octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

An improvement on the last issue, largely I think due to the fact that it doesn't take itself so seriously. The storyline here's kind of ridiculous, but it wallows in the ridiculous, and that absolute shamelessness works - drunken Thor talking to his hammer, the cutesy elf lands with gingerbread pub, the fact that when a violent dark elf wanders into this technicolour Hansel and Gretel nightmare the light elves pin him down and worriedly feed him, constantly stuffing because they think he looks hungry. It's amusing, and I like the goat.

Credit where it's due, this issue puts a stake through the heart (or a hammer through the head) of the idea that forcing disparate people together into a group and expecting them to get along is a valid survival strategy. Unfortunately, I expect they'll all come together in the end - well, most of them - but I enjoy that this is at least going a little further down the road of nope than is usual. Malekith still isn't stacking up to Gorr, but it's a likeable enough read nonetheless, if nothing particularly startling.

Oh, this is much better. It's still a little hooked on the saccharine, because it's no surprise to anyone that the League is back together I'm sure, even though its apparent dissolution was the best thing about the last issue. Honestly, I would have preferred that the events leading to the break-up were left as they were, underlying the fundamental dislocation between all these worlds. I mean, I know superhero narratives tend to be about drawing people together, but I enjoyed the few minutes of hope I had that the script was going to be flipped here. As it is, that dislocation has entered the text rather thoroughly anyway, with the dark elves demonstrating just how very alien they are. And because of it, Malekith has at last begun to seem an interesting and credible threat for me - I'm far more interested in plotting under the surface than battle scenes, and that the latter were used as camouflage for the former here seems to be a good use of them, for once.

I don't know that like is the right word for this, three star rating aside. It's certainly compelling, but usually on a horrifying level. Reischek was an Austrian taxidermist who spent years wandering around the backblocks of New Zealand in the late nineteenth century, collecting specimens for museums mostly. Those specimens were both biological and cultural, and this is a genuinely interesting account of his travels, particularly his interaction with Maori and his fascination with birdlife.

Oh, what he does to that birdlife. Shoots it as soon as looks at it, essentially, and the rarer it is the quicker he is to shoot. (At the end of his travels Reischek goes back to Austria, toting his collection, which includes hundreds and hundreds of extinct bird skins. Including more kakapo, stuffed into his trunks, than are alive today, and monstrous numbers of huia, now gone entirely. I want to strangle him.) It's the hypocrisy that gets to me. He spends so much time waxing lyrical about the ecology of the country he's pillaging, lamenting how it's being destroyed by careless exploitation. And for all his apparent good (if still racist) opinion of the Maori, he looks down at them for being so uncivilised as to trade mummified heads for gold while at the same time stealing corpses so that he can do the same. 37 skulls he takes back to Austria with him, amidst the mountain of dead birds, and hocks the lot to a museum. Apparently, it's different when he does it.

Just a quick note - I'm switching my original review to the omnibus edition, because that's what I read back in 2014 and, looking back, I realised I'd mistakenly reviewed the first volume instead. Anyway, this was what I wrote then:

Seriously dire, and its relentlessly episodic sequels aren't any better.

It's just so vacuous. Granted it's YA, but that doesn't mean it has to be so superficial. And the terrible, terrible pandering that goes on in it! YA often has wish-fulfilment tendencies but rarely are they so deeply, crushingly blatant.

Each of the main children have special powers and extraordinary eye colours (topaz, aquamarine, etc. - if you can get through them all without groaning you are a more tolerant reader than I). The central two also have dead or missing parents and are of course experts in some obscure form of martial arts. (I kept hoping Gwen would get at least as irritated as I was at Vic's constant "Sheesh!" and murder him with prejudice, but it was not to be. Alas.) That is not all of it. The Special Snowflakeness just goes on and on.

There was a brief moment of interest in the first book, where the bad guy was so thumpingly telegraphed that I felt sure the authors were pulling a fake, but no. The plot was as depressingly obvious and heavy-handed as the rest of it. I wouldn't have put up with this as an under-10, so it boggles the mind that older readers seem to be the target audience. I suppose I should say "at least they're reading" but really, that is a cold comfort. Surprising, too, as I've read a lot of Anderson and generally enjoy him.

