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845 reviews
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
reflective
slow-paced
3.0
Awards give much needed exposure to authors who might otherwise not be read. But the mortifying ordeal of being known opens an author to the mortifying ordeal of being less well-received by wider audiences. Regardless of how stalwart your mind may be, it’s quite likely that the book will be perceived through the prism of “I see why this won the award” or “How could this have won an award?”
Samantha Harvey won the Booker Prize for Orbital.
Orbital is a slim volume that is not for everyone. A brief meditation on the weightlessness and gravity of humanity and existence, there is ironically — or fittingly — not much to grasp onto here. There are six astronauts, all from different backgrounds and all with different reactions to space, but they may as well be interchangeable. There are moments of poetry, but Orbital often reduces itself to sets of lists both literal and metaphorical.
If Orbital works for you, it might really work for you. But its increased audience — and I certainly don’t regret buying a copy — means that by design Orbital is going to end up in the hands of those who won’t appreciate it as well as more who will. It’s a niche work gone wide, and I wish it luck; it just didn’t do much for me.
Samantha Harvey won the Booker Prize for Orbital.
Orbital is a slim volume that is not for everyone. A brief meditation on the weightlessness and gravity of humanity and existence, there is ironically — or fittingly — not much to grasp onto here. There are six astronauts, all from different backgrounds and all with different reactions to space, but they may as well be interchangeable. There are moments of poetry, but Orbital often reduces itself to sets of lists both literal and metaphorical.
If Orbital works for you, it might really work for you. But its increased audience — and I certainly don’t regret buying a copy — means that by design Orbital is going to end up in the hands of those who won’t appreciate it as well as more who will. It’s a niche work gone wide, and I wish it luck; it just didn’t do much for me.
Holding the Man by Timothy Conigrave
5.0
A singularly* important document in so many fields; it hits very different between reads when you're young and coming up and out, and then again when you're settled down and older than Timothy Conigrave and John Caleo. A vital piece of history that many people would rather forget - are in the process of memory holing - but really shouldn't.
*Ideally, it should be singular. Realistically, it's emblematic, which makes it all the more tragic.
*Ideally, it should be singular. Realistically, it's emblematic, which makes it all the more tragic.
Foe by Iain Reid
3.0
The greatest trick I ever pulled was making two very literal minded people at work read this because I thought it was a psychological thriller about a marriage. How you package a story definitely affects how it is received, because while there's psychology in Foe, there's no thrills.
Foe is a slow burn with a good pay off, but there are sci-fi elements that are impossible to ignore. Good if you care about stories that explore the nature of humanity and artificial intelligence (before that became such a dirty term), not so much if you just want to read something about the misery of modern relations.
Thoughtfully composed, and you've always got to respect a novel that uses its punctuation to tell the story, not just tell the story.
Foe is a slow burn with a good pay off, but there are sci-fi elements that are impossible to ignore. Good if you care about stories that explore the nature of humanity and artificial intelligence (before that became such a dirty term), not so much if you just want to read something about the misery of modern relations.
Thoughtfully composed, and you've always got to respect a novel that uses its punctuation to tell the story, not just tell the story.
The Mistletoe Mystery by Nita Prose
2.0
I don’t think we’re allowed to call Molly the Maid “autistic”, or “neurodivergent” or even “autistic coded” – she’s just another in a long line of protagonists with undiagnosed brain chemistry, something that became excessively popular when a certain sitcom that shall remain nameless inexplicably took over the world.
But I can call The Mistletoe Mystery cruel. Which it is. After the strong showing of The Maid, Nita Prose has treated her heroine as a plaything to be batted around, written as if by a child. Nobody dies, so the mystery is in Molly’s head, and every reader can see what the solution is before she even begins to get suspicious.
In the lead up to Christmas, the dearly departed Gran’s favourite time of year, Molly becomes increasingly suspicious of Juan, who is uncharacteristically keeping a secret from her, is running around at all hours, and asks her questions about her stance on diamond rings.
Of course Molly takes all this the wrong way, and her coworkers try to convince her to ignore the evidence of her own eyes. It doesn’t take much for the not-particularly-eagle-eyed reader to piece it together, but the onus is not on Molly for her misunderstanding; but on everyone in her life who knows her intimately, who knows how her brain works and how she takes everything literally and doesn’t cope well with subterfuge, for putting her through this.
There are some unexamined factors in play here, like the fact that Molly and Juan are apparently not really paid a living wage by the Regency Grand, and that they live in penury. Prose’s prose pays special attention to the squalor and tatters that her protagonists find themselves living in, shakes it out of its head, and carries on to studiously ignore it.
The one legitimately hilarious element of this is Molly’s run-ins with her nemesis who she chose not to have fired in The Mystery Guest. A regret that she was entirely within her power to prevent, and no reader would have protested. Sometimes you don’t have to be nice for niceness’ sake.
In all honesty, this review already feels longer than The Mistletoe Mystery itself did. It is understandable what Prose wanted to achieve, but there was almost certainly a way to reach the final result while having Molly investigate a different non-mystery that it is not so distressing to her and offensive to all that she stands for.
