octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This is a significant improvement from the earlier book in the series. Gone is (I'm sorry to say it) Ward's leaden prose, the life sucked out of it by an over-reliance on technobabble. In its place, a more readable style, and characters who are actually allowed to feel things. Swallow's version of the characters seem more like people than compartmentalised chess movements, and it's so much more appealing to read. The plot is pacy, some of the deaths are affecting, and everything regarding the destruction of the wormhole was genuinely exciting. Kira was excellent. I was all set to give it four stars, and then...

I don't know why I was feeling horribly suspicious as the last few pages ticked over. I got that sinking feeling that I really only associate with one element of the Star Trek universe, but I thought "No, it couldn't be."

Reader, it was. If Bashir's last-minute suggestion is anything to go by, the next book will involve the mirror universe. I cannot overstate how much I hate the mirror fucking universe. Every time this overused lazy goddamn trope turns up I hate it, and it turns up again and again because it is, apparently, the shit well that never, ever runs dry.

It ruined the ending of an otherwise decent book. But that's the mirror universe for you... constant disappointment. 

 

There's one quiet, awful little sentence towards the end of this book, where the author goes back to the place she grew up, and where thirty seven members of her family died in the Rwandan genocide. She says, of that destroyed community, that there's no longer a school, because there are no longer any children.

I think that might be my entire review. There's nothing else to say that will make any of this better. 

This was such a riveting read! I have to admit that I knew absolutely nothing about Yemen before starting this book, and I don't know much more now. No blame to the author there; he cannot be expected to fill in so much ignorance with a single book. The religious war that is devastating the country has a very personal consequence for Al Samawi - as a peace activist with a particular interest in building bridges between people of different faiths, he's pretty much directly in the firing line of all the parties currently at war in his country. His family, though loving, is less than sympathetic and he can't really confide in them anyway, as doing so would only put them at more risk as the conflict escalates. Disabled, cut off from everyone he knows and sheltering in the port city of Aden, pretty much the only resource he has is the internet. He uses it to ask for help... and then something amazing happens, something that helps to consolidate a belief in the human potential for goodness. A handful of strangers come together and, in a desperate last-minute bit of networking and politicking, involving two countries and numerous officials, they manage to smuggle Al Samawi out of Yemen.

It's all horribly exciting. I say "horribly" because, even though I knew going in that he'd get out safely (the fact that he survived to write the book being something of a spoiler in that regard) the sequence of events is so fragile, and so terrifying, so dangerous and apparently hopeless, that it's genuinely nail-biting to read. 

I've been meaning to read this for ages, and have finally plucked it off my bookshelves. What a great story! It's unsettling and atmospheric, and I like the sense of is-it-real-or-is-it-not that the author promotes. I think what I like best of all, though, is that there's no solution. We never find out what happened to the missing girls. I understand from Wikipedia that there was a chapter, sensibly taken out by the publisher before publication, that gave a somewhat science-fictional explanation. Honestly, the total ambiguity and sense of mystery just works better as is. It's also what tips it over into horror in my opinion; mystery stories often have solutions while horror stories are less reliable that way. 

The ending, I have to say, didn't quite work for me as much as the rest. It was a little too abrupt, and I thought the conclusion of the Sara storyline was a little too.... concrete, I think I'd describe it? Although the Wikipedia summary gives an entirely different interpretation of Sara's fate than what I thought, so perhaps the ambiguity is there as well. That said, the whole was still wonderfully creepy, and I'll certainly be reading it again in the future. 

I wanted to like this better than I did. The plot is encyclopaedic and has clearly been thoroughly worked out, but of the three main elements that I read for - characterisation, language, and plot - I reliably care about plot the least. I didn't much care for the plot here, but that might not have mattered if there weren't endless pages of technobabble and a totally flat emotional effect. I just didn't feel for any of these people, and that's a problem.

A lot of that lack of empathy is influenced by a very particular authorial choice. Now granted, the entire plot is a series of crisis points, and there are people dropping like flies and so some semblance of emotional control is necessary in characters so that they don't all go into complete meltdown... but the balance is off for me. There's a lot of talk about pushing emotions aside, and a lot of comments about compartmentalisation, which in practice means lots of pages of encyclopaedia and technobabble and not that many pages about actual people actually feeling things. Let me give an example: Wesley Crusher (apparently) dies. Now, granted, I am indifferent to Wesley at best but when his own mother's reaction to witnessing her child's death is so glossed over, and when the interaction between Picard and Crusher afterwards is so muted (these people are married? I'm warmer to strangers I meet at the bus stop) then honestly, I don't see why I should care. 

