Category: Reviews

Review – The Invisible Library

Posted January 14, 2017 by Nicky in Reviews / 7 Comments

The Invisible Library, Genevieve Cogman

I don’t know why I was rather hard on this book the first time I read it. It’s a romp, and there’s a lot of seemingly disparate elements — mechanical centipedes alongside the fae — but it comes together really well. The main characters are Irene, Kai and Vale, and they’re all pretty fun. Irene is capable, but not infallible. Kai is a bit of a mystery, but also a decent person who genuinely forms bonds with those around him. And Vale is the archetype of a great detective, which is rather fun — especially if you know your great detectives. Brandamant is also interesting: very different to Irene in some ways, and yet I think they do have commonalities, and perhaps that’s why they don’t like each other.

I still wish there was more time spent in the Library itself, but now that I reflect on it, that’s more the book lover in me than the plotter. The Library would severely cramp the action: I’m sure there is a story that would work with that setting, but this isn’t it — these characters aren’t the ones. Not in this book, anyway.

It’s a fast-paced romp, and on this reading, I completely devoured it and loved it. I’m almost tempted to give it the full five stars.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Genevieve Cogman, SF/F

Review – The Magician’s Nephew

Posted January 13, 2017 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

The Magician’s Nephew, C.S. Lewis

When I planned a reread of the Narnia books, this isn’t one of the ones I was especially looking forward to. It’s so blatantly allegorical: it’s basically Genesis, Adam and Eve, etc. It’s preachy too, more so than my preferred Narnia books. As a myth on its own merit, I think it was Tolkien who complained about the mishmash of influences in Narnia, and he wasn’t wrong. It’s not so noticeable in The Magician’s Nephew, but it’s still a little weird. I think ultimately, I come down on the side of liking it; it’s a mess, but it’s a joyful one.

Diggory and Polly aren’t the most likeable characters, but Jadis makes an excellent villainess — and even Uncle Andrew’s weakness and vanity is well-drawn. The Pevensies are more engaging as heroes, but the villains here might just be the highlight.

Despite the allegory, there’s still something warm and engaging about Lewis’ writing. That’s the only reason this isn’t slipping down to two stars, I think.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, C.S. Lewis, SF/F

Review – Ayiti

Posted January 12, 2017 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Ayiti, Roxane Gay

I find myself not sure what to write about Ayiti. It’s a collection of short stories set in Haiti, or with Haitian characters. It evokes Haiti as a place of both beauty and struggle, the sun and the salt of the sea and the stench of blood. The inevitability of kidnap, of beggars, of hunger, of a need to leave. The stories are sensual, some sexual; packed with feeling and meaning.

It’s such a small collection that I feel like all I can remember of it is a cluster of sense-memories: sweat, sugar, blood. For me, it just seemed purely evocative, calling up a Haiti both beloved and hated, with a surprising vividness. If this is the quality of Roxane Gay’s writing, I’m definitely down to read some more.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, short stories

Review – The Assassin’s Blade

Posted January 11, 2017 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

The Assassin’s Blade, Sarah J. Maas

The stories contained in this volume are much more meaningful if you’ve already read at least the first book of the series, Throne of Glass. They fill in details referenced in Throne of Glass about Celaena’s background, and how exactly she came to be in the position she’s in at the start of that book, but they have more impact if you already know Celaena. If this was your first outing with her, you probably wouldn’t get to know her well. Each story is connected and leads fairly logically from the previous one, though it doesn’t quite have the cohesive feel of being a novel — it’s definitely episodic.

If you enjoy Celaena, it’s worth picking up; it fleshes out details about her past and gives more weight and meaning to some of the things she says and does in Throne of Glass. It’s an easy read, too; for all that it’s 450 pages worth of storytelling, it seems to fly by.

The books themselves… I’ve never been quite as in love with them as a lot of YA bloggers are, or were, so the collection remains exactly what I expect of Maas: an entertaining story (or in this case, set of linked stories), with an engaging but not perfect female character. (Come on, though; Celaena’s a highly trained assassin, yet she trusts the wrong people, she can be spoilt and petulant, etc. Sam Cortland, I think you deserved better.)

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Sarah J. Maas, SF/F, short stories

Review – Where Am I Now?

