Astrid Hawk

3.75*, because I have a soft spot (organ heart?) for octopuses, and I think the author really nailed Marcellus's "personality" in this. Marcellus is *exactly* as I would expect a sentient GPO (giant pacific octopus) to be - slightly grumpy, slightly judgmental, grudgingly yet deeply attached to special humans. (In fact, I have a plush GPO in my house who has pretty much exactly the imaginary personality that Marcellus has, and my GPO Otto has been in my home for 6 years now (ignore the fact that Otto would never live that long in reality), so his character in my life far predates Marcellus's publishing... the similarities are really striking and predisposed me to love this book no matter what the rest of it was about.)

But, I digress. Most of the book is a human story, and while it's touching and heartwarming, I feel it's like much of modern contemporary fiction is - a bit overly warm, sadness and happiness both exaggerated to draw deep feelings out of the reader, with simplistic language and an annoying third-person-present-tense perspective that makes the tone even more colloquial and casual. If Marcellus wasn't in this, I would have been even less enthusiastic. Although I think Van Pelt does a good job of capturing various elements of small Pacific Northwest towns, the whole thing is very idealized. There are mentions of poverty and being "on the wrong side of the tracks", but everything we see feels more like Issaquah or Sammamish (if Issaquah and Sammamish were on the coast) than a real economically depressed PNW community. (For those not in the PNW, Issaquah and Sammamish are both suburbs east of Seattle that are both more recently affluent out of middle- to upper-middle-class beginnings with small older downtowns that appeal to tourists and city visitors on day trips - although to be fair, neither one has true small-town vibes anymore.)

I loved the sense of place we got, from the descriptions of Seattle's freeway system as chaotic winding viaducts and tunnels (accurate) to the frigid briny water of the Sound (also accurate). But the human characters annoyed me. Tova was somewhat believable, I suppose, as someone who has become prickly and closed-off as a result of the traumas she's lived and how she's dealt with getting old and being alone. But the others felt very unrealistic.

Cameron especially reads more like a 19-20 year old than a 30 year old. I get that he's supposed to be stuck in this "failure to launch" sort of place in his life, but his naivete and apparent lack of ability to take any kind of responsibility or know the basics of adulting sounds far more juvenile than 30 years old. Perhaps it's also weird to me that he's suddenly taking on this quest to find his parents at the age of 30... which seems like something one might do closer to 20 when one is first of age and having to make one's way in the world. Perhaps this is my own blindness having grown up with two parents.

This is one of those rare cases where I actually think the movie was better than the book. Marcellus, who we've already established is the best part, is portrayed and voiced perfectly in the movie. The plot points are also significantly changed in the movie - in my opinion, these changes helped explain some of the characters' motivations, particularly Tova's unresolved feelings around Erik's tragedy, while maintaining the bones of the book. I'd recommend the movie if you, like me, love octopuses and cephalopods and enjoy imagining them as thinking, reasoning, feeling creatures with real personalities. If you prefer reading about struggles with loss and aging, I guess the book is better for that... but I still feel the movie expresses the story better.

A thriller that I actually found thrilling... what a revelation. This book kept me feeling slightly uncomfortable most of the way through, particularly following Claire's story, since her story dealt with domestic abuse and domestic violence. But mostly I was just constantly worried for her, worried that she was going to make an obvious mistake, and I appreciated that about the writing. I was genuinely hooked, maybe in spite of myself, maybe because I was hoping to watch an abuser get taken down. The situation was a bit improbable, and the purchasing of hotel rooms and plane tickets with cash seemed especially conveniently easy... but overall it was still a good tense read.

The one thing that really bothered me was the use of a Google doc for spying... the author apparently forgot that little icons show up at the top of the screen so that everyone can see who is in the doc... and if the same person is in there from two locations - two browser tabs, two different browser windows, two different machines - they'll show up twice in that list of icons. So spying using another user's credentials wouldn't have been possible without detection. Fortunately, this flawed Google doc spying mechanism mostly serves to add suspense and doesn't end up being pivotal to the plot.

I'm giving this 4.5*, because I think it's not quite a 5* - not quite one of my all-time favorites - but certainly stands above what I've recently marked 4*. I loved the relationship between our two main characters, and I definitely enjoyed the ingenuity in the premise of this - how Weir came up with a somewhat scientifically-plausible situation that put Ryland out in space far from Earth, and then kept building on the science he made up to create plausible problems and puzzles on top of that. And of course it's fun watching Ryland figure out how to work out these puzzles and solve all these problems using just the materials and knowledge he has on hand.

