octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

Two and a half stars, rounding up to three. This is a fast-paced, entertaining read, and the second of the Starfleet Academy series that focuses on Geordi. It doesn't do quite as well as the first at rounding out the secondary characters, but it's still likeable... if you can forget about the problems with the plot. There are two of them, they are major, and honestly part of me thinks I should give the book two stars for failing that badly there, but as I said, I enjoyed it well enough.

The first problem is Geordi's assessment of the volcano, a plot point that relies on idiot adults. (Yes, Geordi is himself an adult, a cadet at the Academy, but this is a children's book and the idiot adults trope is jumped on hard.) Sent on a field trip to a volcano, Geordi's assessment of the collected data is that the volcano is about to erupt. No, no, say all the experts, people who have been studying volcanoes for their entire careers. Geordi, who has only very basic geology, is able to interpret geological data better than they do, and it frankly defies belief. Secondly, when everything turns to custard, Starfleet Academy does not beam its cadets out of harm's way. They save themselves, and are left to shuttle home even when several of those cadets are fairly seriously injured. I actually thought there'd be a twist ending when it was revealed to be a virtual simulation to assess how cadets react to unexpected disaster, starting from where they all had the helmets put on. But no, it really is that nonsensical. Oh, screw it. Two stars it is, together these things are just too annoying to overlook. 

This is a distinct improvement on the first in the series, given that its focus has shifted from all the twee little flower fairies to the birds of the New Zealand bush. And not only birds - as the title indicates, Hutu and Kawa make friends with a tuatara, and learn about how he lives. It's all still squarely in the realm of fantasy, but I have to admit I would go and watch a tuatara eat a birthday cake of insects, so I can't really blame Hutu and Kawa for doing the same! I might not actually make the cake for the tuatara as they do, though, even enjoying baking as I do, because that cauldron of squirmy things looks kind of disgusting. Points to them for that. 

I have a review copy of this, and the related review of it is coming out soon in Strange Horizons, but I'm just noting down a few things here for my own records, in language that I probably won't use in the actual review. By which I mean this is weird as shit. Oddly compelling, but weird as shit. I don't want to spoil things here by saying too much, as it technically isn't out yet, and anyway I'm not sure that this is a book that can be spoiled, given its plot and structure, but still. A volcano appears in Central Park, New York. It changes the world, and then it doesn't, and then people do - sometimes, or they don't. If you like multiple timelines and jumpy structures and don't get hung up on bizarre images and occurrences and periodic advertisements for lemonade, then this is the book for you. Honesty compels me to say that the end isn't quite as strong as the rest of it, but My Volcano is deeply and entirely original, and I have a real appreciation for that. 

My mum's got the set of Hutu and Kawa books and I'm re-reading them now. I should like them better than I do. The focus on New Zealand plants and birds is appealing, and when the illustrations focus on the purely natural they are attractive. But the chubby little flower fairies... ugh. I'm sorry, I am, but they're just so very twee. 

 It's an odd experience, reading a book when you know in advance that the author died part way through. Perhaps it's being a writer myself, albeit on much less difficult topics, but it's hard to imagine anyone else taking over if I dropped dead in the middle of one of mine. Yet crime investigations that go on this long are characterised by collaboration, so perhaps that's appropriate here as well. McNamara's successors, at least, do not try to mimic her. They admit that her prose is too good for them to copy, so, sensibly, they try to limit their own intrusion. There are a number of places where editorial notes talk about how some of the writing was pieced together from early drafts, or taken from published articles. That's fine - McNamara's prose is excellent, and I'd rather have draft work from her than full chapters from researchers who are plainly intelligent, competent, and dedicated, but who perhaps don't have McNamara's literary talents. 

I wish she'd lived to see the subject of this obsessive search caught. I think like most people who read this book, I was most struck by the end of it - of just how accurate her prediction was of how that catching would happen. It doesn't seem fair that she missed seeing it for herself. But perhaps it doesn't matter... just as it doesn't matter how responsible McNamara was, or not, for contributing to that capture in the first place. As her husband points out, the main thing she would have cared about was that the person responsible for all that horror was caught at all. 

 

A quick, fun read about Geordi La Forge playing war games at Starfleet Academy. Geordi's a good choice of focus for that storyline, given that he's friendly and generally laid back, a science nerd who is really not that into war games but will still give them his best effort. I have vanishingly little interest in war games myself, so it's enjoyable to see a character who's doing his best for his team mates but isn't that invested in winning at all costs. There is, of course, one unpleasant cadet who takes the competition far too seriously and clearly wants to to smack the shit out of people, as well as a team full of the people who are always picked last in PE, and it all goes exactly how you'd expect. The total lack of surprise doesn't take away from the essential good nature of the piece, however, and by the end even the bullying cadet has become a bit more decent.

