octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

Well this was outstanding, and constructed in a really interesting way. It almost seems like a collection of set pieces, rather than a continual narrative, though of course it is the latter as well. These set pieces are organised as to show the protagonist at different stages of disillusion, and it's all so wasteful, and so hideously, horribly tragic that it's almost comical in places - the series of terribly naive choices that lead to a visiting dignitary to stupefaction in a brothel, for instance, is one the one hand almost grotesquely funny, and yet the humour is undercut by the underlying suspicion that the truly innocent party, the poor student who is only following instructions, will surely be the one to suffer the consequences. And he is, and they are only the first.

Not gonna lie, I've been meaning to read this book for a while, and part of me thought that the invisibility of the title was actual, and speculative - I think I got it confused with the H.G. Wells book of the same title, which I also have been meaning to read and really should get around to. I think it's possible to read this as a story of that kind of invisibility, and how such a phenomenon seeps into existence, but for the most part here the invisibility was metaphorical. It's very much based on the idea, in this case racially-based (although other prejudices could prompt similar stories, I expect) of how society can be so determined to see the expectation rather than the individual that the individual might as well not exist as anything other than a stand-in for stereotype. Which sounds grim, and it is, and this could easily have been an extremely grim book. And in many ways it is an extremely grim book, but there's a very appealing liveliness to it as well, in both plot and language, that keeps the very cutting observations and character work from sinking into dreary misery. It's just an extremely well-written, and very observant piece of work. 

This is not quite what I expected from the blurb on the back. That indicates a story of a man who lost his mother as a child - she disappeared suddenly and without explanation, after a military junta took over Buenos Aires; the implication is that she was a political dissident, forcibly taken from her home. The blurb also indicates that part of this story is this man's childhood, living with his young and beautiful mother, but really... that's a good 85% of the book. The looking back, and trying to piece together, is a very small section at the end, and it's not really enough to tie the book together. There's no resolution as to what happened to the mother, but I can understand (only marginally familiar with that continent's history as I am) that this is a realistic choice that reflects other experiences of dissidence in South America.

The problem with telling a story through the eyes of a very young child, however, is that they often don't understand what's going on. This can be enormously effective as a narrative strategy, as the author works on two different levels so that the adult reader can bridge the gaps, but the balance here doesn't quite work for me overall. It's skewed a little too far toward the child, and although I enjoyed the book, I was left thinking that its 150 odd pages felt longer than they were because there was so much ambiguity. Beautiful ambiguity, it's true - the prose of the opening section is particularly lovely - but I would have swapped a little bit of that beauty for some much-needed clarity. 

This is a beautifully presented little book, and the frequent woodcuts by Michael McCurdy are the most appealing thing about it. Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy the story itself - I did. It was nicely told, about a young man who goes walking in the mountains and finds an elderly, isolated man who is quietly planting trees on abandoned land. Hundreds of trees, thousands of them, and over the decades they become a forest. I note, though, the afterword by Norma Goodrich, in which she recalls the first time she met Giono, and he tells her about the questionnaires he's sent from Paris. One of the questions concerns his favourite real life heroine, to which he says "There are no heroines in real life." To which I can't help but think You only wrote about planting a forest. Wangari Maathai actually did it.

I'd like to think that if he'd known about her before he died, he would have changed his mind. 

Three and a half stars, rounding up to four. I think this is the best of the series I've read so far - which might make it seem as if I don't like Kate, as she's not in this at all, but I don't think that's true. I do like her. But I also tend to gravitate more to characters who use intelligence to solve their problems, like Dali does, more than the ones who tend to go for physical violence, like Kate does. Which is not to say that Kate's stupid, because she isn't, but she is saddled with an extremely irritating love interest who gets in fights quite a lot, and I'm not that interested in their relationship. Jim, on the other hand, is the spymaster of the shapeshifter group, I think? Admittedly, he doesn't do much along that line here. It's mostly him following Dali around as she solves things, and he's certainly the brawn of this particular pairing, but they seem a little more reserved, the two of them, and I enjoy that. Compared to Kate and Curran, it's positively Jane Austen with these two, and again... I find that more appealing.

I also liked Dali's mum, and that the antagonist was actually sympathetic on some level. I'm pretty sure on one of the previous books I said that I enjoyed the completely unsympathetic villain, but sue me. I contain multitudes, and it's possible to like different things on different days. 

I found it oddly difficult to warm to this, and I don't know why. I generally like poetry about animals, and there are a number of animal poems here - one, "The Thought-Fox," is one of the first poems I ever remember studying (I dimly remember it from high school, I think) - but the prose doesn't entirely do it for me. While there were a number of poems that I liked, there was really only one that gave me a little jolt, prose-wise - you know, the feeling you get when you read something that's just beautifully phrased. That was "October Dawn," which has a lovely opening: "October is marigold, and yet / A glass half full of wine left out / To the dark heaven all night, by dawn / Has dreamed a premonition."

Those four lines are worth the price of admission, I reckon. 

