octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This is a beautifully written memoir of Huxley's time on a Kenyan coffee farm when she was a young girl - I believe it starts when she's around six and covers a couple of years, up until the beginnings of World War One. So she was very young, and the prose here is immensely well-balanced. There are clearly currents - particularly in race relations and in romance - that six year old Elspeth has no real understanding of, and yet the Huxley who wrote this, and wrote it in her early fifties, I think, makes it absolutely clear to her adult readers what is happening, all the while filtering it through the perspective of a child who is more interested in making mud pies and riding her pony and being freaked out by soldier ants than anything else. This, admittedly, has the slightly unnatural effect of having young Elspeth appear rather more mature than she was, but that's the inevitable consequence of childhood recollections: they're always filtered through adult understanding. 

Despite the undercurrents here, this isn't really a book that addresses any of the issues surrounding colonialism. Because it's told through the perspective of an adventurous child, there's a strong emphasis on wonder and exploration, shot through with bemusement at inexplicable adults and moments of sheer horror (most of which are to do with animal abuse, which is pretty rife, to be honest). More than anything it feels like a snapshot, I think, a sort of golden-tinted nostalgic haze, early memories of duikers and coffee plants and leopards. And it's lovely, as most snapshots of that kind are, but it also comes across as a bit romanticised... but then are the recollections of time as a happy six year old ever not? 

This was excellent. It's a collection of short stories, written in the 1990s for the most part, by a North Korean author. The stories, although not the author, were eventually smuggled into South Korea and subsequently published, although of course publication has to be under a pseudonym (Bandi apparently means "firefly," with the connotation of light in darkness) to protect the life of the author. The stories themselves are grim and tragic things, illustrations of how the lives of ordinary people are destroyed by fascism. The man who can't get a travel pass to see his dying mother, the woman who is punished for taking care of her sick child instead of attending a parade, small children who have their prospects ruined because a relative has been convicted of some terrifyingly minor "crime"... things become so bleak, at some points, that the stories almost take on the patina of farce, but this is all too terrible to be a farce. And, sadly, I suspect it is all too realistic as well, and that Bandi, whoever he is, is writing from life - and for life. What an extraordinarily brave person he must be, to risk himself this way. 

The best of the series so far, and that is I think because there is (at last) some variation in the victims. Yes, most of them are still women, but they're not being targeted because they're women, they're being targeted because of they're victims of an industrial coverup who happen to be women, and that makes a considerable difference. I like mysteries and thrillers, even if they're not the genre I read the most of, but it gets a little tiresome when so many of them follow the same victim script. The Sinner, by contrast, is clearly inspired by the disgraceful Bhopal disaster, which gives it a focus on science and industrial ethics... something I'm very interested in, so it was good to see it turn up unexpectedly. Under the circumstances, I could have done without the incest subplot, which drags in that same tired carryover of sexual violence, but progress is progress, and for the most part this was a fast-paced, enjoyable read that is something a little different within the genre. I liked that there was a little bit of character development for Rizzoli as well. 

This is a very low-key, literary horror that had me fascinated all the way through. Told from three different perspectives, in three different sections, it follows a young woman who becomes vegetarian and who, ultimately, wants to turn into a tree. There's the odd surrealist moment that very slightly undermines the presentation of her behaviour as a mental illness - her eventual refusal to eat at all is diagnosed as anorexia, for example - but the whole thing is so destabilising, so unnerving, that the question of Yeong-hye's sanity is almost moot. Because really, this world that she's trying to escape? It seems pretty shit. On the surface, she's married, with a mildly interesting job in comics, and has a close if not entirely supportive family. They're living the middle-class dream in South Korea, except for the fact that everyone, absolutely everyone is an emotionally stunted wreck. Her husband works ludicrous hours, is completely obsessed with cultivating an appearance of utter normality, and is frankly a rapist. Her father is physically abusive to his children and to animals. Her sister is lovely, and loves her, but is holding the wider family together only by subsuming her own identity into being the perfect daughter, the perfect wife, and the weight of it all is just crushing her further towards her own breakdown. It's an unpleasant depiction of an extremely ordered patriarchal culture, and no surprise really that Yeong-hye wants out. 

It's her determination to out by becoming a tree that makes the whole thing so weird, and so damn terrifying. 

