octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I do find these entertaining! They're so easy to read, and the main character's so sympathetic. I do think, however, that it's not as funny as the first two in the series. A lot of the humour in those books comes from Lou's family, and with her in New York the focus has shifted to a different cast of supporting characters. They're interesting, and I like them - especially the ancient, clothes-obsessed neighbour with her ugly little dog! - but they're not as purely funny as the Clark family. That being said, this is still one of those perfect popcorn reads, and I don't say that to be denigrating. It's well-written, with excellent character work. It's easy to read, a feel-good story with a happy ending, and although I've been reading these as e-copies from the library, I'd be happy to have them in hard copy on my overstrained bookshelves, because they're the perfect read for a lazy day when you just want to enjoy yourself. 

Came across this little book of ghosts recently - it's a collection of a few dozen ghost stories for kids. Not fiction, but Canadian ghosts that have appeared, or are believed to have appeared, throughout history. The Canadian equivalent of Catherine Howard running through Hampton Court Palace, for instance. There are stories on haunted ships, haunted theatres, haunted railways, all sorts of things. None of them are very in-depth; this is a book aimed at ten to twelve year olds, perhaps, so the more gruesome historical details are skipped over. The chapters are generally not more than four pages long, but they outline the historical circumstances around the hauntings well enough. I actually found one that takes place in the town a Canadian friend of mine lives in... I'm going to have to ask her if she's heard of it! 

Well this was outstanding! Really amazing work. Set in Ghana, it's the story of two sisters - one who stays, in a relationship with a slaver, and one who is packed off in a slave ship to the United States. The book bounces between each side of the family, successive interweaving novelettes through the generations to the present day, illustrating the continuing half-life of trauma. It's the portion - somewhat more than half - that's set in Ghana that's the most interesting, although I don't know if that's because I've read a number of slave narratives from the US already, and the different perspective is reaching me in a different way. It's just very, very considered. I'm not usually one for intergenerational family epics, because they're frequently the size of a brick and I lack the patience for them, but in less than 400 pages Gyasi manages to create a number of stories, all of which can stand on their own, which nonetheless reflect everything that comes before them in the book. It's just incredibly well-done, and I'm in awe of the craft as much as I'm riveted by the story. 

Rereading this for a nonfiction project I'm going to be working on, and it's just as batshit as I remember. I think the last time I read it was before I started leaving reviews over on Goodreads, anyway, so time to update my reading list. Anyway, being from New Zealand I have an interest in NZ-adjacent utopias, and the influence of the sheep farm is redolent here. A large part of it's satire, of course - the deliberate opposition of physical and moral illness, for one - but it's hard to miss the taint of eugenics, as well as the near total blanking of the Indigenous population. That last is probably a good thing, given the presentation of the single Maori supporting character, which is unflattering to say the least.

Where the thing really goes off the rails, though, and I say that in the full consciousness that it is an interesting and weirdly compelling jumping of the tracks, yanking the narrative aside for three solid chapters as it does, is in the refusal of the Erewhonians to deal with any mechanism past the onset of the Industrial Revolution. They're worried about machines breeding machines and leaping ahead on the evolutionary ladder, which is certainly a significant theme in science fiction, if rarely explored so early in the history of the genre. 

The author is an ex-premier of New Zealand, and our national science fiction awards are named after him. This is a generally readable utopia, and it's a strongly feminist piece for 1889, in that women not only have the vote but routinely hold high political office, and are prominent in science, diplomacy, law, and any number of other fields. The protagonist is actually a young woman MP, and the Prime Minister of Britain and the President of the United States are also women. They are, notably, white women - for a settler country, for a colonising empire (and this book is uncritically adulatory of empire) there's nothing here that looks at race relations. Indigenous peoples are notably absent, and the one sustained objection to the British Empire being an assimilating juggernaut comes from the Irish, but they are inevitably folded in and made to like it.

The really interesting thing here, though, apart from the treatment of women, is the strong ethical stance against poverty. Vogel clearly finds it disgraceful that anyone, anywhere, is in want of a decent standard of living, and although he doesn't use the phrase, there's the equivalent of universal basic income in Anno Domini that provides every citizen with adequate food, shelter, and clothing no matter the employment choices they make. I side-eye some of the rest of what goes in this book, but UBI sounds like a fantastic idea to me. 

