Category: Reviews

Review – Angela Carter's Book of Fairy Tales

Posted April 5, 2015 by in Reviews / 2 Comments

Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales, ed. Angela Carter

Read this one for the Cardiff SFF Book Club. I’m not the biggest fan of Angela Carter, having read a couple of her books back during my BA, but I do love fairy tales, so I was ready to give it a go anyway. Turns out, it isn’t a book of fairy tales by Angela Carter (which to be fair, having read The Bloody Chamber, wouldn’t be unexpected), but edited by her. She wrote a fairly scholarly introduction to it, acknowledging colonial bias, etc, etc, and commenting on the content. I’m… probably going to read that again before the book club meeting to see if I want to discuss anything from that angle.

Then comes the collection. The ordering is roughly thematic, although some stories would fit in multiple categories. Despite Carter’s acknowledgement of the limitations of her collection (due to her lack of linguistic skills), it is a pretty diverse collection, with fairy and folk tales from all kinds of cultures and time periods. It’s not just the traditional ones, but variations thereof and whole new stories that are more foreign to a Western audience in their preoccupations (I was a bit puzzled by the mothers turning into lionnesses and dogs forming from their saliva, for example). It can get a little repetitive — a Cinderella story is, ultimately, a Cinderella story: many cultures have it, and we know how it typically goes — but it probably didn’t help that I read this in the space of two days. The tellings chosen are usually fairly clear, and Carter avoided editorialising them too much, so it’s not a chore to read at all. My version does have some proofing errors like missing quotation marks, which was kind of irritating, especially when you’re trying to figure out which character is saying what in some of the more dialogue-heavy sections.

Overall, though, it’s an enjoyable read, and one I’ll keep around. Fairy tales are such a fun way to tell a story: they’ve been evolving so long, so they’re flexible, and they’re so familiar that when you make a change, it’s obvious what that change was and what you want to highlight. It can be a way to write marginalised people back into society, etc… They’re so rich and full of possibility.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books

Review – Red Sonja: The Art of Blood and Fire

Posted April 4, 2015 by in Reviews / 0 Comments

Red Sonja: The Art of Blood and Fire, Gail Simone, Walter Geovani

Gail Simone’s run on Red Sonja continues to make the She-Devil about a lot more than tits and ass and the male gaze. Her relationships with other women are important, but here we also see how she relates to the rather male-oriented world around her. I love that it makes no excuses for what Sonja is like — low on hygiene, high on hedonism, low on distinction, high in violence… And she’s a character you can love anyway, because there are things she cares about, regrets that she has, and she clearly inspires people around her in many ways. Despite her faults, she has friends, and she knows exactly who she is.

The art is mostly lovely, though some of the variant covers do veer back to the tits and ass version of Sonja, I think. And the… ‘chibi-fied’ ones just made me wince. C’mon, don’t infantilise this powerful woman who would hate to be portrayed that way…

Sonja’s adventures continue to be more episodic and disconnected than cohesive. It’s not a superhero story with a massive arc and a need to obsessively buy loads of tie-in comics. Which is good, I think.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, comics, Gail Simone

Review – City of Bones

Posted April 3, 2015 by in Reviews / 4 Comments

City of Bones, Martha Wells
Review from 15th July, 2013.

I don’t know what to think of this book. It’s my first Martha Wells book, and I’m promised some of her others are even better: this one is beautiful in its attention to detail, its careful worldbuilding. I enjoyed a lot that this is fantasy and post-apocalyptic work at the same time: we’re talking magic here, not science, not even science that looks like magic. This is what I’ve hungered for — a one-shot fantasy story that isn’t focused on romance or anything other than solid characters and a solid plot.

