octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This novella is one of those very-near-future climate pieces... so near-future that it hardly feels like the future at all (or even science fiction, for that matter). There's been enough severe weather events in the past couple of years in New Zealand that the massive storm at the centre of the story here feels all too plausible. Part of that plausibility, I'm sure, is the recognisability of the setting. I know the places described, and if I haven't sat out a storm in Wellington airport, I had to spend the night in Auckland airport earlier this year, trapped by floods and with the rain coming through the ceiling. Not pleasant.

Also recognisable are the characters. There's a variety of them, from displaced teens to exhausted scientists to despairing farmers, and there's nothing unusual about them. They're people anyone who lives in NZ would meet every day, and it's easy to feel for them because they're so clearly drawn from life. I think what makes this story so affecting, though, is the sense of... not quite apathy, but the banging-your-head-against-the-wall frustration that comes from trying to get a nation of people with disparate interests to draw together in the face of coming disaster. That emergency weather that left me stuck in Auckland airport, that ravaged the East Coast, that caused those landslides in Nelson... it's not going away. There's going to be more of it. Lots more. We won't have the option of prevarication much longer, though I'm sure some people will still try. What makes Emergency Weather fundamentally hopeful for me, however, is that familiarity of character. I feel for them all. I think most readers will feel for them. That empathy encourages working-together rather than working-against, or at least I hope it does. 

We're going to need it. 

I've been meaning to read this for ages, and it finally came off hold at the library, so here we are! A horror story about the Titanic, as if it wasn't horrifying enough all on its own. An enjoyable horror story, too, although I have to admit that the part of it that most interested me was flicking back and forth between the text and the internet, looking up passengers mentioned in the book to see if they were (first of all) real, and (second of all) accurately portrayed. For the most part it seems yes to both, or so my very cursory searches indicate. I always admire historical novels where you see the sheer amount of work and research that has gone into them, and that's certainly the case here.

I did find the research a little more interesting than the characters, though. No, that's not quite it. The characters were interesting people, it's just that I found many of them unsympathetic, which seems a horrible thing to say about people who die awfully in tragedy. This wasn't even the case for all of them (the unsympathy, not the tragedy), but the quadrangle of Annie-Lillian-Mark-Caroline was particularly irritating. It's not that Annie's unpleasant, exactly, but she's so... wet, and I say that laughing at the very poor taste of the wording. She's got narrative reasons for being so (this is a horror story, after all), and for the life of me I can't understand why any woman anywhere would be so attached to Mark. He's terrible. Whiny and selfish and weak, downright murderous towards the end. So, yeah, not quite as convinced by the relationships as I am by the research, and the horror factor could have been ratcheted up a little more, but still. Glad I read it, and I'll be keeping an eye out for the author in the future. 

Sometimes, as a way to broaden my reading, I pick random Goodreads lists and read my way through them. This was on one such list.

At least it was short.

In fairness, I am at least thirty years too old to be the target audience for this book, but even twelve year old me would have side-eyed the boy-crazy airhead who is the main character here. I went to an all-girls school, and no one was this vapid. Maybe girls like this do exist, but I've never met one in real life.

I'm trying to block out the fact that this is the first in a forty five book series, and that I always try to finish series that I start, but it's not working. I need a drink. 

This is one of those English cosy mysteries, and it puts me in mind of Agatha Christie and Miss Marple, except with Miss Marple (such of them as I've read, anyway) I get the feeling that Christie may sometimes be skewering her village characters but is still basically fond of them, while James comes across as a lot more cynical in her depictions. Stephen, especially, comes off fairly badly here, even though he's not much more than thoughtless; James manages to make him so small and self-obsessed that when the rather unpleasant Catherine finally gives up on him, I'm actually relieved for her, even though I don't like her at all! I do think that Sally, the victim, is drawn with not as much subtlety as the rest, and it is a little difficult not to sink into victim-blaming here, which is something of an achievement when most of the rest of the characters are so unlikable.

Not all of them, though. The ones I do end up liking have at least some self-awareness about them, and their cutting assessments of others (and implicitly, of themselves) are finely observed. As for Dalgliesh himself, he's a bit of a cipher still. I rather get the feeling that he could be swapped out for any detective of reasonable intelligence at this point, but this is the first book in a series, so I suspect that will improve as the books go on. I'm interested enough to read on, anyway, and that very genteel, absolutely brutal cynicism is the main reason for that. 

Possums are a pest in New Zealand. I've often said "the only good possum is a dead possum" - which is unkind, but they do an enormous amount of damage to the native wildlife here so I have little sympathy for them. Honestly, the only time I feel at all kindly towards them is when I see an opossum. Not that I ever have, in the flesh, but I've seen them on documentaries and so forth, or in books like this one, and I'm sorry: they're creepy looking animals, they really are. That raggedy fur, that skinny tail... they make our pestilential brushtail look positively cute in comparison.

All of which is very unfair to the poor opossum, I know, but I can't help it. Somehow this book manages to make them look less disturbing than usual, so all credit there, and it's a nice little addition to the Backyard series. I did note, though, that the other Backyard books I've read have little notes in the back about the non-featured plants and animals depicted in the book, but that was absent here, which was a little bit of a shame. I would have liked a little more information on the "playing possum" strategy used as well, as the book says it's automatic, but I guess I'd have to find a more in-depth book for that. If I can get over the opossum creep factor enough to go looking, that is. 

