octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This is a quick, pleasant read about a mother raccoon who's out one night searching for food. The story itself is fairly standard - it's nicely told but not anything out of the ordinary, and gives some basic natural history details for kids. The real strength, though, is the illustrations, which are absolutely gorgeous. There's one in particular, a close-up of the raccoon in water and swimming towards the reader, that's really beautiful. All credit to the illustrator, Cathy Trachok, because she's done some stunning work here. 

This was outstanding. A collection of poems drawn from the life of the author, and the history of the Marshall Islands, it contrasts the forced emigration of the Islanders so that their home could be made into an atomic testing ground, with the possibility of another forced emigration in the future, as climate change raises sea levels and destroys what's left of their home. There's a consistent sense here of dislocation, of a people and a culture being simply discarded for the greater good of everyone else, and it's enormously affecting and thoroughly enraging. This is going on the "must get a hard copy of my own" list, because in a few months I won't have access to the university library where I found the copy I've just read, and I know I'm going to want to read this again. 

This is surprisingly interesting, given the absolute blandness of the cover! It's also somewhat dated, restricted as it is to urban park design in the US to the beginning of the 1980s. But for all that, the writing is lucid, and there's a well-researched history here of motivation behind park design. Political motivation, that is: debates over what a park is for, exactly, and how landscape architecture can best be used to deliver on that purpose. Looking at the park near my house (not American)... it's basically just a big square, lined with trees, and a giant floaty sort of sculpture in the middle. I don't think that many of the park planners that Cranz describes would have approved... many of them seem to want to use public parks to somehow elevate public behaviour (to get the poor unwashed to mimic the culture of their betters), or to somehow fulfil patriotic, law-abiding, democratic, and other desired traits.

I have to admit that, enjoying parks as I do, I hadn't given a great deal of thought to the general history of their use - or, perhaps, of their intended use - but Cranz shows the slow evolution of purpose, and the varying desires of stakeholders, in a really interesting way. It's made me think about parks differently, so that's something. 

This is super interesting, but it is I think a little elliptical for my tastes. I like the format of it, which is very mixed - there are EEGs and a doctor's reports and a photo of Zurita's (self) mutilated face amidst the poems. It's a good thing I never skip introductions and afterwords, because otherwise I wouldn't have understood much of this at all. Zurita was a young man when Pinochet's military junta came to power in Chile. He was arrested and tortured, and this book of poems is a record of the time - not so much a record of what happened to him specifically, but more a record of what was happening to his country.

Now, I understand from these extra elements that this book had a significant cultural impact in Chile, and I can only guess that it's because it was recognisable, in some way, to its readers. There's a long series of poems about the Atacama Desert, and a long series about a cow, and the poems are appealing, but, as I said, elliptical. Once I learned from the surrounding matter that Pinochet had concentration camps in the Atacama it started to make more sense, but even ignorant as I am it seems plain that the cow poems are not actually about cows. They're about power, and loneliness, and the whole effect of the collection is one of terrible fragmentation, of not being able to talk about something and having to find a way to do so regardless. It's a fascinating work, but I think for me to really appreciate it I'd need to read some Chilean history in order to grasp a lot of the undercurrents here. 

I freely admit that I picked this up because of the cover - it turned out to be poetry, but I like poetry so that's alright! As the title makes plain, it's a collection of poems about women who, while not actually mad, can be perceived that way by more, shall we say, conventional thinkers. Many of them are about anonymous women, but there are a handful of poems on legendary or mythological figures, primarily Greek or Trojan women such as Cassandra, for instance. 

While I enjoyed them all, I still think the cover's the most appealing thing about this collection for me. There were a small number of poems that I liked more than the others - "She Who Waits" pulled this up to three and a half stars by main strength, otherwise the collection as a whole would have got three. It's a fantastic poem, though, and it's worth reading the collection just for that one.

This is a bilingual collection; I feel I should note this because I don't read Spanish, so I had to content myself with what I can only presume is the very competent English translation. I did find the translator's notes at the beginning quite interesting, and it brings home, I think, the particular challenge of translating poetry. So much depends on rhythm and meter, and it makes me wish I were better at languages so that I could read more work in the original. 

