ergative's reviews
1055 reviews

Bitterwood by Rowan Speedwell

1.25

Maybe I'm a little harsh with this, but the rating reflects my reaction, rather than any inherent evaluation of objective quality. See, this book was recommended in a list of really great indy published SFF specifically as an example of well-written court politics. I have read indy published books before, DNFed some of them, and for all of them I'm usually quite disappointed relative to the quality of traditionally published books. I don't want to be making overbroad generalizations about indy vs. traditional publishing--and goodness knows there are some real stinkers of trad published books too -- but let's just say my reading  makes it very clear to my how valuable professional editing is. I'm aware of the problems in traditional publishing! I want to invest in alternative means of distributing SFF! And I know from my time on AO3 that amateur or non-established writers can be superb at what they do. But I have yet to see indy publishing show itself capable of truly competing with what trad publishing can turn out. Here, the plot was thin, the characters one-dimensional, the world-building ad-hoc, and the quest itself felt arbitrary and contrived. This was just not a very good book. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't good, either. And to have it presented to me as an example of excellence in indy publishing brings down the entire collective phenomenon that I super duper want to support and value. 

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

4.25

This was structurally brilliant, and I really admire the complexity of the interweaving plot. And Professor Sarah Hart's brilliant book, Once Upon a Prime, lays out the mathematical underpinnings of the structural brilliance, so I admire it even more. Still, the nonlinearity of the narrative, especially towards the end, didn't quite work in terms of the storytelling. I already knew what had happened in most of those vignettes, so seeing them on the page, possibly only because, to make the math work, we needed a few pages here and a few pages there, felt just a bit forced -- and because it came at the end, it felt forced in a way that lingers out of proportion to the actual problems by those extraneous few pages.

Also, as far as I can tell, there are duplicate bonanzas? Or did Crosbie dig up Staines's gold, and that's how it ended up in his cabin? I still didn't quite follow that bit. I clung on to the passage of that money with my fingernails, and if it's the same £4000 the whole way through, then it's very elegant that it ends up in Crosbie Wells's cabin. But how did it get from where Staines buried it, to Wells's cabin? 

A Free Man of Color by Barbara Hambly

3.0

Hmmmmmm. I like the scene setting of 1830s New Orleans. I can't speak to how accurate it is, but it feels like Hambly did the research. There's a very telling moment, when a mixed-race woman is murdered, and the police inspector says that 20 years ago, back when New Orleans was French, the white man who did it would have been prosecuted, and 20 years from now, no one would be prosecuted because she's coloured; but right now, at that moment, he didn't know what the justice system would decide to do. The switch from French control, in which mixed race people have respect in society, to American control, in which the fine distinctions between black and colored are no longer respected and everyone turns into n**rs, is pretty grim. The modern reader knows where it will end, and the characters can see it happening. But still, when Benjamin January reflects that New Orleans is his home, and for that reason decides not to go back to France, I kept thinking, 'wrong decision, my friend. It's only going to get worse.' 

Gather Her Round by Alex Bledsoe

2.75

I always respect the Tufa books, but I think the ones that blend outsider and insider are more successful than the ones that take place with entirely Tufa characters. With Chapel of Ease, Bledsoe was doing a very intentional kind of uncertainty; but here the uncertainty felt less intentional and more . . . lazy?

Where did the pig come from? The supernatural part, I mean. It can't have been any kind of manifestation of Duncan's jealousy at first, because it killed Kara Rogers before he knew she was sleeping with Adam. I like the idea that the wee feral piggies themselves conjured it up because they were so sick of being hunted by fish & wildlife people; but if that's the case, why did Pig God end up going after Kara? She wasn't a hunter. And if it was conjured up by the wee feral piggies as a protector, then why did it change its focus to Duncan? And if it was a Pig God, then why did it condone so much cannibalism among them? The whole link between Duncan and the pig just doesn't work, because he didn't become the troubled, murderous, miserable person he was until after the pig had entered his life by killing Kara. 

Also, what the actual fuck, Mandalay? In what universe is justice served by inciting a bunch of drunk murderous people to beat someone to death? Maybe if Duncan had actually killed Adam then there was some sort of justice to be had. Certainly that's the implication we get from Bliss telling Jack that the Tufa handle things internally. But Duncan didn't, in fact, kill Adam. He thought about it, sure. He got Adam to come out 'hunting' with him for that reason, sure. But when the moment came he did not pull the trigger. Instead his crimes amount to nothing more than not firing his gun at the pig as it mauled Adam to death. And the description of the moment makes it seem like it was as much terror of the pig as calculating murderous strategy that stayed his hand. Now, this inaction sure made Duncan feel guilty, but I don't see that it would have changed anything if he'd been able to pull himself together and shoot the pig, and it may well have put him in danger too. We'd already learned that this pig is not easy to kill. It's shaken off multiple rifle bullets already. And people freeze when they're scared; it's natural. So this pig-based trolly-problem equivalent doesn't actually seem to work to demonstrate Duncan's guilt. It was a catastrophic accident, which happened because Duncan put the pieces in place for it to happen. But he didn't kill Adam, and it's not clear he had the power to prevent the pig from killing Adam. Justice for Duncan! He did not deserve what happened to him, and I really don't think Mandalay served any kind of justice with what she did.

