octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

There are five episodes from the original Star Trek here, turned into short stories, and although some of the episodes are dire - there's not a lot can be done to improve something like "Shore Leave," for instance - the pacing moves along very quickly and overall this was a likeable enough read. Not altogether surprising, as I remember the episodes, but relaxing, I think I'd call it. Of them all, I think "And the Children Shall Lead" was my favourite, given the horror elements of the story, and I actually think I preferred the short story version to the episode. Mostly, though, I'm struck by an element of the first episode collected here, "Patterns of Force," in which a brilliant humanist historian of the Federation actually tries to create elements of Nazi Germany on a warring planet, in order to quell the infighting there by creating an outgroup to persecute. I just... I cannot credit it. I know that Trek likes to play with history, but the mental and moral lapse required to do such a thing... honestly, I'm just baffled by that particular narrative choice. Baffled. 

All of which is to say that Blish and Lawrence do their very best with some astonishingly stupid storylines, and under the circumstances their best is pretty good. 

I actually read several of these books years and years ago, but couldn't remember anything about them. My dad loves them though, so I thought I'd give the series another go. It was alright. Unfortunately, everything I didn't like about it was the protagonist. Particularly his relationships with the women around him - all of whom are knockouts, and all of whom he angsts over because he hurts, betrays, or otherwise browbeats them (but he hates it! he's a nice guy! he only does it because he has to, it's for the plot). 

I am thoroughly unsurprised that he's got no mates. I remember now why I always low-key expect urban fantasy protagonists to be thoroughly friendless, and a lot of that's down to Harry Dresden. Which is a bit of a shame because I like the rest of it well enough, and I have vague recollections of Karrin Murphy and how she was my favourite, so I'm looking forward to reading more from her, and although I don't recall ever really liking Dresden himself, perhaps he's suffering from first book syndrome here a bit. 

This is deeply strange and rather nightmarish. A young girl is traveling with her dad and their car breaks down. Dad goes for help, and eventually the girl wanders up to a looming house to look for him. There's a party, and everyone's in masks. It's creepy as shit, and then her dad comes back and everything turns to custard. To be perfectly honest, I don't find the story itself all that compelling. The artwork, however, is amazing - it's black and white and sort of sparsely claustrophobic, really beautifully done. If I didn't care for the story, I had a great time looking at the pictures. The whole thing is just very very stylish. 

This is a creepy slasher horror where a bunch of small children are killed and then possessed, by what I won't say since it would spoil things, and promptly form a zombie mob with which to gruesomely murder their parents. There's a lot of sadistic violence here, which isn't my preferred horror type to be honest, but it moves along fairly quickly. It's helped, too, by an extremely sympathetic and genuinely well-drawn protagonist. Kyle is an average teenager, and he's goodhearted but not perhaps that bright, or that aware, so he's a good choice for this. He flounders a lot, but he feels like a teenager when I'm reading is what I'm saying. He has verisimilitude. Unfortunately, his partner in crime and incipient love interest, Marie, does not. She is far too mature for her age, especially compared to him, so much so that their sex scenes actually made me feel a little uncomfortable, because as much as Marie looks like a seventeen year old girl, she behaves like she could be Kyle's forty year old mother, and the contrast between the very believable Kyle and her completely unbelievable self is noticeable. 

A while back I read Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, and it was incredible. A five star read, and so when I got this from the library I was really looking forward to reading it, hoping to have the same reaction as I did to Chronicles. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. There's nothing wrong with these stories. They are perfectly adequate, perfectly average. It makes me wonder if this was an early collection, or a collection of the leftovers. I enjoyed reading them - I think "The Long Rain" was my favourite - but they're not in any way outstanding. 

