octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

A short little story set just after the novel Widdershins, which I read recently and enjoyed. Because it is so short - only five pages or so - there's not a great deal going on. It's still a likeable read, however, being one of those warm-hearted holiday stories where the protagonists cuddle up and are grateful for what they have, which in this case is each other.

I remember when I read the first one of these I found the combination so interesting - a funny thriller. This first sequel is still funny - I think it might be funnier - but it's sort of half mystery, half thriller, if that makes any sense. I mean the villain in the first was really revolting and quite scary, while the villains in this are rather less so, even with the chopped off body parts. And I realised, then, that I'm probably not really reading these for the plots. Don't get me wrong, the plots are entertaining enough, but the real appeal for me here lies not in the case that needs solving and the bounty that needs hunting, but in the characters. Primarily, those of Stephanie's family. Granny Mazur is comedy gold, and honestly, if she could be the assistant on future cases as well that would be excellent. I'm far more interested in her, and in Stephanie's relationship with her, than I am in anything else...

I tend to think of this as a placeholder Anne book - having ended the last engaged to Gilbert Blythe, the two of them are entirely separated here as Gilbert goes to medical school and Anne is teaching in a new town. They're so separated that Gilbert doesn't even appear, and the bulk of the book is Anne writing to him about the people she meets in the new town, all of whom are quirky in one way or another. Any romance is ruthlessly edited out of the letters by Montgomery, with little notes that such was excerpted, and I honestly don't know why. Well, yes I do. Montgomery was clearly more interested in the personalities around Anne, and the result is a gossipy sort of book, as Anne does these character sketches and relates the domestic dramas going on around her. Most of the people she describes are well-meaning, but some remind me inescapably of C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters and must be real horrors to live with, just a grinding level of mild and petty unpleasantness. Given Anne's sense of humour, they are mildly skewered, but still. I'll be happy to get back to Gilbert.

The second volume of Frame's autobiography, An Angel at My Table covers her life at university and her subsequent hospitalisation, for the better part of a decade, for schizophrenia. I should say suspected schizophrenia, for she never actually had it. In some ways for me this autobiography suffers a little for skating over what Frame went through in Seacliff mental hospital. I don't mean that I particularly want to read misery porn, but Frame herself mentions here that she'd already written extensively about this time of her life in her book Faces in the Water (which I haven't read but now want to). It's understandable that she doesn't want to have to cover the same ground twice, or in the same way, but her misdiagnosis and hospital stay is the central event of this volume of her autobiography, with reverberations from it spreading through the whole of her life. I can't help but think that the relief that Frank Sargeson gave her by providing a safe place to work and recover and write would have stood out all the more in the text if the worst parts of Frame's twenties hadn't been glossed over so much.

I read and reviewed the two books collected here separately, so this is basically just for my own records. The collection rating is an average of the two individual ratings, rounded up because Goodreads doesn't do half stars. Of the two books, I preferred Anne of the Island, because I really did enjoy Anne's romance with Gilbert. I always thought it was a shame that it never carried on to the next book (which is part of the reason that Windy Willows only earned three stars from me). Yes, they're still engaged, and yes, Anne is writing him letters and those letters make up substantial parts of the book, but... Gilbert isn't actually in it. And Montgomery is ruthlessly careful to edit out any sense of romance from Anne's letters, so it's all a bit odd, actually. Don't get me wrong, I liked Windy Willows, but I read this series several times as a kid and this is the book I always forget, perhaps because it feels so much like a placeholder in that central relationship.

I read and reviewed each of the four titles collected here separately, so this is just for my own records. I read the series several times as a kid, and if none of the books here were my favourite in that series (that would be House of Dreams) I still very much enjoyed them, and continue to do so during my current reread.

The rating for the collection's an average of the individual ratings. Green Gables and Anne of the Island both got four stars from me, whereas Avonlea and Windy Poplars got three. The latter two were bumped down because of the execrable Davy and the absence of Gilbert respectively, but even though I have a soft spot for child Anne, I do find her older self less, well, less intermittently annoying. Which is a terrible thing to say! I'm laughing as I type it, but really... as much as people love Anne (and I include myself in that) the girl could talk a person to death and she has purple prose written all over her heart. You know it's true. I think I commented in one of the individual reviews that the poetry 16 year old Anne would send to lit journals is too awful to bear thinking about, and I maintain that to be the case. Which only makes me feel more affectionate towards her, I suppose... my 16 year old self's poetry would have been awful too.

