is that some of Stoker's notes were discovered, notes he made while researching and writing Dracula, and they've been transcribed and collated here, with some attempt at editorial footnotes - some of these are more helpful than others. And the whole should be interesting, but honestly... is anyone really that interested in train timetables jotted down on scrap paper? Or the permutations of name that Peter Hawkins went through before Stoker finally decided? I know that I am not. Still, if my own academic focus were on the development of the book rather than the final story I might get some mild use out of it, so no real problems there.
As I said, the way the book's put together is a bigger problem. There's a huge amount of repetition, and a number of quotes from various critics/academics turn up more than once. (If I did this in my papers, peer-review would shred me.) The text also appears to have the odd mistake. It claims, for instance, that Stoker's grandson was Noel Dobbs, and that he was named for his father (Stoker's only child was a son called Noel). Granted I do not know the family tree, but a son named for his father should share the same last name, right? So I looked it up, and there's a number of sources saying Dobbs is the great-grandson of Stoker, and therefore named for his grandfather Noel. Which, if true, seems petty and picky to bring up, but also raises questions in me, at least, as to the accuracy of the rest of the information. Especially as parts of the book disagree with each other. The first appendix, for instance, gives a timeline which states that in 1897 Whitworth Jones becomes the first actor to play the Count (i.e. Dracula), but earlier the book describes an 1897 production - which occurred before Jones came to work at the playhouse involved, in which said Count was played, the editors suppose, by T. Arthur Jones. Similarly, the book argues more than once that Stoker was the first author to show a vampire transforming into a bat, while that same appendix-timeline refers to Burton's Vikram and the Vampire (1870) and Georges Méliès Le Manoir du Diable (1896 - aka The Haunted Castle), both of which came out before Stoker's masterpiece in 1897, and both of which had a bat-link in them, as I understand it. Now you could cavil that both Burton and Méliès were not referring to vampires as we understand them today, but that seems rather a circular argument, as vampires-as-we-understand-them-today are heavily influenced by Stoker... and it also takes away from the fact that B&M have been understood and/or interpreted as vampire narratives by other sources. The Kevin Dodd paper, "Blood Suckers Most Cruel: The Vampire and the Bat In and Before Dracula" might be helpful here. It led me to the 1863 short story by William Kingston, which has vampire-women transforming into bats - Kingston is not referenced in Drafts of Dracula, but his story was collected by one of the editors in one of his other books, Vintage Vampire Stories, published in 2011 (eight years before Drafts of Dracula) so he should have been aware of that particular precedent.
One to skim over, unless you're rabid in your fandom, I think.
Did not care for this. Part of it was the hammering to death of every single element - is Rory's only defining characteristic that she likes cocoa? But mostly because the two protagonists are deeply unpleasant people and I don't care if they're happy. Their decades-long prank war is neither cute nor funny, especially as both parties don't give a single damn about the collateral damage they cause to other people, and the giant side-helping of misogyny in the hero doesn't help.
The only reason for these awful people to be together is so they're not inflicted on anyone else.
The only reason for these awful people to be together is so they're not inflicted on anyone else.
So, here's the thing: I don't read romance. Oh, I'm not prescriptive about it - I've read the odd volume here and there. Jane Austen, some of the classics, and so forth. But generally I stick to my preferred genres, which are fantasy, sci-fi, and horror. There's not a lot of romance in horror. But for a while now I've been thinking I really should read more romance, because it gets looked down on so often and I more than suspect that there's latent sexism in the looking-down-on, so I've made a reading goal to read more romance. But I don't know anything about romance, so basically I'm just picking random books from Goodreads lists. This does not always pay off. Earlier today, I finished the most dreadful piece of crap - an ill-written contemporary romance between two utter arseholes. You would think I'd be put off, and I was, momentarily, but then I remembered all the terrible sci-fi I've encountered over the years and I don't let that define the genre for me, so thought I'd give it another go, on the grounds that whatever I chose couldn't be worse than said piece of crap. In my defence, that dreadful book had an average rating of just over four stars, given to it by over 45,000 reviewers, so you can forgive my thinking there was something to it. Well, those reviewers were wrong. It was shite.