Posted January 10, 2017 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Where Am I Now?: True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame, Mara Wilson

Of course I loved Matilda — both the book and the film. I was that kind of child. I probably strained my eyes squinting and trying to do Matilda’s ‘Whammy’ on various objects. (Mostly books I wanted to come closer…) So as an adult, perhaps it’s not surprising that I looked up Mara Wilson and ended up following her twitter, despite her complex relationship with Matilda (covered, for example, in one of the chapters in this book, which is a letter to Matilda).

I did feel that while it was easy to read, it felt a bit scattered: it’s not chronological, so she discusses the death of her mother, then recounts events which happened before that, leaving me briefly confused. I feel like it lacked an overall structure somehow; without chronology, it needed something else unifying. But it was still compelling, especially reading about her fears and anxieties, the development of her OCD. (Our disorders’ acronyms might only share one letter, but GAD has a fair amount in common with OCD, and I definitely have tendencies of the latter too.) Her relationships with the people around her during filming and after were sweet too — her attachment to Danny DeVito, her reaction to Robin Williams’ death, and her mother’s close involvement with the early years of her career.

I read it all in one go, appreciating the frank and honest person I met here. Mara Wilson is fairly clear about portions of her life where she was pretentious, unpleasant, unwontedly angsty, etc. Her tone both accepts it as normal and gently scolds her younger self for that behaviour. I feel like I would quite like to sit down and have a quiet drink and a bun in a bookshop coffee area with her.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, non-fiction

Review – Carry On

Posted January 9, 2017 by Nicky in Reviews / 9 Comments

Carry On, Rainbow Rowell

Didn’t I just read Carry On? It’s true, I read it not that long ago, but after the US elections and various personal stresses (I have how many assignments due?), I needed some comfort reading. Harry Potter doesn’t work for me — for one thing, I’ve never been that big a fan, and for another, I had to read the second and third books five times each in a week on a school trip, since my mother only let me take two books. Since then, and especially considering how miserable the other kids made me, I’ve rather gone off Harry Potter.

My love for Carry On is totally separate to anything I feel about Harry Potter, though. I’m aware I’m in the minority there, but I only read four of the Harry Potter books, and never experienced the end of the series or got into the fandom. So I felt in the position to just love this: love the way the magic works, the way it permeates their thinking; the way Simon and Baz have always been drawn to each other; the way even their love scenes read a little bit like fighting in place.

There are things I don’t love — the constant POV switching, for example. It’s particularly jarring when it happens several times in what should just be a paragraph. And I don’t love feeling like Penny, Ebb and Agatha had their own stories that needed telling, and that they came so close to being able to tell them… before being cut off by the inevitability of Simon and Baz, and Simon’s victory. Particularly in Agatha’s case. I thought the descriptions of her feelings toward Simon were great, and I’d have liked to see some closure between them. In fandom, it’s always been the female characters that suffer from people’s attempts to pair up the boys, and it’d have been nice to get a fuller picture of Agatha. Simon’s still very much the Chosen One, narratively.

But these are things that could probably only be addressed by whole books that deal with these tropes, and deal with the lives of the women around Simon and the Mage. I don’t think there really was space here. Penelope Bunce still rocks the heck out of the book.

And it’s still a book I enjoy very much.

Rating: 5/5

Tags: book reviews, books, queer fic, Rainbow Rowell, SF/F

Review – How To Clone a Mammoth

Posted January 8, 2017 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

How To Clone A Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction, Beth Shapiro

For a title which sounds like a how-to book, this book spends an awful amount of time pointing out the ways in which cloning a mammoth is not possible. A lot of science is stuff I was well aware of, but it’s presented engagingly and clearly, so it was still an enjoyable read. It’s not purely about mammoths, although they are one of the main species considered: after all, they’re thought to have played a significant part in the sustainability of the tundra they inhabited. A lot of the book concerns cases like that: cases where reintroducing an animal to an ecosystem might bring it back into balance.

