octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This is a really interesting, well-presented mini-collection of comics. The premise is definitely appealing: the ghost of Mary Shelley, accompanied by Frankenstein's creature, presents short classic horror stories written by women. Those women are Elizabeth Gaskell, E. Nesbit, Margaret Strickland, and Amelia B. Edwards - the stated goal is to basically rescue these old stories and re-introduce them to the public. Each of the four comics collected here includes the full text of the featured story as well as a graphic adaptation of that story; the adaptations are not strictly faithful, but that only makes them more interesting and avoids being overly repetitive. There's a strong emphasis on ghosts, but shapeshifters get a look in too, and the final story, more a novella, is only barely supernatural, with that aspect played up significantly in the adaptation.

The stories are good creepy fun, particularly Gaskell's and Nesbit's, though in all cases I think I prefer the graphic adaptations. They tend to be punchier, and the art is very attractive. I hope this series keeps going, as I'd love to read more of it.

A collection of four comics containing back stories from Once Upon a Time. They're likable enough, if rather slight - the comic about Regina and the comic about Jefferson are the best of the bunch. I find the one about Belle and Rumple slightly irritating, to be honest, but for the same reason as I found them irritating in the show: her constant need to defend him and paper over how awful he is makes me think she's either got Stockholm Syndrome or is just secretly awful herself. Unfortunately, however, as with the last graphic treatment of this series I read, Shadow of the Queen, the artwork really is iffy. It barely resembles the characters at all - although the cover, it must be said, is much better than the internal artwork in this regard.

I remember really enjoying Binti, the first novella in this series, but I did get stuck on one point: the mass murder of a group of young students seemed pushed aside so easily, with one of the perpetrators rewarded for their bloody participation with a place at the universe's most prestigious university. I thought to myself "That's not going to end well," and in Home, of course, it doesn't. When tolerated, violence spreads, both within Binti herself and within the community at her home, when she brings her Meduse friend home to visit. And, you know, I can understand it. Okorafor makes Okwu unpleasantly alien, and the brief moment of wonder the jellyfish evokes, when visiting waters near Binti's home, doesn't make up for its actions. I'm sure, to the Meduse, the slaughter was justified, but to everyone else it isn't, so I'm glad this hasn't been papered over.

Equally as interesting is the conflict Binti experiences at home, where her determination to go against tradition has caused conflict within the family, simultaneously limiting her future at the same time as her experiences with unknown family members expands possibilities in another direction. Okorafor is always good for the sense of wonder that science fiction can evoke, and I enjoyed reading this for that reason before all else, but she doesn't shy away from the costs of wonder, too, and that's what makes this series so compelling, I think.

It's taken me most of the year to read this. That, unfortunately, is a literal statement. I think I started in April? It was during lockdown, anyway, isolated in my Arts Centre flat so that a pandemic didn't go raging through my own country. It was not, perhaps, an inspired reading decision at the time. I bogged down less than halfway through, and as I've moved around the country I've borrowed this enormous damn book from three different libraries, just so I could finish the thing. It's the complete, uncut version, some 1300 pages long, and it's the length that's dropped this down from four stars.

Look, there's a lot to like here. Some of the character work is great. I very much enjoy Tom Cullen, for instance. But I've never been that interested in King's ultimate villain, no matter how many of his books RF oozes his way through, and I wish there were more women characters. But the main problem, as I said, is the length. This is about twice as long as it needed to be, and I know King can waffle on entertainingly for hundreds of pages, I've read enough of his books for that to be no surprise. I just generally prefer concision in my reading, and while I'm glad I read this, and I mostly enjoyed it (the last 200 pages especially) I think it's safe to say I won't be slogging through the thing again.

Read it, liked it, glad it's over.

I haven't read any of the Kate Daniels series before, but have just got the first three books from the library, and as Goodreads tells me there's a prequel short story (in an anthology the library so conveniently has) I thought I'd read that first. I liked it. It's very much in the urban fantasy mould, with Kate hired out to act as bodyguard for a night... to a client who has swallowed something very dangerous and very stolen. I don't want to give too much away, but I was intrigued by the focus on Russian mythology, which I haven't come across often in my reading. I was also really interested in the setting in general, which is a shifting mix of science and magic - on a regular if unpredictable basis, science fails and magic takes over, and vice versa. This naturally requires shifting between two ways of doing things, or finding methods (such as swords) that will work in both. That's a fun, novel approach to take, and I'm looking forward to reading the novels to see where this series goes.

I love Once Upon a Time, so I was quite excited to read this. It didn't live up to expectations, I think because the book was just too ambitious. I picked it up thinking it was a novelisation of the first episode. Instead, it's a novelisation of the first season. There's just too much to cover. It's basically one chapter per episode, and that's simply not enough. It's not enough to add any extra material, or to go more deeply into the characters. It's certainly not enough to even cover everything that exists, even briefly. Storylines are cut right down; some are absent altogether. Entire flashbacks are summarised in short paragraphs beginning with "Henry explained that...".

