octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

Fairly predictable story about a runaway who takes a job at a pig farm. It's honestly more nasty than anything else - quite a mean-spirited horror, and I include the protagonist in that. Yes, Nina's new employer is absolutely evil, but when she's huddled in a laundromat without any food or any money, and said employer offers said job, the first thing Nina does is make nasty comments to herself about the other woman's appearance, and the narrative itself hammers pretty hard on the "fat is evil" trope. There are a few genuinely disturbing scenes, but it's not what I'd call an enjoyable horror.

This is an odd book - not in its structure or anything like that, but in its content. It's very much a story of two loves that rarely come together. Markham is famous in the history of flight, being the first person to fly, solo and non-stop, from England to America. This famous flight, however, is really only covered in the very last pages of the book. Far more time is given to her life as a young pilot, learning to fly in Africa and working as a sort of pilot-for-hire there, doing everything from dropping off supplies and medicine to scouting elephants for big game hunters. I do not like these big game hunters. I do not like Markham, much, when she's helping them slaughter for amusement. And what makes it so difficult to read - and so incomprehensible - is how much she clearly loves animals. The other half of the book has nothing to do with transport at all. It's stories from her childhood and youth of the animals she loved or was affected by - her dog, her horses, the lion that attacked her. It's all animal, animal, animal, until she learns to fly and then it's all fly, fly, fly (especially if she can fly to shoot the animals). And I kind of shake my head, but. But. Her prose is absolutely gorgeous. I mean it is beautiful. It's been a long time since I've read prose this good.

Anyway, I read this book because it's one of my Dad's favourites and he raves about it. I thought I better read it just so I can understand why he loves it so much. He grew up in Africa, so I think he loves the familiarity of the setting. That doesn't affect me so much, but the writing... it's worth reading just for that beautiful prose.

Three and a half stars, rounding up to four. I don't know why on Earth Reynolds keeps insisting that this isn't a history book, because it plainly is. It only isn't a history book if you think of history as something discrete in time, that doesn't have direct consequences for the world today - but history isn't that at all. It's a continuum, and the racist practices of history that are detailed here are neither discrete nor done with. Sadly, they continue today in not much different form than they ever did.

I read this book for task 2 in the Read Harder 2021 challenge, which was to read a nonfiction book about racism. And while I enjoyed it and thought it had a lot of valuable things to say, I wish that my library had had the original Stamped by Ibram X. Kendi rather than this, the YA version. Reynolds has done a good job re-interpreting for younger people, or so I presume (not having read the original), but I wonder if the adult version is more in-depth in its content. I enjoy reading nonfiction, even the more academic nonfiction, but this came from a small town library and the more academic nonfiction is not so much the priority there. Well, fair enough. If I were the librarian and had to choose between the two books on my limited budget I'd pick the YA one too, if only to encourage more kids to read it. Reynolds has made this book very accessible for younger readers, both in his language and in his broad approach. For all the protestation that this isn't a history book, it covers the genesis and motivation behind racism in the United States over a period of several hundred years in a clear and convincing manner, and the book makes a concise argument for the necessity of activism. I just wanted more history, please!

You can always tell the characters who've never read a horror story. Wayne, the protagonist of this horror novelette, is one of them. He makes a bargain with a witch and doesn't hold up his end of the deal, and so things go very badly wrong for poor old Wayne. (If he'd ever read a horror story, he'd know this and be more careful.) He's a decent enough person, just trying to get by and scrape together enough cash so that his family doesn't lose their little home, but creepy witches don't much care about consent and nor do they care about character, so sucks to be Wayne. Just what's going to happen to him is pretty obvious, but because this is only a novelette and quite a fast-paced one at that, the story zips along nicely despite the foreseeable outcome.

Picard and company are in negotiations with an insectoid race who is considering joining the Federation, and initially things seem to be going better than expected, which is always a portent of disaster. The Jarada are subject to a medical condition which is inexorably sending them all insane, and the away team is split up and forced to deal with a society consisting of individuals who are increasingly unbalanced and increasingly dangerous. It's an enjoyable read, with focus split between a number of characters, which I always like, and it's good to see Keiko get a starring role for once... if only the focus had stayed on her botanical skill, and there'd been less of the squabbling with her husband. I like O'Brien, but he was an unmitigated arse here and I didn't enjoy the implications that Keiko was equally to blame because she wasn't. That is a small quibble, though, and I'm prepared to put up with the tedious marital squabbling if it means I get more Keiko working with plants.

A rather larger quibble - although one that didn't much interfere with my enjoyment, as it was really only there in the last ten percent or so of the book - was the solution to the Jarada insanity. I don't want to give too much away, but for a space-faring race to be so limited in their basic science is just not very believable. Environmental factors should have been one of the first things tested for, and that it wasn't just isn't credible.