There’s a lot of really fascinating aspects to this world. There’s some interesting gender stuff going on with the main character, Khat. He’s part of an engineered race who are like humans but have various modifications to better suit the conditions of their post-apocalyptic world. One example being their ability to tell where north is by instinct. Another being the fact that both men and women can bear young in pouches. Then there’s the fact that the kris — Khat’s people — are sought after by some high class women because they can’t interbreed with humans: it’s not high class men taking advantage of poor women, but the other way round (in effect). And the high class women all have very short hair, while high class men wear veils. One of the main characters, Elen, has a powerful role to begin with and becomes more powerful in her society as the story goes on; the ruler’s heir is a woman.

At the same time, there’s some possessiveness around women and an expectation that they’ll stay home and have children, so it’s not quite turned completely around.

Khat is a great character: tough, smart, but not infallible and not all-knowing. I can believe in the people around him, the bonds he has to others — I love the awkwardness with Elen at the end, and the comfortableness he always has with Sagai because Sagai understands Khat isn’t going to confide everything in him. I liked that the “bad” characters aren’t completely one-sided (except the Inhabitants and perhaps the Heir), and though I saw it coming, I liked what became of “mad” Constans.

I love the details of the world, the fact that water is a commodity — which isn’t a hugely original idea, but which fits so well here and isn’t used as some kind of dystopic problem, but just as a background to the story, a part of the system of commerce and trade.

I really enjoyed the fact that this is sort of a fantastical Indiana Jones with aristocratic scheming moving the pieces, too. The details of the relics, the academic discussions around them… That’s my world, really, at least on the literature side of things, and it’s lovely to have a hero for whom that is a big draw.

There’s a lot of genuine sense of wonder and beauty, here, and the author steers away from a too-convenient ending. People die, friendships are stillborn, and the world ticks on as before with the person who made that possible barely rewarded. Very enjoyable, and I’m looking forward to reading more of Wells’ stuff.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: books, Flashback Friday, Martha Wells, SF/F

Review – Tomb Raider: Season of the Witch

Posted April 2, 2015 by in Reviews / 0 Comments

Tomb Raider: Season of the Witch, Gail Simone, Nicolas Daniel Selma

I never got into Tomb Raider as a kid — though it helps I didn’t have any games consoles until I was a teen — but I recently played the reboot and loved it. The survival aspects were great, and I needed to think tactically about taking out enemies, etc, etc. Season of the Witch doesn’t, in my opinion, bring anything really new to the story. It deepens the stories around some of the relationships, but in many ways the actual plot is a re-run in miniature of the game — without such high stakes, it seemed; there weren’t many characters to lose anymore.

You’ve got to love, though, the tension between Reyes and Lara, and the way that plays out; but especially the deep friendship between Lara and Sam. I hope that remains an essential part of the series.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, comics, Gail Simone

Review – The Riddle of the Labyrinth

Posted April 1, 2015 by in Reviews / 2 Comments

The Riddle of the Labyrinth, Margalit Fox

This book discusses the decipherment of the Minoan script, Linear B. I didn’t know much about it before I started reading this; I’ve read pretty often about Champollion’s work on hieroglyphs, though not in the detail given here, and it’s the kind of thing that always fascinated me as a kid. So I was intrigued by this right away, especially because it promised to bring the work of a more obscure female scholar into the foreground. Fox definitely wants to highlight the work of Alice Kober, who she seems to hold in great affection, but there is quite a lot of space dedicated to the discoverer of Linear B, Arthur Evans, and the man who ultimately deciphered it, Michael Ventris.

It’s a thorough explanation of the decipherment, so perhaps not for the faint of heart, and it never pretends that the contents of the tablets were expected to be (or found to be) particularly glamorous: it was obvious from the start that the tablets would prove to contain inventories, not great literature. The glamour is in the mystery, which for a long time was completely locked: the language wasn’t known, the script wasn’t known, and the contents weren’t known. It was very hard to get a grip on how to extract meaning. Arthur Evans never did; he seems to have locked onto what he thought the answers would be, and gone looking for evidence. Ventris did the same, initially. Kober, of the three, was the one who really began on the right track: she studied all sorts of languages to understand how languages in general work, and she did painstaking work on the statistics, until the facts began to emerge for themselves.