Despite science fiction’s hopes, cloning an extinct animal is still pretty far off — but it does depend on the methods you use. Shapiro uses a fairly broad definition of cloning, discussing back breeding as well: the process by which a current species is selectively bred to restore features of an ancestral or related species.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff here, including an explanation of why you can’t clone birds in the same way as Dolly the sheep was cloned. Fascinating stuff, and well presented. And if it’s a bit of a killjoy to know that mammoths aren’t so easily cloned, I think the interest of the science and discussed ethical issues still makes it worth it.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, non-fiction

Review – The Steerswoman

Posted January 7, 2017 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

The Steerswoman, Rosemary Kirstein

The Steerswoman is an interesting novel with a fantasy feel, but some hints that it might be more of a science fiction universe — especially if you see the original cover of the second book. In this book, the hints are subtle but do begin to build up, and even if you jump ahead in your guesses, it’s strangely satisfying to watch the eponymous steerswoman, Rowan, get stuck into the problem.

That’s probably starting at the wrong end, so here’s the intro: The Steerswoman is a fascinating novel which follows a character called Rowan as she investigates the world around her. She’s a steerswoman, a group of people who investigate the world around them by asking questions, making observations, and eventually forming theories. If a steerswoman asks you a question and you don’t answer, no steerswoman will ever answer you again. This can be quite a big moral dilemma and it produces some interesting conflicts.

Alongside Rowan is a female warrior from the Outskirts of their world, Bel. She’s got a different and refreshing view on it, and she and Rowan are both clever and capable in their own ways. You’d think they make a bit of an odd couple (so to speak), but actually they work together pretty well. There’s also a third member of their little band, later on, a boy called Willam, who despite being common-born, knows some of the tricks that only wizards are supposed to know…

The whole point of this novel is discovery, questioning, and whether any limits on knowledge should be accepted — and indeed, whether perhaps there might be a reason for keeping some secrets hidden. It doesn’t feel like a conventional fantasy novel — in fact, Rowan is a scientist, a logician, a mathematician — though it ultimately seems to sit in that genre. I enjoyed it a lot, and look forward to reading more. The pace is a little slow, and I hear it doesn’t much speed up, but the individual arc of the book has been solved so that it doesn’t feel like a cliffhanger.

Oh, and it’s casually queer — there are a pair of wizards, brother and sister. It turns out they both love the same woman. It’s a casual detail, but it’s nice to find such casual details sometimes.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Rosemary Kirstein, SF/F

Review – Winter Tide

Posted January 6, 2017 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Winter Tide, Ruthanna Emrys

Received to review via Netgalley; publication date 4th April 2017

Winter Tide has a very interesting premise, which builds on a short story by Ruthanna Emrys, ‘The Litany of Earth’ (you can find the story free to read online here). It took me a while to get used to what was going on because I hadn’t read that short story, but once I did, things started to fall into place. I do have to say that you’d probably appreciate this more if you’re familiar with Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. Since I’m not, I couldn’t appreciate a lot of the detail and the way Emrys reframes the sexist, racist themes of Lovecraft’s work. From the reviews/commentary I’ve read, that’s really well done.

The problem for me, aside from not having the background in Lovecraft’s work, is that I found it kind of slow-paced. I appreciated the character development, the descriptions, all sorts of things about the world… but I wanted a story that was going somewhere faster. It was worth sticking with it, but I found that I enjoyed ‘The Litany of Earth’ (which I read when halfway through Winter Tide) more satisfying somehow.

Still, I did appreciate that all the markers of monstrosity and so on were subverted here. I think Emrys loved the material and took care with making it more accessible to a modern, diverse audience, and it shows — as well of being a story of its own.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, SF/F

Review – Dark Tales

Posted January 5, 2017 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Dark Tales, Shirley Jackson

Received to review via Netgalley; publication date 6th October 2016

Dark Tales is an interesting little collection of uncanny stories — not stories which are openly horror, but ones with that creeping sense of unease, or that little twist. Like the man who finds someone stalking him all the way home, does his best to avoid him, and when he eventually gets home… his wife calls someone up to tell them she’s got him. Twists like that, and moments where it feels like the story took a left turn from expected normality all of a sudden.

Shirley Jackson was a fine writer, and these stories are really well done in terms of structure and content: there’s just enough in each one, but not so much that it makes things too obvious or belabours a point.

My only issue reading these was that the Kindle version received as an ARC wasn’t properly structured, so you couldn’t jump to a particular story, and the stories weren’t actually separated from each other. I’m sure that’s not the case in the printed work, but you might want to preview an ebook to make sure they did fix that.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, short stories