Another likeable outing in this series, and I continue to enjoy the mix of forensic science and actual crime. It feels a little less thriller-like than the other two I've read, though - not that I'm complaining, I'm just raising it as a point of interest. No-one's attacking Scarpetta here, unless they're attacking her reputation. It's more a straight hunting down of clues for her, while other people confront the suspects. The one time she does opt for confrontation, she chickens out before actually doing it, and I liked that. After all, she's a doctor, not a detective, so potentially facing up to a serial killer should terrify her. She should see it as a terrible idea and change her mind and leave it to people who are either more expert or more stupid than she is. If I'd managed to stumble across a serial killer in the course of my day I'd be walking the other way as well. I guess what I'm saying is that there's less of a sense of creepy danger here, although there's still just enough to scrape a place on my thriller shelf. More entertaining for me is the fun little science twist at the end.

A beautiful little chapbook of poems, and one that I think really successfully exploits the chapbook form. There's a noticeable repetition in some of these poems, similar words and phrases, and because the collection is so compact this comes across as a deliberately unifying feature (as I suspect it is meant to be), and one that transforms the small individual poems into pieces of a whole. If this were a full length collection of poetry, that repetition would perhaps seem a little more laboured, but because everything here is so very concise, it sharpens the individual pieces rather than blunts them. There are so many little scalpel lines that stand out to me here: the mermaid imagery in "terracotta soldiers," the nonhuman footprints in "the dogs of Rotterdam," and the similarity of resurrection and extinction in "hoarfrost harvest." Just a really enjoyable read, full of lovely prose.

This is really fucking strange. In-depth analysis there I know, but my point stands: it's just really, really strange. I don't actually know if I like it. Tentacle is ambitious and interesting and complex and it's deeply original. It's also not very pleasant. Nearly all the characters are arseholes, and there's not a whole lot of characterisation beyond that. It's post-apocalypse and climate change and ocean conservation, which are all things that I like, but it's also time travel and pirates and, well, people being arseholes, and those things I always find a much harder sell. It takes careful reading to follow the plot, which I like, but structure and concept, in the absence of a character I can give a damn about isn't enough. That absence might, in another book, be mitigated by the emotion evoked by environment - such as the dying ocean at the centre of this book - but the affect of that particular absence is so flat here that it doesn't really compensate.

I really don't know. I think I'm going to have to mull it over and perhaps read it again before I can come to a real conclusion here. And that's a conclusion that's interesting in itself. I read a lot, and there aren't many books that I read and bounce off so hard I can't even tell what I think about them. Usually I either like a book or I don't, or I can articulate a general level of indifference. My response to Tentacle, however, is wholly ambiguous, and that's honestly kind of fascinating.

I would dearly like to give this four stars, but the first third was so unnecessary, and so monumentally dull, that I seriously considered putting it down and never picking it up again. I find reading about battles boring at the best of times, and there were two in a row here. The book opened with a fight between the Klingons and a ship of alien invaders, with a very lengthy digression into changing gravity and mass that never went anywhere and so seemed like an utter waste of time. (Granted, this is the first book in a miniseries of four, so the gravity weapon might come up again, but it was pointless where it was.) Then there was an equally long and equally boring hand to hand fight on a planet between the Enterprise crew and the Klingons again, a fight which was essentially tossed to the side when the invaders came in. Both these lengthy scenes were tedious in the extreme, and both of them added nothing to the overall story.

It was a relief, then, when Kirk started building what seemed to be a friendship with one of the invading leaders. I want more from Trek than people endlessly smacking the shit out of each other and I got it here, eventually... albeit it ended tragically. The more books I read in this franchise, the more it becomes clear that the stories I really warm to are about two mortal enemies who build friendship and respect while still representing the interests of their own culture, and who manage to maintain that relationship even in the midst of serious conflict. I got that here for most of the book, so I ended a great deal more pleased than I started... but my goodness, that start was a drain on my interest.

Three and a half stars, rounding up to four. For the first half of the book it was a solidly three star read for me, and that was entirely due to the prose. It was considered and technically competent, but... I don't want to say that it was devoid of personality, because that's not quite it. It was more that it was so very consistently earnest, cheerful, and inoffensive that it practically screamed "I've been sanded down by lots of people to avoid anything that might upset anyone! Why yes, my speaker is in politics." The prose came across, to me anyway, as extraordinarily smooth and with more than a whiff of plastic. Towards the second half, actual hints of personality and emotion started coming through, and I was much more engaged with the person as opposed to the politics.

Subject-wise, there's a lot to be engaged by. Buttigieg is intelligent and thoughtful and I admire his idea of service, and that he's willing to put his money where his mouth is regarding that ideal. Whatever my opinion of the US military and the use to which it's put, it's an inescapable fact that many contemporary US politicians seem far more willing to send it out to fight wars than they are to fight those wars themselves, or to send their own children to fight them. I can't help but think that perhaps there'd be a bit less war if the people responsible for stoking it had to lead from the front, as it were. Buttigieg's military service is only a minor theme here, compared to his focus on civic engagement and the transformation of struggling small city economy, but it reinforces the idea of public service that is much of his apparent motivation. And while I generally agree with his politics, he comes across as a decent guy here as well, and that's mostly because he doesn't seem to ask people to do what he wouldn't do himself.