Tag: book reviews

Review – Being Human

Posted November 19, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Being Human

Being Human: How Our Biology Shaped World History

by Lewis Dartnell

Genres: History, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 368
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

We are a wonder of evolution. Powerful yet dextrous, instinctive yet thoughtful, we are expert communicators and innovators. Our exceptional abilities have created the civilisation we know today.

But we're also deeply flawed. Our bodies break, choke and fail, whether we're kings or peasants. Diseases thwart our boldest plans. Our psychological biases have been at the root of terrible decisions in both war and peacetime.

This extraordinary contradiction is the essence of what it means to be human - the sum total of our frailties and our faculties. And history has played out in the balance between them. Now, for the first time, Lewis Dartnell tells our story through the lens of this unique, capricious and fragile nature. He explores how our biology has shaped our relationships, our societies, our economies and our wars, and how it continues to challenge and define our progress.

Lewis Dartnell’s Being Human was okay, but not too surprising for me: it explores the links between our biological constraints (such as our immune systems and adaptive immunity) and historical events (such as the enslavement of millions because white people had no immunity to various diseases and thus were dying).

It discusses some other types of issue, such as cognitive biases, and briefly gestures toward mismatch theory… but mostly it skims over each topic, and doesn’t feel like it goes into depth on anything. The incidents chosen are illustrative rather than exhaustive, so it’s usually an idea, one example, and then move on.

I didn’t notice any glaring errors where it concerned things I know, but I think it rather lightly touched on most things, so there weren’t major opportunities for it to go wrong.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Yellow Jessamine

Posted November 18, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Yellow Jessamine

Yellow Jessamine

by Caitlin Starling

Genres: Fantasy, Horror
Pages: 140
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Powerful shipping magnate Evelyn Perdanu lives a tight, contained life, holding herself at a distance from all who would get close to her. Her family is dead, her country is dying, and when something foul comes to the city of Delphinium, the brittle, perilous existence she's built for herself is strained to breaking.

When one of her ships arrives in dock, she counts herself lucky that it made it through the military blockades slowly strangling her city. But one by one, the crew fall ill with a mysterious sickness: an intense light in their eyes and obsessive behavior, followed by a catatonic stupor. Even as Evelyn works to exonerate her company of bringing plague into her besieged capital city, more and more cases develop, and the afflicted all share one singular obsession: her.

Panicked and paranoid, she retreats to her estate, which rests on a foundation of secrets: the deaths of her family, the poisons and cures that hasten the dissolution of the remaining upper classes, and a rebel soldier, incapacitated and held hostage in a desperate bid for information. But the afflicted are closing in on her, and bringing the attention of the law with them. Evelyn must unearth her connection to the spreading illness, and fast, before it takes root inside her home and destroys all that she has built.

Caitlin Starling’s Yellow Jessamine is a horror novella, following a young woman who fell heir to her family’s estate and business after the tragic deaths of all her family. Evelyn Perdanu likes to tightly control her life, managing the business around the war that will all too soon come to her home, and managing her household according to her own (slightly eccentric) needs. Her solace is her garden, where the things she grows can both heal and harm.

Slowly, the extent of what she does becomes clear — in response to the sudden appearance of something like a new plague, which leaves people empty and catatonic, after a brief period of total obsession with Evelyn. It’s all very creepy and tense, both with the plague and with the fear of the enemy and the eventual death of the town, and the fear of being found out for what she’s done.

Where it failed for me is that Evelyn is hard to pity, since she’s ruthless despite her fragility. She thinks nothing of blinding a man, even as she’s supposed to be nursing him to health. Poison is an answer that comes easily to her hand. It’s hard to feel sorry for her — for me at least — given how culpable she is. Points for atmosphere, but the character didn’t work for me: just a step too far into her own private madness to ever seem sane and worth investing in as a reader.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – The Seat of the Scornful

Posted November 17, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – The Seat of the Scornful

The Seat of the Scornful

by John Dickson Carr

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 240
Series: Dr Gideon Fell #14
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Judge Horace Ireton didn't care about the letter of the law. He was interested in administering absolute, impartial justice as he saw it. To some, his methods of meting out justice made him seem hardly human, for they were coldly calculated - the same type of "cat and mouse" technique that he used in his chess games with Dr. Gideon Fell, the elephantine detective. The system, as he explained it, consisted in "letting your opponent think he's perfectly safe, winning hands down: and then catch him in a corner." But the system was not infallible. One day Judge Ireton was found with a pistol in his hand, beside the body of his daughter's fiancé, a man he had every reason to dislike, as many people knew; and he found that when one was on the inside looking out, the game had to be played differently.