The Mistletoe Mystery is for die-hards and completists. There is no real way to justify its Australian price tag, and it puts the “stuffed” in stocking stuffer. If The Mystery Guest already put a sour taste in your mouth, this will not help in the slightest.
Dear Evan Hansen: The Novel by Val Emmich
2.0
Personal story time, and it's not about when I spent the summer hanging out in a nature reserve in the deluded hope it would endear myself to my absentee father. All I saw was sky for forever ...
No. The story is about how, several years ago, I decided to almost completely cut YA fiction out of my diet. I wouldn't say my life improved immeasurably, but my general well-being did. I still read all sorts of things, but not that many of them are about the minutia of teenagers' lives.
Dear Evan Hansen, a hit Broadway show and a failed movie starring Kyle Derin from Marge vs the Monorail, was also a New York Times bestselling novel. And it embodies all of the worst excesses of the genre: Evan Hansen is a solipsistic goober and the depiction of his various mental illnesses is not exactly empathetic.
Evan Hansen is very anxious, and one of his coping exercises is to write a letter to himself about why he's going to have a good day. On the first day of the new school year, Connor Murphy swipes Evan's letter, and Evan worries about what is to be done with it. Until Connor is found dead by apparent suicide, with the letter - and Connor's parents think that Evan was Connor's friend, the one to unlock their mystery of a son.
Without the tones of Pasek and Paul to send Evan soaring to the top of a tree (don't ask him what happened next), Dear Evan Hansen stays grounded, trapped inside the confines of Evan's claustrophobic head. Without the songs, Evan doesn't make sense. Connor's parents see something in him that we can't, because he doesn't get to spin out the desperate fantasy of "For Forever"; when Connor goes viral and finally feels like he matters, it's impossible to say why, because he merely stumbles through a speech instead of delivering "You Will Be Found". We know that he's not really singing, but that he has found a way to communicate with people that reaches them. In the book, Evan never finds his feet and it's impossible to understand why he is considered magnetic: we're on the outside, always looking in.
The only escape is Val Emmich's poetic licence, which is potentially the most immoral part of the book: periodically there are sub-chapters narrated by the ghost of Connor Murphy.
People far smarter than me know all of the ins and outs of how to talk about and report suicide but, despite the various support services listed at the end, I'm pretty sure that Dear Evan Hansen goes completely wide of them. The Connor ghost scenes attempt to rationalise Connor's actions, which is not helpful at all.
The younger characters themselves can't be expected to know all of this, but at some point an adult really needs to step in. They let a trio of seventeen year olds single handedly manage a charity organisation, with absolutely no oversight of the grossly inappropriate methods that they use to garner attention. Alana, power-mad co-president of "The Connor Project" is painted as a striver desperate to pad her college application resume but really just wants eyes on her; on the page she's deracinated, but she's very unfortunately African-American in both live-action versions, which give incredibly bad connotations to her actions that are a cynical kneecapping of legitimate student activism.
For her part Evan's mother practically has to work herself to death to make Evan's life liveable and to keep his mental-health even vaguely approaching sustainable, but when he's finally had a breakthrough with her we may never know if he understands her. Again, she doesn't get a song to tell Evan precisely how much he means to her - but in this case you do get the gist from the dialogue. However, she is a nurse and she just kind of sniffs when she hears Evan's taken himself off his antidepressants without supervision, so ... take that as you will. She can't be as neglectful as Evan's narration wants us to see her.
It's not clear if Emmich doesn't understand what's happening or if Evan himself doesn't, because some characters don't grow or change and yet Evan thinks they have. Jared, Evan's one "real" friend, is a real piece of work. Sexist and homophobic - an odd choice for a work that was workshopped, championed, and starred in by an avowed homosexual - we're supposed to believe he's helping Evan when he's both giving incredibly bad advice and enabling him to act upon it. Despite Evan's sins, Alana commits the worst trespass in the book, and is rewarded for it when ideally she should burn. By comparison, Evan gets next to nothing out of his Faustian pact, almost as if Alana is his Dark Half because Evan must be protected from potentially judgmental audiences.
Of course, there are no repercussions for anyone for any of this, except the one big one that can't be taken back that instigates the larger story.
But if you never once think that Evan is enjoying the accidentally ill-gotten fruits of his labour, then you have to think he's being a desperate people pleaser, that trying to assuage his anxiety is actually doubling down on it and making it worse. However, none of the psychology that Emmich applies here goes deep enough, so we'll never really know.
Dear Evan Hansen is a bizarre cultural relic, the story of a boy who means too well who gets sucked into the whorl of unnamed social media in the era of Upworthy and Buzzfeed clickbait. There are many ways to tell this story – and it's actually fairly well trodden ground, where people leverage an apparent suicide for either their own gains or for something else – but it's not clear that Dear Evan Hansen gets any of them down correctly.
