octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This is one of those variants on the Prince and the Pauper type tales, in which a young slave woman in the American almost-South (does Missouri count as the South? I've honestly no idea) swaps her baby with that of the man she is enslaved by. The two boys grow up into each other's place, but the story really has no interest in the white-child-turned-slave, it's all about the slave-turned-white-child, and I'm not sure how I feel about him being thoroughly a bad person. On the one hand, he's cosseted and spoilt by his vacuous purported relatives to an extent which would ruin any child, but on the other it smacks a little too much of the (unfounded, in this case) argument that nature is overcoming nurture. Which is of course bollocks, but which would be absolutely of a piece with the attitudes of the time... attitudes which Twain is admittedly skewering. The final line - which I won't spoil - is so pointed, so vicious and ridiculous at once that it is both the only line Twain could have ended this story on, and worth reading the entire book for. Which seems to give the impression that it's a bad book, now that I think of it, but it isn't. I genuinely liked it, but the sting in the tail is what really makes it.

Charles Dickens is a judgemental bitch, and I love him for it. You only have to read his novels to know that he was judgemental, and that all his contempt was reserved for those who mistreated the weak. His rants on the evils of poverty, for instance, are many and heartfelt. It is no surprise, then, that in his volume of English history, written for children, his sympathies are almost entirely for the common people, who are starved, murdered, exploited, and forced into wars in the service of rulers who are as vicious as they are cruel, and who are almost to a man utterly untrustworthy. When he actually approves of a ruler it is a notable thing.

This book is nearly 400 pages of scorn and disgust, a series of extremely unflattering portraits of rather repulsive people. I do believe my favourite description relates to Henry the Eighth, whom Dickens calls as "a most intolerable ruffian, a disgrace to human nature, and a blot of blood and grease upon the History of England." There's more than one place where he describes the inexplicable survival of one of the royal louts and their lackeys and admits it might have been better for everyone had a raging mob pulled them to bits (I rather got the sense of wistful sighs). And, you know, those near 400 pages of inflicted miseries can become a little repetitive, and the history itself is very thin and not perhaps completely accurate, but the judgemental bitching, and the general humanism behind the complaints, makes it worth the read.

Likeable short novella about a man who gets lost in the countryside while trying to escape a dodgy ex, and meets the youngest son of a family of shapeshifters. Romance ensues, but it's the ending I found most interesting. David's experiences cause him to make a decision that's bound to have significant repercussions for his life and future, but he feels bound to do it anyway because it's the right thing to do. I have to admit, I was expecting that plotline to be dropped, for his past actions to be excused by his present character, but that doesn't happen. I don't suppose that the book needs a sequel, but I'd happily read it if so, as David's journey is more interesting to me than the romance or the whole shapeshifting thing. Speaking of the shapeshifting, Fox takes an interesting tack there as well, with a lot of the focus of the middle part of the novella on what it means to not be a werewolf - I'm being vague, so not as to spoil things - but this didn't really have the follow-through that it might have done, I think.

Still, a likeable book. I've got another of the author's about the place somewhere - I bought them both at the same time - so I'm looking forward to reading that one.

I think it's fair to say I'm not the biggest fan of Lovecraft. I think there's a couple of his short stories that I actually liked, but mostly I find his work to be overwritten and not disturbing in the slightest. This is, however, his most famous work, and I've been meaning to read it, with as open a mind as I possibly can, for some time. It's a good thing I didn't know in advance that it was heavily influenced by Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, though, because that book was absolutely dreadful and would have only have put me off reading further. H.P., alongside your other problems, if this is any indication you have trashy taste in books. Yes, you do.