This was not. It was honestly kind of delightful. Historical romance this time, because I wanted to try something different to the awfulness I'd just read. Honesty further compels me to admit that I found Romancing the Duke over-written in a great many places, and falling into purple prose with frequency. But the protagonists were actually likeable, and though the Duke was frequently difficult there was genuine reason for his behaviour. And it was interesting to have a disabled hero, I didn't expect that. Also what I did not expect was the streak of farcical humour, occasioned by the supporting cast of fairy tale fans who'd formed a cohort of good-natured lunacy that tended to horrify both the protagonists, although they come out of it well... and with separate story arcs that revolved around more than each other. That made it really entertaining, and I was prepared to give this likeable story three stars until the immortal line, near the end: "Release the ermine!" I won't spoil the lead-up, but I nearly fell off the bed laughing.
Three and a half stars, rounding up to four. Apparently there's more in the series, and I feel I should read them. This is absolutely a popcorn read, but it's a such a fun one - I love the ridiculous fairy tale cos-players! All the characters are sympathetic, even the supporting cast, and there's a level of self-awareness when it comes to the perceived tropes of the genre here that makes it all so much more entertaining.
This was not. It was honestly kind of delightful. Historical romance this time, because I wanted to try something different to the awfulness I'd just read. Honesty further compels me to admit that I found Romancing the Duke over-written in a great many places, and falling into purple prose with frequency. But the protagonists were actually likeable, and though the Duke was frequently difficult there was genuine reason for his behaviour. And it was interesting to have a disabled hero, I didn't expect that. Also what I did not expect was the streak of farcical humour, occasioned by the supporting cast of fairy tale fans who'd formed a cohort of good-natured lunacy that tended to horrify both the protagonists, although they come out of it well... and with separate story arcs that revolved around more than each other. That made it really entertaining, and I was prepared to give this likeable story three stars until the immortal line, near the end: "Release the ermine!" I won't spoil the lead-up, but I nearly fell off the bed laughing.
Three and a half stars, rounding up to four. Apparently there's more in the series, and I feel I should read them. This is absolutely a popcorn read, but it's a such a fun one - I love the ridiculous fairy tale cos-players! All the characters are sympathetic, even the supporting cast, and there's a level of self-awareness when it comes to the perceived tropes of the genre here that makes it all so much more entertaining.
There's some really unfortunate racial attitudes in here, courtesy of the time it was written, but what sets this treasure-hunting story apart is its focus on cryptography. It's all laid out very carefully, as the structure of the cipher is slowly untangled for benefit of the reader. (A little too slowly, perhaps, yet cryptography is an interest of mine so perhaps I have the advantage over some other readers here.) The subsequent discovery of solution leads to a series of clues which leads to treasure, as it so often does, and it's the kind of thing that makes the thought of treasure-hunting appealing... if you can get over the hours and hours of digging and accusations of madness, that is.
I haven't read anything from this series before, but the short story is available for free on the author's website so I thought I'd give it a go. It was okay. Nicely written, not overly-serious, and the relationship between the characters seems like it might be interesting but it's just too slight to really catch my interest. It seems like something that would appeal to fans of an existing series, but as an isolated short story it's not enough to pull me in.
I was quite looking forward to reading this, despite - or perhaps because of! - the differences of opinion I have with the author. She's a pro-life Christian, and I am a pro-choice atheist. Well, so what - it's good to read things from other people's perspective. And despite this fundamental disagreement, a lot of this book was enjoyable to read. It's well-written, and I can admire the author for having the courage to follow her convictions (at considerable cost) when those convictions changed. Going from the director of a Planned Parenthood clinic, to a pro-life advocate, can not have been - and by this account was not - an easy transition. I can sympathise, too, with her disgust at the prospect of increasing clinic income by increasing abortion - although admittedly, if her country will insist upon treating healthcare as a business instead of a right, then such a thing is inevitable. So, I was expecting to give the book three stars, liking it even though I disagreed with many of Johnson's decisions.