Deeply infuriating. It's very well-written, and I have all the sympathy in the world for the victims, their family, and Scott Richardson, the detective who finally caught Thomas Luther, but there are so many terrible people in this! Luther, of course, and his criminal mates, but then you don't go into a true crime book expecting anything but moral vacuum from the perpetrators. But the cops and the attorneys who plea bargained away the first victim's experience, the sloppy investigators, the judge who decided that multiple past convictions for rape and attempted murder were not at all relevant for the jury of a rape-and-murder trial to hear... incompetent, all. Special hatred for the hold-out juror who was so indifferent to justice that she nearly torpedoed the whole thing, the spiteful, unfeeling, immoral woman.

But honestly, the disgust here, the real unending disbelief, is for Tom Luther's long-term girlfriend. She's almost as horrifying as he is, albeit in an entirely different way, and one geared more towards self-destruction than the destruction of others. And she's a psychiatric nurse, too, so one would think there'd be a brain in her head but there isn't. It's just endless waffling and excuse-making for this monster, a slavish, almost dog-like love that she can't grasp will never be returned, and always, always, the servile whimpering that no-one else has ever really loved her. Frankly, I can see why. Both Richardson and the author have more empathy for her than I do, but the fact that she testified against Luther in the end in some ways just makes it worse, because it's evidence that she was capable of seeing what he was all along, but was too hopeless to bother. Jackson makes it clear that he considers Debrah Snider another victim of Thomas Luther, but I'm afraid he completely lost me on that one. 

I wasn't aware, until I read this, that it was cobbled together from a lot of articles from Kolbert's work as a journalist. Although "cobbled" sounds pretty condescending - all that previous work is woven together so seamlessly that I felt I was reading something that had been written of a piece, as it were. The writing skill it takes to achieve that effect is incredible. If only my own nonfiction was this good!

The writing's not the most interesting thing here, though. It's the overall effect. This is a collection of case studies that together give an impression more compelling, I think, than a more cohesive and typically interwoven factual narrative. All those species, dying out. It's terrible but it's also fascinating - not only for the ecological gaps they leave behind, but for how we as humans respond to those gaps. And how the science of that extinction, the nuts and bolts of this creeping death, is carried out. A biologist myself, there's this dual response: the science is so interesting, and I want to know more... but to know more is to engage with this ongoing biological apocalypse, to revel in it almost, because the interest is so all-consuming, so horribly and creatively entertaining, that there's almost a guilt in enjoying that science in the first place. 

My mum adored these books when she was a kid, and I'm rereading them now. Honestly they're a wee bit twee for my tastes, but when Acres gets off the flower fairies and gets onto describing (and illustrating) the denizens of the New Zealand bush then I am far more entertained. And honestly, I think she is too, because as the series goes on, the focus gets further and further away from Hutu and Kawa and their pixie friends, and instead looks more closely at birds. I am all for this, so it's no surprise that my individual ratings ended up as two stars for book one, and three stars for the following two volumes. As always, the collected rating is an average of the individual ratings. 

This book could well be called Avis Acres Hates Possums, and considering the dreadful things they do to endemic wildlife here in New Zealand, so she should. Still, in this book the possum gets his, and given that he makes up songs about eating baby birds, no-one feels sorry for him. It's perhaps the least sentimental of the series, masking ecological concern with fairy tricks, and of the three it's the one I like the best. 

I don't know if this is my favourite Boxcar mystery, but if it isn't, it's very close to it. I think it may be the closest in spirit to the original novel, anyway. The kids are volunteers at a local animal shelter, and the two elder ones have part time jobs (one helps in a shop, the other has a paper route), and they're constantly making things from the resources they have - cobbling together a cat cage out of an old fruit box and some wire screening, for instance. They are therefore far more appealing to read about than the entitled brat versions of themselves that, in a previous book, begged their grandad to buy them a lighthouse so they could spend a few weeks of summer there. 

Similarly, going back to basics has also made them much more pleasant in that they're less nosy. It's still a mystery, they still take an interest in people's lives, but it's as if they're genuinely trying to help rather than intruding because they're bored and have no manners. As I said: ten times more appealing! And I'm predisposed to like this mystery anyway, as lost pets keep turning up in advance of an animal shelter being shut down, and so of course the kids want to help, and their determination to help look after the animals is well done and sympathetic.