Jessica

So... I really liked this book.

Anyway, I don't know why the blurb calls it “impossibly funny”, because I don't really think it is (aside from laughing at Humbert's misery when Lolita finally escapes him, of course). However, the use of language is beautiful – so lyrical, my favourite style of writing – and the story it tells may be disturbing, but it's so self-consciously disturbing. I thought it was great.

I did feel it dragged in places, especially around the two-thirds mark. But it ended well. Lolita – who actually, more than once in the course of the novel (accurately) accuses Humbert of having raped her, despite his earlier protestations that it was her who seduced him – manages at last to escape, he is devastated, three years pass, he finally tracks her down and she's perfectly polite but clearly regards him as the pathetic sex criminal that he is. Then Humbert goes and kills the man who helped her to escape, but the point I'm trying to make is this...

Lolita is no mere victim. She pursues what she wants, she escapes, and she's able to build a new and functional life in spite of how Humbert controlled and abused her for so long – and it's him who becomes the wreck. I derived some satisfaction from that.

A closing comment – there HAS to be a TV Tropes page for the wealthy, French-speaking pervert, right? I swear I'm not TRYING to read books about such characters (real life is enough, thanks) but there they appear, again and again and again. This is nothing short of a literary conspiracy.

Sorry for the incoherence of my review; I'll try to fix it up when I'm less sleepy if I remember. Good night!

So... this book is slooooooow. It's mostly descriptive, with SOME conflict here and there but uh, mostly no. In fact, there are way more potential sources of conflict than actual sources of conflict.

As well, the start of the book kind of antagonised me, seeming to be more a polemic in the form of a novel than a novel itself. This feeling DEFINITELY went away, maybe a quarter of the way in (I forget exactly). The thing that irritates me is when writers create characters with perfect politics, and then make the whole book about this skilled political analyst existing in a particular situation. Given that the narrator is a late twentieth-century woman existing in an oppressive, pseudoreligious patriarchy, I got worried that that was what I was in for. But I wasn't. I was relieved.

Once that fear went away, I could better enjoy the flashbacks to life before, and especially the chapter that went through how the system changed. I am unconvinced that the explanation for how things changed is likely, but it didn't irritate me too much. As I said, there isn't really much conflict that over arches everything – there are more these flashes of conflict, especially in the flashbacks or in retrospect. At 81% done I had no idea where the climax was going to come from; at 92% no idea... then at 94% the narrative ended suddenly and I was really confused.

The epilogue contextualises things a bit better but I feel like SOME of that context could have been IN THE NOVEL (in particular, it is never mentioned even once – as I recall – that this is a recording on a cassette tape. She mentioned once that she was monologuing to herself, I think, so I thought the novel was supposed to represent the stream-of-consciousness from her head).

I actually really liked the epilogue. As a history student, once I read this series of letters by a particular woman, and there's no record of what happened to her after the letters cease either – so it's like, there's this whole story but some of the context is missing and we have to guess. Either way, it's an interesting form, to write in the form of historical documents – even if it's a bit late to be all, “By the way, that's what I was going for,” in the epilogue of the book I think.

Anyway! I did enjoy this overall, but it didn't grip me. If half-stars were a thing I might give it three and a half, but I'm not feeling very generous today, haha. So that's that.

This is definitely my favourite book that I've read so far this year - and I know that it being February means that there's plenty of time for that to change, but the point is, I thought that this book was amazing.

The problem with loving a book so much is that I don't have much to put in a review of it. The one thing I didn't get was why parts two and three are in the order they are. That is, chronologically part three comes before part two (the rest of the parts being in order) and I just don't know what the purpose of that was? All it meant was that I spent part two mildly frustrated at this mystery being built up surrounding the circumstances of Baby's birth, and by the time I was reading part three I already knew how everything was going to turn out - that Olanna would forgive Odenigbo and Kainene would forgive Richard, because I'd just read about them being perfectly happy in part two. And also, that the baby would end up being raised by Olanna and Odenigbo, because that's what was happening in part two, after all.

But it didn't bother me that much - the novel works the way it is, I just think it also would have worked without the middle two parts being swapped, and I don't understand what swapping them really achieved.

Anyway. The novel as a whole has a sense of the inevitable about it, so maybe that's another reason why it didn't bother me. After all, it's a historical novel, and honestly I had never heard of Biafra before reading this book, so I was pretty sure they were going to lose their war of independence. But within that, there was still suspense. Bad things would happen, but what bad things? Characters were dying left right and centre, with only the five characters at the novel's core seeming immune - so I guessed that at the end something bad, like death, would befall one of them and that would be the climax... but that didn't really happen. There was the fake-out where Ugwu seemed to have died, but then he came back and recovered, and of course there was Kainene's mysterious disappearance that DEVASTATED ME FOREVER because she was the most engaging character to me, but her disappearance didn't seem much of a "climax" to the book, even though it happened at the end. In the end, the way the book ends seems to mirror the end of the war it's set in; it's exhausted and devastated, and there's nothing left to go wrong because there's nothing left.

