octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I actually really liked this for the most part. It's an appealing mix of genres, part sci-fi, part thriller, but most of all it's horror, as a mass contagion that appears to be spread by sound affects crowds in an interesting and creepy way. There are some genuinely disturbing moments here, and if the characterisation is consistently one-note, then the imagery of the mob, crushing each other and running to death, is certainly compelling. Especially as there seems to be a number of different possible explanations, with the two most likely appearing to be government conspiracy or demons. (Not gonna lie, I was kind of hoping for demons.) And for most of the book, the tension keeps rising and the horror keeps coming, and I was seriously considering giving this four stars and then the end came and it all fell apart for me. The final fifth, perhaps, is the problem. It felt rushed, and the eventual solution to the mystery wasn't that compelling, and - more crucially - didn't seem to fit the tone of the rest of the book.

In short: great idea, fun execution, let down by the ending. 

Sahar and Nasrin are teenage girls in Iran, and in love with each other. Because it's Iran, however, their relationship can never come to anything... not unless Sahar takes the extremely drastic step of gender reassignment surgery (apparently the Iranian government supports and subsidises this surgery for Iran's trans citizens, which I didn't know). As a reader, it's immediately obvious that a) this is a terrible idea, as Sahar is gay but not trans, and b) she will not go through with it. I was not surprised at any point here, but I was moved.

I do find the ending particularly interesting, especially as I'm always so interested in categorising the books that I read. I am particularly fussy with romance, restricting it to those stories that are either happy-ever-after or happy-for-now, because I have a vague recollection of that being the standard of the Romance Writers Guild, and presumably they would know. The ending here isn't happy... but it's not entirely sad either. Sahar and Nasrin don't really make the shift from romantic to platonic love, and they will never act on their romantic feelings towards each other again, but they are reconciled, and the love that they have for each other is still the underpinning of their relationship. So I guess I'm coming down on the side of the romance categorisation here, because they've found a way to live and maintain as much of each other as they can, and if that resulting relationship is limited in scope, it's still critically important to both of them. 

If I could give this more than five stars I would. It is excellent. Not only is it plainly the result of years of painstaking research, but it communicates that research so clearly and accessibly. The writing is really incredible - this book is one of the best examples of written science communication I've ever come across, and I say that as a science communicator.

It is also terrible. The subject matter is vile. It's taken me weeks to read because I had to put the book down and go away and rage before I could bear to come back to it. There were points where I literally gasped and flinched away from the page. I had a quick flip through it last year when researching a story of my own, and promised myself I'd come back to give it a proper read, and I'm very glad I did. As far as I'm concerned books like Medical Apartheid should be required reading for scientists, and not only those who work in medicine and human health. The ability of scientific professionals and institutions to exploit others, without ethics or remorse, and then to cover up and excuse their own disgusting behaviour, ensuring that there is no professional consequence for deliberate abuse, has been made all too plain here. It's a litany of failure from beginning to end: a failure of ethics, of empathy, of every shred of decent human behaviour, and all of it is supported, in every particular, by racism. That's why I say it should be required reading: scientists have a responsibility to educate themselves about the limits of scientific practice, whether they work in a hospital or an oil company. Such education is work. It is not pleasant. There was not one point where I can honestly say that I enjoyed reading this book. It is too terrible for that. And it is necessary because it is so very terrible. 

Oh my God, I don't want to say this is interminable, but it kind of was. I've been wanting to read it for ages, too - I've been keeping it aside for the Read Harder 2021 task about an own voices book on disability. I expected to love it. I did not love it. And I feel really bad about that! I can't honestly say it's punching down to dislike so much of it, given that this was written by a woman who became both blind and deaf at 19 months and even so learned English, French, German, Latin, Greek, Braille, and an alphabet sign. I mean clearly she's a genius, much cleverer than me. I just can't get on with her prose. Different time, different style and all that, but this book praises her writing to the skies, and compares the writing of her teacher, Anne Sullivan, as being much the inferior. I'm sorry, but I'd take Sullivan's prose every day of the week.

I don't think it helps that this book is cut into three parts. The first is Story of My Life proper, and in all fairness I did enjoy it. It is monstrously impressive - even without being blind and deaf, all those languages! And Keller comes across as consistently kind and decent and hardworking, and I liked her. It's the second section that wrecked this book for me: it's a selection of the letters she wrote as a child. It goes on forever, is enormously repetitive, and the style... it's like Anne Shirley ate candy floss for a month and then was sick all over the page. (Keller's purple prose continues into adulthood, but it's far improved from this.) If these letters weren't an important artifact in the history of education I'd say that were an argument for the destruction of juvenilia, because they could put a diabetic into coma. Yes, I'm a terrible person. I feel it right now I can tell you. Making fun of a child's writing is awful, but what I'm really making fun of is the editorial decision to include them... or to include so many, or such a selection. I understand they've been curated, but in them Keller comes across as so sugary and so saintly that she stops feeling like a real person. She really does. (And honestly: she doesn't feel real in Story either; I realise that she talks about challenges and difficulties there, but it's all so sweet and glossy, it puts my teeth on edge.)

It's the final section, consisting of letters and reports from Sullivan, where things really pick up and where Keller starts to come into focus for me. Sullivan describes an actual child. A girl who can be a spoilt brat, a loving sister, absolutely mad on animals, and yes, kind and generous to others. The picture is well-rounded, and ten times less flowery, and I tell you: that little girl who pinched people when they didn't let her steal food off their plates... that's the girl I wanted to read about. The person, not the shining example to humanity. That person was fascinating, and Sullivan's third of the book redeemed the whole thing for me. 