I really thought I disliked John Dickson Carr’s writing, and didn’t pick up most of his books republished in the British Library Crime Classics series. It seems I was wrong: after I enjoyed He Who Whispers, I decided to give a couple more a shot, and this is the first one I got to. It concerns a judge who is particularly merciless in court, dealing out justice according to his own sense of it, who becomes entangled in a murder case — the murder of his daughter’s undesirable fiancé.

It’s not the usual locked-room puzzle, but more of a puzzle of how people work, and how appearances can be made to serve one narrative or another. It has a bit more humanity to it than some of Carr’s other books (perhaps ones written earlier), and the characters feel a little more real, a little less like archetypes acting out their stories.

It made for a fun puzzle, at least, and I’m convinced enough to try reading John Dickson Carr’s other novels — clearly they can be either hit or miss for me, and must each be judged on their own merits, despite my run of bad luck with his other work that I’d read before.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Evidence of the Affair

Posted November 16, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Evidence of the Affair

Evidence of the Affair

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Genres: General
Pages: 88
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

A desperate young woman in Southern California sits down to write a letter to a man she’s never met—a choice that will forever change both their lives. My heart goes out to you, David. Even though I do not know you.

The correspondence between Carrie Allsop and David Mayer reveals, piece by piece, the painful details of a devastating affair between their spouses. With each commiserating scratch of the pen, they confess their fears and bare their souls. They share the bewilderment over how things went so wrong and come to wonder where to go from here.

Told entirely through the letters of two comforting strangers and those of two illicit lovers, Evidence of the Affair explores the complex nature of the heart. And ultimately, for one woman, how liberating it can be when it’s broken.

I actually really liked Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Evidence of the Affair, a short story/novella in which two people find connection over the fact that their partners are cheating on them, together. They offer one another friendship, and find comfort in their shared predicament — and ultimately find some joy there too, figuring out what they really want and need, and giving each other some of the affirmation they lack from their unloving partners.

I was a little surprised by the way it ended: I’d expected something a little more cynical, where the couples separate and reform only for the cycle to repeat. Instead there’s something gentler: not total reconcilation, not going back to the status quo, but each of them getting what they need. I really liked the letter format for this, too: it gives such insights into character, while at the same time avoiding needing to explain everything — instead, detail is given casually, and it works well.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Basilisks and Beowulf

Posted November 15, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment

Review – Basilisks and Beowulf

Basilisks and Beowulf: Monsters in the Anglo-Saxon World

by Tim Flight

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 336
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

This book addresses a simple question: why were the Anglo-Saxons obsessed with monsters, many of which did not exist?

Drawing on literature and art, theology, and a wealth of firsthand evidence, Basilisks and Beowulf reveals a people huddled at the edge of the known map, using the fantastic and the grotesque as a way of understanding the world around them and their place within it. For the Anglo-Saxons, monsters helped to distinguish the sacred and the profane; they carried God’s message to mankind, exposing His divine hand in creation itself.

At the same time, monsters were agents of disorder, seeking to kill people, conquer their lands, and even challenge what it meant to be human. Learning about where monsters lived and how they behaved allowed the Anglo-Saxons to situate themselves in the world, as well as to apprehend something of the divine plan. It is for these reasons that monsters were at the very center of their worldview. From map monsters to demons, dragons to Leviathan, we neglect these beasts at our peril.

This would probably have been a more interesting read for me back when I was doing English literature and studying Anglo-Saxon literature! I’m a little out of touch now, a decade later, but it was still interesting to delve back into this kind of thinking, this kind of linking texts and cultural attitudes together to better understand something more like the whole experience.

The central thesis here is that monsters are about enforcing the barriers between humanity and the unknown, humanity and monsters. They represent blurry points where people can become monsters, where monsters might also be kind of people, and sometimes they just make it clear how scary the unknown is.