Many of the Tufa books have one thing or another that rubs me the wrong way. This particular presentation of Tufa justice seems to depend on my accepting a lot of interpretations that simply don't follow from the facts on the page. And I still don't understand where the (unnatural part of the) pig came from.

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman

4.0

I don't usually go for memoirs, but this literary memoirs of Batuman's education with Russian novels is really lovely. She has a real talent for connecting entertaining anecdotes about college and grad school with corresponding discussions of related literature. The three chapters on her summer in Samarkand are wonderful -- somehow de-exotifying the post-soviet Uzbekistan, while also opening up new worlds into a literary history of a country that English speakers will probably never know, because no one translates Uzbek classics into English -- and in describing these literary artifacts, she re-exotifies the country (to a Western reader like me, at least), making it strange and wonderful and enticing again. And I loved the chapter about the Tolstoy conference, which rang very true to life of academic conferences. Really, if you like classic Russian literature, this is a great book; or if you have been to grad school, this is a great book; and even if neither of those things are true, give it a try! Batuman has such an engaging, charming voice, and the structural connections between each book or author, and the events she relates alongside her discussion of them, is very skilled.

Space Oddity by Catherynne M. Valente

2.5

I wanted to like this. I wanted to like this so much. I thought Space Opera did something new and fresh and exciting, and I was so eager to see what could be done with the sequel. The problem, though, is that the narrative voice that made Space Opera so fresh and new was the same voice here, given such free rein that it overpowered all the other things we need in a novel. Every character had a tendency to monologue in the identical matching narrative voice; and the side-quests into, say, overly stalled board meetings, or the incompetent team activities of the Metagalactic Grand Prix Semi-finals, felt self-indulgent and slow. The last 10-15% or so were constructed to build off certain events and clues that were dropped earlier, but the wildly wide-ranging narrative approach from the first 85% of the book felt so slow and incoherent that the eventual emotional pay-off just didn't land. The building blocks were in place for something really terrific; but unlike the first block, the coherence of the rest of the book was too tenuous to actually tie together the key things effectively. 

This Charming Man by Caimh McDonnell, C.K. McDonnell

3.25

This series is entertaining, with a lot of different characters who seem reasonably distinct from each other. It's fast, it's fun, and if it's not terribly groundbreaking, I do keep an eye out for 99p ebook sales, and intend to read the rest of them.

The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

4.5

A folklore-inspired mishmash built on the association between the oft-acknowledged etymological link between 'grammar' and 'glamour'. I've seen this done so often before that I was worried El-Mohtar would be heavy-handed, but she has a deft touch with a theme, her exploration has some lovely touches. The idea of magic being measured in 'grams' was cute; and the use of 'conjugation' to refer to spellcasting, because to conjugate means to change -- verbs, people, the possibilities of the past/present/future of the world -- was inspired.  The folktales that were woven together into this story were all familiar to me, but they are less commonly used than the ones that make me groan and roll my eyes at yet another damn fairy-tale retelling; and I've always loved the one about the woman whose body is turned into a harp (which I've only ever seen done before by Juliet Marillier in Wolfskin). Also, my own mother used to sing to me I Gave My Love a Cherry, which is very rarely mentioned elsewhere, so I was thrilled to see it here. It has slightly different words from my mother's version, but the interpretation weaves back into the idea of conjugation beautifully. Overalll, this was an elegant book that also spoke to my own childhood associations with folktales, and my own aesthetic values about fantasy narrative, and so worked particularly well for me.

The Waking of Angantyr by Marie Brennan

3.75

I always enjoy reading Marie Brennan's work. This one had a real suck-you-in quality that I appreciate, and I gobbled it up. The author's note in the back is not to be missed, by the way: in brief, the genesis of this tale is as a fix-it fanfic of a Norse Saga that had an extremely disappointing conclusion -- but you should read the full details for yourself. Still, the story relied on repeated invocations of my least favourite trope: a woman dressed as a man, who is revealed as a woman, and loses everything that she managed to build up while dressed as a man. I hate it so much, and it happens multiple times here. And somehow, because of the requirement to start over after trope-revelation, we have multiple sets of characters, which means I can never really build up much sense of relationship to any one set of them. This means that their tragic ends (usually at the hands of someone going berserk and slaughtering them all -- Norse saga, remember) doesn't hit as hard as it might.

The Mad Ship by Robin Hobb

5.0