This short feminist novel is about an older woman with twelve children, whose husband takes a much younger second wife and essentially abandons his first family. It's short and thoughtful and a little meandering, which is honestly quite appealing given the length, as it contributes to the slow, almost-chatty tone of the book. (It's written as a series of letters from the protagonist to an old friend, who left her husband after he too took another wife.)

The really interesting thing here is the complicated agency of Ramatoulaye. As a Senegalese Muslim woman, she has in one sense very little agency here. Her husband doesn't consult her - he sends his friends to let her know what he's done on the day of his wedding and basically never sees her again - and her freedom, compared to his, is clearly constricted. On the other hand, she has the choice to stay in the marriage (absent as it is) and takes it, which is a choice on her part, and I rather got the impression it was a choice her husband would have preferred she didn't make. It's a complex, nuanced, restrained response to the destruction of family life which is genuinely compelling to read. 

This play chronicles a deeply depressing bit of science history that I was already familiar with. I've an interest in Bletchley Park, and I've written a story on Alan Turing before, so unfortunately nothing in the play was a surprise. There's no happy ending. Turing dies, having been hounded to death by a deeply ungrateful legal system and small-minded morality, because even having done perhaps more than anyone else to safeguard the UK during WW2, he happened to be gay.

He was a genius and it didn't matter. He was a scientific hero and it didn't matter. That his image has been rehabilitated, decades after the fact, is too late and no comfort whatsoever. It's a really good play, but it's an utter disgrace that it ever needed to be written in the first place. 

I like that this book puts the focus on female audiences of horror films: what's in it for them, basically, as if the thought of enjoying blood and screams and slasher films is somehow unfeminine. Given that I'm part of that audience type myself, it's interesting to be analysed in this way! And it's safe to say that feminist criticism of some horror films does have valid points. It's pretty well known by now that when comparing male and female deaths in horror films, for instance, the latter tend to be longer and more explicit and more sexualised.

Pinedo, however, argues that women enjoy horror films like these because of the subversive lens of that horror. Slasher films may emphasise women's deaths, for instance, but the phenomenon of the Final Girl prioritises women's rage and vengeance as an explicit survival tool, allowing for a cathartic expression of emotions that are frequently less welcome in daily life. It's all very interesting and well-argued and I do feel somewhat understood, which is nice. The final chapter is a little bit disconnected, though - it's a very readable account of race in horror films, but the focus on the audience drops off, and there's very little acknowledgement of intersectionality going on there. Race is treated as separate from feminism, as if the intersection between the two doesn't manifest in a number of complex ways, so it would have been nice to see a little more done with that, I think. 

This is one of those books that is just plain easy to read. It's sweet and a little sad, but pretty much every character in here adores books and so naturally I find them sympathetic and not at all unreasonable in their shared quest to give away random books to people who look like they need them. The idea here, clearly, is that books are magic, and there are small intimations here and there that the books want to be given away, that they're looking for new people to affect, but really the magic lies in the fact that books are windows to other worlds, and that they can build connections between people, and inspire them to reach beyond themselves. Juliette, who is something of a loner, gets her life upended by this, and we're meant to see it as a good thing. I do, in fact, see it as a good thing, as Juliette's increasing withdrawal from life, at the beginning of the book, is cutting herself off not only from the people around her, but from her possible futures.

I do find the ending a little bit of an emotional let-down, I suppose, and somewhat abrupt, but it's a likeable book. One of those ones you read on a cold day with hot chocolate and a fire and a blanket, I think. A comfort read, that's what it is. 

This was an almost-dreamy read, the story of a French woman who has moved to a rundown rural plot of land with her Moroccan husband, while the fight for the independence of that country goes on in the background. I enjoyed it - there's a lovely tone to this - but I wondered at first if the independence storyline was rather too much in the background. Then I thought that it was probably a deliberate choice. By telling so much of the story through the experiences of Mathilde and her young daughter Aïcha, the story is almost reframed as a domestic drama, one where the cultural conflict going on in the background is played out in microcosm. And honestly, I think that's a clever choice. I certainly found it appealing, because it allows Slimani to explore gender roles particularly well and that's something that interests me. In a novel so influenced by colonisation, and by the different expectations of the French and Moroccan cultures, the domestic is as important a theatre as the political... if indeed they are not one and the same.