octavia_cade's reviews
2294 reviews

Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe

adventurous medium-paced

3.0

The thing about Moll is that she says, flat-out, that most readers will find the story of her repentance a lot less interesting than all the stories of her sinning... and she's right. The vast majority of the book is a catalogue of her bad behaviour, and I was honestly surprised at how modern her presentation was. I've never read Defoe and know vanishingly little about him, except that this book of his came out in 1722, so I wasn't expecting such a feminist approach to the main character. Yes, Moll is essentially amoral, always out for herself, but it's clear that Defoe considers her a product of exploitation and poverty as well as her own character. I think he enjoys her immensely, and that atonement at the end... it does water her down somewhat.

The thing is, even before we got to the watering down, I was getting a little bored. Immensely appealing as Moll is, her story got pretty repetitive by the end. There's only so many times she can steal or cheat or screw her way through the surrounding population until it feels a bit same-old, and I was done long before she was.

I will say that this edition has a particularly poor attempt at a glossary tucked away at the back. A glossary related to classic literature in general, not just this novel, but it's badly edited and occasionally inaccurate. Check out the entry for "words, to have" which asserts that Black Beauty was written by Emily Brontë. I think the fuck not. 

Day of Honor Omnibus by Michael Jan Friedman, Dean Wesley Smith, Diana G. Gallagher, Jeri Taylor, Diane Carey, L.A. Graf, Kristine Kathryn Rusch

adventurous fast-paced

3.0

I read and reviewed the six Day of Honour novels collected in this brick of a book separately, so this is basically for my own records. On the whole it's pretty average: adventurous and fast-paced, and more than one of the novels here rushes their ending, which is a bit of a shame. Still, four of the six got three stars from me. As for the others: Ancient Blood was by far the worst of the lot. It got a grudging two stars from me, largely due to the absolutely idiotic plot with Picard and Alexander. Diane Carey is usually one of the Trek authors I enjoy most, but she missed the mark by a long way with this one.

At the other end of the scale is the four star Armageddon Sky by L.A. Graf, which is pretty damn good and the only one of the six that I'd ever bother to read again. I want my own copy of it, in fact - and half the reason that I keep recording books and reviews on sites like this one is that it allows me to make a note of the books I want to buy print copies of in the future. This was published way back when, so it'll likely have to be a secondhand copy at this point, but I still want it. Graf did a great job, and Armageddon Sky is the pick of the honourable litter. 

Treaty's Law by Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch

adventurous fast-paced

3.0

Of the six novels in the Day of Honor series, I read this one last. Which may be completely backwards, as it's the first chronologically, being the story of when humans and Klingons worked together to defend the same planet, even though they're enemies. It was a Klingon farming planet, which was quite nice - I always enjoy stories where the Klingon characters do something other than war. The Empire's got to eat, after all. No great surprise that the farmers turn out to be decent soldiers when that's called for, and I liked that they interpreted their vocation as a war against weeds and disease and hunger, essentially. (It makes me wonder if there are any tie-in novels out there that focus on Klingon doctors or singers or some such. I'm sure that I remember Worf being a fan of Klingon opera.)

For a story that's basically one long battle - never my favourite type of story - it was still entertaining. The fast pace and character work helped; I especially liked the main farmer Kerdoch. I did the the end was rather too abrupt, though, with the conflict too easily solved. Not the best book in the series, but not the worst either. 

Madness by Gabriel Ojeda-Sague

challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

5.0

I love this. It's fascinating. Selected poems of a fictional poet, edited by fictional editors, and it's published fifty odd years from now, looking back into the 1990s and forward into the climate disaster that's ongoing and to come. I understand that the author was a grad student at time of writing; I hope it gave him great pleasure to create the small academic essays that accompany the poems here, especially as the conflicts and critical judgements in them are quite made-up. Goodness knows the temptation to create your own bullshit when surrounded by the library stacks. I've been there.

Despite the fact that this is a genuinely serious book about a very serious subject, there's also a strain of whimsy and almost tongue-in-cheek biography going on here too. A small sense of the ridiculous that leavens all that anxiety, even when it shades into a very realistic sort of horror. That's my favourite part of this, I think. I read Leaving Miami and liked it a lot, but this is even better. I'm so glad I bought it.

Extended review to come in Strange Horizons. 

Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz

dark sad medium-paced

4.0

I think what I liked best about this was how often it avoided melodrama. There were several different points where I thought "oh no, here it comes" - not because I dislike melodrama, although I often do - but because the general restraint shown as the story went on was so finely balanced that I kept expecting it would topple, and then being consistently surprised (and pleased) when it didn't.

