octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I really loved this, and I think it's my favourite of Okorafor's that I've read so far, even surpassing Who Fears Death, which was outstanding but a little too violent for my tastes. I don't even want to give the library copy of Shadow Speaker back, which means I'll have to buy one of my own...

I think what attracts me most to this is the imagery. In a way it reminds me of Meredith Ann Pierce's Darkangel trilogy. Not because of any similarity of setting or subject matter, because there is none, but because both Okorafor and Pierce built these worlds bursting with colour and magic. In each, the pages are just stuffed with strangeness and wonder and I think that's what really appeals to me: the sense of wonder. Usually that's something I get from science or science fiction rather than fantasy, but every so often I read a fantasy that becomes so technicolour, if that makes sense, that it seems to billow out of the black and white world of print and I'm left delighted and amazed at the pictures these worlds form in my imagination. And, you know, the story here is appealing too. I will never not like books about young women who abandon the expectations other people have for them in order to experience something larger, or something more idealistic. In this case it's stopping a war, and that's done at least in part, but the vividness of the worlds traveled through makes Ejii's journey far more wonder-full than the norm.

This is the follow-up to Hick's Vet on the Loose, which I read last week and enjoyed - luckily for me the library had both of them and so, looking for something light and entertaining, I picked up the second volume as well. In this book, Hick is well-established as a vet, and while a lot of the stories here are set at her normal practice, there are a few that come from her regular shifts as a volunteer vet for an animal charity, doing low-cost consultations for people who might otherwise struggle to get care for their beloved pets. As in the first volume, there's a lot of humour - I think the best example of this, and the chapter that I found most entertaining, was on Sydney the sickly boa constrictor, who was surrendered by an owner who couldn't look after him. Hick had to keep him at her own house for a week to nurse him back to health. The only problem was she loathed snakes, and with Sydney it seems the feeling was mutual. Her determination to treat him - a treatment which required daily warm baths and forced feeding - combined with her absolute repulsion at even having to touch the thing, was really very funny... and I sympathised enormously. Coming from a country with no snakes myself, I couldn't bear to have one in the house either. I know it's not their fault for being snakes, but ugh.

I liked this a bit better than the first one - there was more action and less backstabbing over boyfriends, which I appreciated. Shane is still far and away my favourite of the bunch, with runner-up going to Brandi's little sister Raven, who is pretty awesome herself. I continue to dislike Marisa, though - beautiful but humble my arse.

The increase in action here is due to a kidnapping, and I don't think I'm giving away any spoilers there considering what the title of the book is. I did like that the kidnapping wasn't sexualised, though. I don't enjoy reading about sexual abuse so I'm glad there was another motive (she says, trying not to give anything away). I did side-eye the resolution a bit, because surely there were other ways to convince the adults of the existence of the drive-by car. I can think of several off the top of my head, but given the kids were already brushed off by the cops once, I can understand that, in context, they may not feel the police were that interested in solving the disappearance of a young black girl. Besides which, you know, it allows for more action rather than staying home while adults do the work, which is far less exciting to read! I also liked that Shane's belief in Raven allowed her to explore her investigative skills further (without actually beating readers over the head with the fact that that's what she was doing). It was a nice subtle carry-over from her journalist aspirations in the first book, and is yet another reason why Shane's my favourite.

Easy to read, entertaining memoir about a woman living in Brooklyn who finds her back garden playing host to a colony of feral cats. This is not everyone's cup of tea, of course... unless, like the author (and, let's face it, like me) you love cats to an often unreasonable extent.

Look, feral cats are a problem. More so here in New Zealand than in New York, I would imagine, given the different ecologies, but still. These cats - and there are several of them, the colony number varying over time - are feral. They're not going to be turned into house pets. Their lives, sad to say, are likely to be nasty, brutish, and short. If they're female, those lives are also likely to be one of constant kitten-producing. Feral cats have a lot of kittens, which exacerbates the problem. The solution that Malkin plumps for, and that the book is lightly interested in promoting, is called TNR: trap, neuter, release. This not only limits the amount of kittens being born, but it's also healthier for the mother cats, who are often worn out and starving trying to provide for their litters. When you think of a topic for a funny memoir it probably isn't this, but Malkin's focus is as much - if not more - on the personalities living in her garden... personalities which are often vicious and spiteful, which almost makes her attempts to cuddle them even funnier. It also helps that she's so self-deprecating about it, and the often ludicrous attempts she'll go to to trap these moggies. The woman's a crazy cat lady and knows it.

