octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

You know, I can't help but feel that Poe, little weirdo that he was, wrote this story fantasising that the victim was someone of his acquaintance. It's a creepy little story, but I think what makes it work is that there's no real reason given for the actions of the protagonist. He murders a man he knows quite well, after apparently mortal insult, but I'm left with the feeling that said insult was probably relatively minor - cutting in line or something equally petty - because he's just so unbalanced. There's a morbidly funny little line about a trowel in there, though. I think that's my favourite part.

Continuing on my journey to try and read more romances, and this time I thought I'd try a western. It was awful. It's awfulness was entirely down to the heroine. Jaxi apparently decided, at the ripe old age of 10, that she wanted to marry the local rancher's eldest son, who happens to be a decade older than her. Fine, kids get crushes, whatever. But then the little psycho - who apparently has no other interest in life - spends the next 11 years turning herself into the perfect rancher's wife. Goes to college, doesn't finish - only takes the papers she thinks necessary to turn into the PRW. Helps out in the community lots. Want to guess why? It makes me appreciate that historical romance by Tess Dare that I read a few days ago even more - both the protagonists there had storylines and character arcs of their own, irrespective of their growing relationship. That doesn't happen here.

But even if I could stop rolling my eyes at this absolute monomania from the obsessed heroine, it gets disgusting pretty fast. See, local rancher's eldest son has five younger brothers. What does Jaxi do? Well, apparently these poor bastards are practice runs for the main prize. Sure, for most of them it's only a quick kiss between adolescents as these neighbouring children grow up together, but two of the brothers get actually emotionally involved - one of them's even in a relationship with her for years! - and get hurt because of it. One of these brothers may be a dick, but still. They do not deserve this. (And apparently we, the readers, are supposed to feel sorry that Jaxi is affected by their pain. You can imagine how much sorrow I do not feel.) But it gets worse, if you can believe it. Jaxi finally bags the eldest, and their first sexual encounter is in front of some of his brothers, after she sets up what is basically public indecency with them to upset big brother. Because heaven forbid the family not be involved in everything going on here...

There is an incestuous undertone to this book - heavily underlined by another brother having a threesome with his girlfriend and his cousin - that is just cringingly gross.

Finally, "Jaxi" is a front-runner for the stupidest name in all creation. That is all.

In some ways, I think this is bloated, over-written, and in places so saccharine it makes your teeth ache. But the emotion in it is so finely drawn, and drawn, too, from Dickens' unending sympathy with the poor and the socially abandoned, that in the end the flaws just don't seem to matter. Part of the attraction, too, is the doubling that crops up again and again - not just in the cities, but in the characters and in the histories and permutations of plot. At times these are too closely related; I've always been a little suspicious of stories that rely this heavily on coincidence, but, as I said before, ultimately it doesn't matter. The identity of Madame Defarge, while not at all surprising, matters less in that she is a stand-in for any number of blighted individuals - just one of the tens of thousands of people ground down by the actions of the aristocracy pre-Revolution. As sympathetic as her back story is, however, Dickens is careful not to excuse her actions, which admittedly are arguably justifiable... but only up to a point. She is, however, a far more interesting character, grotesque as she is, to the milquetoast Lucie, who is another one of the Dickensian angels of the home that were far more interesting for him to write than for me to read.

All of this sounds like but but but... and it's true that there are a lot of things here that make the book imperfect. It is still no Bleak House, which is as close to perfect as Dickens ever got as far as I'm concerned, but A Tale of Two Cities, ultimately, is more than the sum of its flawed and sometimes staggering parts.

Oh, this is a creepy one. A novella, and it's as sad as it is quietly horrifying. After the death of her two young children, Dora takes a room at a boarding house... but it's not just any boarding house, as the ghosts from a nearby shipwreck attach themselves to the inhabitants while they sleep, with each part of this parasitic relationship looking for something and never quite finding it. It's such an easy read, too - not in subject matter, but the prose is very smooth. Not pretty, but smooth, and once it had hooked me in it was very hard to stop reading.

I think this may be the first of Warren's books that I've read. I'm going to have to find more, because it was great.

It's an improvement on the last one of Mathewson's I read, in that the two main characters aren't completely awful people, although the hero certainly tries. Claiming, of his family, that "we don't humiliate women" and then stripping his girlfriend's swimsuit off in the hotel pool so she has to walk back to her room naked is the action of a jerk who thinks humiliating his girlfriend is funny and my mind is not changing on that. That I can call him "not completely awful" even so is a tribute to just how terrible the hero was in said last book.

It's also irritating in a number of other places. The whole food thing that keeps going on in these books, where they're all banned from restaurants for acting like spoilt brats, is not funny or entertaining in the slightest. It just makes me think they're spoilt brats, and the kid that pops up briefly in this volume is clearly being raised in the same ill-mannered way. The one thing I did like here is that Jodi, when medicated (and it seems she's medicated for most of the book, because even after only two of them I can tell when Mathewson hits on a character trait she hammers it to death) acts in exactly the same way towards the Bradford family as that idiot family acts towards others - thoughtless, combative, self-centred, and horrifyingly annoying - and they hate it. They don't realise the parallels, of course, but they hate it all the same so I got some amusement out of that. Also, why do these people never talk to each other? Perhaps if they stopped stuffing their faces for two minutes together, they wouldn't have so many misunderstandings.