In many ways this is an older, grimmer, more monochrome version of The Lovely Bones, and while I confess to liking that book better, the sort of muted emotionalism of this one is also affecting. The murder is solved, but life for the people around Alice, the people who never really knew her, becomes a little lighter in the aftermath of her death. The blurb on the back of the book calls this "strangely joyous," which I think is overstatement. It's not joyous at all, but there is a sort of head-down-get-on-with-it minimalist optimism that adds sympathy and realness to the characters. 

Peril at End House by Agatha Christie

mysterious fast-paced

4.0

I admit that I did not at all see the end coming here! Which is not terribly unusual with me and Agatha Christie, but there it is. For all I frequently (and accurately) accuse Poirot of being smug, I was so busy being smug myself at suspecting the whole fake disability/forgery/mailbox/will subplot that I completely missed the actual murderer. 

I comfort myself that I'm at least smarter than Hastings. Then again, that rather feels like competing against a Labrador in the brains stakes. Hardly something to be proud of, but I'll take what I can get. 

Get Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook to Planting in Public Places by Ellen Miles

hopeful informative inspiring fast-paced

4.0

I'm not sure I've shelved a book under both the "plants" and "politics" tags before, but there should be more of them. This is a great beginner's guide to guerilla gardening: the act of planting in neglected public spaces, such as empty lots and the little spaces at the bottom of sidewalk trees. It's particularly good in that it's so thorough, focusing not on the best ways to determine suitable planting, but the importance of local action, of gardening as acts of resistance, of getting people onside and how to deal with any resultant complaints. The repeated themes of localisation, resilience, sustainability, and social inclusion are welcome, and all the facts about the benefits of nature on social activity are well-referenced.

There's also a number of short case studies. I would have liked to see a few more of these, to be honest, but there's still a decent range of illustrations that indicate just how many options the guerilla gardener has to increase the green spaces around them. 

Day of Honor by Michael Jan Friedman

adventurous fast-paced

3.0

I remember watching the episode this novelisation was based on! It was years and years ago, and while it wasn't outstanding it was likeable enough. As the episode, so the book. It's a quick, easy read, with some nice characterisation of B'Elanna. I quite enjoy the fact that her life has a history of turning to shit on the Day of Honour; it's the kind of black-humoured disaster roll that's the Klingon version of Murphy's law, I guess - mostly entertaining because it's not you suffering it. Though I have to say, any ritual that involves pain sticks is not one I'd be bothering with either, so I absolutely do not blame B'Elanna for giving that one a miss. 

I admit, I do think the conclusion is wrapped up too quickly and conveniently, but that was the case in the episode as well, so what can you do, really. Still, the book's passed a couple of hours on a rainy night quite nicely. 

Bibliolepsy by Gina Apostol

reflective medium-paced

3.5

I love the concept behind this: that a young woman, obsessed with books, falls compulsively in love with authors as a revolution takes place in the background. It's not even that she's in love with the authors at all, really - she's in love with books, and because she can't have sex with the written word, men who create the written word are good enough. There's a whole series of them, these transitory affairs, and Primi wanders through them and then wanders into therapy, wondering what on earth she's doing but not that invested in stopping it. Part of it's because she's looking for connection, the orphaned daughter of a cartoonist and a taxidermist who were so in love with themselves and each other that they may have thrown themselves into the sea, leaving their daughters behind.

There's an underlying weirdness here that I find very appealing, but it's never leaned on as much as I'd like, and I'm not sure that keeping the revolution so very much in the background does this book as many favours as it might. On the one hand, it's darkly amusing that Primi manages to miss nearly every political milestone as Marcos is toppled, holed up as she is with the latest writer to cross her path, but it's kind of baffling as well, how very much obsession can contribute to obliviousness. I want that political backdrop integrated more into the novel, or I want Primi's self-centredness to be so over-the-top monstrous that the whole thing reads as black comedy, or at least much blacker than it is, I think - that appealing weirdness can feel, in places, a little muffled. Revolution encourages writers, as the book points out, so it's a sexual opportunity for Primi really, and that should be hilarious. And it almost, almost is. 

D is for Deadbeat by Sue Grafton

dark mysterious sad medium-paced

3.0

Well this is depressing. It's well-written, and I zipped through it with pleasure, but there's no denying that it's just very, very sad. A drunk driver kills five people and when, a very few years later, he's let out of prison he end up dead. No surprise that it's one of the relatives of the victims who's done him in - the question the book's centred around is which one. I almost hoped it wouldn't be solved, because the ripple effects of that tragedy have clearly been profound and no one's really recovered. And let's face it, the murder victim was not the most sympathetic of men.

There are times when, reading mystery or crime novels, you can't help but think that the victim deserved it, and the kindest thing would be to let the perpetrators go. Just pretend not to see. I don't know how or even if that would work in real life, on a wider social level, but in a story? It's a bit of a shame that Kinsey just doesn't give up and let a more elemental form of justice prevail. Unfortunately she doesn't, and ends up just as traumatised as everyone else. No winners here.