octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

Nicely written story about a young trans girl (I think she's about ten?) coming out to her friends and community. It's overall pretty positive, though there are some realistic bumps in the road - particularly the mother's ongoing reactions, though she does come around somewhat at the end. The supportive older brother was a pleasant surprise, though, and Melissa's best friend Kelly was clearly going to be a major ally from the get go. The focus on Charlotte's Web as a way of exploring identity was one designed to appeal to fans of that book - which I am - though again, it was fairly obvious the way that storyline would turn out.

I think the thing I liked best here, though, was the childish tone. I haven't read a lot of coming-out fiction, and what I have read has tended towards older characters. All the kids here are very young, though, so even though the subject matter could be challenging, it was leavened with a lot of entertaining commentary. Melissa's worried about how her family will react, yes, but there's also the disgusted delight at the kid who throws up macaroni in PE and the possibility of dealing with bullies by being a "vomiting machine gun," which very much cements this as a children's book - Melissa very much feels like a young girl, and not a ten year old masquerading as an older teen. It's a quick, enjoyable read, and the optimistic ending is appreciated. 

This is miles better than the first volume in the Day of Honor series! I'm tempted to get myself a copy of it to keep, seeing as this one has to go back to the library. I especially enjoy that the focus is spread quite evenly between a number of different characters... I think Bashir's storyline is my favourite, focusing as it does on his role as a doctor and his increasing communication with a new sentient species, but there was genuinely no storyline here that I didn't enjoy.

I think the vast improvement from that first volume lies in the fact that it's more subtle in its depiction of what honor is, and what it means to Klingons. It's still not especially subtle, don't get me wrong, but the choice to have Kira as the character who so often questions how Klingons approach honor is inspired - she tries to wrap her head around it from a Bajoran perspective and largely fails, simply because their cultures are just too different. It's not that failed understanding that's the focus, though... it's the attempt to understand, even when that attempt is baffling and frustrating and goes against every biased, preconceived notion that she already holds. There's something fundamentally optimistic about that determined attempt, and it's an optimism that permeates all the storylines. It's just very well done, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

I read and reviewed the two novels collected here separately, so this is basically just for my own records. The collection rating is an average of the individual: Flowers got four stars from me, while Petals only got three.

I remember reading the first book, at least, when I was about twelve, and it stuck with me (as it did for many girls of that age, I think). It's all creepy Gothic captivity and claustrophobia, and Cathy - with her distrust and refusal to go along - was an enormously sympathetic protagonist. She's far less likeable in the second book, having escaped from that terrible house. As frustrating as I found her consistently poor choices in Petals, however, it doesn't take away from the fact that Andrews did an outstanding job with her: Cathy is absolutely traumatised by her experiences, and it's left her completely dysfunctional in her relationships. I'm not convinced she's meant to be likeable as the larger story goes on... but she is interesting. 

I didn't like this as much as the first one, but it's still a riveting - if consistently frustrating - read. What it does do, very well indeed, is the illustration of a very Gothic generational trauma. You can see it emerging and mutating in the kids, and dollars to doughnuts Cathy's children are going to be affected by it as well. It's just plain bleak in that respect, and despite the genuine success achieved by the two older children, now adults, it's very much a house of cards because they consistently keep sabotaging themselves in increasingly destructive ways. The horror is less overt, but it's still seeping away underneath, and Cathy in particular becomes more and more twisted as the years go by.

She's the source of the frustration for me. In Flowers in the Attic, she was the most clear-eyed of the kids, determined to face the awful truths that her elder brother shied away from. I remember reading that book and wanting, amidst my sympathy, to reach through the pages and shake Chris for being so determinedly blind, so it's a little disappointing that Cathy has lost that sense of self and truth here. The whole book is basically her making one dreadful decision after another; her relationships with men, especially, are absolutely self-destructive. The thing is, I can't fault Andrews for that decision, because Cathy's awful choices are clearly the result of her awful life, and it's fairly realistic that she's not healthy or stable. It's brave to make her such a mess... but it's a mess that just goes on and on. This book is at least a third too long, to my mind, and I can't help but think it would have been a tighter and more effective story were it considerably shorter. 

I usually like Diane Carey's Star Trek books more than this one, but Ancient Blood didn't really work for me. There were parts of it I did like - the focus on conflicting ideas of honour, and what to do when the price for keeping your own honour falls on someone else. There's a very bleak ending to one of the threads exploring that idea, and I thought that worked really well, depressing as it was.

Half the book, though, was Picard and Alexander roleplaying the American Revolutionary War on the holodeck, as part of the latter's Day of Honour celebration. I always wonder, when I read stories like this, if the author mightn't have been better off going to write the historical fiction they've clearly always wanted to write, without the speculative veneer, but anyway: the parallels were a little too didactic for me. Worse, though, and what dropped my rating down a whole star: the fucking holodeck malfunctioned, AGAIN, and part of it evidently dropped on Picard's very bald head, because instead of leaving the holodeck, as was perfectly possible, he consistently took that child back into an active warzone, knowing that the compromised safeties wouldn't prevent Alexander from being hurt by, for instance, all the cannons and rifles being fired straight at them.