I skim-read some reviews here on Goodreads and there were some complaints about the characters - that they were unrealistic, too perfect, or unengaging. I found none of these to be the case. To the contrary, they were all very imperfect but you could see how their backgrounds and social positions made them what they were. In particular, one of the reviews I skimmed complained that Richard was so anti-racist it was painful, but I still thought he was anti-racist in a very “privileged white person” way. He gets excited about Biafra's declaration of independence because he thinks this means he can be a native Biafran, and he spends half the book irritated that this or that person considers him an outsider, when can't they hear he speaks Igbo?! (Even though at some point late in the book he admits that "idioms and dialects elude him" - which would seem to mean a lot of spoken Igbo...) The point is that he, just like every other character, has flaws.

Another of the criticisms I read is that this book is hard to understand if you don't know anything about Nigerian history; well honestly, I knew practically nothing, and got completely absorbed in this book all the same. So while it may have been the experience of that person, I really don't think people should avoid the book, or postpone reading it in favour of another one, for that reason.

In fact, I would recommend this book to anyone who likes historical fiction. The characters are very real and engaging, I found the storyline compelling, the book never seemed to drag in spite of its length. There's a lot of sex scenes, if that influences your decision. Just read it because I loved it, and I'm sure that people aside from me would love it, too.

Where do I even begin?

This book reads like a first draft. What's more, it reads like a NaNoWriMo first draft, with oodles and oodles of pointless description that seem to serve no purpose but to pad the page count. But unlike the NaNoWriMo requirement, this book is really long. According to my phone's Kindle app, it is 580 pages long. There might be 300 pages' worth of content in there. Look, there's nothing wrong with your first draft being overlong and unwieldy with lots of pointless stuff that needs to be cut out, but if the finished product is like this, it's a big problem. Most of my antipathy for this book is probably due to this.

Considering the 580 page length, it feels like not a lot really happens, either. Looking back on it, I guess stuff happened, but the way I remember it is: something happened at 10% in, another thing happened at 42% in... and although reviews on Goodreads had suggested that the book would get better in the second half, it really didn't. It continued to be a slow and plodding story in which I was desperate for something, anything interesting to happen. At 54% into the book she did seem to die, which fit my criteria quite admirably, but unfortunately she didn't actually die and kept on narrating from the spirit realm. And then returned back into the "real" realm, where she discovered that she had a brother who was a giant cat. Mmhmm.

What did happen in the second half was narrator Cat randomly crushing on her would-be murderer and general vain and conceited twerp, Andevai. As well, in the last 20% of the book, we suddenly found ourselves in the midst of a vast, popular uprising, but not to worry, as if this novel would spend much time contemplating that! Instead, we hear all about Cat's aforementioned sudden inexplicable love for Andevai. I'm assuming that this is what the next two books in the trilogy are going to be about (the sudden inexplicable love that is, I wouldn't hold out any hope it'll be about the uprising) but I don't really intend to find out.

My review might seem unrelentingly negative, but honestly I'm just frustrated that I spent so long reading this book, which was set in the lead-up to a mass uprising with a woman of colour for a protagonist, and it was so boring. How do you even have a beginning like this and make it so boring? How is this even possible?? Like, there's potential here, and it's completely squandered and buried under hundreds of pages of hardly anything ever happening. Ugh. If you'd like me to begrudgingly admit some things that I liked:

1. the demonisation of Camjiata over the whole book - I don't recall any huge block of exposition at once, but he's gradually depicted as some incredibly evil, dangerous guy, who challenged the political order (even though we can see this order is really bad) - before it's revealed that he's a radical who isn't too bad.

2. that Cat is a member of a minority group... this got annoying when it was 755867968 characters commenting on her shiny black hair, but it was good when it involved her explaining how the Romans had demonised her people, for instance. It wasn't a whitewashed vision of alternate-universe nineteenth-century Europe, which I appreciated.

3. the basic story around Cat's parentage, I guess... except IF IT COULD HAVE BEEN GOT THROUGH A BIT FASTER, THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN GREAT.

Yeah.

This is a book that I read and adored when I was 13, and rereading it now, my opinion didn't change very much.

You can probably read the blurb for yourself, but it encompasses a lot of themes that I find really interesting - there's a dystopian, futuristic society, there's a bunch of rebellious youths struggling to create a new kind of society, and there's creepy stuff around brain surgery changing the way people think, making them placid and happy all the time. The first time I read the book, the first few chapters seemed kind of boring, but they establish the setting of the book efficiently and it's not like they're hard to read, so you can race through them and get to the good bit soon enough.

