octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I liked this one just as much as the first in the series - honestly, maybe even more. Blossom is the narrator this time, and her voice is slightly more entertaining than Alexander's. She's a feral little girl, albeit essentially goodhearted, and takes a pretty jaundiced view of, well, everything, which is extremely entertaining to read. I can't help but think that she and Tiffany Aching would get on very well.

Anyway, Blossom's second sight is coming in, which she finds an absolute nuisance, especially as it's forcing her to deal with ghosts crying in the kitchen and visions of a young child drowning aboard the Titanic. Don't expect a happy ending to that storyline; as with The Ghost Belonged to Me there is a solid streak of unhappiness running through the lives of the dead, and Peck is clearly very careful not to sentimentalise, or to have the narrative soften cruelty unnecessarily. That being said, there's not a great deal of dwelling on it either, and these are fundamentally hopeful books in which you can't help rooting for the protagonist. Apparently there's a couple more in the series, and after I've got them out from the library I think I'll try to locate a complete set somewhere so I can have copies of my own, because they are fantastic books and I don't care if they're meant for children, I am thoroughly enjoying them.

This is not the worst of the series, but it is the last and I am thankful for that. The end seems to set up potential for a follow-up series; I don't know if it exists or not but I have no interest in reading it. As for this last entry... well, Luke, if you will take a child on a mission you deserve what you get when they act like a child, don't listen, and fuck everything up, leaving you hostage, without your lightsaber, and covered in spider web. You have no-one but yourself to blame.

Sadly, that's not the worst of it. Irritating as the above is, you can sort of excuse it as this series is meant for kids so the child character is going to be front and centre, even if it means to get him there every adult loses every bit of common sense they ever had. No, what's worst is the parentage reveal. It was hinted at pretty heavily in book five, and I had hoped to be wrong because what's the point of writing the same damn story over again? Alas, I was not wrong. If you imagine the laziest, most unoriginal, repetitive ancestral reveal you could possibly have for young Prince Ken you would be right, and then you would rethink your life and reading choices, as I am currently doing.

I read and reviewed each of the books collected here separately, so this is basically just for my own records. The second trilogy contained both the best and the worst of the series. Book four, Mission from Mount Yoda, marked the first and only time this series earned more than a single star from me. Granted, two stars is not great, but it was a distinct improvement over the rest, being significantly less ridiculous. Unfortunately, it was followed up by what may be the stupidest book I have ever read, Queen of the Empire, in which Princess Leia decides to elope to Hologram Fun World, which is basically the long-time-ago-in-a-galaxy-far-away trash equivalent of running off to Vegas to get married by an Elvis impersonator, except that would be a lot more classy. These characters often only bear marginal resemblance to the originals, but whatever is wearing Leia's face is far less recognisable than anything else.

The one star rating for the collection is an average of the individual ratings. You can deduce from that what the other two were.

I remember reading this as a kid! I liked it then and I like it now - and most of that's down to the portrayal of Troi. She kind of got the short end of the stick in a lot of TNG episodes, reduced to stating the obvious much of the time, so I really appreciate that here, David shows her as a highly competent professional, a well-trained and well-regarded psychologist with a challenging case in the form of an officer temporarily seconded to the Enterprise.

That officer, Stone... well, I have mixed feelings about him. I think he's effectively abrasive, and he can certainly out-manoeuvre many of the people around him. While I can often find that appealing in a character, I do think he's a little over the top. He once comments, somewhat snarkily, on questions of style, and I think that's the issue. I want to see an ambiguous officer who is questionably sane, because that is interesting in the context of the well-ordered structure of the Enterprise, but what I am getting is an ambiguous officer who is questionably sane but who I think I'm supposed to see as cool. Even his back story is over the top, and I don't for one minute believe that the Federation would admit as members planets who see no problem torturing children and infants to death for political purposes. Not for one minute, but it's the style isn't it, that insertion of edge for coolness factor. This is something that turns up in another of David's characters, but where Stone is merely over the top, Calhoun - who I admittedly loathe - is full on caricature, albeit come from the same mould. I can't help but think that Stone is an early version, or at least an influence, on what Calhoun turned out to be. (If only any of the New Frontier women were portrayed as well as Troi is here.)

Anyway. Easy, quick, fun read. Troi is excellent, may there be many more stories like this for her in the rest of the tie-in novels.

You know, a while back I read Who Fears Death and it was excellent, and I read some more from Okorafor but Who Fears Death remained my favourite. Then I read The Shadow Speaker and it became my favourite. I've just finished reading Zahrah the Windseeker and now it's my new favourite of Okorafor's novels. I'm almost afraid to read another one because I don't want anything she writes to beat this out, although I can't imagine how much I would enjoy it if it did.

Suffice to say I love this book lots. Lots. It is gorgeous in every respect. Okorafor's best writing talent, I've always thought, is her gift for imagery, and this book is stuffed full of it, and the magical denizens of the jungle Zahrah travels through are fascinating. (The gorillas are my favourites.) But even more than the imagery, I enjoyed the sense of bravery and gentleness here, and the constant emphasis on the need for curiosity and the scourge that is ignorance. It's just the best book I've read in ages, and though I have to return this as it's a library copy, I can look forward to getting a copy of my own, because I will be reading this again and again. It's going on my shelf next to The Secret Garden. They are not at all alike, but the favourites should sit together.