This is written from the perspective of someone who has read the book and seen the movie, in anticipation of seeing the stage musical next week (in Australia, starring the son of an Olympic Medalist who is also a game show host). Maybe the stage will make it work, or maybe the songs are just good enough (although in 2024, Pasek and Paul's anonymous wall of sound approach to musical theatre is too passé for it to be the Greatest Show).
Postscript: Having now seen the (quite good) stage version of Dear Evan Hansen staged by the Sydney Theatre Company, this story works best when it is clear that it's about one anxious boy's mental breakdown that sees him riding a wave of mania until his inevitable crash. The difference is that, apart from the songs, Dear Evan Hansen as a stage show is not trapped inside the head of a boy you can't trust to tell his own story. This novel doesn't work for many reasons and one of them is because it's better in the experiential rather than the internal.
Sometimes you really do have to sing out your feelings ... and Alana really is the villain of the piece.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Suicide and Suicide attempt
Kapowie! by Marshall Thornton
2.5
I've never been overly convinced that the Pinx Video Mysteries series was particularly good, but they were quick distractions that were enjoyable enough. Kapowie! is potentially the loosest and sloppiest of the lot, with the least respect for legal process and human nature.
A locked room murder where almost no one at all cares that one of their number has been murdered, Thornton describes one incredibly long night in the production of a reunion special for a poorly described variety show/morality play for children.
It's not great but it's also not so poor that I won't read the next one if its release coincides with another free Kindle Unlimited trial period.
A locked room murder where almost no one at all cares that one of their number has been murdered, Thornton describes one incredibly long night in the production of a reunion special for a poorly described variety show/morality play for children.
It's not great but it's also not so poor that I won't read the next one if its release coincides with another free Kindle Unlimited trial period.
Howards End by E.M. Forster
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
There's a loose policy around these parts of not really rating or reviewing the "classics". It is hard to know what to say about Howards End, viewed as E.M. Forster's masterpiece; it is instantly less accessible than A Room With A View, and its encapsulation of the time it was written is its strength and its detriment. 114 years after publication, the world is very different and, as Forster emphasises in the text, the England he describes is already on its way out.
The fact is that a lot of the big dramas in Howards End would be shrugged off in the modern era, and so much of the psychology in its examination of the three tiers of society described herein are near alien to the modern mind. Matthew Lopez made a good fist of adapting and updating it for his Olivier-and-Tony-winning The Inheritance, but that has its own excesses and shortcomings to contend with that are not Forster's at all.
So what, then, to say? Howards End is strangely static in a way that a lot of books that have endured for more than a century are not and Margaret, while a vibrant heroine, makes opaque decisions that don't make sense even by the end of proceedings. Why do the Wilcoxes endure when they are clearly beasts? Why must it always be that we must Only Connect with the Other when they will make no attempt to Connect with us, and we know that they cannot ever succeed - as Margaret is aware in her heart of hearts?
Howards End is not a novel that you discard out of hand, but it is a lot more effort than some of Forster's other work. It is something that must be meditated upon because, without concentrated toil to contextualise and sit with it, Howards End remains nearly as shut up and mothballed as its titular estate is for the majority of its run. If I ever return - and I may very well - it's possible that I'll have a deeper understanding and love this more.
The fact is that a lot of the big dramas in Howards End would be shrugged off in the modern era, and so much of the psychology in its examination of the three tiers of society described herein are near alien to the modern mind. Matthew Lopez made a good fist of adapting and updating it for his Olivier-and-Tony-winning The Inheritance, but that has its own excesses and shortcomings to contend with that are not Forster's at all.
So what, then, to say? Howards End is strangely static in a way that a lot of books that have endured for more than a century are not and Margaret, while a vibrant heroine, makes opaque decisions that don't make sense even by the end of proceedings. Why do the Wilcoxes endure when they are clearly beasts? Why must it always be that we must Only Connect with the Other when they will make no attempt to Connect with us, and we know that they cannot ever succeed - as Margaret is aware in her heart of hearts?
Howards End is not a novel that you discard out of hand, but it is a lot more effort than some of Forster's other work. It is something that must be meditated upon because, without concentrated toil to contextualise and sit with it, Howards End remains nearly as shut up and mothballed as its titular estate is for the majority of its run. If I ever return - and I may very well - it's possible that I'll have a deeper understanding and love this more.
Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey
3.0
The adventures of a man who returns from Hell to seek revenge on the people who sent him there is jam packed with good ideas but works best as a set up for the sequels (Kadrey has been contracted for five more books - two trilogies). It gets legitimately exciting towards the end, as it sets itself up for further adventures (the last character introduced is somewhat akin to a stroke of genius on Kadrey's part), but the story itself is rushed to the point that some characters on Stark's hit list are removed off camera to save on scenes. Still, this is set up masquerading as a novel, so it's forgivable to a degree.
Also the title is stupid and inexplicable, with the name "Sandman Slim" shoehorned into the text to justify it. Still a good read and I've been sitting on the sequel far too long. The last pages were legitimately grand.
Also the title is stupid and inexplicable, with the name "Sandman Slim" shoehorned into the text to justify it. Still a good read and I've been sitting on the sequel far too long. The last pages were legitimately grand.