octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I may well have read a Poirot short story without Hastings in it before, but if I have I don't recall it. In his place as sidekick is Miss Lemon, who is an unimaginative mechanical delight... I hope there are more stories with her in them. As for the mystery itself, it's clever and interesting and related to gardening and fish, which I enjoy. I also enjoy Poirot's immediate sympathy for the underdog, and how determined he is that she should be exonerated. He really is a very nosy little man, but that does work out well for Katrina here. 

I've finally made it through the three novels in this series - just the shorts to go - and this is just for my own records, as I read and reviewed the three books separately. 

I just... I can't get past the fact that I find the world-building deeply unconvincing. Both when it came to the factions and when it came to the science. The second bothers me more. The first I can understand as a metaphor, even if I think it's an enormously heavy-handed metaphor, but the second... I know that science fiction often uses handwavium in its world-building, and I'm happy to accept that, so long as the handwavium is internally consistent. Here, it just isn't. The development of genetic science, within the series universe, is so monumentally out-of-step with all the other sciences that it's impossible for me to take the world-building seriously. That kind of scuppers the rest for me, I'm afraid. 

I don't think I'm having the emotional reaction to this book that I'm meant to. For one, this is the first of the three Divergent novels where I've found myself liking Tris. I didn't dislike her before; I was merely indifferent. That being said, I didn't actually like her enough to care about what happened to her. Zero emotional response there, although I do admire the writing decision behind it.

The one thing that did really get my attention was the world-building, and - as with the previous two volumes - not actually in a good way. For a society with such a focus on genetics, the total lack of development in genetic science compared to, say, that required for the manufacture of an unending number and variety of serums... it's just not credible. Granted, my own background makes me pickier here than most readers, but when my biggest emotional response to a sweeping novel that includes the death of a number of characters is irritation at the science world-building, then yeah. As much as I appreciate the final message of hope coming from choosing to go on, and even move on, I can't get over the futuristic understanding of the serums when compared to the historic understanding of genetics. It makes no damn sense!!! 

I read and reviewed the two books collected here separately, so this is just for my own records. I bounced off them, I'm afraid. Divergent got a single star from me, and Insurgent two, so the average is one and a half. I think the issue, for me, is that I'm just not convinced by the setting and I don't really care about the characters. I did like the increasing emphasis on politics - there was more of this in the second book than the first - but the constant deception by the main characters felt repetitive. I'll finish the series because it bothers me when I don't finish series, but I think it's safe to say this one's not for me. 

Fun, moderately creepy ghost story that's clearly influenced by the The Turn of the Screw and Jane Eyre while not being quite as good as either. Eliza takes up a position as governess in a rural Gothic setting, after the death of her father in London, but what she finds when she arrives is secrecy and absence. The children's parents don't seem to be around, and a succession of governesses has died in mysterious circumstances. What's more, it seems like she's next.

The antagonist is the best thing about this. They're entirely off their rocker, but you can understand why they are and, given the state of mental health care in the nineteenth century, it's not like they got any useful help from anyone. I'm being somewhat vague so as not to spoil things, but their motivation, from their point of view, is hard to argue with even if it's completely unbalanced and absolutely counterproductive. As much as I enjoyed the horrifying antagonist, however, the identity of the second spirit was apparent a mile off, and the twist at the very end seemed a little laboured to me. I still enjoyed it, though. 

I feel that I should like this more than I did. There's a family curse and a supernatural horror looming over the downs, and the setting should be creepy but it isn't. The title is a rather unflattering description of the heroine, and she's certainly the most interesting thing about the story - it's a shame she's not the protagonist instead of the rather boring Armstrong.

What's really made me struggle with this over the few days that I've been reading it, though, is the pacing. It's diabolical. It picks up when there's dialogue, but otherwise it really drags... and Ape's-face is a short book, it should not feel so long. But it does. It really does. 

This is a fun little adventure, in which what is essentially a school camp gets interrupted by Cardassians. It's impossible to read the book without hearing the aliens as Yoda, however, and they're basically cyborged Ewoks that look like troll dolls, which is a sentence I'd never have imagined myself making. I also feel as if I should give some credit to the author for including a supervising adult while making sure that they never get to do any supervising: the cyborg Ewok troll dolls are in advanced stages of pregnancy, and so Keiko has to help them out while her horde of charges is acting like a horde and stealing shuttlecraft... for the greater good, of course.

It's not remotely credible, but as I said: it's fun. 

This was a little better than the first volume, but I'm still deeply unconvinced by the worldbuilding. And I confess that I find the characters irritating - the plot here seems to rely on the fact that all of them lie to each other all the time and never learn not to do so. Candor may be useless, but at this point I'm rooting for them simply because they've the decency to complicate things by being honest instead of otherwise.

I'm reading this series because it's such a juggernaut and I want to be informed, but I'm just not feeling it, I'm afraid. 

This book came out when I was a kid, although I never heard of it (and the rather large series that it's part of) until a few years ago. Onto my to-read list it went. I enjoyed it, though I did find it a bit drawn-out. Still, the focus on bravery and community is nice, and there are a lot of fun characters. Constance the badger is, I think, my favourite, and I did enjoy the ongoing treasure hunt for the sword, especially when it was clue-solving rather than snake-fighting.

In some ways it's a little odd reading children's books as an adult - not because there's anything wrong with that, but because I'm always wondering how I would have reacted to said books if I'd read them as a kid, in comparison with how I'd react to them today. With something like Redwall, I think I would have read it and liked it - but not loved it - which is much the same as now, but I also remember the books my sister used to read and this would have been right up her alley when she was a kid. Not so much now, maybe, but she adored animal series books then. There was a series, what was it? Farthing Wood. I remember she had a few of those. Must look them up again sometime as well... 

This was not exactly what I expected. Brand is an ecologist who specialises in mammals, particularly foxes, and I picked this up thinking that it would be a little more science heavy than it was. While there's certainly science in it, The Hidden World of the Fox is more a gentle, evenhanded exploration of human relationships with the nonhuman - this is something I'm interested in, so in this case "not what I expected" doesn't equal "disappointing". 

There are no foxes in my country, so my view of them is certainly idealised. Still, given my liking for animals in general, I tend to think that if I were living in a country like England, sharing space with foxes, I'd consider it a positive and welcome experience. Not everyone does think that, and how and why people choose to interact with the nonhuman in the ways that they do is worth exploring. Brand is clearly on the side of the foxes, and there's something almost meditative in the way that she talks about them and the world they (and we) inhabit together. It's a thoughtful, enjoyable piece of nature writing.