I really could not get into this, it was a slog from beginning to end. It's not badly written or anything, and there were a few bits that approached likeable, but, well, meh. 

I read the first in the series a few weeks back. I enjoyed it, particularly the setting - large parts of the book were in underground tunnels, which was creepy and unusual - but there was no such interest here. Just drug warfare, which (with the best will in the world) does not compel me. Neither, it must be said, does the protagonist. Clearly he appeals to a lot of people. My stepdad's one of them, he loves these books! But I have to admit I find him - Bosch, not stepdad - just a little dull, and when the story doesn't engage me either it's not a great read for me on any level. Still, as I said, I liked the first book in the series, so maybe the next one will be better. 

I liked this a little more than the first one, I think. Both books are enjoyable popcorn reads of the mystery type, but Kinsey's character is a little more fleshed out here. It's not that Grafton goes into backstory or anything. It's that Kinsey's stream of thought can often veer off in strange or whimsical directions - not directions that have anything to do with the plot, but just the kind of random thoughts that most of us have in our everyday lives. I find that appealing to read; Kinsey seems like a person rather than just another investigator. Some of the supporting characters are just as entertaining, particularly the elderly woman who is just so excited about getting to be involved in a case because it gives her something to do, even if she can hardly move without a walker. I doubt dear old Julia will continue to be in subsequent books, as she lives on the other side of the country from Kinsey, which is a bit of a shame as she's a lot of fun. That being said, as much as I liked Kinsey and Julia I was less invested in the investigation itself, basically because the missing person, her sister, and a couple more people very closely connected to the case are all so unpleasant that it's a bit of a shame they all didn't kick the bucket, frankly. 

There's an appealing idea here - Armitage walks the Pennine Way, and everything on the journey is financed by the poetry readings he gives each night. I don't know whether I'm more jealous that poetry is making him money, or that he gets to walk the Pennine Way (one of my bucket list items) but there's definitely a mild sense of jealousy going on here, except for the parts where he's stumbling about lost in awful weather, because I've been on equally unpleasant walks and it's no fun. Those are the why-am-I-doing-this-stupid-thing? walks, when all you can think about is that you could be warm and dry at home, but at least when I've been stuck on one of those walks I've never had to give a poetry reading at the end of it. No, I've collapsed into the nearest pub and started hoovering down beer and hot chips, which is the best way for any walk to end as far as I'm concerned. All credit to him for trying it this way instead... and largely succeeding! 

I really enjoyed the language here - the author is from Trinidad and Tobago, a country on the other side of the world from me. I've never been there, but I assume the language is reflective: it's very different than what I'm used to and I enjoy that. I enjoyed the story, too, which was a sort of mash-up of ghosts and magical realism and a very understated romance, as a young man arrives in town, from the country, and takes up a job as gravedigger... a job that, it becomes clear, has criminal undertones which Darwin doesn't want a bar of. Not far from the cemetery lives Yejide, the latest generation of a family of women who are, in a very nebulous way, interactive with, and responsible for, the dead. Neither Darwin nor Yejide are best pleased with the lives that they appear to be stuck with, but they are able to help each other, and the solution is reconciliation to their responsibilities, rather than chucking them all and running away in search of a more appealing life.

The characters are interesting - Darwin a little more than Yejide, who is accused by her longtime companion, Seema, as being something of a whiner (with some justification) - and so is the story, though I do think it drags a little in the middle. That being said, what a fantastic debut! I'll certainly want to read more from this author in the future. 

This is one of those novels that is barely a novel - at least, that's the impression that I get of it. The author is drawing from his own experiences of years in a labour camp, and it's hard not to read One Day in the Life and wonder just how little was changed, and how much of this actually happened. Are the characters taken from individual life, or are they amalgams of men that Solzhenitsyn met over and over again, and clotted into character? I don't suppose it matters. The real sense of verisimilitude here lies in the small things... hiding a trowel, warming one's foot rags, the lingering resentment at not ever receiving a parcel from family, despite telling them not to send one and to feed the children left fatherless at home instead. How used a person can get to rotten fish in soup, how valuable the oats are that were once fed to horses. It's a grim, miserable portrait not just of a prison system gone wrong - so wrong it's incomprehensible - but of how used a person can get to that system, how they carve survival out of routine, how they find happiness in bricklaying. 

This is a very fine book, but it's a portrait of such waste.