I did get some ironic enjoyment out of the antagonists appearing as faceless avatars, because so many of the characters here had compartmentalised themselves into walking plot points, but otherwise: meh. I got the entire trilogy out from the library, so maybe now this set-up volume is over there'll be more characterisation (and less endless technical explanation) in the next. 

This was fun! It's s very deadpan thriller, told by a young nurse who's always stuck cleaning up after her homicidal sister. Ayoola is so insanely beautiful that no one would ever really believe Korede if she tried to turn her little sister in, but... she doesn't really want to. I mean, she's irritated by all the drama Ayoola brings to her life, but I can't help but think if she were that irritated she would have done something about it, because (it has to be said) Korede is enormously competent and probably could have figured out a plausible way to implicate her sister if she had to. But as the story goes on, and the cover-ups become more elaborate, and as a man that Korede actually likes falls into her sister's clutches, Korede starts to wonder if she's really doing what's best after all. 

Ayoola is entertaining, but it's Korede's own ambiguity that's the most compelling part of this for me. She's very sympathetic, but the late reveal regarding what happened to the girls' father indicates aspects of Korede's character that are not quite surprising, perhaps, given the choices that she continues to make. The character work is very well done, anyway, and the whole is enormously entertaining.

I might give a copy to my own sister, come her birthday this year. I think she'd appreciate it. 

This was outstanding. I read it as part of the Read Around the World challenge, and I freely admit that I just grabbed the first Venezuela book I could find in the public library, so I went into it with no expectations whatsoever. It's sort of general fiction, sort of thriller, of a woman trying to survive political unrest in Caracas, and the compromises and violence she has to tolerate and/or embrace in order to survive. I should have been doing my own writing this morning. I thought "I'll just read fifty pages" but hours later, I'd gobbled down the entire thing. It's grim and complex and horrifying, and I'm really interested in reading Borgo's nonfiction now, as I understand that, up until this point, she was primarily a nonfiction writer.

I'm going to need to get a copy of this for myself. It really is so well done. 

Oh, I wanted to like this better than I did. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed it. In places it actually reminded me of Mervyn Peake, who's one of my favourite authors, and the idea is fantastic: a collection of related short stories, apparently influenced by Schulz's own childhood, but with a magical realist tinge that mostly comes out in the figure of the father of the family. I think what's holding it up for me is that it's just so much description - very pretty description, often very effective description, but it's hardly ever leavened by anything else. I needed it broken up with conversation, or with something, but it just wasn't... and so gorgeously written as it was, there was more than a whiff of the soporific about it. 

I was honestly a bit hesitant about reading this, because the only other Joyce book I've read before was Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and I did not get on with it. Still, I tend to think authors deserve at least two chances to bore me rigid, and this was shorter than Ulysses, so here we are. And, you know, I actually quite enjoyed it! It turns out that, in short form, there isn't space for Joyce to pontificate on all that tedious philosophical meandering that so turned me off Portrait. Instead, the stories were finely observed character pieces, and if I wasn't absolutely riveted by any of them, I still enjoyed them all and could appreciate the craft that went into them.

Which means, damn it all, I'm going to have to give Ulysses a go sometime, aren't I? That monstrous thing intimidates me. The last time a book made me feel this way was War and Peace, and gentle reader: it was not worth it. 

Gappah is a new writer to me, but I'm going to have to read more from her in the future, because this was fantastic. I read a lot of short stories, and every so often I read a collection of them that reminds me so much of why I like the form. They're small, polished pieces of narrative, that often end in interesting ways, and they are sometimes, as they are here, a concentrated study of character. Whether it's the woman who takes her neighbour's baby, the man who loses his job and starts building coffins, or the problems of navigating bureaucracy and trying to salvage some sort of financial security in a country where inflation is running rampant, every protagonist here is utterly believable. They're all compelling, even if they're not always pleasant, and the social and political undercurrents running through the book as a whole are well-explored and finely observed. 

I understand that the author has written at least one other book (according to the catalogue of my local library, anyway) and it's going on my to-read list, because this was thoroughly enjoyable.