octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This is well-written, and with an interesting premise, but I will never enjoy that horrid, godawful trope of raping women as motivation for men. Never. 

This is more of the science fiction that I like - small-scale, reflective stuff that centres on character. The idea here is based on a mildly off-putting exhibitionism. You buy something called a Wasp, which follows you around your daily life for a minimum of 8000 hours, recording, so when you die your loved ones have a record of you which they can access. I would hate that. I don't even like to be photographed, but you know there are people out there who consider themselves so riveting that 8000 hours of shopping and brushing their teeth and clipping their toenails and so forth seems a valuable investment. But of course the Wasp, and the memories, aren't really about the subject, no matter how self-obsessed they are. They're about the survivors, who tap into these records, or don't, and why they do or don't, and the mechanism of memory: what we choose to remember, and the remembrances that we value. 

This is thoughtful and well-written, and I didn't really like it. I don't think I'm supposed to like it. I'd call it "effectively unpleasant," I think, and it's one of those very unappealing (t0 me) stories where men go off to war and do war crimes and they come back home, still monsters. Because this was first published in F&SF, there's a speculative element which introduces spiritual judgement in the Central American jungle, as well as drugs that turn soldiers into killing machines, but neither of these really does away with the fact that the protagonist is a fairly terrible person, marginally tolerable in comparison to his exceptionally terrible compatriots, and I suppose I should care about his trauma, sent off to a terrible war as he is, but I don't. Burn down villages with everyone still in them, and I don't give a shit about your trauma. 

A mixed bag here. I really enjoy the setting, as always, and I continue to enjoy everything that makes this book urban fantasy. Kate's crazy aunt was especially creepy, and sometimes it's nice to have a villain who's just completely off their rocker, someone you're not expected to sympathise with. On the other hand, the paranormal romance has been cranked up here, and that wouldn't be a problem but for the fact that Kate and Curran are deeply unappealing together. At least for me they are. Hopefully now they've finally hooked up the constant squabbling will stop. Honestly, so much of what they do is fight that it stops coming across as sexual tension and starts coming across as a couple of people who, deep down, don't actually like each other but just can't stand the thought of the other person finding someone they do like. 

I'm far more invested in the friendship between Kate and Andrea than I am in the main pairing, and unless the romantic leads shape the hell up and soon, that's not going to change. 

I don't have the faintest idea why this has the cover it does, because there's certainly no such scene in the book. Kirk has an encounter with a wild animal, but I guess that "Vulcan" in the title means that Spock gets put on the cover, regardless of how flagrantly deceptive it is. I suppose an image of him sitting at a computer, which is what he does for the bulk of the story here, would be deemed too boring. I wasn't bored. It was a fun story, with some good character work, especially of Sarek, and every so often it's nice to have a more contained story in the franchise books, rather than big space battles and so forth. This is a murder mystery set in a science school, and it zips along easily. I will say, however, that the murderer is blatantly obvious pretty much from the get go, and nearly the entirety of the book was waiting for everyone else to realise it.

Nice to see the first meeting between McCoy and Dr. M'Benga, though, and how the latter ends up working on the Enterprise. 

I continue to really enjoy these books, though I do think the revelation of Maura's heritage, here, was overdone. I'm not sure it added much to the story to drag her unsavoury relations out of the woodwork, and adding in the final murder at the end... it's all a bit over the top. I think I'd have preferred to spend page time on other things, though - I continue to enjoy the relationship between the two main characters, for example, and how they're slowly becoming friends as the books go on, and I'd rather have more of that. I'd have liked to see, as well, some of the follow-up here. All these dozens of stolen infants means an awful lot of families who have lost out on raising their children, and an awful lot of families who may yet be broken up as the child they have raised turns out to legally belong to someone else. The book feels as if it stopped before the really interesting part, although granted, neither Rizzoli nor Isles would be involved much with this particular aftermath.

All of which feels like a litany of complaint for what was actually an enjoyable thriller. And I did enjoy it, quite a lot. 

One of the first, if not the first, graphic novels, and it's a series of interwoven stories that, from the introduction, are based very much on Eisner's own experience of tenement life in the first half of the twentieth century. What struck me most was the size of it. Not the length, but the illustrations. Many of the graphic novels I read now are structured, on the page, in the same way as comics, with the odd full-page illustration. Lots of small pictures, lots of (often very tiny) text. But this is like... oh, imagine you're in the large print section of your local library. This is the kind of graphic novel you'd expect to see there. Everything blown up, lots of space on the page, big print. It really shows, I think, how the format has changed over the decades. I'm not the biggest graphic novel reader in the world but I've read some, and I don't remember reading a contemporary one that looks like this.

The presentation, I admit, was the most notable thing for me here. The subject matter's mildly interesting, but I didn't connect to a lot of it (I found the comments in the introduction on the death of Eisner's daughter more affecting than the part of the novel based on it) and the last section, with its sexual assaults, left me particularly cold. 

Fun little novella in which a couple of were-hyenas go after Cerberus. That's a ridiculous-sounding summary I know, but sometimes you just want a nice over-the-top fantasy read in which the hyenas find romance and the Cerberus gets to trot back to the underworld with a dead pagan priest like a bone between his teeth. 

I read the first three novels in the series back in 2020, I believe, and liked them, but they sort of fell off my radar, mostly because the rest of the books weren't in my usual library. I've moved since then and now they are so it's time to pick the series back up, I think. I admit my memory of events in the books was kind of fuzzy, but I found some summaries to help me out and to be honest, this is pretty much standalone anyway, so you don't need a great deal of background to understand what's going on. I enjoyed the romance part particularly, but I did think the end wrapped up a bit too easily for my tastes. Still, a quick enjoyable read, and I'm looking forward to the next book. 

This collection consists of seventy-odd very short essays, which were originally published (according to the blurb on the back) as Sunday columns in the newspaper. They're breezy, informal pieces about dogs and family and friends. I think the best description of them is chatty - considering how short these essays are, they do jump about, sometimes in unconvincing ways, much as conversations do. They're all very mildly funny, and I can already tell that by the time I've woken up tomorrow morning, I'll have forgotten every single one of them. 

 

I spent the 2020 lockdown on my own in a flat in a strange city, having just arrived at that city's Arts Centre as their artist in residence. Lou spent it in rather more challenging conditions - stuck at home with her parents, both of whom could drive anyone barmy. Lovely people, loving people, but to be stuck with them in a small house with no escape for weeks on end? Lou copes by making costumes for the local children, to wear on the weekly congratulatory claps to the NHS (an institution which, no doubt,would have preferred more funding to applause, but that's neither here nor there). It's a funny, touching, recognisable short story, that made me glad for the Arts Centre.