So. I got hold of At the Mountains of Madness and it was going so well. For about the first third I was seriously considering giving it four stars, because the journey to Antarctica, that hideous mystery of what happened to the rest of the team, and the sense of incipient menace was actually well done. And, while we're giving praise where it's due, the final third wasn't bad, and neither were the penguins, although I do think they were criminally underused. But that central third... that long, tedious history of previous life in Antarctica? Bored. I was bored. It's dullsville, I'm sorry. I don't know why the life and verve of the first person narration died when it came to The Relating of the Unending Murals, but it did. It's honestly taken me several days to get through this novella because I kept getting bogged down in the middle bit. I don't say it sent me to sleep every time, but it came pretty close. Interesting idea, great beginning, but the historical worldbuilding killed it for me, it really did.

Poor old penguins.

This is a mixed bag for me. There's a handful of stories by Lovecraft in here, and most of them weren't that good. The Rats in the Walls, The Dunwich Horror, and At the Mountains of Madness have interesting elements but don't rise to likeable. The high point here was The Colour Out of Space, which I thought was excellent. It tried its damnedest to drag the rest of the anthology up to three stars by main strength, but one good story compared to three indifferent (and one of those indifferent being a short novel) just isn't enough to compensate for the rest, or the letter fragments in which Lovecraft expounded on weird fiction in a way that made me think he must have been a terrible bore at parties. I think the best word I can use to describe the collection as a whole, bar that one excellent story, is "overwrought." Still, I read it and I gave it a good shot.

The whole volume is introduced and annotated by S.T. Joshi, and I don't know why he didn't bother with a table of contents or captions for the various illustrations, but I wish he had. His short introductory essay was clear and interesting, however, as were some of the notes, but others seemed a bit like filler. A number of them were just definitions for not-very-unusual words. Is it really necessary to have footnotes explaining words like "pustules," "puerile," and "plethora"? If so, that might just be more terrifying than anything else in here...

What a clever little puzzle box of a mystery! I admit I picked the identity of Crow very early on, but the rest was a surprise. The mystery isn't really the point here, though. It's more the brief interactions of the sixteen different characters, and how being forced to take part in a mystery alters their lives. It's on that point that I'm of two minds, however. This edition is - wait, I'm checking - 225 pages. With the best will in the world, a 225 page book with sixteen different protagonists can do very little than sketch in characterisation, and given that characterisation is something I enjoy, it often felt very thin to me. That being said, those sketches were extremely well done, and Raskin managed to include more character information in them than I would have thought possible, but still. I don't say this often, but I wonder if a bigger page count might have helped.

I wonder, too, if I would have liked this book if I'd read it as a child. I'm not altogether sure that I would have, which to me seems an argument, if nothing else, for continuing to read children's books as an adult. You can appreciate more then.

I did enjoy this, but it has to be said: Criminy Stain may be one of the most laughable names I've ever come across in fantasy. It doesn't scream romantic hero to me, it screams like something unpleasant on an ad for washing powder.

Still a fun read, though. Letitia comes across a locket that acts as a portal to a world called Sang, which (unsurprisingly, given it's called Sang) is a place where vampires are a significant part of the population... and not only are there vampires, half the ecosystem runs on blood. Vampiric bunnies, vampiric rats, vampiric horses... it sounds demented but it works. It's also a very different sort of life to Letitia's real world job as a nurse, and her loving relationship with her elderly grandmother, but of course the problem of living in two worlds is that sometimes you have to choose. I have to say, I didn't care much for the guilt trip that Criminy laid on her a time or two - she only found the locket in the first place because he basically did a magic spell in Sang to bring him his perfect match. Only that spell is all about him, and never once in performing it did he think that his perfect match might have a life of her own, with things that she valued and couldn't abandon. I wish Letitia had brought that up, but she didn't. Which is a shame, as I liked her and would have liked to see her defend herself a little more there.

I did enjoy that there was no buckling to blackmail for her though. At the climax, she thought her way out of things very quickly, and was cool-headed and intelligent with no hand-wringing. I really dislike stories where evil people are allowed to go on and hurt others because the protagonist is too worried about their own moral status to effectively stop them, and that didn't happen here. Letitia was "You're evil, you need to go. Full stop." And fair enough too, I thought.

