octavia_cade's reviews
2611 reviews

I love this film! Although there was a moment of horror last year when my sister and I discovered that our father - a man in his seventies - had never seen it. That sad fact has since been corrected. I don't know how many times I've seen The Princess Bride myself, but it's been a lot. So naturally, this book went on my list of things to read.

It was fun. There's something very chatty about the tone, and I enjoyed the stories of Elwes's time making the movie, especially as I didn't know any of the behind-the-scenes events that he writes about. I'm tempted to look up the movie again, just to watch the scene filmed right after he broke his toe, and apparently there are out-takes on YouTube. Why have I never looked?!

I'm going to look right now. 

This is a very basic introduction to making costumes for cosplay. I'm just reading for interest and am not a cosplayer myself, so I'm unlikely to use any of the techniques shown here but they are clearly and accessibly presented, which is a sensible choice as the book is aimed at absolute beginners. There's not actually that much information included - it's a short book, and even so there's a lot of photographs and blank spaces - but it does get points for being extremely encouraging and welcoming towards newcomers. 

This was fantastic! Some of what's in here is familiar to me, of course, as it is to anyone who either studied biology and/or lives on an island where endangered species and what to do with them is a constant underlying national conversation. Much of the book, though, covered debates that I'd never given much attention to, or experiments that I'd never heard of. Crucially, it does so in plain language - often leavened with humour - and it's just an excellent overall introduction to biogeography, one that can be appreciated by the general public.

I do admit to some national bias, however. I kept expecting New Zealand to come up - and it did, but only in throwaway examples. Quammen never looks in any detail at what's happening here as he does in Hawaii or Tasmania or Madagascar, for instance, but then again that alternate focus exposes me to examples that I would never otherwise have considered. The close look at the conservation programme that saved the desperately endangered Mauritius kestrel, for instance, seems a very close analogue to that focused on the Chatham Island black robin, which has always been my go-to example for a last-ditch, desperate measure breeding programme. The robin is over here, of course, whereas I wouldn't recognise a Mauritius kestrel if one fell on me, but I think that's the beauty of a book like this: readers will be able to apply what they read about, even if it's over the other side of the world, to the species in their own local or regional environments.

Hopefully that will make them more interested in, and supportive of, the conservation programmes around them. 

I love Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, so this has been on my to-read list for a while now. I can't deny it was a slog. I admire the attempt and the scale and the willingness to knock off character after character... But I confess. By page 100, I was hoping for the plague to hurry up and arrive so that these melodramatic twits would die off.

It happened, eventually, but not nearly quickly enough. The first quarter to a third of the book could have been cut to no real loss. Instead, the pace is glacial, the language overwrought, and the characters, most of them, could have done with a damn good slap. They were histrionic drama llamas before the plague got to them, and the purple prose - more constant than infection - made me somehow even less sympathetic to their struggles. One of the contemporary reviews (from 1826) which is reprinted at the back of the book says that The Last Man is characterised by "morbid affectation", and you know what, it's not wrong.

There's the potential for a good story under the weight of all this hysteria, and every so often glimmers of it shines through. For the most part, however: I have read this once, and once is enough. 

I admit that the Frog and Toad books are not my favourite picture books, but I will say that this particular one is bumped up to three stars solely because of the "Cookies" story. I am sad to admit that - as annoying as I sometimes find both our amphibian friends - when it comes to cookies I might as well be them. I have no will power and, like Toad, I'd rather make a cake. 

Frog, of course, feeds the cookies to the birds, which is exactly what I'd expect from someone who, in the previous book, nags his friend out of a sleep-in. I'd say that Toad has a lot to put up with, but after listening to him whine about lists and gardens, maybe Frog got rid of the cookies in the hope of some peace and quiet, in which case they deserve each other. 

This is the best of the Star Trek kids books that I've read so far - mostly, I think, because while the kids are having adventures and getting into trouble they're not doing ridiculously dangerous things while the nearby adults essentially shrug it off. (Ben Sisko would never.) I like that the other kids from DS9's school are involved too. The resolution of the conflict between the Bajoran and the Cardassian children is pretty obvious and quickly tied up, but the focus on how war causes trauma in kids is effective. 

This is a novella from a paranormal romance series I haven't come across before - apparently all the books are standalones, so that makes it easier, especially as the library doesn't have them all. It seems like shapeshifters living openly in society, which is interesting, and the romance here is between a detective ex-soldier who's also a wolf, and a schoolteacher who's also a chameleon. It's a good thing they're both human-shaped when they have sex, is all I can say to that particular mix. They both seem decent enough people though, which is mostly what I want in romances, and if there isn't a great deal of worldbuilding, well, it's a novella, there isn't room for much.

It's a quick, easy read. Very fast-paced, which helps. 

I like trains well enough. I have an uncle and a friend who are both mad about them, and honestly, there are worse things to be obsessed with. There are some train trips around the world that would go on my bucket list, but none of them are featured here: as much as I like the idea of an anthology of train horror stories, I don't actually want to be trapped in a train car with vampires or ghosts or what have you.

I liked most of the fifteen stories here, though I think it's fair to say that none of them filled me with any great sense of surprise. I did think that the collection felt a little repetitive in places, but perhaps that's just a result of having such a narrow theme. That said, with the exception of the two older stories - from Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle respectively - they all zipped along at a nice pace, which I enjoy in an anthology. My favourites were "Weeping Waters" by Lee Murray (it's always nice to see a NZ-based story in collections like this!) and "All Aboard" by Christopher Golden, which were both more sad than horrifying, but then I like sad horror so that worked for me. 

I wanted to like this much more than I did. It has a great concept: seven stories about body positivity with sympathetic women protagonists of all body types... for the most part, anyway. There's one exception: "Eddie's Ring" by A.T. Russell, which feels like an outlier. The other stories have a woman as the main character, overcoming career or romantic struggles as she improves her self-esteem. "Eddie's Ring", however, is told from the perspective of a deeply unpleasant husband, and the tone is more nasty than good-natured. It feels as if it would have been a better fit for a different - and much darker - anthology. Apart from that the other stories are alright; I'd probably give them all between two and three stars.

The biggest reason that this collection as a whole is getting one star from me, however, is the execution. The book is absolutely littered with errors. Most books have the odd typo, but this has spelling mistakes and grammar mistakes and punctuation mistakes everywhere. There are so many that it clearly hasn't been given even the most cursory proofread or edit, which is a shame. If the publisher can't be bothered to care, then I don't see why anyone else should. 

This is a sequel to the book I read yesterday, Iron Duke, and it's much of the same. This time, Jim is off to the Olympics, where he meets a girl and gets an unpleasant close-up look at the political side of athletics. There's a double dose of the last, as it's not only the manipulations of his national athletics association that he has to put up with. This particular Olympics is held in 1936 Berlin, and the creeping realisation that Hitler's turning that country into a mob underpins a lot of the text.

The edition I read has a somewhat defensive introduction that explains how Jim's struggles with his national association is a nutshell comparison to the wider political issues - I'm not sure that's necessary. It seems a little obvious to me, but then this book is aimed at younger readers and was first published in 1939 so perhaps, during the war years, people read it differently.