octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I don't know what it is about corn mazes that makes them so creepy, but they are. I say that with no personal experience whatsoever, as (sadly!) I've never been in one. They do seem to turn up fairly often in horror, however, so it seems like there's lots of people who find them as appealingly creepy as I do. This likeable story, about a couple stopping for a break on a long car trip, is not exactly surprising - you know the maze, or something in it, is going to get them, just as you know that people who decide to spend the night in a haunted house will come to sincerely regret it - but even so there's a nice sense of claustrophobia here. And I did enjoy the spiders...

This is excellent. I was honestly skeptical at first; I'd picked up the book expecting another easy adventure with Kirk and company, and it was very clear very soon that Kirk was only there to bookend a so-called historical novel about Klingons. I was not enthusiastic, and a very unappealing start to that novel - a lengthy and tedious game/battle sequence (and I do hate battle sequences, they bore me rigid) - had me very tempted just to put the thing down and walk away. I even came to Goodreads to check if other people had hated it as much as I did, and was surprised to see all the positive reviews... they were so positive I thought I had to keep reading. And I'm so glad I did. Once that off-putting beginning was over, this exploration of what it means to avoid war, and the relationship between a Klingon captain and a decidedly non-military human ambassador, an elderly scholar with strong pacifist beliefs, was just so strong, and so very thoughtful, that by the end I was both riveted and genuinely, enormously touched.

I've been reading Star Trek books a lot recently, especially over this past year, because they have the advantage of being generally hopeful and also generally popcorn. They don't require much of me, and I say that with affection; pandemic has given me new appreciation for escapist texts. This one, though, is a substantial cut above, and still hopeful even so, and I'm going to go out and find a copy of my own to keep, because the library (damn them) will not let me keep this one. And, you know, they probably shouldn't, because my giving it back means that other library users get to read it, and that's a good thing.

It's without doubt the best Star Trek book I've ever read.

This was excellent. Horrifying, desperately frustrating, but excellent nonetheless, and a perfect illustration of why business should never be left to police itself. An extraordinarily weak-minded regulatory community, when meeting a company comprised of people with extraordinarily weak morals and extraordinary levels of greed, can only result in a disaster like this. Ciba Chemicals can argue until it's blue in the face that they should be able to dump toxic waste wherever they like, but when they're hiding what they do, burying reports that they don't like, and knowingly exposing their workers and community and environment to such horrible risk they lack all credibility and, frankly, all decent human feeling. Sunlight, they say, is the best disinfectant, and to be so consistently shady... is shady on a whole other level.

I'm honestly not sure what's worse. That they did all this, knowing that if they were caught the fines were so minimal that waste dumping was worth it, or that when they could no longer get away with dumping and water poisoning in Toms River they basically said, "Oh well, onto the next exploitable community" and moved to places even poorer and less regulated than New Jersey. Which strategy, incidentally, was the reason they ended up manufacturing in Toms River in the first place - they'd essentially been kicked out of their previous manufacturing sites, or had found it unprofitable to up their game to meet newly imposed standards at those sites, and so just packed up to pollute elsewhere. For no better reason than money, of course. All the times, reading this book, that they put off installing things like water filters because it would have cost them a fraction of their yearly profit - of their monthly profit! - are just sickening. And the local politicians and community members and every possible oversight board that looked away, again and again... I said it before, it's enormously frustrating watching these fuckers slither away time after time with little more than a slap on the wrist. I'd like to think that if they'd known the cancer they'd end up causing the local children they'd have done differently, but the truth is they'd probably just have tried harder to hide it. They certainly didn't do much to protect their own workers from bladder cancer, by all accounts... perhaps if those workers were smaller and cuter Ciba would have shifted more often, in order to shift blame a bit faster.

All credit to Fagin here, he's done a marvelous job stitching this all together, making a welter of detail both clear and understandable, and turning a story of industrial pollution and child cancer into an extremely compelling narrative. If only all non-fiction were this well-written! And if only this one had never needed to be written...

I enjoyed this! It's a little novelette that mixes up clockwork spiders and vampires, which is a frankly appealing combination that I'd like to see more of. Unfortunately I think this is a one-off story, though, which seems a bit of a shame, as it could have been the start of a fun series. I liked the imagery in particular (those spiders!), and I liked the main character. I even enjoyed the antagonistic vampire emperor, in the sense that he was an interesting character even if he was a horrible one... and he thoroughly earned his deserts, here. (I don't know what it is about child vampires that is so creepy, but creepy they are: Claudia was the best thing about Interview with a Vampire, and the child emperor here is very much of her disturbing type.)