The first half of the book read like conversations I used to have with my best friend in high school. One of us would come up with a question - "what would happen if X came in contact with Y?" or "what would you do if you were stuck in XYZ situation?"- and then he'd ask me additional questions to goad me on while I tried to reason out a logical answer just based on principles of physics (and later, principles from our college engineering classes). We typically didn't ever get to the point of actually pulling out a calculator or pencil and paper, but sometimes we did just to get a feel for order of magnitude of things. I loved the early parts where Ryland is trying to figure out where he is and what he's doing, and is reasoning it out based on the little information he has on hand plus his knowledge of math and physics.

For those who complain that there is a bit too much math... there is actually 0 on-page math. I actually found myself wanting more of it. I took astrodynamics in college (I have an aerospace engineering degree with a space focus... astro, as we called it then, is kind of essential :) ), and I wanted to see the orbits, insertion paths, and escape velocities sketched out and calculated. I wanted to actually see the math that resulted in the constant tallying of grams of fuel being used. If Weir has a calculation notebook lying around somewhere that he used, I'd totally read that version of the story.

Weir does take a few significant scientific shortcuts in this book - which of course happens all the time in science fiction, but I'm not used to seeing from Weir. The one that stands out, and which I can discuss without spoilers, is that he relies heavily on a fictional material that his main character has named xenonite, which is apparently a substance made from xenon in solid form that has practically mythical qualities. Xenonite can't be cut or dented by any of our earth-built tools; it can be shaped into just about anything; it can be used to create almost any kind of surface including transparent surfaces; it can withstand a huge range of temperatures and pressures and pretty much the entire periodic table of elements; it can bond to any earth-rendered metal or composite material. And our characters go through xenonite like it's an infinitely renewable resource, without much consideration for how much of it was actually brought on board to begin with. It's a bit of an odd juxtaposition against the rest of the materials mentioned in the book, which are typically assigned quantities or volumes or some kind of limit. Xenonite feels limitless, both in what it can do and its availability.

I think perhaps my favorite element of the book was the first contact element - how Ryland goes about discovering properties of extraterrestrial life and figuring out how it works and how to communicate. Are the various life forms realistic? No idea. Probably not really. Maybe the unicellular ones are plausible. The multicellular ones are likely more imaginative. Either way, it's fun reading about how Ryland encounters them and tries to figure out what he's dealing with.

And of course Rocky. On his own, Rocky is probably not a compelling character, just as Ryland really isn't (in fact, the flashbacks to Ryland's life on earth, and especially his interactions with Stratt and other scientists got a bit dull for me). But Rocky and Ryland together are great to "watch", as they learn to work together and develop a real friendship.

I don't know if I'll ever re-read this, but it was definitely a great ride and deserves the hype.

Still a great series, with likeable, relatable characters and many more imaginative uses of magic to discover (the trick streets are an especially fun mechanic in this book), but I didn't think this second entry was as strong as the first book.

In Wundersmeden/Wundersmith, we follow Morrigan and her cohort of 8 other young students with magical abilities in Unit 919 through their first year of education where they're trained in the use of their magical skills and taught relationship skills, like collaboration and loyalty. Morrigan, however, is still treated as a bit of a pariah - her magical ability was revealed only to her immediate cohort and her teachers and kept a secret from the rest of the school/community, and most of those who know the secret resent having to keep it and are afraid of what it means. While the previous book ended on a warm note with feelings of strong acceptance, found family, and Morrigan feeling like she could finally stop worrying about not being enough, this book feels a bit like a step backward, where Morrigan is once again fighting to be accepted and to find her place in this new company of magic wielders who are supposed to be loyal for life.

What frustrated me is that Jupiter, who is Morrigan's father figure, is mostly absent from this book, leaving Morrigan to struggle with serious moral dilemmas, bullying, and life-threatening situations on her own. He was often protectively dismissive of her worries in the first book, but in this one he plays the role of the absent father who values work over family. Although Jupiter recognizes that his prioritization was poor at the end of the book, it felt unsatisfying to me - perhaps if I was reading this as the target audience age instead of as an adult, it wouldn't have bothered me.

I did enjoy seeing a lot more of Cadence and Jack in this book, and I hope we get more of them in the next one as well. I have all 4 books in Danish, and although you'd think my reading level would be improving beyond them by this point, I'm reading them so inconsistently that I still don't feel the translation is too remedial for me. So... on to book 3 it is.