Finally: "vile" and "vial" are not the same things. Once is a typo, twice is not knowing the difference. (This doesn't irritate me as much as the conscience/conscious confusion, which Mathewson is absolutely not guilty of, but if you read as much fantasy as I do the vile/vial thing comes up ridiculously often and I hate it.)

This was really entertaining - there's such a sense of personality here, a woman who is both interesting and amusing and fun to spend time with. No surprise that her cooking shows - not that I've seen any of them - were so successful, if this is how she comes across. This memoir, food-based of course, is the story of the time she spent in France learning about food. From her first visit when, largely indifferent to fish, she had a transformative experience with sole meunière, through taking cooking lessons in Paris, to the ongoing slog that produced the monumental cookbook that made her famous, Child's enthusiasm for food is both constant and immensely appealing. This is what food should be like - something enjoyable and absorbing. There are no recipes here, though there are a number of things I'd like to try, so one day I'll have to get a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking myself... but in no universe whatsoever will I be crushing duck carcass for sauce. I don't care how good she thinks it is.

I really enjoyed Interview with the Vampire - it was a solid four star read and Claudia was a work of creepy genius. Yet it took me a while to get around to reading the sequel because honestly, Lestat was the least interesting part of Interview for me and I wasn't particularly thrilled at the thought of a whole book focused on nothing but him. Yet in some ways I found Lestat a lot more tolerable here - particularly in the first half of the book. I think it was genuinely clever to have him flat-out state that Louis' story was biased and not entirely accurate, because of course that would be true. Everyone's stories are biased! You would think I'd have the sense to expect that, but I didn't, so well-played to the author there.

It's just that good beginning did not sustain the weight of what followed. The book went on and on and on, a mish-mash of ideas and repetitive angst, and I can't help but think that cut down to half the size this would have been a three star read, maybe even four, but at five hundred and fifty damn pages, I was done long before that. Long before. (When I end up saying out loud to myself, on turning a page, "How much bloody longer?!" I know I've passed liking.) Lestat, again, began to bore me. I'm not surprised his mother left his increasingly tedious arse. Frankly, his repeated assertion that men are more interesting than women is belied by the fact that Gabrielle is the most interesting - perhaps the only really interesting - character of the whole book as far as I'm concerned. I'd far rather have read her story than his.

This book is marketed "with a twist," and I'm not sure that's entirely accurate. There was no real twist here, and the only real surprise was that one of the protagonists kept ferreting out artifacts of murder and hideous death and bringing them home to help build her own house - I can only presume she's never seen a horror film in her life, because that's not generally something that ends well. Despite this, however, The Invited was an enjoyable read. Not particularly deep, and there was the odd part that seemed to trail off and go nowhere for no good reason (I'm thinking especially, here, of the bog's previous owners and how one of them drowned, which didn't seem to tie into much at all.) What set it apart, however, and my favourite thing about it, was the bog setting. It was an interesting environment, portrayed well, and it tied in thematically to the rest of the story.

The book didn't scare me, which is a minor failure for horror, and it didn't shock me very much really either, but it did make me want to go out walking in the wetlands, so I genuinely appreciate it for that.

Although, seriously: people have been looking for that treasure for generations, and none of them thought to look in the very obvious hiding place where it was eventually found? Dunces, the lot of them...

Not quite as good as the first in the series (it doesn't have quite the same level of farce - I miss the ridiculous fairy tale cosplayers) but still light years ahead of some of the other romances I've read lately. I think what I like best about Dare's books - and admittedly my sample size is only two so far - is that each of the main pairing has their own storyline, and their own challenges to overcome, that are entirely separate from the romance proper. Well, perhaps not entirely. Each of that main pair encourages the other to better themselves, and helps them to do it, but they don't take over. Character growth is still required, and that's what happens here, with Clio's desire to go into business for herself, and Rafe's family problems. (What stupid names they have, but they're both immensely decent people so I don't care.)

Also, I love the idiot dog, the focus on cake, and Clio's two sisters. Admittedly the elder of the two is mildly awful, but their relationship is still loving and believable, and her younger sister Phoebe, who I think is supposed to be autistic, deserves a book of her own. That's the other thing I like about Dare's books so far - there's no not-like-other-girls heroine, and all these people have friends and people around them who are well-meaning and supportive.

I was chatting recently with a friend about the mystery books we'd read as kids - I had the Trixie Beldon series and she had Nancy Drew. I realised at the time that I'd never read a single Nancy Drew book ever, and they're supposed to be classics. Well, I've read one now... and it was okay. I can't say I was particularly delighted with it, but then I'm not ten years old anymore, so perhaps if I'd read it back then I would have been more enthused. Nancy herself is kind and intelligent, so that's something, but the story, sad to say, was just a little dull. I can't quite see how, seeing as she was kidnapped by robbers and locked in a closet for part of it, but still. A little dull it certainly was.

Now I know.