This is a book that will be appreciated, I think, by people who own a lot of books. They will find it familiar. I certainly do - the time spent looking for a particular book, the realisation that you've had this other book for ten years and still not got around to reading it, the desire to have more and more books while that pile of owned/unread teeters even higher, and the constant rereading of old favourites...

Hill, in search of a book, gives herself a challenge: to spend a year reading (or rereading) the books she already has. She can't get through all of them. There's not even a hope of that. Rather it is an excavation of the near and existing, a recollection of what each volume means to her and the possibilities inherent between covers. It's an interesting journey - but then it's always interesting, I think, to see what authors read. To be honest, of Hill's work, prior to this, I have only read the wonderfully good ghost story The Woman in Black, so I had few if any preconceptions of her reading bent, but still. It continues to astonish me that anyone feels this deeply about Virginia Woolf. It does not astonish me that anyone feel this deeply about Charles Dickens... but that Gormenghast, that most Dickensian of fantasies, remains on her unread list, does. Then of course there is the winnowing down: if you could only read forty books for the rest of your life, what would they be? Hill's list is very different to mine, and she does not take Bleak House, but her observations that our own literary histories are as unique as fingerprints, as DNA, is both delightful and true, so I shall not look too askance.

Two and a half stars, rounding up to three. A likeable enough read, if uneven in places. Picard and most of the bridge crew end up on an alien planet where a human colony is basically living in the Dark Ages, complete with dragons. When I read books like this I kind of wonder why the author's writing science fiction when clearly they're rather be writing fantasy but then I thought what the hell, may as well go along. It's entertaining even if I can't take it very seriously.

Fun read though it was, however, I can't get over two of the logical problems at the centre of the narrative, and that's what's keeping it from getting the full three stars from me. Firstly, and I realise that Peel is somewhat constrained by canon events from TOS here, the total stagnation of the culture in question... it's just not plausible. Sorry. It wasn't plausible in the canon inspiration for this novel, and it's not plausible here, though Peel does give it a good try what with the effects of outside interference with the dragons. The plot hole that's entirely down to him, however, is that of the gravity bombs, which through handwavium are exerting the gravity of suns and nearly tearing apart the Enterprise... which is all well and good except the Enterprise is orbiting a planet, and these sun-sized gravity effects have absolutely no effect on the planet or the solar system that it's in.

So basically, the whole thing is implausibility on top of implausibility, and while one of the characters references Clarke's law (you know, indistinguishable from magic and so forth), the only magic here is what caused the entire editing staff of Pocket not to notice that gravity affects planets as well as starships.

A step up from the other tie-in to this series, the Brooklyn House Magician's Manual, because it actually goes into some of the history and mythology behind the ancient Egyptian gods and the culture in which they were created. In marginally more depth, anyway. It's still a very thin treatment - this is more two and a half stars, rounding up to three - and as with BHMM I struggle to see the point. Riordan has clearly got an audience here: this series is really popular with kids, so I can't help but wonder if he couldn't have leveraged that popularity to turn this into something rather more informative than it is. Because right now, there's nothing in here that isn't in the series proper, and there's a lot of repetition even within this single book. Basically, it's struggling to be average.

Having read the two Cat and the Hat books - having taught them, even - I expected from the title that this would be more of the same. I mean, obviously there's a quiz in it, but I thought that there would be a story of sorts too. There isn't. It's just random questions, some of them trick questions, and as such it doesn't really hold my attention.

There was one genuinely funny bit. The reader is challenged to do better on the quiz than two featured children... apparently they got it 100% wrong, and one of the questions was to identify which of these two kids was in a portrait. If they're too thick to identify themselves, no wonder they failed everything...

Picard and company come across a lost colony of humans, who are being enslaved by a race of bird-like aliens. It sounds fairly straightforward, but it's more nuanced than it seems. The slaves are about to revolt, and their leader - who Riker warms to very quickly - turns out to be a far more ambiguous character. There's a desperation to the life of the slaves that justifies a lot of their actions, but how much can you exploit a child soldier before that justification runs out? The author's sympathy is clearly with the slaves, as is mine, but even so it's still a thoughtful exploration of the topic, and one that avoids a too simplistic analysis.

Most of the TNG characters get a decent role here too, which is nice. Doctor Crusher, particularly, stands out in her developing relationship with a child soldier who reminds her of her own son, happily off at the Academy and (even more happily) out of this story. Another stand-out character is one of the human overseers, a humanist very much of Picard's type, who is distrusted both by the slaves he is responsible for and by the aliens who essentially consider him to be a foreign degenerate.

All in all it's an enjoyable read that zips along at pace, although the conclusion is surprisingly abrupt... it reads very much as if the author suddenly ran out of room and had to wrap everything up in 15 pages.