Finally, I love that Geordi ends the book more convinced than ever that science and engineering is far more interesting than being in charge and having to fight people. Because it is. 

This is a bit of an odd book to describe. More than anything else, its structure reminds me of a scrapbook: disparate bits and pieces crammed together, with no editorial comments. Which is not to say that this indicates an absence of editorial input, as the whole has clearly been painstakingly constructed from an enormous variety of sources. The whole effect, at the end (and I am only guessing as to what was intended) is to cement African Americans in the history of the United States, in multiple ways and in multiple fields, in order to prevent the whitewashing of history which is frankly all too common.

Some of that history is horrid and confronting. Cheek by jowl with photographs of art made by slaves are photographs and records of lynching, and this is hard to look at. Unsurprisingly, the early parts of The Black Book have a heavy focus on slavery, and while this is leavened with documentation of active resistance, the real variety comes through later in the book, with sections on everything from music to military history. What's most impressive, though, is the variety of sources. All are contemporary, from newspaper articles (admittedly, sometimes these were hard to read because the font was so tiny; one of the few times I would have preferred a change in format), letters, artwork, legal documents, musical scores, poetry, movie posters... when I said above that this book has the feel of a scrapbook this is why! It's an enormously appealing approach to history, collating so many contemporary records in this way. And while I see the reason in having all the editorial work behind the curtain, as it were, I would have loved for this book to have included a chapter (or a foreword, or an afterword) on the making of it, and how the editors made the choices that they did. Because as crammed as this book is with primary sources, they can only be a fraction of what actually exists... 

This study apparently developed from Davis' PhD thesis, and it shows. I did find it interesting, especially once it got onto the actual topic of women in Disney's animated films, but it took a while to get there. Barring appendices, the text is around 220 pages, and the first 90 odd pages were contextual material on the history of animation in general, or the inner workings of the Disney studio - ongoing problems with distributors and so forth. All of which is, I'm sure, very useful, but it's not always entirely relevant. Once it's all done away with, there are only three chapters that cover what the title says the book covers. In fairness, Davis' argument appears solid: women in the early animations, such as Snow White, were either largely passive (if good) or actively evil, but that as women's role in society changed, so did the representation of them in Disney films. I mean, it's not a rocket science argument, but it's solid - although, if the role of women in film is linked to history in this way, a much more in-depth study, pertaining to science fiction rather than animation, can be see in Dean Conrad's Space Sirens, Scientists, and Princesses: The Portrayal of Women in Science Fiction Cinema.

One big gap here, I think - and a surprising gap, given Davis' focus on contextualising the given narratives within the cultural and business practices of the day - is that there's no attention given to Disney's adaptation of source material. I'm not even talking about fairy tales here, continually altering as they are, but films like The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Pocahontas are so far removed from the source material (a famous novel and, more problematically, actual history) that I would have thought these deliberate changes in the way the women at the centre of these stories were represented merited discussion. Apparently not. 

In summary, then, it's a fairly decent study, but a bit unfocused, and ruthlessly limited. 

I read a short fiction collection by Fracassi a couple of days ago and thought it was excellent, so I went straight on to this. I didn't realise, going in, that Commodore was set in the same creepy small town of Sabbath that one of the stories in the collection was also set in, but given I enjoyed that story, that was a nice surprise. On balance, though, I didn't enjoy the novella as much as the collection. I just don't find stories about cars that fascinating, even if they are creepy, and although I realise that the car here wasn't really a car - it just drew in victims by pretending to be a car, much as an anglerfish uses light to lure in its prey - I still couldn't get into it much. The characterisation that stood out so much in the collection is a little more absent here, as well, in favour of a series of weird and lethal settings that were somewhat disconnected from each other. So as a whole, although I liked it well enough (and would certainly read more Sabbath stories), I didn't love it. 

I don't think that I liked this quite as much as the first one - I thought the whole drama-filled bit with Sam at the end was real overkill - but Lou continues to be such an appealing character. Even if she is, at times, somewhat frustrating. I was in real sympathy with her sister when she tried to get Lou to see how often she sabotages herself... and talking of Lou's family, they remain an immensely enjoyable part of this series for me. They're warm and funny and relatable, and the random, frequently vacuous crap that comes out of all of them could come from any family (but is always funnier in someone else's). Moyes is just so very, very good at characterisation, I think, that it's almost restful to read her work, just absolutely effortless.