In 1948, the body of an American journalist tasked with covering the Greek civil war was found. George Polk had been murdered, and a disaster of an investigation and show trial followed. Pitting the ethics of honest journalism against the endemic corruption of the Greek government, and the willing-to-countenance-corruption of the Americans propping up the regime, it's no surprise that ethics lost. And they did so partly because the bulk of the American journalists, some of whom were in positions high enough to make a fuss, decided (with some honourable exceptions) to look away, to be deliberately sub-standard in the performance of their vocation. Marton's coverage-in-retrospect, taking place 40 years after the events in question, seems well-researched and plausible. I'd never even heard of Polk before this, but despite a fatal naivety in his last few days, he comes across a lot better than the men who did their level best to obfuscate his death. Yes, the Yanks were in the beginning of their frothing-at-the-mouth over communism, but their willingness to throw up truth and justice for their own ends make that frothing appear a lot less about idealism and loyalty than it does their desperate desire to hold onto power at any cost, and for its own sake.

One would like to think that journalists working now would be less slavish in their desire to please, but one only has to look at what passes for much of contemporary political journalism to see that such a wish is woefully optimistic.

My goodness, what a ridiculous pontificating jumble. It's one of those dialogue narratives so beloved by philosophy, but in this case it's hardly Socratic. Instead of asking questions and leading the answerer into contradiction and illogic, this is a basically a puffed-up manifesto rant, and when the author stops for breath it's so his loyal companion (a woman, of course) can say Are You Sure? or I See. (I can't help but think that, if this conversation were happening today, these deadening non-responses would be the verbal hints to shut up and go away that Stacpoole is just not getting.)

This isn't to say that the book's an entire waste of time. When Stacpoole talks about science - which he does fairly often, as the central idea is that humanity is evolving into a world mind, shades of The Phenomenon of Man I think - he's frequently wrong but he does produce some beautiful sentences and imagery. Unfortunately he gets off his wrong-headed if pretty understanding of evolution fairly soon in order to start ranting about what are clearly two favourite bugbears - socialism and feminism. He grabs bits and pieces of evidence from every possible source - science, religion, history - to justify his rather condescending rants, and it's all clearly cherry-picked and often contradictory. For instance: an individual is of no real account to the world mind and the ongoing perfection of the species, so women should limit themselves to the home and motherhood no matter their desires or talents (a woman who exists outside of the home is of "no account"). But socialism is wrong because ensuring an equal playing field means that the individual's desire for self-improvement may be tarnished and they (by which he means men) will lose the opportunity to compete in business and rise through the ranks of society, and the individual's success is key to progress. See what I mean?

If this were actually a dialogue these inconsistencies might be acknowledged and confronted, but it isn't. It's basically just a manifesto rant, and has as much value as those things tend to do.

Excellent. I've just pulled this out again to check some things and it's as useful as the day I got it for my marine science classes, which is more than you can say for most textbooks.

Not absolutely comprehensive (it only gives a brief over-view of each species) but it's not meant to be. As a guidebook it's invaluable.

I am clearly utterly biased, as I'm the one who picked the stories that ended up in this anthology, but I love them all to bits. Consumption is such an interesting theme, especially when it's tied into issues of sex and gender, and the stories in here have all approached the issue of women and food and horror in a variety of creepy, compelling ways. I love that while some of the stories in here depict women as victims, as consumable objects, others subvert that expectation by making women predatory consumers themselves. I love that some of these stories navigate and survive horror by relying on friendship and family and shared experiences and sticking together. I love that so many of them have a bone-deep streak of kindness that turns monstrosity into something generous and wonderful. And I love that they're about choosing to act, and choosing not to act, because so often objects of consumption aren't expected to have a choice.

Oh, I do feel bad giving this two stars. Credit where it's due, Tindall's prose is gorgeous. I routinely stopped to reread sentences, and if my own critical efforts were as beautiful as his I would be very happy with my academic writing. But. But. As beautiful as his sentences were, and as much sense as his paragraphs made, I finished this book not ten minutes ago, after a week of moderately careful reading, and I couldn't tell you the first thing it was about. Yes, it's about the literary symbol, I know. But what Tindall thinks of it, his theory of it (if indeed there is one)... it has floated away as if it never were. It's not that I didn't understand what he was talking about at time of reading. It's just that the whole thing was so shapeless that nothing whatsoever has stuck. Like critical candyfloss... pink and billowing and, once you've tasted it, completely melting away.