octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This is more two and a half stars, rounding up to three I think. There were a few creepy moments, but it's all a bit choppy and oddly-structured, with the focus continually being dragged off the actual haunting. I can understand the flashbacks being a means of fleshing out the main character and his motivations, but it just crossed the line to wandering from the point to me, and the often very short chapter lengths didn't help. Furthermore, the family inhabiting the haunted house were, from the get-go, so very odd and off-putting that the truth about them was no surprise at all. That the protagonist spent so much time not picking up on this is consistent with his character, but it didn't make me feel much sympathy for him. Finally, the ending was pretty abrupt and not that convincing, seemingly there for shock value only.

Which sounds like a litany of complaints on my part, but there were some good things in here. The family was moderately disturbing, and Edith was really enjoyable. I kind of wish she'd been the main character, actually! All in all, pretty average though, and far from the best Herbert book I've ever read (that distinction still goes to Moon).

I was hoping to like this book more than I did, but Winchester's willingness to go down all sorts of sidetrack paths was quite frankly exhausting, so it's taken me close to two months to wade through it. I picked it up because Book Riot's Read Harder challenge for this year had, as one of its tasks, to read a book about a natural disaster. A volcanic eruption sounded exciting enough... and, credit where it's due, once the author actually got round to the eruption things moved more at pace and I was far more interested. It's the 150 odd pages of wandering background that comes before this that tried my patience. To give what I think is a particularly annoying example: there is a chapter in here with the appealing title of "The Curious Case of the Terrified Elephant." Well, goodness knows I'd never willingly terrify an elephant myself, but a quick glance at the table of contents before I started reading made me think that chapter was going to be an interesting one. Little did I know... the elephant is mentioned, for the first time, on the penultimate page of that chapter. What filled up the bulk of it? The history of the circus, a frozen meat company, a rivalry between two clubs as to who could hold the better ball, a man who made a living catching cannonballs, and a fight at a hotel. Nothing about the damn elephant, and very little about the volcano. What I'm saying is that the book suffers from lack of focus, and if Winchester could have confined himself to what I actually wanted to read about - namely the erupting volcano, you know, that thing on the cover - the book might have been half the length and twice as entertaining.

That being said, the chapter, towards the end, on the biological recovery of the Krakatoa islands was the best of the lot. That I really enjoyed.

This is excellent, with a really appealing structure - non-linear, and from multiple different narrators, which is something I enjoy. The title character, who is not really the central character of the book at all - rather she is the catalyst that a bunch of inter-related stories play off - is a stillborn infant who, before being returned to her family for burial, is the subject of a medical experiment. Her eyes are cut out, all without the permission or knowledge of her family, who are understandably horrified at what has been done. It's based on a true story, according to the author's note, and it's hard not to suspect that this child is treated as a disposable resource primarily because she is Maori.

But burial is not the end of Baby No-Eyes, as her ghost continues to haunt her younger brother, becoming more and more entwined in his life. Simultaneously, her extended family are involved in their own recoveries of land and language and purpose, and Baby's relationship with her brother Tawera continues in the background of protest, occupation, and the journey to get stolen land returned. If that sounds sprawling and nebulous it is, a little, and towards the end I do tend to think that the book gets a little too unfocused, but overall it's thoughtful and affecting and angry and wonderful. I'm so glad I read it.

A quick, fun read centred around Fey's experiences in comedy. These range from improvisation and theatre work to writing (and eventually performing) on television shows like Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock. To be perfectly honest, I've never actually seen an episode of either of those shows, so this seems like a strange book for me to read! But Fey's a household name and I was wandering the aisles of the library, waiting for the rain to let up so I could walk home and there it was, so why not. I gobbled it down in one afternoon, after a month or so of hardly being able to read anything, and it's a relief to feel my reading desert may have ended! This is a good book to get back into my favourite hobby - it's funny, relatively short, with snappy chapters that are sometimes lists, and if none of it goes particularly deeply into anything that's really the kind of reading material I need right now: amusing and not requiring a great deal of effort on my part. (Stuck between the conference presentation of the near past and the conference presentation of the near future, my brain is on strike against further effort.)

Fey comes across as likeable and entertaining, anyway. And I'm tempted to go out and watch 30 Rock now, if only to see the bit with the pigeons.

Likeable and really readable climate fiction novel that doesn't shy away from the economic conflict that comes in the wake of environmental devastation. The difference between the haves and the have-nots is fairly staple in dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, of course, but this is still nicely done. I'm undecided about Ross, though. The privileged teen son of the president, he's clearly extremely sheltered and has a deeply unrealistic view of his father and the world his father is creating. The scales fall off his eyes early in the narrative, but part of me wonders if I wouldn't find Adam the more sympathetic protagonist. The friendship between them, barely sketched as it is, is certainly more interesting to me than the romance between Ross and Marin (which is all fairness pretty thin itself).

The most interesting thing about this, though, comes in the author's note at the beginning of the book, which records her grandmother's imprisonment in a Japanese interment camp in the US during WW2. That has had a clear influence on the direction of the book, and every parallel that's drawn out in the story here has the weight of history and family grief in it.