Really, "summary" is the correct word. This novel summarises the first season episodes, and it does it as quickly as it can and with as little detail as possible. To be honest, I'm struggling to see the point. Why adapt something if you're going to do it this thinly? Just produce an episode guide and be done with it. The first season of the television show was excellent. This, disappointingly, is not. It's so basic it's barely even adequate.

Why this perfectly enjoyable book has been saddled with such a hideous cover I don't know, but it has. A quick glance at the other editions indicates that their covers, at least, are an improvement, but I don't know what Gollancz was thinking with this one. It's awful.

The contents of that cover are quite different. As I said, it's a likeable urban fantasy which seems based on a mythology I don't know a great deal about, originating in Eastern Europe or thereabouts. I understand the author is of Russian heritage? Which would explain it. I'm enjoying being exposed to different mythological creatures, anyway, although vampires and shapeshifters in general play a background role here. Well, it's not quite background, but I wouldn't call this a vampire-and-werewolf novel in the same way as I'd call the Anita Blake novels that, for instance. They seem like part of the worldbuilding but not a solid focus, or at least not yet.

The most appealing part of this for me, though, is the setting. I like the constant switching between magic and science, and the fundamentally destabilising influence this has on the narrative. I like, too, that almost in contrast to this, a society has developed that has adapted to this shifting state of being. That's entirely plausible, and it's interesting to see just how that adaptation becomes part of normal life.

I particularly enjoyed the first season of Discovery, so when I saw the two prequel novels in the local library I grabbed them. This, the first, I have mixed feelings about. Oh, don't get me wrong. I liked it. There were a number of appealing things here. I particularly liked how Saru was fleshed out a little more, and I liked the ongoing confrontation between Georgiou and Pike. The debate between them about orders and principles, and how far one should go in the pursuit thereof, is a debate that I never fail to find fascinating whenever I come across it. I'm far more on Georgiou's side here, but the thing is: Pike isn't wrong, exactly. Both captains have valid points, and that's what makes this sort of conflict endlessly interesting to me.

Unfortunately, what is not endlessly interesting to me, and what never has been, is the trope of individuals being tested by a higher power of some description, as happens to Burnham and Spock. I was mildly interested in their relationship, but the testing trope, as I call it, is something I always, always, find irritating and a little tedious, and Mack doesn't change my mind in this particular iteration. That storyline dragged for me, and I was always glad to get back to the rest of the book.

Finally, I didn't for one minute buy that a ship abandoned for nine million years would still be in working order. Hell, I didn't believe it for one nanosecond. That piece of silliness should have been scaled way back long before this went to the printer.

Immensely interesting and readable account of Visser's work with New Zealand orca. It's primarily focused on the work she did as a PhD student and, given there were few cetacean scientists working in New Zealand at the time, and absolutely no-one working on orca, Visser basically built orca research in this country from the ground up during her time as a grad student. That, I think, makes this book particularly interesting, as readers almost learn as Visser does, following along as she tries new things, not knowing if they will work (and sometimes they don't). It's accessible, is what I'm saying.

It's also very informative. I've always like orca myself, but I didn't know a great deal about them, and now I really want to know more. Their social structure seems fascinating, especially how they care for disabled members of their pod, such as Prop, who was injured after a run-in with a propeller and who never reached the full size and strength of her pod-mates in consequence. It seems looking after Prop was a long-term endeavour that the rest of the pod was quite willing to undertake - the pod moved, on average, a third slower than other pods, and Visser theorised that it was done deliberately so that Prop could keep up. This is not even getting into the food sharing that kept her well-fed. Humans should behave so well!

Just a really enjoyable read.

Three and a half stars, rounding up to four. It really is very readable, though I do think the first half is significantly better than the second - I was all ready to give it four stars, but the lyricism of the writing trailed off a bit. The first half seemed a lot more polished, anyway, and was less burdened with what I found to be the least interesting theme of the lot: Mulgrew's romantic encounters. I mean, they're interesting enough, but the sparkling relationship here isn't with any of the men. It's with her mother. I understand her mother was ultimately diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and although that diagnosis isn't reached in this book, it's clear by the end that her mental state was deteriorating. Very sad, especially as she was such a strong and appealing (if not always comfortable) personality.

I'm shelving this under television, as although Mulgrew is also a stage and film actress (and these do get mentions here) much of the career described in Born With Teeth comes from Mulgrew's two main tv roles, in Ryan's Hope (which I've never seen) and Star Trek: Voyager, which I'm a long-time fan of. It's basically because of Voyager that I chose to read this in the first place, as Janeway is one of my favourite characters from that franchise. There is some coverage of the show in the latter half of the book, but it's not actually in-depth. In some ways that's a little disappointing, but in others it isn't - I went into this knowing it was an autobiography, and for all I love Voyager it was a part of Mulgrew's life and not the whole of it.

I've heard there's a follow-up volume that looks more closely at her mother's deterioration, and I'm looking forward to reading that, as the most interesting prose here came from family relationships, and I'd like to read more of that from Mulgrew.