storyorc's reviews
644 reviews

The writing style and atmosphere are smooth and darkly delicious, as befits a vampire book. All actions are steeped in meaning; all emotions leave characters breathless and desperate. Constanza drags you down into her crimson velvet hell of a life as surely as she was dragged into it by her unnamed, fanged husband.  The book opens with Constanza promising to explain why she killed him, and why she refuses to name him, and though she takes time to get to that point, the rush of seeing her reach it will satisfy readers looking for stories of feminine empowerment. 

That said, I appreciated the nuance to her husband's character too, and was a little disappointed to see it drop off every time a new bride (or bridegroom) came onto the scene in need of pagetime. They were lovely, and I understand centering victims in what is unashamedly a domestic abuse metaphor, but they are also my biggest complaint with the book. I had to justify Constanza's immediate, deep love for every new member of their family as 'a vampire mind-trick' in order to excuse it. Would have preferred she actually be rivals, or even just disinterested, with one instead and let that love sneak up on her, or perhaps just leave them as allies to her so that she is not always sharing her husband's tastes.

Entertaining in how its housewives bicker and heartbreaking in how their pains bleed through, reading  Les Belles-Sœurs only made me imagine how vivid the performance must be. I did not expect such vivid cursing either. You can see why it caused a stir at the time and, and how revolutionary it must have felt for Québécois to finally make it onto the professional stage. This play feels like a love letter to Tremblay's working-class mother, aunts and possibly sisters, imperfections and all. They are bursting with strife and spirit. It also reminded me to be grateful for the feminists who won rights that allow me to avoid the domestic traps that leave these women so unhappy.

Le Guin carries on her quietly beautiful prose to bring to life, instead of Earthsea's far-roaming vistas, a single, dark holy place. With Tenar, we dance, stalk, and flee through that utter darkness at various points of the story as it fluctuates between cloaking her from danger and cloaking danger from her. Le Guin makes it, and the treasures and traps beneath it, as sacred to us as to its priestesses. Details trickle in, from the number of blind turns to get to the treasure room, to the dance of power between the tomb's original religion and that of the area's conquerors, to the kinds of fruit Tenar's friend smuggles her from the gardens, to build up a vivid sense of place.

Second only to the atmosphere is Tenar's inner journey. Starting the story from the perspective of her parents' smothered loss as she is taken from them to become the priestess, we are primed to pity her. But Tenar is not only a victim. I admire Le Guin's dedication to demonstrating her indoctrination to the point of having her make some reprehensible choices and not setting up some external circumstances to soften the consequences, while still using those consequences to drive the story forward naturally - for example, the prisoners she

condemns to starve to death are not miraculously spared, and that guilty mark on her soul propels her to be kinder to Ged

. An ounce of genre-savviness makes it obvious that Tenar will reexamine her religious and cultural prejudices over the course of the novel, yet it is no less satisfying or healing to follow her through it, and still provides a gentle jumping-off point for self-reflection.

Tenar and a recurring character from Earthsea (so much wiser and yet still in need of help and humbling) are also delightful together, almost as a softer version of Joel and Ellie of The Last of Us fame. I enjoyed the oddly-long final section for their small, uneventful journeying together even though the climax of the action was past, and, for once in my life, wished the book was longer.

An interesting cross-section across a couple centuries of American history through the eyes of various indigenous characters. Standouts:

I also recommend Never Whistle at Night and Taaqtumi for anyone delighted and intrigued by this anthology and looking for more North American indigenous horror.

The stakes seem high but it quickly became apparent that the narrative would excuse away any problems that would actually let them BE high. What's left is fluff and minor squabbles. Not bad, but not much drama. 

There's nothing really orcish beyond a few tusk mentions either. The orcs may as well be humans from a few hundred years in the future, politically. This is cozy. We don't have to worry about feudalism ethics. But it's not exciting.

Finally, Elketh is irredeemably immature and brings nothing to the table. I was hoping Ruga would take her pretty little face in hand and tell her so at the end. She deserves better.

It's just all very ok.

Sharp little murder mystery with serviceable characters elevated by its setting. Would recommend for sci-fi fans like myself (especially the gay ones) who don't typically stray into mysteries/thrillers because it takes place on a large-scale Earth-orbit station where humans fled after environmental collapse and there's an entire university dedicated to the study of Earth ecosystems so that one day they can play God well enough to restart life on Earth in perfect balance with humanity. Not everyone agrees on that goal, or when we're ready to try Earth 2.0. The plot interacts with all these viewpoints and it's fun food for thought.  

Do not go into this expecting a buddy cop thriller where one Culture Special Circumstances agent and one non-Culture agent must save a 'primitive' world from self-destruction whilst arguing the morality of doing so. Do let me know if you know of any books like that though.

Ever since Banks died, I've been rationing the Culture series but Use of Weapons was an exercise in frustration. Two of the big choices that frustrated me - the SC agent being immature and ineffectual, and the narrative structure being a whirlwind tour of Culture meddling rather than focusing on a single case - I understand are in service of showing how the Culture doesn't understand these 'primitive' worlds and people like it believes it does, and to give a wide sample of how its meddling can turn out. That doesn't change the fact that Sma was a disappoint and the rapid-fire cases didn't give the native characters enough breathing space to make us really see them as humans being manipulated and demeaned.

