octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This was excellent. I was enthralled from beginning to end - it wasn't quite a single-sitting read, but very close. Maisie Dobbs, starting her own private investigative firm in the years following WW1, is moving through a world that's defined, almost, by shell shock. Her own experiences as a war-time nurse were horrific, and now, years later, the disfigured victims of that war are turning up dead... ostensibly by their own hand. And the awful thing is, it's so believable. Friends and family don't question it, because the war crushed the living as well as the dead, and though some are walking around, like Maisie, apparently undamaged, the trauma just doesn't go away. The great strength of the book is, I think, the compassionate tone and the steady refusal to look away, even when looking away seems the kind and sensible thing to do. It was just very, very well done - quiet and restrained, and all the more effective for it.

Finally, finally, in this, my year of reading romance, I have found a contemporary romance that I actually like. Maybe I've just had a bad run, but honestly, I don't think I ask for much. Two likeable protagonists should be the bare minimum, but in book after book I've been presented with arseholes. This is not the case here. Caroline, the main character and narrator, is immensely likeable. She's kind and honest and put together. She has friends who she supports (and who support her). She treats others well and has a healthy level of self-respect, and she has a sense of humour. These things are invaluable in making a likeable protagonist. Equally important, this nice woman has met a nice man. He has all the qualities she does, and because they are both decent, likeable people it was easy to get invested in seeing them happy. It's true, Simon does get a small side-eye for almost falling prey to that seemingly ubiquitous backstory for men in romance, the tragic past, but he skates by because his parents died when he was eighteen instead of an actual child, he had a support network that got him through it, and he's aware of the emotional toll it's taken and uses that awareness to almost immediately better himself when he makes a small mistake in his developing relationship with Caroline. (I am very sick of seeing Men With Sad Backstory Being Emotionally Unavailable In Romance. Go die in a fire, that particular trope.)

Finally, as the cherry on the top of seeing decent people get a happy ending, Wallbanger was very, very funny. I cackled all the way through it.

It's been a year or two since I read the first book in this series, and from what I remember of it, I think I like this one a little better. Credit where it's due, I thought the villain here was very creepy, and I do enjoy the politics and backbiting that exists within the vampire seethe and the werewolf pack. I also enjoy Mercy, whenever she's not complaining about her love life. Complaining about that is my job: the love quadrilateral going on here, where she is pursued by two werewolves and one vamp, is so ridiculous that I roll my eyes whenever it comes up. Mercy is much more entertaining when she's navigating the paranormal underworld, running her mechanic business, or exploring her own were-coyote powers while not being weighted down by polygons. As if love triangles weren't bad enough!

This book has achieved the remarkable - it's actually made me like Sherlock Holmes. The man, I mean, rather than the books. I've read a couple of those books and admittedly enjoyed them, but the main character always struck me as smug and mildly irritating. The Beekeeper's Apprentice does I think a better job at presenting him as a human being who, by the nature of his capacities, is somewhat distanced from the world around him... and it shows, too, the cost of that distancing. It's a sympathetic view, in other words, made more so by the mirroring of capacity with the narrator. Fifteen year old Mary has an intellect and a character to match Holmes, and these two isolated individuals, one of them starting out and the other staring retirement in the face, find understanding with each other. As they solve crimes, of course. And though I was interested in the crimes - and I enjoyed the further mirroring of the two fundamental father-daughter pairings here - it really was the relationship between the two leads that made this so enjoyable.

A collection of four comic short stories set in the Sandman universe, but otherwise not really related to each other. In all fairness, I do enjoy "Dream of a Thousand Cats" and its take on feline mythology, and how that mythology can be manipulated to change the relationships between cats and humans. It's original and sad and affecting. Neither "Midsummer Night's Dream" nor "Facade" have the same level of interest for me, but they're basically alright even if I don't find them particularly startling. If it were just the three of them, the cat story alone would make me give this three stars.

Unfortunately, I loathe "Calliope" and always have done - this isn't the first time I've read Dream Country, and then - as now - the first short seriously puts me off. It's presented in an isn't-this-terrible way, the capture and enslavement of a muse, but what makes it so off-putting is the constant rape Calliope is subject to. I am just so sick of seeing - literally seeing, in this case - the brutalisation of women as the centrepiece of stories. Also, I feel I've read this nasty narrative so many times in other works... I distinctly remember noting this captive-muse trope pop up on the Strange Horizons lists of "Stories We've Seen Too Often" so if it could go die in a fire that'd be good, thanks.

