octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This is absolutely bonkers and I love it. I don't think it's perfect - four and a half stars rather than five, because the abrupt end kind of lets it down a bit - but the voice is just so much half-mad fun. It's as if Merricat from We Have Always Lived in the Castle wandered away from Shirley Jackson and ended up the protagonist in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus, except communist instead of Cockney, and with horses.

That's the best description I can give. Unfortunately this is a library copy and so I have to give it back; fortunately I can get a copy for myself and keep it forever. 

This is a fairly low-key story that's both about going home again and never going home. Peter, who has been away from his Saint Lucia home for eight years, studying in the UK, makes a short visit back for a week or two until he goes on to teach elsewhere. His parents, brother, old school friends, and his estranged wife await him, and really I'm only interested in two of those. Not long before he left, Peter got a girl pregnant, and he married her rather than lose his social standing. Their twin children were born and died while he was gone, and he's got no real interest in his wife, feeling that he's outgrown her; this is contrasted with his brother Paul, who also got a girl pregnant but refused to marry her. That torpedoed his life and lost him a career, and Paul is left as a very indifferent parent to a child he doesn't want after his ex-lover threw herself into the ocean. 

It's all very literary, focused as it is on migration and social standing, and some of the character work is very good (although this is a short novel, with not a lot of space for development, so many of the characters are little more than sketches). When I say I'm only interested in two of the above relationships, however... it's a very mild interest. I can see that this book's well-written, but it's not really grabbing my attention. Perhaps I'd be more compelled if Phyllis were the main character, but then again she does come across as essentially static here, a sort of Penelope figure who does nothing but wait - and substantially more passively than the original - so perhaps not. 

One of the quotes on the back of this book refers to it as "magical historicism" and I think that's accurate. There are elements of the supernatural here that come out in a very magical realist way, but while I enjoyed them, I'm not sure that they were effectively melded together with the rest of the text. I appreciate that the author is trying to balance science and the supernatural, and that this mix was an inescapable facet of the time - late seventeenth century Europe - but the effect was still disjointed, so much so that the end was pretty ambiguous, and not in a particularly compelling way. I'm strongly inclined to think that the protagonist, Laurentius, was suffering from more than melancholia, and that many of his odd experiences resulted from a creeping onset of insanity.

Certainly The Willow King might be read as a record of his hallucinations, and that could be a valid reading, considering the nightmarish state of the region at the time. Laurentius is a Dutch student, arriving at a distant university in Estonia in order to get away from suspicions of heresy, but he's walking into a powderkeg. There's a severe famine on, and starving people are descending on the university town of Dorpat (currently known as Tartu), and all this seeping misery and conflict is leading to accusations of witchcraft, which are not mitigated at all by local superstitions regarding a willow king. It's all enormously unsettling, and Laurentius - clearly not the most stable person at the best of times - is undermined in all his senses, particularly smell and taste. It's the shifting, nauseating atmosphere that's most successful here, but a little of the repetition and the slow pacing could have been sacrificed for a bit more clarity, I think. 

I really think this is in-your-face-farming-romanticism, and yet there's no denying that it works, that there's this golden glow of nostalgia wrapped around what is endless backbreaking labour. It helps that the family seems quite well-off, as farmers go, certainly compared to the couple of books I've read that feature Laura as the protagonist. That general prosperity is represented with large and frequent meals - when you do this much physical work, you simply have to stuff yourself, and Almanzo does at every opportunity. Food descriptions are everywhere, and it's honestly making me kind of hungry. I'd like to have some fruit or custard pie right now, but their version of mincemeat pie, which I grant is a traditional version, containing actual meat as well as dried fruit, is less attractive. 

Rather less interesting to my gluttonous self is the almost-as-frequent descriptions of carpentry and so forth, though I do find the rest of the farming life more appealing as presented here. Of course, that presentation is, as I said, given a glossy sheen. Any inclination I have towards nostalgia disappears with the lack of running water and indoor plumbing, and why on earth Almanzo's poor mother and sisters have to wear hoop skirts, of all things, as they go about their daily chores is beyond me. Who wants to make sausage patties and watermelon pickle and black the stove in a hoop skirt? Not me, that's for sure. Roll on jeans and electricity, I say. 

First off, this woman and her husband have the most appalling families. Vicious, treacherous, hypocritical, awful people. Of all the dreadful things in this book, I'm most shocked by the sheer nastiness of their relations. That might be an odd thing, considering that Badawi was sentenced and flogged by a Saudi court for promoting freedom of expression and women's rights, but it's hard to expect much from the Saudi Arabian government in the way of good behaviour, while clearly I still have unrealistic ideals of families sticking together, so the disappointment of the latter failure was much more disillusioning.

In a nutshell: this book records Haidar's experiences as her husband's work causes him to be investigated by his country's religious and secular authorities. The slow sense of rising doom is clearly apparent, and not long after Haidar and their three young children escape the country for Lebanon, and ultimately Canada, Badawi is arrested, charged, convicted, imprisoned, and publicly beaten. A quick trip to Wiki tells me that he has since been released, upon the completion of a ten year prison sentence, but that he's currently prevented from leaving Saudi Arabia for another decade, and so the separation of this small family continues... because honestly, you can't take children back to a country like that, you just can't. Although I suppose they're teenagers and young adults now, but even so. It goes to show, I think, the sheer importance of safeguarding freedom of speech and political protection for writers, and how crucial it is to maintain these ideals. Both Badawi and Haidar are clearly very brave and principled people, and I hope they get to see each other again soon. 