The other thing that frustrated me, I don't believe was intentional: I hated Zakalwe. He should be fascinating - a pawn of the Culture, yet also carrying out their will, whether its a rescue or a war crime - but his personality is everything most boring about the chauvinistic action hero of the 80s. The whisky, the (sometimes borderline too young) women, the guns - maybe it would play better with a charismatic actor on screen but here it is eye-rolling at best and insulting at worst. Neither romance nor tragedy could make up for his constant whinging about a mysterious 'chair' in his past. The reveal about the chair was pretty affecting too, but by that time I was so pissed off hearing about it, it didn't garner the sympathy it should have. Similarly, the impact of the ending was somewhat kneecapped because

I couldn't hate 'Zakalwe' any more for being Elethomel than for having to follow his arrogant ass through 300 pages already.

Every time we got a thrilling tale of a near-death experience, I wished his enemies had had a little more luck.

I must give unto Banks what is Banks' however, the chapter we spend walking through a Culture GSV with Zakalwe was a brilliant rest stop on the hell tour of this book. Not only was it finally a slice of life for your average, non-SC Culture citizen, but Zakalwe's mixed feelings on body modifications, idleness, mood drugs, and many other Culture mainstays made for good pondering whilst he wandered. Beyond this chapter, too, the Culture's morality is challenged, from the specifics of each case Zakalwe takes (sometimes he is tasked to help idiots or degenerates, set up to fail, or extracted when they need him most), to the careless way Sma deploys him (once returning a desperate call from him whilst 'entertaining'), to the way the oh-so-enlightened Culture is happy to use someone as phenomenally unwell as Zakalwe (that alone succeeded in drawing sympathy from me) to do their dirty work. Even Skaffen-Amtiskaw, Sma's drone partner displays an attitude toward violence so at-odds with Culture values that its continued service in SC raises serious questions. Good food for thought.

Finally, I must give credit to:

I know this sounds like a lot of praise, so just look at my rating again and understand exactly how much Zakalwe dragged it down. Still worth a read for anyone who's read a couple Culture books or spent a lot of time thinking about the Prime Directive though.

I was advised to skip the first two Dresden books - too misogynistic and edgy, they said - and thought that I had until I noticed the series numbering when I came to write this review. So it is with pleasant surprise that I can report Fool Moon is neither as misogynistic nor as edgy as I feared. Literally every named woman on page does either want Dresden carnally, or disrobe at some point (sometimes both) and he does wear a trench coat and have a tragic past, but there are also many spirited (beautiful) women in the story in positions of various authority and Dresden is often explicitly scared, crying, and trying to make the world a better place. He's not actually a faithful instance of the hard-boiled noir detective in that respect. I was looking for novel-John Constantine but I found a decent guy instead. (Constantine continues to be more compelling but it'll be a fairer comparison when I've read a few more of Dresden.)

But enough about character; the world is the most interesting part of this novel. Its magic level hovers slightly higher than the secret-monstrous-underbelly of your typical urban fantasy while still staying well below your Brights and Shadowruns, which allows for factions from the police to the mob to have knowledge of and opinions on magic. These are used to good effect to complicate Dresden's life. The magic is soft in its entirety but the parts of it that were key to the plot were given harder rules so we could understand and anticipate when they were explored and exploited. There were also some thrilling hints at supernatural scheming that runs deeper than Dresden knows - especially Dresden's negotiations with a devil. Spices the mystery of the week vibe up with a hint of real dread.

The plot jumps along at a good clip too. Butler has great timing in dishing out his cool ideas and magic tricks to keep us entertained between scenes of spectacle. And to top it all off, Fool Moon was short! If the misogyny and edginess only lessen from here on out, I see no reason not to pick up the next Dresden installment this Halloween. (Though not enough to try the first either.)

As convincingly a work of the 19th century as it is a true account of English magic, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell will delight the lovers of whimsy, historical fiction, and anyone who chafes against the portrayal of fairies as hot boys with abs and a hidden heart of gold. These fair folk will ruin your life and only sometimes do you the dignity of noticing.

Magic never loses its mystique and danger, even as we follow Strange's growth in his abilities, even without invoking fairies and forgotten kings. Clarke lays down general principles as well as the exact methods and ingredients for many an individual spell but refrains from any explanation of how the former lead to the latter so that we, like amateur magicians, never fully understands its innerworkings. This hard-to-the-characters, soft-to-the reader pair perfectly with the impression of scholarship created by endless footnotes and academia to preserve a sense of magic's vastness no matter how many spectacles our heroes and villains pull off.

I use the term 'heroes' loosely. Though Strange makes a superior first impression to Norrell, both titular magicians are selfish in the way that only wealthy men could be in that era. They cause near as much strife as they solve, which is only compounded by the Georgian manners. It often makes for an aggravating reading experience but the self-sabotage grows so organically from their personalities that it couldn't really be any other way. The welcome counterbalance to this is that, while the characters exhibit period-typical misogyny, classism, and racism, the novel does not. Clarke never breaks character to openly denounce it but her narrative spends more time in the point of view of servants and wives than a true 19th-century account of historical events would, and they are often the only ones with the most common sense. Childermass, especially, is perhaps the single most effective actor in the story and Norrell's sequences would be insufferable without him. It can be no accident that while society overlooks them,

the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair and John Uskglass himself seek out Stephen Black, Emma Pole, Arabella Strange, and John Childermass, not Jonathan Strange or Norrell - nor that those four get the most desirable endings

.

The only downside of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell being such a faithful representation of Victorian (Georgian, technically? Depending on whether we go by style or setting) literature is that it shares the same drawbacks. I often wanted to grab characters by the scruff and shake until they stopped beating around the bush and being so hung up on propriety. The commitment to detail could also get exhausting. On the whole, however, the frustrations are part of the experience and very much worth it for the delightful, surprising ways Clarke ties off all her plot threads in the end.