Tag: book reviews

Review – Magic Rises

Posted September 5, 2016 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of Magic Rises by Ilona AndrewsMagic Rises, Ilona Andrews

Magic Rises really ups the stakes. It opens with a serious dilemma for the Pack being made really crystal clear to Kate: the likelihood of the Pack’s children to ‘go loup’, at which point the pack have to kill them. To make sure we really notice, one of the children affected is a friend of Kate’s adopted daughter, and then the Pack receive an offer: go and mediate issues with a woman who is pregnant by two different men, whose father uses her as a way to control and divide territory. In return, you’ll get a load of the stuff you need to drastically reduce the odds of loupism.

It’s a trap, of course, and the trap is really well baited. The only question is really who it’s set for, and of course, it turns out that this advances the overarching plot as well: Kate’s heritage comes more and more to the fore, and her relationship with Curran has to weather that. At the same time, there’s a price paid within the story for every advance they gain, and lots of impossible choices to make.

My main frustration is that Kate and Curran start being idiots again. Communication, people. It’s not a myth. Use your mouths and talk to each other. Argh! Even if they don’t agree on tactics and so on, I wish their personal relationship felt less shaky and superficial at moments like this. I believe that Kate needs Curran, loves him. Now make the two of ’em act like it!

Also, the whole Andrea-and-Raphael issue is just all of a sudden solved. I’m guessing this is the point where it’d have helped to read Gunmetal Magic.

It’s a really fun read, though: it just races along at breakneck pace, and you never know exactly what’s going to happen next. The writing team that is Ilona Andrews don’t pull their punches.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Saga volume 4

Posted September 4, 2016 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of Saga vol 4 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona StaplesSaga volume 4, Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples

Volume Four takes a little timeskip to move the story on, and it’s a wise decision. It drops us right in the middle of Alana and Marko’s difficulties with Hazel as a toddler, and with balancing their lives between caring for her and working, and scraping some time for each other. And it’s kind of awesome how not fantastical those aspects of Saga are — the way Marko and Alana mess up and hurt each other, and don’t manage to do the right or best thing, despite their love for each other and for Hazel.

The other storylines of Prince Robot, Gwendolyn and even the gay reporters are also touched on, but they felt more throwaway when compared to the messing up of Marko and Alana. And, to be fair, the way other people participate in messing them up — looking at you, dancing teacher lady and high-as-a-kite tree lady.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Home

Posted September 4, 2016 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of Home by Francis PryorHome: A Time Traveller’s Tales from Britain’s Prehistory, Francis Pryor

Unlike the more focused Seahenge, Francis Pryor’s Home tries to cover a lot of ground — no less than looking at the roots of family life in the Neolithic world, and its development through to recorded history. There’s a lot of evidence to look at, but a lot of it doesn’t deal directly with the home: in fact, Pryor discusses Seahenge and Stonehenge at reasonable length, as well as other potentially sacred places and practices that we don’t now fully understand (or in some cases, understand at all). It somewhat ties in with what I’ve been reading recently about Celtic culture, and the development of infrastructure in Britain, though it covers a lot more centuries, so it was interesting to see where it dovetailed.

Unfortunately, I think the fact that there’s sections about burial practices and the like detracts from the central theme, even though it does relate to how a home life might have been seen and how individuals were treated. Pryor’s willingness to speculate about all these things makes the book seem a little overstuffed at times — reiterating ideas from Seahenge and from Mike Parker Pearson’s Stonehengethen discussing Pryor’s own digging experiences, and then talking about a hoard found somewhere else… It lacks focus, I think, which is a shame.

It’s still a fascinating book, and Pryor writes well and interestingly, but it feels like the material could equally constitute most of Britain BC, which I haven’t yet read but intend to. It isn’t just about the home; we don’t have enough evidence for that, as much as we would wish it. Instead, questions about ritual and beliefs about death intrude at all times, partly because these are things we are more fascinated to know, and only partly for the way it reflects on the living of life.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Gillespie and I

Posted September 3, 2016 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Cover of Gillespie & I by Jane HarrisGillespie and I, Jane Harris

This book had a really weird effect on me: after I finished, I sat there wondering if I was like the narrator — self-deluding, manipulative, not able to see what I’m doing or worse, knowing and yet somehow still managing to tell the story as if I’m the victim. There was something just so well done and so unpleasant about the way the narrator tells her profoundly skewed version of events, and the slow way the hints pile up about that. The little details you need to keep in mind, because they suddenly reveal something huge.

The main character is not likeable, though she is at times pathetic in a way that makes you pity her; the others around her are much more alive and genuine, though you only see them through the biased eyes of Harriet. Again, you have to watch for the gaps to see why she’s so fascinated, how these characters really feel about her, what is really going on. It’s not a mystery novel, not really, and yet in some ways you need to read it like one, watching out for the gun in the first act that must go off by the fifth.