I sympathise.

Well this was charming! Part memoir, part animal story, part tribute to small town libraries everywhere (and I say that as a person who lives in a small town with an excellent little library), this is the story of a library cat. Shoved into the book return box as a kitten and left to freeze there in the middle of winter, Dewey is rescued by head librarian Vicki Myron and her merry band of helpers. He's kept on at the library and, with a personality deeply suited to the entertainment of the public, Dewey soon becomes a local sensation... and then a national one.

Look, my little town library is, as I said, excellent. (I borrowed this book from there.) Still, a cat could only improve it. Right now all they have are fish. And I've nothing against library fish, but a library cat would be nicer. I feel it would certainly have more personality.

It's just a feel-good story. Everyone loves the cat, bar that one miserable letter writer who everyone ignores because she is plainly nothing but a whinging curmudgeon. And the cat loves everyone back. In the middle of an economic downtown, when Myron's community is struggling and the library a central hub, Dewey's presence proves a reinvigorating factor. I could wish the book ended on a happier note, but nineteen years of being spoilt rotten is a good run for any cat. It's nice to think there's a great library in the sky somewhere that he's lounging in, because that would be lovely.

"Refuge is not a place outside myself" - or so Williams concludes, towards the end of a book where refuge has been that very thing. When her mother's cancer returns, and it becomes clear that she is dying, Williams copes with the long, painful decline of a parent by seeking solace in the Great Salt Lake, a wetland habitat near Salt Lake City in Utah. The lake is something that I'd only vaguely heard of before, but it sounds fascinating and has immediately gone on my bucket list, being a haven for birds in particular, and possessing a shoreline that rises and falls periodically, and often drastically. Williams, who has since childhood experiences with her grandmother been a dedicated bird watcher, describes the lake environment with such passion, and such clear knowledge - born of a lifetime's experience in the lake environment - that it becomes clear that the lake and its avian inhabitants have become central not just to her way of coping with her mother's death, but to her experience of life in general - an external representation of internal beliefs.

That "life in general" exists under challenging circumstances. In a relatively short space of time, Williams loses both her mother and her grandmother to breast cancer. Six aunts and another grandmother have all undergone mastectomies as well, and of these nine women, seven have died. Williams herself has had multiple biopsies and a "borderline malignant" tumour. It turns out if you lived in the right part (the wrong part) of Utah during the second half of the twentieth century, you got hit with a whole lot of fall out from American nuclear testing. The near-destruction of entire female lines is a likely result of this. Williams, a dedicated Mormon, has trouble reconciling being raised to respect religious authority, and authority in general, when women and the environment are both so ill-served by it.

I find it surprisingly non-difficult to sympathise with her religious beliefs, which are intertwined with a lot of this memoir. I'm an inveterate atheist myself, with very little time for religion overall, and honestly Mormonism seems particularly, uncritically credulous, but it's clear that Williams finds beauty and comfort in some of her beliefs and that sense of consolation does come across. I can feel glad that she and her mother were able to find peace through their religion even as I can't understand why they do, exactly. (Do I need to understand it? Perhaps not. My understanding is not the important thing here.) Anyway, this is a beautifully written piece of nature writing, a panegyric of sorts to the Great Salt Lake.

I am enormously pleased to have read it.

This is a bit of an odd book to categorise. Normally, I don't consider travel books to be memoirs, but Life on the Mississippi is very much a book of two halves. The first half is Twain's experiences as a very young man, when he was a pilot's apprentice on a Mississippi steamboat, learning how to traverse the river. It seems a mind-boggling job, as of course there was no radar or anything like that to help navigate the constantly shifting water course, so navigation needed a great deal of attention to detail and a prodigious lot of memorisation. That being said, Twain did not, of course, stay a steamboat pilot to the end of his days. That childhood dream achieved, he changed career and went on to do a number of other things - the most famous of which was writing. He did a few travel books, if I recall correctly, and that's the second half of the book. Over twenty years after he left off piloting the Mississippi steamboats, he returned to travel the river, basically to see what had changed.