A short story in the Whyborne & Griffin series, taking place not long after the first novel. It's Valentine's Day in Widdershins, and Griffin has planned the perfect date night, but being Widdershins it all turns to custard as a lost talisman from a creepy family of funeral directors calls up a monster from the depths of hell. Because this is a short story the lost talisman is found in very short order and the story ends more concerned with romance (well, sex) than it ever is with monsters, and the central emotional beat is Griffin's insecurity in the relationship, which is a bit of a turnaround as in Widdershins it was really Whyborne who had no self-confidence. Anyway, Eidolon lacks the depth that I so enjoyed in that first novel, but that is, again, a function of length. I still enjoyed reading it.

This didn't hit me quite as hard as the first book in the series, but I still really enjoyed it. Maisie continues to be deeply entertaining, but I think what impresses me most about these books is how unwilling they are to let generational trauma lie. It's 1930, or thereabouts, and the effects of WW1 are still (as they were in the first book) having an enormous impact on society. Well it was the Great War then, wasn't it? The war to end all wars, and they had no clue that worse was to come. And Winspear lets the effects of that horrifying experience ripple throughout society, and no-one is immune. Which is the way, of course, that it must have happened. I don't know if every book in this series has the trauma of WW1 embedded in it, but the first two have, and I find them terribly sad and terribly fascinating. The first book, which focused on soldiers who had suffered immense disfigurement, was one thing, but the focus here is quite different... yet still, of course, connected.

I don't know what it was that made some women try to shame young men into signing up for slaughter with their gifts of white feathers, but I can only hope that a) they were not aware of the monstrosity of their actions when they did them, and b) that they became aware afterwards, and regretted it to the end of their days. Such is the case here, and Maisie is confronted with a case that asks, essentially, how does a person go on from that? How can they do something so terrible, something which they must have thought, in some way, was right, and how can they live with themselves after? I don't know. I just know that they did have to live with it.

According to the introduction, this is the first anthology of solarpunk stories, which matches with my (admittedly vague) recollection of the genre. Solarpunk's a relatively new form of science fiction, and for me it's a welcome change from doom and dystopian gloom. Watching it develop over the past few years has been an interesting experience, to the point where, reading this anthology, some of the stories hardly strike me as solarpunk at all. Ecological, yes, speculative, yes, but either my own experience of solarpunk has been hitherto limited (admittedly a likely option) or the definition, such as it is, has evolved over the very few years solarpunk has been acknowledged as a thing.

That being said, challenges to my own personal classification system aside, there's some lovely work here, and I like how there seems to be as much emphasis on poetry as there is on prose. One of my favourite pieces in the entire collection is a poem: "The Seven Species" by Aleksei Valentin, which was so good I stopped to read it several times over before moving on to other works in the anthology. Another highlight was "The Boston Hearth Project" by T.X. Watson, but my absolute favourite, and a story that has become one of my instant all time best shorts ever read, is A.C. Wise's "A Catalogue of Sunlight at the End of the World," which is just so beautifully written that - even if I can't bring myself to think of it as solarpunk - is still just outstandingly lovely. This anthology is worth buying for those three pieces alone, but there's a lot of other fantastic work here too.

This was excellent. What a great piece of science communication! Tallamy has stuffed this book full of research, and in some ways it reads as reminiscent of a scientific paper, in that references follow in brackets for a lot of the information passed on here... and yet it's clearly written for the layperson. There's a restrained but friendly tone, a scattering of personal anecdotes, and more importantly simple, clear explanations of how and why it's important to prioritise native plants over introduced ones in gardens. Tallamy has very obviously written this to persuade, and in that he is successful.

His argument - and it is, as I said, backed up with lots of primary research - is that introduced plants can out-compete native ones, because the insects, birds, and other animals that are suddenly faced with this introduced plant have not evolved alongside it, and are not adapted to consume it. They prefer to eat native plants, by a wide margin, and in the absence of stressors like herbivory the introduced plants take off like gangbusters. This means less natives, which means less food for wildlife, which means the ongoing impoverishment and collapse of ecosystems as food and habitat runs out. Functioning ecosystems are important! We need them to live, and one way to help build them back up is to limit the number of introduced plants in people's gardens and to replace them with natives. Which is an eminently sensible and achievable goal - especially as it doesn't have to happen all at once - and Tallamy offers up a number of possible substitutions. It's all in an American context, of course, but the ecological principles can apply anywhere. I'm convinced.