The narration and set-up is really clever; I enjoyed the book a lot, though I wouldn’t recommend it for people who like a quick payoff. It takes a while to really see where the novel is going and what it’s doing. Worth it, but not everyone’s cup of tea.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – The Man Who Loved Books Too Much

Posted September 2, 2016 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of The Man Who Loved Books Too MuchThe Man Who Loved Books Too Much, Allison Hoover Bartlett

Originally reviewed March 11th, 2011

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much is definitely the wrong title for this book, because that’s really not what this book is about. The love of stories is something I can relate to, easily — or even the love of beautiful first editions. The amoral antics of a thief who wants to have books as a status symbol, and the wishy-washy morals of the story-hungry writer, are not something I can sympathise with as much. And I increasingly worried about the latter. She could have reported thefts of books worth thousands and thousands of dollars; she could have reported credit card fraud; she could have helped to discover where Gilkey hid the books.

By the end of the book, I wasn’t sure that she would do that last — and I knew she didn’t report the thefts or the fraud. She becomes an unreliable narrator, I think. I mean, humans already tend to be, because even the most honest of us have fallible memories. I was almost more interested in that increasing swing to being on Gilkey’s side.

In any case, as a book, it’s easy to read, though not exactly glittering prose. It’s a collection of recollections and personal musings, none of which I found particularly interesting. The more interesting figure of Ken Sanders, the “bibliodick”, was rapidly written out as he began to notice the author’s growing bias and unethical practices.

Rating: 2/5

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The Princess Who Didn’t Eat Cake

Posted September 1, 2016 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of The Princess Who Didn't Eat Cake by Lynn O' ConnachtThe Princess Who Didn’t Eat Cake, Lynn E. O’Connacht

Once upon a time, people who weren’t interested in sex (or who weren’t interested in sex to the expected level, or people who were only interested in sex with very particular people) found each other and realised it was a thing, and started to support each other and make a space to talk about how it affected them. And it was great, because it made people a little less alone.

But it’s not always obvious to everyone that this describes them, that this is a useful community to have, etc. So if you’d like to understand a little more about it via the medium of a fairytale, Lynn O’Connacht has got you covered — and the booklet also includes an essay explaining things a little further, and a list of fiction which contains characters who share this experience. The focus in this case is specifically demisexuality, but honestly I think it’s something relevant to anyone on the asexual spectrum, or anyone curious about it.

Disclaimer: I helped to edit the non-fiction essay, and Lynn is a friend of mine.

You can find the ebook here! You’ll be pleased to know that it’s “pay what you want”, so if things are tight, you can still pick it up.

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Review – Reading in the Brain

Posted September 1, 2016 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Cover of Reading in the Brain by Stanislaw DehaeneReading in the Brain, Stanislas Dehaene

This was a really, really fascinating read, and surprisingly easy to grasp considering the technical subject. I actually read it surprisingly fast, and it was definitely the sort of book that provoked a lot of turning to my partner to ask “did you know that…”. It also made me ask a ton of questions of my mother about how I learned to read, why I learned to read late, etc, and honestly had me wondering if I should volunteer for a study on reading — the methods of reading and learning to read that Dehaene mentions don’t seem to apply to me, despite the studies backing up his hypotheses.

I can only really react to this book via my own personal experience/understanding, so this is going to veer off into anecdata a lot. On a purely intellectual level, it seems as if Dehaene’s theories are sound (although I’m not sure his model of synaesthesia is correct). Some of his phrasing was… mildly offensive to me, for example describing synaesthetes as “mostly not crackpots”. Why on earth would an intelligent person, a scientist, even connect synaesthesia with delusions? I know uninformed people sometimes do, but a scientist should know that the brains of synaesthetes genuinely cause them to experience (for example) words in colour, and not talk about them being “convinced” that they do, or describe them as “mostly not crackpots”.

Anyway, on an anecdotal level, Dehaene’s model doesn’t fit me at all. I didn’t/couldn’t learn to read via phonics. At all. I was eventually got reading via essentially the Whole Word method, and I still don’t connect graphemes and phonemes well at all. If I see a new word, I don’t actually think at all about how to pronounce it; I get the meaning from context, and mentally tag the image of the word with it. I only think about how to pronounce a word when I eventually find cause to say it (and then I will more often than not get it wrong). Dehaene not only thinks that doesn’t work as a way to learn words, but the model of dyslexia he proposes is essentially focused on that inability to connect phonemes and graphemes. By the logic in this book, I should be a very limited reader — yet from as quickly as a year after finally learning to read (and I waslow), I was routinely getting the reading score of an adult, and reading adult books fast and voraciously.

Probably there’s some crossover in the fact that I’m synaesthetic; as a child, I apparently complained that the books school gave me to learn from “tasted bad”. And given how terrible my visual skills (particularly the ones located in the same area of the brain Dehaene identifies as the brain’s word form area) are, I’ve got to wonder if maybe learning to read without the phonetic route caused more of my brain to specialise in reading than average.