But as I read on and on, there were a couple of things that bothered me... and bothered me increasingly. There's something of unacknowledged hypocrisy here. Johnson argues - and correctly so, I think - that language can be used to direct argument and manipulate people. Her frequent example, because this is something she comes back to more than once, is that Planned Parenthood's use of "foetus" rather than "baby" helps women carrying unwanted pregnancies to dissociate from the reality of their situation. And I can see her point... but as much as she hates this linguistic tactic when Planned Parenthood uses it, she does the same thing herself, and does it lots. Examples are the constant referencing of women who have had abortions as "victims," when many are frankly nothing but relieved and would certainly not described themselves as victimised. (I'm thinking of studies like Rocca et al., "Decision Rightness..." 2015, though admittedly that was after this book was published.) More disturbingly, this tendency appears yet again towards the end of the book when Johnson and the Coalition for Life are celebrating the closure of multiple "abortion centres," including the one she used to run.
But here's the thing, and this is what fundamentally bumped this down to two stars. The celebration was not of the closure of "abortion centres," hypocritically emotive and manipulative as those words may be. Johnson didn't direct an abortion centre. She directed a Planned Parenthood clinic. These are not the same thing, and Johnson spends much of the first half of the book explaining the non-abortion services those clinics provide: contraception, health checks, sex education... all these useful, necessary services go when the clinics go, and she completely ignore this. It's the ignoring that irritates me. This whole thing has been marketed as a journey, from pro-choice to pro-life, and journeys, at least in my mind, require some sort of progress. Johnson was able to sublimate her own doubts about abortion and work at Planned Parenthood for so many years because she was able to ignore what she felt were the realities of abortion in favour of the services she wanted to promote. Come the end of the book, that determined ignorance has flipped itself around but not moved an inch. She is able, completely and thoroughly, to ignore the very real consequences of taking away essential health services (smear checks, contraception, and the like) from numerous communities, in favour of an agenda she, again, wants to promote. It's like she's incapable of seeing in more than black and white. The black and white have changed positions, but apparently grey is still beyond her.
But as I read on and on, there were a couple of things that bothered me... and bothered me increasingly. There's something of unacknowledged hypocrisy here. Johnson argues - and correctly so, I think - that language can be used to direct argument and manipulate people. Her frequent example, because this is something she comes back to more than once, is that Planned Parenthood's use of "foetus" rather than "baby" helps women carrying unwanted pregnancies to dissociate from the reality of their situation. And I can see her point... but as much as she hates this linguistic tactic when Planned Parenthood uses it, she does the same thing herself, and does it lots. Examples are the constant referencing of women who have had abortions as "victims," when many are frankly nothing but relieved and would certainly not described themselves as victimised. (I'm thinking of studies like Rocca et al., "Decision Rightness..." 2015, though admittedly that was after this book was published.) More disturbingly, this tendency appears yet again towards the end of the book when Johnson and the Coalition for Life are celebrating the closure of multiple "abortion centres," including the one she used to run.
But here's the thing, and this is what fundamentally bumped this down to two stars. The celebration was not of the closure of "abortion centres," hypocritically emotive and manipulative as those words may be. Johnson didn't direct an abortion centre. She directed a Planned Parenthood clinic. These are not the same thing, and Johnson spends much of the first half of the book explaining the non-abortion services those clinics provide: contraception, health checks, sex education... all these useful, necessary services go when the clinics go, and she completely ignore this. It's the ignoring that irritates me. This whole thing has been marketed as a journey, from pro-choice to pro-life, and journeys, at least in my mind, require some sort of progress. Johnson was able to sublimate her own doubts about abortion and work at Planned Parenthood for so many years because she was able to ignore what she felt were the realities of abortion in favour of the services she wanted to promote. Come the end of the book, that determined ignorance has flipped itself around but not moved an inch. She is able, completely and thoroughly, to ignore the very real consequences of taking away essential health services (smear checks, contraception, and the like) from numerous communities, in favour of an agenda she, again, wants to promote. It's like she's incapable of seeing in more than black and white. The black and white have changed positions, but apparently grey is still beyond her.