The book also includes the life stories of the three scholars, particularly Kober and Ventris. It was fascinating to read about Kober and her determination, and her career in academia in the 40s; the hopes and setbacks she experienced. I can understand Fox’s fascination with her. It sounds like she was a great teacher and a passionate person, for all that you can peg her for the dried-up-spinster stereotype.

Some of the technical details of the decipherment were a bit beyond me — statistics and anything to do with numbers just don’t stick in my head — but I enjoyed this anyway. It’s a thorough account, which shines some light on a deserving person (Kober) whose contribution has been neglected.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, non-fiction

Review – Madam, Will You Talk?

Posted March 31, 2015 by in Reviews / 2 Comments

Madam, Will You Talk?, Mary Stewart

Not my favourite of Mary Stewart’s novels, but it’s what the library had when I felt like revisiting. It probably hasn’t really been long enough since I first read them, but ah well: they’re still fun. Stewart was brilliant at establishing a sense of mood and place: a hot French town, dust on the roads, shade under the trees, a cool breeze when you drive fast but sticky and heavy when you’re stuck in traffic… I enjoy Charity’s character, her past, and the fact that despite that tragic past, she uses what her husband taught her about life and love to move on, and Stewart never implies that her love for either the new love or the old diminishes the other.

The relationship itself, well. The constant descriptions of the love interest as dictatorial are exactly right, and one can’t help but think the whole relationship a little off-putting. She’s terrified of him at first, she thinks he’s a murderer, and he’s violent to her, and yet… There’s a passion in the relationship, which is something I do like to see, but his violence was waved away all too easily. A different era, I know… and yet.

The mystery itself, well: it’s melodramatic, all kidnapping and attempted murder and links to Nazism. But it works as long as you’re in the right headspace, and I was, since I’m well used to Stewart’s work.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Mary Stewart, mystery, romance

Review – Blloon

Posted March 30, 2015 by in Reviews / 4 Comments

I don’t normally review services on my blog, but since this one is an ebook subscription service, it seems pretty relevant! I came across Blloon a little while ago through another blogger. I can’t figure out who that was, but I think it was a regular visitor here, so please do let me know and I’ll give you the credit.

I’ve been looking for an ebook subscription service for a while, but it looked like the best ones were in the US or really limited when it comes to serving other countries. I do have a Scribd subscription too, because of the access to so many comics on there — finally read Lumberjanes, last week, and my recent attempt on Daredevil was through them as well. But they don’t have a lot of more recent books. Screenshot of the Blloon app

Enter Blloon! I was surprised to note as soon as I opened the app that they have some very recent and high profile releases on offer — The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro, for example — and I found a fair number of books I’m interested in. To give you just an idea of my list so far, it’s got some Mercedes Lackey, Robin McKinley, Kelly Link, various non-fiction books… And I’m sure there’s plenty more to discover. There are several ways to discover new books too, with a section of highlights, some reading lists (including one to help you diversify your reading called “Not Reading White Men”!), and of course you can also browse by genre.

As for their subscription model, it’s a very flexible one. You can pay monthly for a certain number of pages (500 or 1,000 are the options at present), or you can buy packs of top-up pages. These pages roll over each month, so you don’t have to use them all up to feel like you’re getting the best of your subscription. You can also earn them by giving feedback, sharing the link, and even net 50 pages by following them on Twitter. The first 10% of every book is free, too, so you can test drive it before you ‘spend’ your pages.

So far, I haven’t spent much time actually reading on Blloon. For one thing, for a reader like me reading a 400 page book every day or two, even 1,000 pages a month could be exhausted in less than a week. For me, it’s probably going to be a supplement to my usual sources, for when I really want a book right away or it’s not available on Kobo or whatever. Still, the interface is nice: clean and simple, and you can adjust font size and the background, depending on what’s comfortable for you. My only quibble really is that it doesn’t flip orientation with my iPad, so if it’s on its stand I’m tilting my head while I’m checking for stuff on Blloon, and I couldn’t read like that (though Sarah from Blloon assures me that there’s an update this very week to fix that). More customisation options might be nice if you need to change the font, but the basic features are all there.