In any case, it’s a fascinating topic and Dehaene’s book is mostly very readable and, as far as I can tell, mostly inoffensive — though the way he talks about synaesthetes makes me wonder if dyslexic people might also be less than pleased with the descriptions here. I’m definitely going to look up other pop science (or maybe even some studies) about how reading works in the brain; I’d like to know if any other theories describe my way of reading better, and what developments have emerged since this book was written.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Uprooted

Posted August 31, 2016 by Nicky in Reviews / 6 Comments

Cover of Uprooted by Naomi NovikUprooted, Naomi Novik

I notice other people comparing this book to The Goblin Emperor in reviews, because there is a distinctly hopeful tone to it. I think that’s probably why I enjoyed it and made that parallel myself: this isn’t grimdark, even though it could be. It’s a Polish-ish medieval setting, with feudalism and magic and armies, and with a great big encroaching wood which is second cousin to Tolkien’s Old Forest, but bigger and badder. And yet it turns out to be not so clear-cut, and there’s room at the end for growth and hope, rather than just destruction and violence. A chance for two worlds to meet.

It may not feel that way in some parts of the book, though: there is plenty of horrible moments, where corruption reaches out to touch everything and the only answer seems to be violence. People don’t get off lightly: there is death, there is a price paid. In that respect, it doesn’t feel quite as hopeful as The Goblin Emperor, which largely avoids outright violence.

Uprooted has a somewhat slow pace, at least at first; the narrator takes her time introducing us to the world, even with that corker of a first sentence: “Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley.” Every detail means something, but it takes time to come together, and in the meantime the writing is what pulled me on — not just the build-up of the magic system, the building up of the characters, the mysteries revealed bit by bit, but also the quality of the prose. It felt solid, structured, knowing — I felt like I could trust the narration to get me where I needed to go, so I didn’t mind about the pace — another book I’m reminded of is Juliet Marillier’s Heart’s Blood, which makes sense given that both books grew out of fairytales to some degree or another, without being slavishly attached.

I also love that one of the big drivers of this book is Agnieszka’s concern and love for her friend, her home, the people around her. No grim swearing of vengeance here; in fact, that blind impulse to avenge, to push back when pushed, is explicitly criticised, while Agnieszka’s slower understanding proves the important part.

I enjoyed it a lot, and it stands alone beautifully, with an ending that has just enough room to breathe. It’s not quite The Goblin Emperor for me (the narration did feel like it slowed down a bit too much here and there), but it’s good.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Magic Slays

Posted August 30, 2016 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of Magic Slays by Ilona AndrewsMagic Slays, Ilona Andrews

Argh, this book brings the feels. Characters we love get endangered and characters we love are worried about them, serious issues in the Pack’s way of life start to become apparent, and Kate finds out that some things she took for granted weren’t true at all. We also get to see a bit more of Kate’s past and more about her mother, which we have been lacking, in the form of the witches. There’s also more about Kate’s father, about her bloodline and what it means, and what it means she can do. Plus, more honesty with Curran about those things!

Kate and Curran continue to negotiate their relationship and their respective stubbornness. They’re not perfect at it, but they do it, and they do also manage to express themselves. I’m not 100% a fan of how focused on Curran Kate can be at times (the whole having missed him while at work thing, for example), but it makes sense.

I’m not sure how much this advances the overall plot; it feels like a bit of an interlude, after the events with Erra, except that character-wise it is fairly momentous, and Kate does inch slowly towards an understanding of the cost she might have to pay, but also why she shouldn’t run away.

I find these books solid fun and really easy to read; there’s no way I’m stopping here.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – The Undivided Past

Posted August 29, 2016 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of The Undivided Past by David CannadineThe Undivided Past, David Cannadine

I’m not sure if I’ve totally grasped the point of this book, because if I have, it seems very simplistic: basically, that none of the great dividers between people (religion, nationality, class, gender, etc) are actually as divisive as we think, and that they haven’t been historically either — that men and women have cooperated in societies before now, that Islam and Christianity have coexisted, etc, etc. If there’s really a trend for historians to claim that’s not so, then it does make sense to offer a counterpoint, but it’s not really a point of view I’ve ever seen. While people might not have been talking about intersectionality under that name for so long, I think it’s always been obvious that it exists.

So, in that sense, Cannadine’s book reads as though he’s setting up a series of strawmen to knock down. Of course religion doesn’t divide us wholly — nor does it unite us, as he shows by talking about the quarrels between Catholics and Protestants, or Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Of course there’s been cooperation between genders, between nations, and of course there has been conflict between them. To me, a lot of this seemed very obvious, and hardly worth spending so much ink and paper discussing why it proves that no one identity divides (or unites) man.

If the call is ultimately for unity, one still has to wonder — on the basis of what? Humanity? But the time is coming, if it hasn’t already come, where we could dispute the boundaries of humanity. If you rely on machines to survive, are you human? Are your interests aligned with “humanity”? Once almost any organ can be replaced with an artificial one, is a person in receipt of a lot of those surgeries still human, with the same preoccupations and needs as the rest of us? (My answer would be yes, but it’s a thing which has yet to be debated politically and socially, outside of science fiction.)

Also, I think it’s already showing its age, and it was published in 2013. There’s been no movements based on male identity, according to Cannadine — but Men’s Rights and GamerGate have been a thing. And there’s no modern feminism? What about EverydaySexism, etc?

The book is still a worthwhile survey of the divisions between us and how significant (and not) they’ve been, but if I understood the thesis correctly, then it’s not exactly groundbreaking.

Rating: 2/5

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