Clearly an enormous amount of research has gone into this book. Barndt, a Canadian academic, traces the journey of the Mexican tomatoes (or Mexican-picked tomatoes) that end up in Canada. Through this, she investigates the role of women in the tomato industry: overworked, underpaid, and exploited. More so in Mexico than Canada, although the exploration of how part-time employees (overwhelmingly women) in Canadian fast food restaurants and supermarkets doesn't exactly paint a shining picture of equality either. The epilogue, in which Barndt takes one of her Mexican worker friends to the airport after her season picking tomatoes in Canada is over is frankly shocking: this seasonal worker, and all the others like her, not only travel in a cargo plane but are literally listed as cargo themselves. 

In general, the intersection of gender and race and how it applies to food production is done really well, and limiting the study to the production of a single fruit focuses it down to manageable level. That said, it took me months to read this, and I very nearly gave it a lower score. Once I got to around the middle of the book, things picked up - mostly because this was when the interviews with different women become more of a focus, as did the circumstances of their lives. I remember the first quarter or so as a tedious theoretical slog, however, and the regular return to theory at various points during the narrative did far less to make the intersectional connections clear than the bits that dealt with actual people. I'm glad I slogged through to the good parts, because this really is an interesting and valuable book, but my goodness, it took a while for me to get into it. 

A little less animal-oriented than I anticipated, assuming humans are not counted as animals. A bold assumption, that, but with a whale in the blurb and a seal on the cover my expectation was primed for a very specific exploration of loss. And that exploration is certainly there, and I think it's fair to say that the poems I liked best here were the ones that looked closely at nonhuman animals that were either struggling or extinct or on the verge of either, and how we interact with them. My favourites were "love poems when all the flowers are dead," about grief for dinosaurs; "52 hertz whale," about that poor lonely whale who can sing to none of its kin and have them comprehend it; and "marine snow," about the experience of ecological grief. Poems about the brief seasons of asparagus, while sympathetic, do not quite compare. But then that's the question, isn't it, and it's a question of scale: should loss deserve eulogy only when it is gigantic, on a species or ecosystem scale? Or do the small experiences of absence reverberate into a parade of personalised (depersonalised) isolations that mirror those enormous losses? Are we practicing for extinction? That is, I think, what Jane is asking... but even believing this, I still find the poems of the larger losses more affecting. 

I'm doing a clean out of my bookshelves in preparation for a move, and I unearthed this... I have vague recollections of acquiring it back when I was a teenager and The X-Files was on the telly, but clearly Scully was a greater influence than Mulder because while this is mildly interesting it is also deeply unconvincing. The so-called encounters described here took place from the 1950s to the 1970s, over a range of countries and continents, and a moderate amount of detail is given for each. 

The authors for the most part keep a fairly rational tone, pointing out discrepancies and other undermining factors, but every so often it veers off into slightly hysterical territory, as for example the description of a person who reported a UFO sighting and who died sometime after in a traffic accident, with the implication that was he silenced because of it (p. 63). I was most struck, I think, by the photographs, which were less convincing than even my skeptic self expected; far more of the illustrations appear to be fairly unsophisticated drawings in pencil and crayon.

Off to the free library it goes. 

A short biography for kids about Florence Griffith Joyner and her quest for Olympic Gold. There are plenty of pictures, but I don't think I'd class it as a picture book; it's more suited for kids who are a bit older than beginning readers. It's still an easy, encouraging read, and one which places importance on hard work and continued effort, and keeping trying after disappointment. Not that I'd call an Olympic silver medal a disappointment! But it was clear that Joyner was always aiming for gold, and she kept on trying until she got them, so good for her. 

I love this! Land Girls and shapeshifters... set in rural New Zealand during WW2, it's the story of a young woman who goes to work on a farm while the men who would usually have that job (including her twin brother) are off at war. Farm work is nothing like what Tea's used to, and it's all complicated by the fact that she seems to be turning into an eel. Which is a summary that sounds really bizarre on the face of it, but it doesn't register, in No Man's Land, as more than slightly strange. It's not that other events are even weirder (though some of them are), it's that this is a quiet, almost reserved story about family, found and otherwise, and the transformations reflect that: connections to each other and to the land, and how they are aspects of the self to be embraced, rather than an exhibition of monstrosity to be othered into disappearance and/or compliance. It's just very, very well done... and the cover is gorgeous. 

Three and a half stars, which (looking back) is exactly what I gave Milk and Honey when I read it. I like these poems; some of them I like a lot. With a small handful of exceptions, though, I don't think I love them. I am interested by them. I enjoy the concision. Many of these poems are only a handful of lines long. Occasionally there are poems that are only a single line long. That takes guts - there's so little room to hide in prose that is so sparse. And it's spare, too, as well. There's a lot of imagery, but the words themselves tend to the very simple. There's not a lot of flowery prose here, and I don't say that as judgement. Sometimes I want to read very simple, elegant prose, and sometimes I want to read words that are denser and more tangled; I shouldn't have to pick between the two. 

Kaur's parents were immigrants, and I think the poems that I tended to like best here were the ones that explored their life, and the sacrifices they made to give their kids a better life than they had. It can't have been easy, and the poems that acknowledge the difficulties and the loss and the compromises involved in raising children in a strange land are particularly strong.