Lots, is the answer. I think it's a bit more fascinating for him than me, seeing how things have got on, new buildings sprung up in towns and so forth. Don't get me wrong. It's a likeable enough read, with a few sparkling bits, but... I pride myself on being able to take an interest in most things, but Twain's love of the Mississippi, and his mania for trivia, tested my resolve in a number of places. I really don't care about tables of which boat made the fastest crossing where, and there's only so much description of life in small rivers towns that I can read without it all blurring together. I'm glad I read it, and I liked a great deal of it, but I'm also glad it's over. I probably wouldn't pick it up again.

I would like to see the river for myself one day, though.

Three and a half stars, rounding up to four. The real attraction here, for me at least, is the grab-bag nature of it. There are a couple of dozen contributors, and they all take very different approaches to the idea of ecofeminism, and only a couple of those approaches are academic. (I'm sorry, my tolerance for academic prose is low at the moment.) There are a couple of poems, an extract from a novel, explorations of spirituality and sexuality and experience, and how these intersect with the ideas and practices of ecofeminism. There's even a short essay in here by Ursula K. Le Guin, which is reason enough to pick up any book!

The chapters - I call them chapters, for want of any better word - that most appealed to me were the ones that described activism, often in the non-Western world. "Women and Environmental Protection in India," by Pamela Philipose, for example, described how rural women came together to protect their local forests. It's this kind of intersection that speaks most to be - partly because it speaks plainly, and partly because it describes concrete, sensible action. There's not a shred of woolliness there. That does sneak into a couple of the other chapters, though. There's one on the importance of holistic medicine and women's history in medicine, and, you know, I can agree entirely with the argument about persecution of women herbalists as witches in the Middle Ages, and I can agree entirely with the argument against the disgusting practice of vivisection, but when the argument starts in favour of practices like homeopathy, well, you have entirely lost me with your credulity and lack of rigour.

That being said, there's something here for everyone I think. That Plant has clearly encouraged the contributors to this book to approach the topic in any way they please may cause the collection as a whole to occasionally suffer from lack of focus, but it also makes it an appealing and thought-provoking read.

I quite enjoyed this, thinly veiled polemic as it was. The Enterprise has been tasked with distributing famine relief to a non-aligned planet suffering heavily from industrial pollution and exploitative environmental practices. This, combined with a changing climate, is going to lead to mass starvation and ecological collapse within fifty years. On top of that, there's essentially a civil war going on between the polluters and a splinter group of religious fanatics who, while caring primarily for the environment, are so wedded to dogma that they're largely as unwilling to compromise as the first lot.

As the book wound down, and I was getting to twenty pages or so from the end, I was thinking "Picard's going to have to come up with something pretty quick to solve this!" because that's what he does, generally. Not just him, but Starfleet captains in general. Trek tends towards optimism, so I expected a quick if not particularly credible fix. There wasn't one. Picard gets all sides to listen to his presentation on just how fucked they are... and it doesn't make a difference. On the one hand, that's quite a brave move by Weinstein, within the context of Star Trek, anyway. On the other, as I said, it's a very thin warning about what we're doing to our own planet, and if science fiction is often used as application and metaphor, well, sometimes I want a little more than that. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed this quite a lot - I nearly gave it four stars, and tie-in novels don't get that often from me. It needed a little more character work for that, though, I think.

I know it looks like I'm on a raccoon binge with my reading at the moment, but the title and cover of this book are actually quite misleading. It's a laid back, friendly guide to the animals that can be found in the author's back garden and neighbourhood. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, so very far from New Zealand, and of course a lot of the local wildlife there are things I would never see in my own country. I find it interesting to learn about the urban wildlife of other places though, so that's fine.

The book's split up into sensible sections - insects, amphibians, and so forth - and gives a brief description of each animal, its likely behaviour, and entertaining anecdotes about things Bogue has seen it do, or has heard it do from locals. It's not really a science book. It's more an introduction to the opossum that sleeps in the garage roof, or the birds that might be seen around the bird feeder. Bogue clearly has an enormous affection for the creatures that share his city environment, and the book is full of tips for how to co-exist with them, and not to resort to things like poison sprays that will only damage the environment. I said above that it is a friendly guide, and I think that's the best term for it - chatty and affectionate and can't-we-all-just-get-along (yes-even-with-the-scorpions-they-have-an-ecological-niche-so-try-not-to-disturb-them). It'd be a great book to have on the shelf if I lived in that area... something to pick up and dip into whenever there's something fun scurrying about the garden.