Competent story about a man haunted by the stepfather of a girl he once dated. A girl who apparently killed herself, but that made so little sense once I began to think about it that her actual fate was not much of a surprise. One advantage here, I think, is that the story starts so quickly. In many novels about ghosts and haunting, there's often a fairly slow start, as small disturbing things begin to pile up and up, but here, once the ghost appears (and he does, early on) there's no let up. Which is to say I quite enjoyed the pacing, but I just couldn't warm that much to the characters.

Jude is sort of vaguely unpleasant, and from the moment the story started talking about the snuff film in his collection of weird shit I had no sympathy. Yes, he goes to town on a couple of child molesters in here, but given he's got a film of a girl being murdered, and has found it valuable enough (entertaining enough?) to keep, well. I'd have been more impressed if he'd made the connection between his own choice to exploit victims and those of the horrible people he went after, but the recurring device of the snuff film peters out with no resolution, as if both Jude and Hill forgot about it. To be honest, the most incredible thing about the whole thing was not the horrible ghost, but that Jude's girlfriend Marybeth stayed with him in the first place. I'm just not feeling the apparent love between them, so I couldn't really connect emotionally with the story. Apart from the dogs, of course.

This was interesting - an aspect of feminism that I hadn't given a great deal of thought to. Basically it's about branding, and explores how feminism is used as a way of both advertising and packaging consumer products. Naturally there are both advantages and disadvantages to this. The latter are the most affecting to read, I think, in that there's such a cynical manipulation of the consumer inherent in this type of practice. The example that really brought it home for me was that of the Dove campaign for "Real Beauty." Even in New Zealand I'd seen those ads, with women of different sizes, shapes, and ethnicities laughing together in white underwear. I was aware that it had been an enormously successful advertising campaign that focused on expanding ideas about beauty beyond those that were typically accepted. I was not aware that, at the same time Dove was running this campaign, its parent company was selling those horrible skin-lightening creams to women of colour. Which is monumentally hypocritical, but is also an extremely illuminating example of Zeisler's thesis: that feminism is and has been presented as a saleable product, and that such a presentation requires critical analysis.

This is enormously inventive and just so quietly riveting. I wouldn't have thought, before reading, that "quietly" would be the right word for a book in which a Frankenstein figure is pieced together out of the victims of suicide bombings and goes out to wreak vengeance, but it is. For all the very real horror on every page of this book - and by that I mean terrorism, corruption, disappearing family members and the like - there's something so unmelodramatic about everything that's happening here, and I can't quite encompass how the author does it. Part of it is, I think, the continual focus on small moments: a grieving mother's ongoing conversation with the picture of a saint, the struggle of a small hotelier to keep his business alive, the difficulty of navigating a promotion that puts you above your friends. But part of it is the prose, which resolutely refuses to wallow, and which - drawing on the source material - provides in some ways a philosophical debate about the nature of monstrosity. Sometimes I found it perhaps a little too muted, but I can already tell this is a library book I want to go get my own copy of.

The art in here is gorgeous. Very muted in tone, but that's appropriate for the story, which is fairly muted itself if you don't count all the gore. Three kids and their mum move to a relative's house following the murder of the father of the family, and the strength of the story here lies in just how much it shows the trauma of the murder on those left behind. Each member of the family is trying to hold themselves together in a different way, trying to make themselves seem normal, and as if they're coping, so not as to further upset the others. It's genuinely sad... except sadness is only the half of it, as these poor people have clearly never cracked a book in their lives, moving to a place called Lovecraft and into a house that practically screams "bad things are going to happen here, I might as well be called Hill House." You just have to look at it to know it's full of dodgy supernatural danger, and of course it is - the doors in the house, when opened with the right key, do strange and impossible things... and there's something living in the well-house, in the bottom of the well in the well-house who is manipulating murder behind the scenes. It's affecting and creepy and I want to read the rest in the series, except I can't because the library has closed due to the bloody corona virus.

Damn pandemic.

I didn't enjoy this as much as Welcome to Lovecraft - it felt as if there was far less focus on the Locke family, which was what I found really appealing in the first place. I have zero interest in Luke/Zack, who is neither compelling nor sufficiently creepy. The more he oozes around, the less I care to see him on the page. The head key doesn't do it for me either, as I can't take it particularly seriously. The visuals remain excellent, however, and for a horror it is mildly disturbing. On balance, though, while I feel like I'd read the first volume in the series over again, this one doesn't rise above the average for me.