I will say that Sarah, the heroine here, is a great deal more tolerable than the absolute ninny who was the main character in the last gothic romance I read. She's cool-headed and relatively rational, although perhaps not terribly intelligent, as she's got no real understanding of the people around her - she's a terrible judge of character - and the very obvious villain is completely beyond her. (A reader of very average intelligence will figure it out extremely quickly.)

What's really letting this down, though, and what's keeping it from being a three star popcorn read, is the same fundamental problem as the ninny-book: the timescale's so compressed that the story loses all credibility. There's no reason that the events here couldn't have taken place over the course of a summer, for instance, but to have Sarah be let off a criminal trial for poisoning, take a job as a governess, fall in love with the father of her charge, live through several attempted murders and one actual, fall out of love and then fall back into it again, all over the course of, what, less than a week? Certainly no more than two... it's eye-roll-inducing, it really is, and it undermines all that lurking atmosphere of menace that's supposed to successfully underlie the gothic romance genre. The one sane doctor here considers her unstable, and given her short term, constant emotional back-and-forth... he's not entirely wrong. She's not a poisoner, and she's right that something fishy is going on, but under the circumstances who could possibly trust her? 

Another fun picture book for kids that's focused on animals and science communication. This time, as evident from the title, the subject is foxes - specifically, foxes that live in an urban environment.

What sets this one apart is that the images come from photographs rather than drawings or paintings, and though this isn't unusual I've seen a lot more of the latter recently, so it's worth noting. I'm not entirely sure if the book developed out of the photographs, but that's the impression I got. Wendy Shattil is a wildlife photographer, and she spent some weeks recording a fox family that lived in a local cemetery... and they're wonderful photos, honestly the best thing about the book. The text is fairly basic, informative enough for young children but not especially outstanding in any way. Honestly, most people who pick this up will do so for the photos. I don't know if I find them especially appealing because foxes don't live in New Zealand, and so they seem especially fluffy and cute and not at all like pests, which I understand they can be in parts of the world, but appealing they are. 

Alright, I live on the other side of the world from any sort of armadillo, I think, so I've never seen one in real life. I didn't realise how big they were! Was honestly quite surprised... 

I've never read a Smithsonian Backyard Book that I didn't like - granted, I've only read a handful - but they seem to me to be enormously successful examples of science communication for kids. I don't find the art quite as compelling as it has been in some of the previous volumes, but it's still very appealing and the illustration of armadillo jumping when confronted with a coyote made me laugh. And I learned something, which is all one can ask for with a book like this. Armadillos do seem like interesting creatures, especially in how they navigate water, and if I ever come across a book about them aimed at adults I'll definitely be picking it up. 

This was excellent - I was lucky enough to get an advance copy from the publisher, and it's right up my alley. I always enjoy reading different types of utopias, and this one was particularly environmentally focused, which is especially relevant right now. I also very much appreciated how much diversity was built into this utopian setting: it's a feature of the cultures represented that they realise that not everyone wants to live the same way, so the potential to adapt and split off and live in different configurations and different types of societies has been carefully integrated into the world-building. (One of my typical first responses to any utopia is "Okay, but who is this utopia for, exactly?" and that's frequently a lot less addressed than it is in dystopias, so it was good to see that this had clearly been carefully considered in Inversion.)

Unsurprisingly, there's an outside threat to the utopia of Germinal, and while the threat itself is less interesting to me (there's only so much that can be mined, I think, from the desire to force the same sterile existence on the entire universe) the real focus on this side of the conflict is not the antagonist, but on the people who have been forced to work for him. There's a fine line between victim and accomplice here, but McBay handles it well by always treating Graft with a thoughtful sense of dignity that balances sympathy with the growing realisation that sympathy alone is not enough - not for Graft, or for Germinal, or even for the reader. It's just all very very well done, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. 

I've been meaning to read this for a while and have finally got around to it, and I wish I'd read it sooner, because it's fantastic. The poems affect me more than the art, which I probably wouldn't enjoy so much if it were presented in another context, but the marriage between text and art here really does work... there's something very striking about the images, which are layered and confronting and work with the poems to form a complete and disturbing impression.

There is, I think, a tendency to romanticise early settler life from our life of electricity and relative ease. I'm not just talking about the ethical aspects of colonialism, but the day to day backbreaking labour of clearing land and planting and trying to impose a left-behind landscape onto the one that's in front of you. I've felt that nostalgic glow very occasionally, but never for long. I like indoor plumbing and hot water and washing machines too much to deceive myself into feeling that I'd enjoy a frontier life, and Susanna's own disgust with the whole horrible process is fair enough, I reckon. 

Part of me now wants to go and read the actual journals that inspired Atwood to write this collection, but given her (Atwood's) opinion that they weren't actually that interesting, from a literary point of view, I have to wonder if sticking to the impression might be more valuable than the primary source: there's something brutally honest about this collection, something that may in the end be a more accurate impression of the times. I especially liked, of all the excellent poems, "The Bush Garden," which reflects on how all these new plantings are underpinned by blood welling up out of the soil. Horrifyingly compelling.