pedanther's reviews
480 reviews

Sister Light, Sister Dark by Jane Yolen

adventurous dark emotional slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

It might be useful to know, going in, that this is one half of a duology, so it ends abruptly at the point where, arguably, the story is really getting moving.

It's also quite slow to start: The first third of the book consists of brief glimpses of the protagonist's childhood mixed with explanations of the worldbuilding and backstory, before it finally settles down to a contiguous narrative around the time she turns thirteen. I struggled with the first third, but found it easier to get on after that.

Some of the worldbuilding is quite interesting, though I felt that the most interesting parts ended up feeling like window-dressing that didn't really affect a fairly familiar-seeming plot. I expect those parts will be more important in the second half of the duology, but I'm not particularly interested in reading on and finding out.

One of the features of the book is that it's interspersed with legends and scholarly articles from later centuries, showing how the key events of the protagonist's life left their mark on posterity. The first few piqued my interest, but in the aggregate I felt that they rather weighed the story down, and although I got some wry humour from the scholars' biased misrepresentations of the past, I found that the accumulation of them had the effect of making me less invested in how things turn out: how important can the details of the protagonist's life really be, when posterity will forget most of it, misunderstand the rest, and disbelieve all of it?

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Animal death, Death, Misogyny, Rape, Violence, Vomit, Grief, Murder, Injury/Injury detail

Minor: Addiction, Child abuse, Child death, Confinement, Domestic abuse, Racism, Sexism, Toxic relationship, Excrement, Medical content, Dementia, Abandonment, Alcohol, Colonisation, War

Lady Windermere's Fan by Oscar Wilde

challenging emotional funny tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Infidelity, Sexism, Classism

Minor: Domestic abuse, Physical abuse, Suicide, Grief, Death of parent, Abandonment, Alcohol

Sea Wrack and Changewind by Sharon Lee

emotional funny medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.75

I suspect I would have enjoyed this more if I'd been fresher off the novels; I hadn't realised how long it's been since I read those, or how many details I'd forgotten that the stories assume I'll know. A lot of the stories I kinda liked but felt they could have been fleshed out a bit more. My favourite was the novelette that takes up the last quarter of the book, which has room to breathe and tipped the book from "I guess it's okay" to "I'm glad I read this". But I still wouldn't recommend it for anyone who hasn't read the novels first.

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Addiction, Bullying, Drug abuse, Racism, Violence, Classism

Minor: Ableism, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Cancer, Child death, Confinement, Cursing, Death, Domestic abuse, Drug use, Emotional abuse, Mental illness, Physical abuse, Rape, Sexual content, Slavery, Suicidal thoughts, Torture, Forced institutionalization, Blood, Grief, Death of parent, Murder, Alcohol, War, Injury/Injury detail

Doors into Change by Sharon Lee

adventurous challenging funny fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.75

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Racism

Minor: Animal death, Suicidal thoughts, Forced institutionalization, Grief

Spell Bound by Sharon Lee

medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix

3.5

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Emotional abuse, Classism

Minor: Ableism, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Child death, Confinement, Rape, Slavery, Suicidal thoughts, Torture, Violence, Blood, Murder

The Night Don’t Seem So Lonely by Sharon Lee

hopeful medium-paced

3.5

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Content Warnings

Minor: Domestic abuse, Drug use, Physical abuse, Sexual content

The Gift of Magic by Sharon Lee

medium-paced

3.5

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Addiction, Drug abuse, Drug use

Minor: Domestic abuse, Physical abuse, Sexual content, Alcohol

Surfside by Sharon Lee

medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Bullying, Violence

Minor: Cancer, Cursing, Mental illness, Death of parent, Murder, Alcohol, War, Injury/Injury detail

The Visitors by Clifford D. Simak

challenging mysterious reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

This novel felt underbaked to me. It has some interesting ideas, but none of them are developed to their potential. The alien biology and psychology of the visitors isn't developed enough to be the feature of the novel. There are a lot of scenes where people sit around in conference rooms and talk about the possible consequences of the aliens' arrival, but most of those consequences never eventuate and the ones that do aren't depicted in a way that makes them feel meaningful. The characters, even the ones who exist for more than just to state things for the reader's benefit, never quite come alive, and they all end the novel as the same person they were at the start. There are some gestures toward an analogy between the visitors' behaviour and the behaviour of the Europeans who colonised the new world, but it never comes to anything, and the same with any of the other hints of having something to say about real-world issues.

There's a scene about two thirds of the way through where a character sums up the visitors' behaviour to that point by saying that they've occasionally been a bit of a nuisance but haven't done any real harm, and I found myself thinking that that could serve as the summary of a novel that had been fitfully intriguing but never blossomed into anything really dramatic or involving.

A few chapters after that, something finally happens that promises real drama, but in the end it all fizzles out into more scenes of people sitting around talking about what might happen.

(There's also an ambiguous twist thrown in about thirty pages toward the end that might have passed muster as the sting in the tail of a shorter story but in this case goes nowhere, doesn't fit with the tone of the rest of the last thirty pages, and just makes the ending feel even more like a bundle of loose ends than it already did.)

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Racism

Moderate: Alcoholism, Death, Racial slurs, Alcohol

Minor: Gun violence, Hate crime, Sexism, Xenophobia, Car accident, Fire/Fire injury, Colonisation, Classism

The opening scene of the novel features a character going on a bigoted rant about indigenous Americans that lasts for several pages. I don't believe the reader is intended to sympathise with the character's views, and it contributes to one of the novel's thematic threads, but it's not a fun thing to be hit with right off the bat.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind
Did not finish book. Stopped at 24%.

DNF. The writing style has a certain élan, and there's some interest in a story that focuses on one of the senses that's usually neglected in literature, but I Do Not Care What Happens To These People.