octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This is weird but fascinating! It's almost little interconnected pieces of prose poetry or short stories, making up this novella of alienation and archetype that ends in a horrible zoo conflagration. Small character sketches of disconnected people, of migrants and workers and - honestly - people who have lost the plot or fallen away from society in one way or another. I was all for giving it five stars for most of the book, but I do think that the storyline of the Banker (awful woman) fell over itself at the end. It became a bit too obvious, as if this was the place where the author decided to hammer the theme into readers' heads. Overdone, I think, is the right word for it.

But still, fascinating. Back to the library this goes, and it goes as well on my list of books to get my own copy of. 

This is miles better than the first book in the series, which was absolutely dreadful. I didn't realise that the main pair from that book would end up as supporting cast in this one, but thankfully their presence was minimal and relatively rational. This follow-up looks better in comparison simply by having protagonists who aren't awful fucking people. Maggie isn't a doormat, and what's-his-face (seriously, I finished the book literally two minutes ago and I've already forgotten his name!) had a bad start but improved somewhat. I do think that Maggie fell for him again far too quickly, and I don't really understand why, but she had a decent sense of self-worth and some actual agency, which is necessary in a heroine for me to enjoy a romance.

It's a popcorn read and every plot twist was telegraphed miles in advance, but it zipped along nicely and killed a couple of hours easily enough, so I'm not inclined to quibble. 

Oh, this is fun! And funny. I suppose that technically it's science fiction, given that it posits a future where a birth defect has wiped out all men, but really it's a good-natured series of loosely connected short comics about a world made up entirely of women. So much here is very low stakes, which makes it relatable: it's a rainy day, so do we do paperwork or do we curl up by the fire? It's a sunny day, have we remembered sunscreen? The kids have got to put on a historical skit in class - which battle are they doing again, can anyone tell the difference?

My favourite part was the dad joke. I cackled. 

I'd never heard of these comics before I found them randomly in the library's graphic novel section. I understand they started out as an Instagram web series? I'm not on Instagram, so no surprise I didn't see it. I'd quite like a copy of my own though, I think. 

I started reading this, and after several pages I wasn't quite getting into it, so I went to YouTube. Luckily for me, there's a video from Opera Australia up that's put the whole thing on - it's only half an hour, so not a long watch. I went back and forth between the text and the show, and that made it so much more entertaining! It's a silly, frothy piece of fun. Not especially deep, but it had the audience smiling, and if the judge doesn't come across as entertaining in the text as he does in the show - the actor did a fantastic job there - I still enjoyed it. 

I think it's probably very easy, in a series like this, to lean into the misery, to the idea that no matter what you do, and how good your intentions are, everything you love or empathise with can be taken away. The prospect of reanimation doesn't really solve that, and I'm hoping, by the end of the series, that there'll be a more optimistic end than in the original. I have to admit, though, I'm struggling to see how. There's such an aura of hopelessness here - and it's done so well, but it's still so pervasive. I am desperately hoping for a better future for little Akai, but the argument for grief and love here rests on the continued existence of the former, so a happy ending seems unlikely at this point. 

And those poor pigs! I have to admit, when the Creature went into that barn and started staring at the pigs, I wondered if he was going to be as indifferent to their welfare as he generally is to humans. (I should have remembered the whales.) There was a brief moment of optimism as I realised he actually felt for them, and then it turned to shit and the look of absolute horror on his face... 

I did not miss Hastings one bit!

Honestly, I barely missed Poirot. He's very much a supporting player here, as three witnesses to a poisoning at a party work together to try and solve first one murder, and then three. Poirot basically observes and lets them do the leg work, then divulges the solution at the end. And what a clever solution it is! It's the mark of a good mystery, I think, that it seems so obvious once shared... even if, like me, you're completely in the dark during the read through. 

I like the end very much; partly for the solution and partly for Poirot himself, who seems a little more self-aware and a little more human. I must admit, though, to still being puzzled by one thing: is Hermione or Egg the worse name? That poor woman. Real name or nickname, she's screwed either way. 

This is an old collection of very short scifi stories - what would be called flash fiction if it were published today. Given that the book was published in 1978, I think, it mostly contains work from the so-called Golden Age of science fiction, which - with few exceptions - is frankly not a patch on the best scifi being produced at the moment. That may sound snobbish, but of the hundred stories here, I was impressed by three: "Sanity Clause" by Edward Wellen, "I'm Going to Get You" by F.M. Busby, and "Examination Day" by Henry Slesar. And while they were better than the rest, they didn't reach outstanding.

The rest were distinctly average, and there was rather a lot of repetition. Too many stories reliant on letters to publishers, or puns, or twist endings that can be seen a mile off. Look, I've published a couple of flash stories myself. They are hard, and I say that as an experienced short story writer. They're not my natural length, but there are some speculative writers out there who absolutely excel at them. I suppose I should be glad that the form has improved since this book was put together, but then it would have to. Most of these just aren't worth reading again, I'm afraid. And I can count the number of women included here on one hand, which is disappointing. 

I don't know... I suspect the appeal of the "100 X stories" idea was such that Asimov, perhaps, grabbed at whatever he could to make up the numbers. 

This is very sweet, and I enjoyed it - I realised, as I read it, that I'd seen the subsequent film many years ago. Which explains why parts of it seemed vaguely familiar! Now, as then, I enjoyed the fundamental kindness of the story: a pregnant 17 year old girl is abandoned at a Wal-Mart, and lives there until members of the rural town she's found herself in reach out and support her to make a life for herself. 

The characterisation's very good, and Novalee is immensely sympathetic. Her feckless abandoner and father of her child, Willy Jack, is less so, and I admit I could not bring myself to care about his storyline at all. They're only in the same space at the very beginning and end of the book, and Letts could have edited out his part entirely and I feel as if I wouldn't have missed it. Apart from that, though, the book's warm and enjoyable, if sprinkled with what can seem like unbelievable amounts of drama. 

I read and reviewed each of these separately, back in 2016, so this is basically just for my own records... keeping track of what series I've read and so forth. I liked the books - two of them I liked very much - but these days I mostly feel that they sparked some very interesting fanfic. 

I thought the first issue in this series was great, but the second is excellent. It's so cynical and bitter - and cynicism and bitterness don't make things excellent in themselves, which is a mistake a lot of authors make as far as I'm concerned. Here, though, it's born out of observation and repeated history. Frankenstein's creature, wandering the wilderness, has developed such a loathing of humanity that he'll slaughter anyone, and he's mirrored by those yokel brutes patrolling the border wall for their chance at murder. Even the more sympathetic adults are compromised in multiple ways, and it's hard to read and think that anyone's going to get a happy ending here.