This is an easy read, and I particularly liked the world-building. I thought that Singh juggled three different races (none of them human) well enough to really distinguish each from the others, and I'd totally be up for reading a history of the Psy, because they are weird and creepy and their logic takes them strange places.

That said I did find this a sometimes frustrating read. The main conflict is about trying to locate and rescue a wolf-pack woman who is the latest in a series of victims (irritating that the victims were always women, given the reason behind the murders) of a Psy serial killer. And I was interested in that story, I really was! But every time it looked like it might start going somewhere, I got dragged back to the frequently repetitive angst of the main romantic pairing. And yes, this is paranormal romance, I know. The romance was always going to be front and centre. It just felt a little unbalanced to me. Particularly near the end, when Brenna's rescue was addressed in a couple of paragraphs, very much "Oh, and that happened too". Dammit, don't make me care about the plot if it's going to be shoved aside as inconvenient every time your heroine needs to fight with her boyfriend! (There was a lot of fighting. Mostly because the boyfriend became more and more of a controlling arse as the story went on - why do people find this sexy? Is it his Tragic Backstory?)

I did like the follow-up with Brenna, though. And extra points for Tamsyn, I liked her a lot too.

This has no science in it whatsoever; I admit to feeling a little cheated. But it is about women in horror films, which is - apart from science in horror - my very favourite thing for horror to be about. The authors discuss the various ways in which women are presented in horror films (as the final girl, for instance, or as instruments of revenge) and in each section, several short chapters are dedicated to specific films illustrating that particular quality. It's a good structure, bite-sized and accessible. In fact, I think "accessible" is probably the word that best describes this book. The style is chatty and informal, and it reads as if the book is directed at beginners, basically. Sort of an introduction to horror analysis for non-academics, and when I say it's written at an entry level, I mean that the authors feel the need to explain what PTSD is so that readers can understand horror heroines might suffer from it.

Don't get me wrong. Basic, accessible texts are invaluable in attracting attention to any field, and this does that. I enjoyed reading it, but I'm forced to admit that it doesn't go much beyond the superficial. It's also very scattered. The chapter on The Babadook, for instance, starts with a vignette about Marie Curie's experience of widowhood, which is seemingly included on the grounds that Curie grieved her husband and the characters of the film also experience grief. Similarly, a box text on the Nobel prizes is included in the chapter on Let the Right One In, apparently thematically relevant because both film and prizes originate in Sweden. These odd, unfocused moments are just that, but the lack of focus becomes more serious when chapters are more substantially padded out with the barely relevant. A large section of the chapter on Ginger Snaps, for example, was taken up with an (admittedly interesting) interview with the emerging film director Gigi Saul Guerrero, who not only was not involved with Ginger Snaps, but doesn't talk about it or even about anything remotely associated with it, if you don't count the fact that both film and director are related to women in horror. Which, frankly, is not enough to justify the placement.

So, approachable but unfocused, and not particularly in-depth. Within those limitations, it's likeable enough.

I started typing "interesting but a little bland," for this review, which seems a contradiction, really, but I stand by it. The Enterprise is taken over by an intelligence made of clay, brought on board from an away mission to a geological research station. I don't have a whole lot of faith in the science here, but that's not the point. It reminded me of every blob-based B-grade horror ever made, and that isn't a criticism, I adore B-grade horror, but I can't say I was surprised at anything that happened... the opening hook was clearly never going to come to pass, so not much tension there. And as such, it was likeable enough and mildly interesting, but... yes, bland. Picard is a reserved personality, but there's a difference between reserved and muted and I think that got glossed over a bit here. On the other hand, I do enjoy seeing Troi acting as a counselor to people onboard, and her treatment of a young adult here was sympathetic and plot-relevant, although not being autistic myself I can't comment with any level of accuracy on Penelope's experiences.

Not the best Trek book I've read, but not the worst either. Just solidly average, I think.