The language here is fantastic - the Acknowledgements section of the book says it's Trinidadian Creole, and I've never read anything in that (or even like that) before, as far as I remember, so it's new and interesting to me. Credit also to the cover artist, because I saw this book at the library and immediately knew I wanted to read it, simply because the cover was so outstanding. Part of me wishes that both these things had been in service of a happier book, but that book would have a different protagonist, and Alethea is undeniably the best thing about this.

There's no denying that The Bread the Devil Knead covers some monstrously grim material - there's a rape of a five year old here that's just awful to read - but Alethea's voice is sympathetic and compelling, and the gradual accumulation of friends and family around her as she claws her way out of horror does provide an element of relief in the text. My initial reaction, after the events near the end of the book (I'm trying not to give away that ending) was that I wished she'd been able to be a little more proactive in ridding herself of her current abuser, but a couple of minutes of second thought made me wonder if I'd missed the point. Resilience isn't always one cathartic event. It can also be a slow process of determined survival, and the expectation that Alethea represent the former but not the latter is a narrow one, I think, and almost takes away from everything that she has achieved in building a life for herself, even if that life is not a perfect one. 

This is one of those books that has been on my reading list for years. For all of those years, I do admit, I have managed to avoid knowing anything about the story, other than it involved an orchard (not a great deduction, considering). I've finally got around to reading it, and honestly: the introduction was the most interesting thing about it, being very clear and informative. Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed the play. It didn't bowl me over or anything, but until the time comes when I'm able to see it performed - the real measure of a play is in the performance - my opinion will be one of perfect adequacy. There are some nice character touches, but even so I'm not really that interested in any of the people here. I suppose I feel most sorry for Madame Lyubov, the last owner of the orchard, although she's so determinedly ineffectual that the sorrow is very shallow and doesn't last long.

Apparently Chekhov thought of this as a comedy. I can't see why, unless the Russian propensity for black humour is even grimmer than I imagined. Still... maybe it's funnier on stage. 

This picture book adaptation of Carroll's novel is okay. It's certainly not a patch on the original, but it's been so cut down for length that this is not really a surprise... the overall effect is a little jarring, as Alice bounces from adventure to adventure almost every page. The artwork's decent enough but not particularly outstanding, and the main surprise for me was how much I expected it to be different. The blue-dress-Alice-band version of Alice has so percolated through my brain that it's sort of set in concrete there. This girl in a pink dress is a perfectly valid interpretation, but even so I can't help but think of her as wrong!!!

Even for kids, I'd go with the original over this. Alice is so kid-friendly anyway that even younger readers could appreciate it if it were read to them, I think. 

The thirteen year old protagonist of this coming-of-age story, Alofa, leads an interesting life... or so it seems to me, safely removed from it. In one sense it's not at all extraordinary, as she's very much behaving as all the other girls of her community do and so she's a typical example, presumably, of what it's like for a girl to have a traditional Samoan upbringing. From an outside perspective, though, Alofa's ordinary life is very different. Or at least it's very different to me, who wasn't raised within a society as religious as this one, or with the same cultural expectations. I can't honestly say that I'm sorry. Alofa's a good kid, and the girls around her are good kids, but they still get beaten, frequently and severely, by the adults around them, in order to ensure that the girls conform to what's expected of them. That is, to be obedient and to be chaste. There's more to "good" behaviour than that, of course, but these are the qualities that seem to be brought up most, and as with many coming-of-age stories, this one explores sexuality. It's a difficult subject for Alofa, as she's meant to be wholly ignorant on the subject, but ignorance is no defense, and experimenting with a local boy leads to trouble.

All of which makes this book sound doom-and-teenage-angst, but it isn't really. There's plenty of happy moments, and the relationship between Alofa and her two best friends is well-drawn and appealing. Almost more interesting is the somewhat meandering structure, as Figiel builds up context and community around Alofa. I would have preferred, I think, a more sustained focus on that very sympathetic protagonist, but I still enjoyed the wandering. 

This is a generally very readable academic collection about the 2007 police raids in New Zealand, which accused a number of people - most visibly, members of Tūhoe - of terrorism. The absolutely ham-handed way in which these raids were conducted, and the eventual dropping of the charges, were a national scandal. This collection, written primarily by Māori scholars, focuses mostly on the events at Ruatoki, and puts them into a context of coercive policing in NZ. I have to say that the first section, consisting of several chapters on the specific history of police and political interference regarding Tūhoe, was very useful indeed. Not being familiar with a lot of the historical context there - and isn't that disgraceful, given that I'm from NZ (I remember learning more about the industrial revolution in England during social studies at school than I did anything about my own country) - this was disappointingly necessary.

I think my favourite chapter, though, was "Tūhoe and 'Terrorism' on Television News" by Sue Abel, which analysed news coverage of the raids, and made some very clear distinctions as to how the different news organisations reported these events. This is the type of thing that should be taught in today's social studies classes... it would have been a damn sight more useful and relevant than what I got.