I have finally got around to reading this, and I was mostly riveted. I've never even seen the film, so this was all new to me, and I was genuinely compelled by the androids, and by Decker's interactions with them. Decker himself is surprisingly thoughtful and interesting, which is a lot more than I get from a lot of the heroes of science fiction from that era, so points there. I was a lot less enthused with the whole Mercer thing, though, and just the thought of trying to figure out how the ecology functioned in the absence of animal life set my eyes to twitching. I'm not sure ecology was really a concern for Dick, here, but what I did like, more than anything else, was the devotion everyone had to their pet animals, and how much taking care of an animal was seen as necessary to human well-being, even if that animal was a simulacrum. I'm particularly interested in ecological grief within the science fiction genre, having written on it myself, and this seems like an early engagement with it - with so little animal life left remaining, it makes sense that the rare survivors would be so cosseted and cherished. 

There's a distinct tonal and genre shift between this and the first two books in the series. There's no romance, for a start - Rosie and Don are happily married, with no relationship problems between themselves to solve, and that relationship is a minor thread within the book, whereas in the first two it was the central pairing. I've no complaints there, further problems might have come across as repetitive, and the focus of this book is on their role as parents to Hudson, now ten years old. The other difference is that there's not a lot of humour, either. This just isn't funny in comparison to the first two, but honestly, I find that an improvement - this is my favourite of the three, I think. I always felt a bit, with the first two books, as if I was laughing at Don rather than with him, but the somewhat clownish presentation of a non-neurotypical person is absent here, and it's a shift for the better. Also, no one really wants to be laughing at a young kid struggling in school through no fault of his own and finding it difficult to make friends. 

Hudson, however, with help from his Dad - and Don is an excellent parent - finds his own way through, refusing to compromise who he is while learning new skills and making new friends with kids who both are and are not like himself. He's a very sympathetic kid, and Don becomes more sympathetic himself when interacting with him. It's nice to read books that focus on good parents, and both Don and Rosie absolutely qualify. 

When I read Salinger's Catcher in the Rye I thought that the prose was appealing and the character insufferable, and I had the same reaction here, except this time it's characters (plural). Fuck me, do these people yammer on, obsessed with their own quarter-life crises and first world problems. As much as I admire the prose, with its "mute, fisty defenses of the nursery," by the end I wanted them all to shut up, just shut up, and I can't help but think that if they didn't admire the sound of their own voices beyond all else, they might not be as miserable as they clearly all are.

Insufferable. 

An improvement from the first in the series, but the weak point is still Harry Dresden's relationship with women. Frankly I think he should be single forever, do everyone a favour. There's some progress in that his patronising attempts to protect the women around him by refusing to tell them things that they need to know backfires, badly, and as a result he might actually have grasped how much of a problem his attitude is. Hopefully there'll be no more of that low-key self-congratulation about how he's such an old-fashioned guy, because any more of that and Murphy can just shoot him, I wouldn't mind. Part of me wishes that she'd been the protagonist of the series, because she's so much more likeable than he is, but alas, we work with what we have. And what we have here is your basic urban fantasy werewolf story. There's a full moon, and uncontrollable beasts are running amok. I happen to like werewolf stories, so I found this particular volume entertaining, and there is some amusement to be had from seeing Harry so thoroughly and consistently beaten up. I get my simple pleasures where I can. 

 

I have to be honest, I found it quite hard to get into this. Unusually for me, that's because of the science fiction elements. Normally sci-fi is one of my favourite things, but it never quite merged into the rest of the stories, for me... it was like there was a collection of general fiction comics, set around a group of teenagers, and every so often Maggie would travel to another place with her mechanics job, and there'd be a dinosaur, or a rocket ship, and all I could think was "can we please just go back to the other stuff?" I wasn't entirely riveted by all the everyday conflicts, but I preferred them to the rest of it, and a lot of that's down to the central relationship. Maggie and Hopey's friendship (and sometimes romance) is relatable, they're both likeable characters, and when they're both on page at the same time I'm more just more interested than when Maggie's off doing her own thing. 

A dodgy scientist dies, his work goes missing, and half the people around him are suspected of killing him. It's almost like a locked room mystery, in that all the suspects are gathered together on stage when the lights go out, and when they come back on Sir Claud is dead, and good riddance to him. I'm not always that good at picking whodunnit, but the obvious suspects here were so obvious that I thought it couldn't possibly be them, and I was right. I was entertained to see that Captain Hastings, when he turned up with Poirot, was as dimwitted as ever. "Stay in this room and keep an eye on things," Poirot tells him, basically, and does Hastings do this? He does not. Par for the course, he's distracted by a woman and goes gallivanting off to the garden. I really find it very difficult to see him as anything other than a Labrador in human form: unfailingly friendly and good-tempered, and absolutely distractable.