I didn’t find it too surprising/original, but it was reasonably convincing.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Die Volume 1: Fantasy Heartbreaker

Posted November 14, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Die Volume 1: Fantasy Heartbreaker

Die: Fantasy Heartbreaker

by Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans

Pages: 184
Series: Die #1
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

The Wicked + The Divine writer Kieron Gillen teams up with artist supernova Stephanie Hans (WicDiv, Journey Into Mystery) for her first ongoing comic. Die is a pitch-black fantasy where a group of forty-something adults have to deal with the returning, unearthly horror they only just survived as teenage role-players. If Kieron's in a rush, he describes it as ""Goth Jumanji"", but that's only the tip of this obsidian iceberg.

I’m intrigued by this story/world — which is really accurately described as a “Goth Jumanji” — and at the same time feel like I don’t know what to say about it. Being just the first volume, it’s just a glimpse of the world and of what the characters might be: there’s lots of potential, lots of fucked-up emotional stuff for the characters, hints at how they relate to each other, etc… But it’s just volume one, and so it’s hard to judge where all that is going and how satisfying it might be.

It’s just also pretty dark, and the characters are pretty much all flawed and fucked up, so it felt weightier than the relatively short length of the story so far, and left me not quite sure if I want to invest the time in reading more.

The art is great, at least, and there’s definitely intriguing hints at what makes several characters tick. I think I’ll probably give volume 2 a shot soon, before I forget who everyone is!

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Heads You Lose

Posted November 13, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Heads You Lose

Heads You Lose

by Christianna Brand

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 159
Series: Inspector Cockrill #1
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Pigeonsford Estate is playing host to a group of close friends when one of their number, Grace Morland, is found dead in a ditch. The murder is made even more unusual by the fact that Grace was wearing her friend Francesca's hat, the same hat that only the day before she'd claimed she wouldn't be caught dead wearing. Inspector Cockrill has known most of the friends since they were children. They are all from good families and very close to one another; how, then, could one of them be a cold-blooded killer? And if one of them had murdered Grace which one was it and why had they done it?

Heads You Lose did some very interesting things, from my point of view: the sympathy with a particular character was genuinely affecting, to me at least, and I’m noting some patterns with her work that intrigue me. As a story, though, there were a few things that bothered me. It’s a bit spoilery to go into them in depth, so I’ll just start by saying that I think in the end I’d say it was worth reading, at least for me as a fan of this period of mystery/crime fiction, but I do have caveats and content warnings to go with that.

The main caveat is the fact that the plot hinges on the oft-derived trope of a mentally ill killer, one who has blackouts and commits crimes unbeknownst to himself. That means the third-person narration is sometimes a bit unreliable, as it sticks close to particular characters’ POV, and thus misleads the reader. You have to read very closely to catch the clue, and of course you’re not looking there for it.

I did think that the ending was rather better than the “psycho killer with blackouts” trope portended. There’s a lot of pathos in the ending for that particular character and how it comes about.

I would also note that there’s a Jewish character who is treated somewhat sympathetically, and yet at the same time with some anti-Semitic tropes. Of course this was common in the crime fiction in and around the Golden Age (Dorothy L. Sayers did similar in Whose Body?), but it’s worth knowing going in.

I am noticing that Brand doesn’t do much bringing her villains to justice. They usually die in some kind of appropriate way — not in the way that some other detective novels do, with a “you should write a confession and shoot yourself, or I’ll put the police in possession of what I know”, but still, they each die. It has less of a “detective as judge and jury” ring, and more like… “the universe will put things right, somehow”. Either way, an interesting thing to note, as I read more of Brand’s work.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Buzz

Posted November 12, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Buzz

Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees

by Thor Hanson

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 304
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

In Buzz, the award-winning author of Feathers and The Triumph of Seeds takes us on a journey that begins 125 million years ago, when a wasp first dared to feed pollen to its young.

From honeybees and bumbles to lesser-known diggers, miners, leafcutters, and masons, bees have long been central to our harvests, our mythologies, and our very existence. They've given us sweetness and light, the beauty of flowers, and as much as a third of the foodstuffs we eat. And, alarmingly, they are at risk of disappearing.

