octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I read and reviewed the two novels collected here separately, so this is just for my own records. I've only read the first five books in this series, but the two collected here are the ones I like best: they're straight mysteries, and as I commented in one of the reviews, a lot of what Kinsey does here could have been done by Miss Marple. By which I mean the fights and gunfire and explosions of the other volumes don't really get a look-in. I like thrillers, don't get me wrong, but my favourite thing about Kinsey is how pragmatic and against-putting-herself-in-danger she is. She might be cynical but she's not stupid, and I prefer to see her avoiding actual peril like the very sensible person that she is. She strikes me as extremely realistic that way! 

I read and reviewed the two books collected here separately, so this is just for my own records. I gave both novels three stars, but truthfully I liked D is for Deadbeat better. It's a straight mystery, without the somewhat over-the-top thriller elements of the immediate sequel. It's also simply a more affecting case, with a terribly sad ending, whereas I didn't really care about what happened to any of the characters, bar Kinsey, in E.

The D volume is the best of the series so far, I reckon. 

The series seems to have swerved back into thriller territory, with Kinsey getting caught up in not one but two bombings, which is a little excessive even by her standards. I've only read the first five books in this series so I'm drawing on a small sample size, but even so I think I prefer the straight mysteries. They're a little less melodramatic. E is for Evidence is full of melodrama, including a treacherous ex-husband and an incestuous relationship, and it's all mildly entertaining even if I wasn't terribly interested in any of the characters bar the protagonist. 

I liked it. I'll read the next one. That's about all the excitement I can muster here. 

Oh look, another disguise. I'm not very surprised, but it's a relatively minor part of the story and so fairly unobjectionable. I have to admit, when the old man said he'd been out of work sick for a bit, I suspected that it was him - doesn't seem like much of an alibi if there's no one there to vouch for you. Although a large part of me did wonder if he'd disguised someone else as himself in order to fool a doctor and so give a little bit of support to the sickness story.

Overall, it's okay. Nothing astonishing, and it's not very exciting when the solution hinges on the existence of a ship that the reader doesn't know about until Poirot mentions it. Maybe back in the day this was common knowledge?

I really enjoyed this! It's queer Frankenstein with plants, essentially. Well, Frankenstein if the mad scientist had enough feeling for his creation to at least attempt to raise it, although the general lack of morals is still there because, like dear old Victor, deaths abound in his wake.

I find plant horror in general very appealing, and locating it in those giant Victorian-era glasshouses gives a gorgeous aesthetic sense: a sort of lush, confined fertility deliberately created for show. Gregor's experiments - and his horrific, gravedigging choice of substrate - are suitably demented, but the weird, saccharine mentality that he and his partner show to their beautiful creepy daughter both kind of makes me cackle and shudder all at once. By all means, tuck your botanical monstrosity into bed and insist on her wearing modest clothing in between continually snipping parts off her so she doesn't smother over everything like the invasive that she is! Engage her a governess. That will help her desire to smash in skulls. And don't forget the singing lessons for when she's not crushing little birds between her fists. As I said: demented. But in the best possible way. 

Christie does like her disguises, doesn't she? And it strikes me that she has a rather touching faith in them. True, some people are very good at acting, but it kind of beggars belief that two investigators (and yes, alright, one of them is Hastings) can interview two women, one right after the other, and not realise that they're talking to the same person. 

You'd have to be blind and deaf, surely. 

This was fun! I want to get a copy for myself once this one goes back to the library. I'm a big fan of Frankenstein, and this is a modern, irreverent take on it - still serious, but deeply entertaining in a very different way to the original. There are interludes of it told from the perspective of Mary Shelley, little historical snippets, but the bulk of the book is five characters representing the updated inhabitants of the Villa Diodati. I have to say that Ron, the sexbot mogul and marketer, is far more amusing than I've ever found Byron to be! The main character, though, is a trans man called Ry Shelley, whose journalist role prompts the discovery of, and interaction with, the other four characters.

There's just something quite sparkling about it - I would happily read it again on a long summer afternoon with a few glasses of something light and boozy to keep myself giggling and occupied. It's not perfect - I could have done without the rape scene, there for I-don't-know-what unnecessary reason - but I still very much enjoyed it. 

Over-complicated and just not very interesting, I'm afraid. 

The Secret Garden is my all-time favourite book, so when I heard about this blackout collection of found poetry, I knew I had to read it. I'm not sure what, exactly, I expected, but I didn't think that it would be this. I had a vague idea that this was a horror poetry collection, and it is, but I also thought - and this was probably wishful thinking on my part - that it would be a lot closer to the source material. Sort of a horror take on that enclosed garden, and on Mary herself.

It isn't really like that. There are a handful of poems where it's easy to see the novel's influence - the most obvious, and therefore the one I liked best, was "Evergreen" - but ultimately Strange Nests is its own creation. It's not a retelling, and once I got past that I liked it better. The poems themselves are little polished fragments of grief and trauma, but in many ways the more interesting parts of this, for me, were the scribbled over pages of the original. There are doodles and strikethroughs and complex constructed paths through the text, and each (old) page is new and visually interesting.

It's a fascinating idea for a project. I'm glad I read it. 

I read and reviewed each of the five issues collected here separately, so this is basically just for my own records. The first issue got three and a half stars from me and the rest got three, so the collected rating was easy. It's a fun series, and I liked it, but it's very much a series of two elements. The first, and for me the least successful, was the underlining horror story. As the comics went on, I got less and less interested in what was actually going on at Proctor Valley Road. I think there were just too many elements, and the whole subsequently felt overloaded, scattered, and not that scary (although the hyena creatures get an honourable mention).

On the other hand, the relationships between the teen protagonists were more successful, especially as the story developed and they came more and more into conflict. This was the realistic, low-key element of the text, and it felt as if more care went into developing this part of the story than the actual horror. So: likeable but flawed, I think.