Of course Alexander is hurt, when a grown man attacks him with a sword, and Picard is livid. "What kind of swine attacks a child!" he cries. I don't know, Jean-Luc, perhaps the type of swine that endangers said child by letting them skip around a battlefield in the first place?! During the damn battle, for goodness sake. You cannot convince me that the actual Picard would ever do anything so asinine, but this version of him should be hauled up before the courts for child endangerment. 

This is a collected edition of the "Heartbreak Soup" stories, which have themselves been collected in smaller individual volumes, all of which I've read and reviewed - this, then, gets the average rating of those volumes. An easy calculation to make, given that they all got three stars from me.

I frequently like them, but I'm just as often confused by them. This is a hugely ambitious series, sprawling and complex, and it feels like there's a cast of hundreds. It's further complicated by the fact that it jumps back and forth in time, so sometimes it feels like a giant jigsaw, or mosaic, that I have to put together. I have to admit that I frequently find myself wishing that there were fewer characters, so it would be easier to sort out who's who, and who is related to who, instead of always having to flip back and forth to the cheat sheets, but if there were fewer characters, the series wouldn't have that same sense of amazing depth and sprawl. Palomar feels like a genuine community, rather than a story with a crowd backdrop, if that makes sense. 

I don't always enjoy it, and I don't always understand it, but I do find it interesting, and that's enough. 

For a while I thought that this was going to be the first book in this series that I'd give four stars to - Ofelia's horrible backstory and how it intersected with the political and military chaos of the times, and Luba's life as a teenage bride, were really affecting. But Luba's husband Peter Rio was a gangster, and the increasing focus on gangster activities was something I found less appealing. I was glad to see her escape that life and find her way to Palomar, which is where my interest in this whole ongoing story is centred. 

I think one of the most interesting things about this series is that it's made up of individual comics - which is a facile thing to say, considering - but they're frequently not in order, and go back and forth in time. In a novel, I find this technique a fun challenge, but in a graphic story, I have to admit I find it sometimes difficult to grasp. I don't have the most visual brain - when I was young it took me years to remember what colour my mum's car was, despite seeing it every day, and I could only ever reliably find it in a parking lot because of the number plate (numbers were easier to remember than colours) - and so I often find myself floundering a bit with this series, just because it's so visually complex. I remain interested, though, so even though it's a challenge to read I plan on keeping up with it. 

This is beautifully written, and I liked the changing perspectives... it's the story of essentially three generations of a family, plus various in-laws and attendants, living in the same house for the most part. Chapters are relatively short, and cycle through the various characters, showing their experiences and changing relationships over time.

There's nothing terribly dramatic going on; the various storylines are generally all very domestic and intersect in a number of ways. It's very much a slice-of-life kind of book, and the real interest for me lies in seeing how people live in what is a very different society than the one I'm used to, predominantly set as it is in an Omani village. That being said, while I appreciate the meandering nature of the storytelling here - I don't think a more cohesive narrative was actually necessary; I liked how it wandered - I do think the ending could have been stronger. I realise that slice-of-life stories don't always have the kind of heavily structured narrative that lends itself to a strong conclusion, and that can work, but this sort of petered out for me towards the end. 

The thing about reading adventure stories that are specifically written for kids is that they're often unrealistic by design. There's nothing wrong with that: it gives kids the opportunity to imagine themselves as the hero, succeeding at tasks they'd never hope to attempt in real life. It's the whole suspension of disbelief, and you know what? I get it. Jake Sisko has to enter a virtual game in order to save his friends, fine. Against all scientific sense, their minds are trapped (outside their comatose bodies) in the alien game device. Okay, that's a bit dodgier, but whatever, handwavium. The game has never been solved in two thousand years, but a fourteen year old manages it by being a decent person. I'm rolling my eyes, but sure.

That Jake Sisko will die if he doesn't succeed? That's just high stakes.

That Benjamin Sisko would agree to put his only child in such jeopardy, simply because Jake's good at games? No fucking way. Hell would freeze over first, and that's where my suspension of disbelief hit the iceberg of cold hard Nope and never recovered. 

I think this is the first of these books I've given four stars - it's the best of the lot so far! A strong focus on Maturin, the end to that interminable voyage, more politics than sailing, and finally we get to see little Brigid Maturin. That's a touching storyline, though I do think her recovery comes very quickly. Oh well, I don't care, at least it's not been dragged out. 

I think the real improvement here, though, is the pacing. It's not as glutinous as it has been for the past few volumes, and the whole feels like a much quicker read because of it. I think it may also be that there's a lot more focus on people than ships... even when they're sailing up and down West Africa, the focus is on the (often combative) relationships between the ships and their captains, and this is far more interesting to me than reading about any other nautical detail. 

I'm going to finish this series, and (with the odd exception) I've enjoyed it, but until I came to this book I hadn't thought I'd ever bother to reread any of them. This one I might.