As informative and enchanting as the waggle dance of a honeybee, Buzz shows us why all bees are wonders to celebrate and protect.

Thor Hanson’s style is quite enjoyable — conversational, personal, but usually to the point. We’ll see some scraps of his family life as he talks about making experiments with his son, for example, but it doesn’t veer off into three pages of some scenario about a mid-life crisis and turning to bees or something like that (which can be a bit of a hazard with books of this genre). Mostly, he’s focused on the bees, and his enthusiasm for the bees.

I actually didn’t know much about any type of bees other than honeybees, so I really enjoyed hearing about sweat bees and alkali bees and learning a bit more about bumblebees and their tiny amount of honey.

Of course he also addresses colony collapse disorder, and the general decline of bee species worldwide, with some room for hope and some much-needed warning. Bees are just “cute” enough that I hope humans are going to come through for them.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Tread of Angels

Posted November 11, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Tread of Angels

Tread of Angels

by Rebecca Roanhorse

Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 201
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Celeste, a card sharp with a need for justice, takes on the role of advocatus diaboli, to defend her sister Mariel, accused of murdering a Virtue, a member of the ruling class of this mining town, in a new world of dark fantasy from the New York Times bestselling author of Black Sun, Rebecca Roanhorse.

The year is 1883 and the mining town of Goetia is booming as prospectors from near and far come to mine the powerful new element Divinity from the high mountains of Colorado with the help of the pariahs of society known as the Fallen. The Fallen are the descendants of demonkind living amongst the Virtues, the winners in an ancient war, with the descendants of both sides choosing to live alongside Abaddon’s mountain in this tale of the mythological West.

I really enjoyed Tread of Angels. I was probably only partly on board, right up until the end, because it felt like the main character (Celeste) was being a bit stupid about something that was right in front of her face. It felt like everything was going to be just a bit too predictable — enjoyable, but not something that would stick in my mind. And then, at the end… consequences.

In the end, I still can’t give it five stars, because holy crap, Celeste, how are you so stupid? And how do you keep taking such terrible advantage of everyone around you? It’s a wonder you’ve managed any friends at all… That part didn’t quite make sense to me, because the profound selfishness of Celeste made me wonder how her friends hadn’t seen it.

But something about the ending surprised me; I don’t want to say too much, but it made me re-evaluate a certain character and decide that he probably was more interesting than I’d initially written him off as. The book from his point of view certainly would’ve been something.

In the end, it strikes a sad note, but it works really well.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Accident by Design

Posted November 10, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Accident by Design

Accident by Design

by E.C.R. Lorac

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 199
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Templedean Place in the Cotswold Hills of England was among the last of the truly aristocratic estates, where old family traditions still flourished. When Gerald Vanstead arrived from Australia with his family, to attend his father in his last illness, other, more deadly things flourished.

Gerald's wife was the bickering kind; he drank too much, was given to feuding with the chauffeur, and seemed excessively tightlipped and disagreeable—and so no one was particularly sorry when one day the brakes on Gerald's car failed to hold, and he and his wife were killed.

A family picnic ended in the accidental death of another Vanstead, a fire destroyed what might have been a clue, and there was a night of horrible suspense before Inspector Macdonald could say who hated Gerald Vanstead the most and who, in a house of cultured, well-bred men and women, was most capable of murder.

I’ve said for a while that E.C.R. Lorac is one of my favourite authors from this period, and that’s in part because she can sketch in a place and a cast that one can care about, often full of decent people trying to do their best, and driven by her humane and careful detective, Macdonald.

Accident by Design is another case of that, but it subverted my expectations somewhat in the way the characters were set up, proving that Lorac was careful not to get too formulaic. It would be easy to slip into looking for a certain character type, and to feel sure that they are guilty, but Lorac doesn’t make it so easy.

In the end, it isn’t one of my favourite stories by Lorac (I think that still goes to Death of an Author, which isn’t even a Macdonald book, and is rather clever instead of being atmospheric), but it’s a solid example of her work. Perhaps best enjoyed once you’re used to her tendencies, so you get the surprise I did…

I continue to think Lorac’s one of the best of her generation of mystery writers — and that’s despite a fairly prolific output.

Rating: 4/5

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