I don't care much for reading about battles, and much of this was two species trying to brain each other, with a very long running fight through corridors at the end. I wanted them all dead just for it to be over. Neither do I care much for stories that are all about higher beings forcing humanity to go through arbitrary tests, and while I'm pleased that Picard shares my dismay, I've got about as much interest in reading it as he has in living it. Against all odds - because I generally can't stand him - the best part of this book was Wesley Crusher. It's set just after that point in the second series where his mum leaves him alone on the Enterprise to further her career at Starfleet Medical, or whatever it was. When I saw the programme as a kid, I could completely understand her wanting to ditch him, but David makes it painfully clear that this 16 year old kid has essentially been abandoned and isn't coping that well because of it. Which is actually pretty realistic, and all the adults around him have just left him to flounder. Clever does not mean mature, and even intelligent adolescents shouldn't be expected to raise themselves.

I actually felt for him. I'm sure it won't last, but all credit to David that he's managed to eke some sympathy out of my cold black heart anyway.

Three and a half stars, rounding up to four. It would have been a full four stars if the ending wasn't so abrupt. What Carey does particularly well, in Star Trek stories, so I've noticed over the years, is character work. I can't think of another author in this franchise who does so well at it, and I'm far more interested in character than in things like running battles, which partly explains the difference in rating between this and the last Trek book I read.

Because this is set so early in the series run, everybody is still finding their place aboard the ship. This is especially true for Riker and Troi, who are both struggling with the ill-defined nature of their roles. First Officer, as Riker points out, is very much a look-up-in-case-of-emergency position, and the extremely new (within Starfleet) role of ship's counselor has not yet settled to one that everyone is comfortable with. This is something that I find particularly interesting: the human stories of space exploration, and how such exploration develops. Everyone's used to a medical doctor being on board, but someone with nonhuman senses who's there to monitor your mental health? No wonder there's a sense of awkwardness and second-guessing. The issue of the ghost ship itself is almost secondary to all this, which is fine by me... especially as that ghost ship is basically used as a means of poking at the tension points among the crew. Riker and Data get a good storyline there, as conflict illuminates prejudice as to what does and does not count as life. It's all well-measured and thoughtful, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it - it's a great example of tie-in fiction as far as I'm concerned. If only this was the usual standard!

Honestly, if I didn't have the history I have with this book, it would probably be a four star read. But screw objectivity, nostalgia is affecting me in a big way and there's nothing wrong with that! I have been reading this book ever since I was a little kid. A recent Twitter conversation about New Zealand authors encouraged me to dig it out of the bookcase and read it again, and I loved it just as much as I ever have.

The thing is, you see, growing up in NZ a few decades back, and being a total SFF fan even as a child, pretty much all the SFF available - with a few notable exceptions - was from overseas. You know that those cookie-cutter European-inspired fantasy settings? There were lots of those, and I enjoyed them, I did, but there was something about reading stories set here that was just amazing. Moreover, because Maurice Gee lived in the same small town as I did, books like The World Around the Corner were set in places I saw every single day. At one point I even lived across the road from Botanical Hill, which is the focal setting of the story. I can't tell you how often I pretended to be Caroline, but it was lots. This book and Maurice Gee probably did more for ten-year-old me's imagination than any other story out there. I love it.

Okay, I was supposed to be trying to read more romance this year, but the past couple of months I've hardly read anything, so it all sort of fell apart in the middle there. Still, back to it I go, and this one was okay. I've read a couple of others in this series that I did not like at all, and this (the first) is a clear step up. The improvement is basically down to the fact that the protagonists aren't awful people. The hero can be a little annoying, and the constant inability of the central pair to use their words and actually tell each other what's bothering them makes me roll my eyes at the both of them, but they're basically decent people. It's also mildly funny - especially the disastrous honeymoon - so that too is a step up from some of the standalone sequels, which try to be funny but aren't so much.

I do wish, though, the the not-like-other-girls trope wasn't being its horrid self here. Haley's friends are nearly all total bitches, as are her mother and sisters, and every time Jason refers to any women he's ever met, it's derogatory. And all his ex-girlfriends are apparently terrible, which only makes me think of the common denominator. I don't enjoy this trope at the best of times, but I especially don't enjoy it in romance, because it impacts my ability to think of the protagonists as nice people who deserve happy endings. It was such a minor theme here that Mathewson skated by, but only just.

This is certainly better than the first volume of the series, which was dire in every respect. It's still not great, however - though I'd raise the rating to two stars if it weren't for the truly terrible poetry that the authors, against all talent and cringe-factor, insist on having one of their characters speak in. (It doesn't even scan, did they not bother to read it aloud?!) Also, I can't say I'm thrilled about the idea of a hidden Jedi prince, in the form of a 12 year old boy called Ken. Prince Ken? Not gonna lie, I kind of snorted at that. I get that this is tie-in for kids, and so they wanted to strongly feature a child character. I get, too, that having him whinge about homework probably makes Ken sympathetic to the target audience, but... it all seems so simplistic, really.* There's a lot of excellent fiction for kids out there that isn't quite so basic, but I suppose as a demographic they want their popcorn reads too.

*And that's not even getting into the secret password Luke has to remember to use in the Lost City, a code which is the Jedi equivalent of "password1."