Three and a half stars, rounding up to four. This is a sort of slipstream retelling of Sleeping Beauty, in which various Beauties try to escape their fates. If you're aware of the different possible endings of Sleeping Beauty, particularly the nasty rape one (the inspiration for my own Convergence of Fairy Tales) then you'll understand why escape is a sympathetic strategy here. The two main Beauties of the novella are quite different, however. The second is pretty much the Disney archetype - tower, spindle, sleep for a hundred years and so forth. The narrator is the first. She's from our world, and is dying of an industrial disease, something which could honestly have been made a little more of, I think - had Zinnia been dying of cancer, or anything like that, there's not a whole lot that would be different. (Then again, I've a particular interest in environmental malpractice and industrial pollution, so I always want to see more exploration of that topic when it comes up. It's important, let's give it considered page space rather than make it a token sort of tragedy.)

How these two girls meet, navigate their own separate curses, and find a way to help each other is entertaining. I enjoyed the mirror aspects of their lives, and of their places in each other's fairy tale, but I have to admit that the most interesting characters for me were neither of them. Zinnia's best friend Charm, and the evil fairy doing her best to mitigate the miserable lives of her charges, were more appealing. Admittedly, it's a likeable cast of characters, so I'm interested to read the follow up. I hope the fairy's back. 

I'm sorry, but this didn't work for me at all. The protagonist was an unpleasant creep. He was also incompetent - by all means, believe the suspect when he says there's nothing in those suspicious outbuildings! You've checked some of them, that should be enough - which wouldn't bother me so much except the narrative never calls him on any of it. It's not out of the realm of possibility that an unpleasant, corrupt, incompetent creep could be an interesting character, but Chaucer isn't. Not for me, anyway, and certainly not when he's embedded in a plot that tries to cram as much sexual abuse as possible into one tiny village. It's unpleasantness piled upon unpleasantness.

I could look past that as an issue of taste. The prose, however, needs substantial work on a sentence level. This feels like a draft that hasn't seen an editor. And it needs an editor... preferably one who knows how to use a comma. 

Let us consider the women in this volume of The Dresden Files. I will do us all a favour and not describe them as Harry tends to, i.e. tits-first.

Murphy - cop, good person, far more likeable and professional than Dresden. Sidelined early, has to be rescued, spends most of the book in the hospital

Charity - wife and mother. Has to be rescued, spends most of the book in the hospital.

Susan - sexy girlfriend. Has to be rescued, but is corrupted by vampires, on the border of being evil sexy but ultimately saved by true love.

Lydia - innocent victim. Has to be rescued - rescue necessarily includes her being stripped of her underwear so as to distract the creature possessing her with sex.

Justine - mentally unstable nympho who has to be rescued, but who can be magically made stable by ongoing sex with sex vampire.

Lea - fairy godmother. Sexually threatening. Evil.

Bianca - vampire. Sexually threatening. Evil.

#

You see my problem here? In the midst of it all is Dresden, who can't shut up about the chivalrous streak that prompts his constant rescuing and tit-description. I'm very close to not being able to stand him. I only read these books because a) he's so off-putting that it's entertaining how often he's beaten up; I actually enjoy seeing him suffer, and b) apparently Murphy has bigger roles in the future. I'm reading for her at this point. 

This was lovely - one of the best Star Trek books I've read. I really enjoyed that it strongly featured Uhura, who never got enough to do in the series. It's got an interesting premise, too: an old friend of Uhura's comes from a world that is suffering a sudden, massive outburst of a lethal disease. The only hope to find a cure lies in ancient songs that indicate the population came from another planet, some time in the very distant past... and that planet might have a cure. The whole thing's done extremely well, from the highlighting of the medical doctors to the creation of a sentient alien species that's basically giant cats. A book about talking cats may sound cutesy, but there's rather more effort put into culture and characterisation than otherwise might be the case - notably, this book's substantially longer than many of the early TOS books, so there's more opportunity for Kagan to explore her creations.

Notable, too, is the utter lack of military conflict between characters. Yes, they're fighting the disease, but everyone's doing their best, in their own way, to bridge culture gaps and work together to try and overcome the problem. It's a book absolutely stuffed with decent people, trying hard, building relationships, and there's not a single bloody space battle or anything similar, which frankly is not missed by me in the slightest. This is far, far more interesting to read and I wish more Trek books would follow suit, really lean into the non-violence and delight in learning about others that was the basic idea of the series in the first place. 

The thing about "best," in anthologies like this, is that "best" is ultimately subjective. These are the stories that Dozois liked the best, and I think it's safe to say that our tastes do not always coincide. That being said, I do like most of the stories here. I don't know that there's a single one that I'd rate as five star, so no absolute knock-outs from my perspective, but there are a few that I'd rate as four star stories. I particularly enjoyed "The Lincoln Train" by Maureen F. McHugh, which I thought was the pick of the bunch, and there were a few others that made an impression. I have to say, though, that the longer the pieces were, the more likely they were to leave me cold - with the exception of Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" there wasn't a single novella here where I wasn't thinking Would you please just get on with it, and I felt the same way about a good portion of the novelettes. My preference for short fiction (actually short fiction) becomes ever more entrenched. 

I haven't read any other of Dozois' "Best of" anthologies, and while I mean to get around to them eventually, there are certainly other anthologists for whom I have greater sympathy of taste, I think.