You know, looking back on this, the science is tragic. It really is, but you can't blame Verne for it as he was doing the best he had with the state of knowledge at the time. The conclusions he came to were all wrong. but that doesn't take away from the fact that he found the sense-of-wonder button that best characterises science fiction, and he jumped up and down on it hard. The adventures of the Professor and his nephew, off to Iceland and travelling down through a fissure in the bottom of an extinct volcano, are certainly entertaining. And the imagery that results - the underground sea, the forest of mushrooms, the pillars and chambers and rock formations and fossils... it's honestly quite special. I was gearing up to give it four stars, and then came the end, and I will look the other way on ridiculous science under the circumstances, but there comes a point where ridiculous becomes blind bloody stupid and being exploded out of a Mediterranean volcano goes well past that point. A great book let down by what is just a very dumb ending.

This is a bit of an odd one, on the surface at least. The Enterprise is faced with a society where fiction is thought crime, essentially, and anyone committing said crime is mind-wiped. Naturally Captain Picard and company can't just fly off - hostages are taken, and things pretty much turn to custard before they get any better. And the thing about a lot of the worlds of science fiction is that they're not really that plausible. The logic to them doesn't hold up, and I kept wanting to pick apart the reasoning and the society that resulted from it here, until I decided that I was missing the point. Yes, it's not all that plausible, but the novel's functioning as a metaphor for the limited understanding that occurs in the absence of metaphor, and with that interpretation it's rather more successful.

I was also pleased to see Troi had another major role here. Pleased but surprised... that's two books in a row where she's presented as an effective and competent professional who provides an absolutely necessary critical perspective. I wish I weren't surprised, but stories like that were few and far between for her in the series, so I'm glad to see the books explore her skills more thoroughly.

Well, I am so glad that the library has the sequel to this, because I want to read it immediately! This was really good. If I'm perfectly honest, I did get a little frustrated with the heroine and how long it could take her to get her arse moving, but she was very like the queen in that regard. Sorry, your highness, but if you birth a monster you don't get to wait until the very last minute to decide no, maybe I should do something about this. The people of Orleans don't need another Belle, they need a guillotine - both for the monster and the mother who refused to handle her.

That said, the worldbuilding here is fascinating. The concept is so original. It's not something I likely would have picked up on my own - special girls, born to make other people look beautiful - but I saw it recommended and thought I'd give it a go and I read the whole thing in a day, compulsively. The focus on the price of beauty is only to be expected, but the imagery is gorgeous and the prose really wallows in aesthetics - how things look, how they smell and sound, and I love prose like that so this was right up my alley. Aside from her lamentable tendency to dawdle and prevaricate, I liked the main character too, and I loved her sisters - especially Edel. I'm excited to see where the story goes from here. I love that pretty much all the main characters are women, and that their talents and interests are seen as entirely valid. You like pretty dresses? Good for you! There's none of that denigration of the feminine that so often lobbied at, for instance, Sansa Stark. There's critique of some aspects of it, yes, but there's respect for it as well. Good for the author, they've done an amazing job there.

Also, that bitch princess better not hurt that sweet little teapot elephant. I would be most upset.

This was certainly an interesting read! It's basically a series of case studies, set within the United States, of various species and the challenges of developing useful conservation strategies to deal with them. Most of the case studies here follow a very similar pattern: European colonists arrive in North America, and start exploiting beaver, birds, what have you, until their populations absolutely tank. At which point conservationists begin to appear, and start passing laws and developing wildlife refuges in order to save the remnant scraps of population from extinction. They are very successful... too successful.

It's clear that Sterba isn't referring to all (past or present) endangered species here, or even a good chunk of them. His focus is on the species that adapted, very quickly, to living with humans in built environments. The Canada geese that colonise city parks, the beavers that cause suburban flooding, the white-tail deer that start chewing on plants in people's gardens. The comebacks for these once endangered animals have become so successful that their populations have skyrocketed, in some cases past their natural carrying capacity... and that's not getting into monstrously effective introduced species like domestic cats. Sterba argues that many of these species are over-protected, to the point where their populations are causing enormous damage to ecology. And, in a New Zealand context, I get it. Possums were introduced here from Australia and have absolutely decimated the local flora and fauna, and if anyone tried to tell me they shouldn't be hunted or culled I would huff at them and repeat, as I have a thousand times before, that the only good possum is a dead possum. They are ecological menaces.

Sterba, though, makes no bones about the difficulty of managing two conflicting goals: protecting the animals and managing the ecology. There's so much emotion tied up on either side - cat lovers don't want the feral moggies killed, bird lovers are all for getting shot of kitties (often literally); people love beavers in their backyard until their property gets damaged, what about sportsmanship in hunting, how do we feel about bears really, and let's make sure we cull the geese before the school bus rolls by. It's just a welter of competing priorities and emotional minefields, as dedicated people on all sides argue about what's best for ecology and conservation management. I winced a little, sometimes, while reading, but these are arguments taking place now, and there's no solution to them yet.

What a great idea for a book! Bosselaar, the editor, has collected together a number of poems about city life. Specifically, city wildlife, and if you're expecting from that a bunch of poems about pigeons, well... you'd be right. There are a bunch of poems about pigeons here, and a lot of other birds, from sparrows to raptors. And trees, and potato bugs, and roadkill. I have to say, my favourite poem here, by a significant margin, was one of the poems about roadkill. It's by Gail White and it's called "Dead Armadillos" and I don't know whether I should say "Don't judge it by the title" or not, because it is indeed about armadillo roadkill, which does not strike me as the most poetic of subjects, perhaps, but it is also a catchy name, and represents a poem far less simplistic than that title might indicate.

Often, nature poems tend to the larger scale, and the grander subject. Numinous thing, like daffodils in the Lake District and so on. Many of the poems here have a harder, more sardonic edge; there is not a lot of romanticism going on here. There is a sense of real affection, though, even if it needs dusting down a little from the gulls in trash heaps and the odd dead rat. That makes it worth reading, I think.