All in all, I definitely recommend Blloon. They’re friendly, helpful, and they have an interesting selection available including most Open Road Media reprints. It is limited to iOS in the UK, at least for the moment, but within the UK it’s easily the best option.

And, pssst. If you want to net me 200 extra pages in my ‘wallet’, sign up to Blloon using this link! Mum, that means you.

Tags: books, ebooks, non-book review

Review – The Explorer

Posted March 30, 2015 by in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Explorer, James Smythe

I’ve been vaguely meaning to read something by Smythe for a while. This doesn’t really encourage me: the idea is interesting enough, but my interest waned from the very first chapter, because the narration is so flat and lacking in affect. I couldn’t care less about Cormac (or indeed, the rest of the crew), and the science was inconsistent enough that it didn’t capture my attention as a novel of ideas, either. (I mean, be clear: are you or are you not breaking Newton’s laws of the conservation of motion? If yes, why?)

It seemed… just rather too similar to various other books and sci-fi films that are around, without giving me anything that made it stand out. Which is a disappointment given that this book has been vaguely on my radar for a while, but not too surprising when I look at the reviews on Goodreads and such. Ah, well.

Rating: 1/5

Tags: book reviews, books, SF/F

Review – Daredevil vol. 1

Posted March 29, 2015 by in Reviews / 2 Comments

Daredevil volume 1, Mark Waid, Paolo Rivera, Marcos Martin

I don’t really know much about Daredevil, beyond the fact that his real name is Matt Murdock, and that he’s blind. This comic makes a reasonable introduction, though it’s a bit obvious that it is an introduction — there’s a lot of ‘as you know, Bob’ type exposition about how Matt can see, his limitations and his background. Apparently this takes a turn out of a gritty trend for Matt, which it sort of flags up in the story by Matt going on about how he has to do this to cope. It feels a bit clumsy, in that sense.

Some of the art is really great, though: the way they represent Daredevil’s senses, the way they bring across the insouciance of the character, etc. The plot itself seemed similar to She-Hulk’s, in a way: they’re both lawyers, both now trying to integrate their superhero identities with that and having problems. It wasn’t a bad plot, but it didn’t feel particularly new and fresh and startling; it definitely felt like just a primer on Daredevil and what he can do. State of the Daredevil.

Okay, and I did read it in one go, but not enough to make me love the character (unlike, for example, Kelly Sue’s Captain Marvel or the new elements introduced to the team in Gillon’s Young Avengers, which were also Marvel Now titles).

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, comics, Marvel

Review – Season of Storms

Posted March 28, 2015 by in Reviews / 4 Comments

Season of Storms, Susanna Kearsley

There’s so much about reading Susanna Kearsley that reminds me of reading Mary Stewart’s work. Something about the sense of place (this is so firmly Italy, and the house and its grounds are so easy to imagine), the female heroine, the romance… Except it’s better, because it steers away from some of the colonial and sexist attitudes that were still pretty firmly entrenched in Mary Stewart’s work, despite her independent and reasonably proactive heroines.

And this book especially won me over, because the main character has been brought up by two gay men in a stable, loving relationship. Neither of them are stereotyped, and the relationship feels real, lived in, between both them and the woman who is essentially their daughter. I got more caught up by Roo and Bryan than by Celia and Alex, honestly. I also ended up having a conversation on Twitter with the author about which of various characters I’d want to be my dad… (Well, in reality, no one is better than my dad. But shush.) There’s some serious emotional punches there, which really work because of that warmth and family which Kearsley portrays so well.

The plot itself is reasonably predictable; the trick is that I got involved with the characters.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, romance, Susanna Kearsley