The novel can certainly seem a bit heavy-handed - the words “ugly” and “pretty” are used so many times that they can start to seem like they're not even real words, and there are quite a few tangents (whether spouted by a character in dialogue, or as a monologue from narrator Tally's own head) about the absurdity of judging people by their looks, how this leads to societal problems like anorexia or discrimination against ugly people or just everyone feeling really miserable in their own skins all the time. This is all true but I think the book overdoes its denunciations a bit - no one consciously thinks this obsession with appearance is a good thing, after all.

Overall though, the plot is good, the setting is fascinating, and towards the end of this book and, I think, in the other two of the trilogy, there's some stuff that comes up to make you pause and think. It's not a five-star book for the reasons I've outlined, but I love it deeply nonetheless.

I actually liked this better than the first book, at least until the goddamn CLIFFHANGER ENDING, which can't really count as a thing to make me dislike the book. (Well... I guess it could? But for me it doesn't. Not really.)

Good, so now that's settled. The book does start really, really slowly - the first 15% or so could be condensed so much, and there's lots of needless description devoted to such topics as Lisbeth's furniture purchases - which, needless to say, are never relevant to the rest of the plot.

As far as I can recall, it took until I was 40% of the way through the book for the really key event, the one that triggers all the drama and suspense, to happen. Then there is a veritable explosion of new characters, new intrigues, new mysteries, etc. and I could only just barely keep on top of it. This is another of the reasons I'm irritated about the cliffhanger ending - I have no idea how much of those characters, intrigues, etc. I'll be expected to remember by the time I get to it, although admittedly this book did a pretty good job of summarising the important plot points from the last one in case I'd forgotten what they were (I hadn't - that book was a breeze to understand compared to this one - or maybe that was because I read it faster), so...

I continued to love Lisbeth Salander; I know I should probably have some kind of political objection to vigilantism, but I share Lisbeth's revulsion for the cops and honestly, it's just so satisfying to see people we know (because the narrative told us) are the bad guys get their comeuppance. This is like 90% of the reason I read books so you know I'm going to love it.

Although, in contrast to what I wrote in my review of the first book, this time I did not like Mikael Blomkvist. Or I don't know, it's not that I didn't like him so much, but it seemed to me that he was just serving as this wish-fulfilment character for the author. That is, he's this man who's just so perfect in bed and he has all of these relationships on the go with all of these interesting women and he always remains on good terms with them after breaking things off, with the sole exception of Lisbeth Salander... but it seemed to me that after I noticed this the author did too, and the sections from Lisbeth's point of view are full of her making jabs at him, calling him “Practical Pig” or... ok apparently I lost all my other quotes but things along the line of “insufferable do-gooder”. And I would read these things and be like, “YES, THANK YOU.” It is actually possible that these comments were there all along, and not just after I realised how annoyingly perfect Blomkvist was... but maybe not, I don't know.

So overall, I did enjoy this book better than the first one, but not enough to give it a higher star rating (they're both four stars!). There are just too many flaws for me to give it a five-star rating - the slow beginning, the lengthy paragraphs about Ikea furniture, that kind of thing. Happily though, there was much less space devoted to the accounting of the Millennium newspaper, or any of the corporate intrigue that bored me the first time round. It's a good read and reasonably political, so I'd consider it a great follow-up to the first one.

I'm definitely more liberal with the five-star ratings with nonfiction books than fictional ones... regardless though, this was a great book. It should be compulsory reading for any right-wing idiot who wants to claim Orwell was against revolutions; the entire point of this book was that he was fighting to defend it, and his criticism of the Communist Party is scathing not because they wanted revolution, but because (under orders from Moscow) they were determined to wreck it. His political analysis is brilliant – he uses the phrase “state-capitalist” before Cliff had ever theorised state capitalism - and above all, is passionate in his support of working-class revolution, with no pretense of being “impartial”. The truth is not impartial, basically.

Overall I loved this book. I'm definitely going to have to read more of his work; of course I've read his novels, but this has given me a taste for his nonfiction, too :)

So I liked this, but it was by far the weakest book of the trilogy. Above all, it was just very, very slow. I felt like there were lots of subplots and plot threads that were unnecessary, or not fleshed out enough to justify their presence in the book, but they took up space nonetheless. For instance, the Section fabricated a new exchange to replace the conspiratorial one that had really happened between Telorian and the other guy... but this never seriously posed a threat to the "good guys"' plan, ever? And Erika Berger's subplot seemed extraneous as well, and its resolution meant that the book really had two climaxes, which is just kind of weird.

Overall, this book is a bit of a mess. There are too many characters, too many plot threads to keep track of (I can tell you for a fact that I didn't keep track of), and my favourite character spends most of the book stuck in hospital not able to do very much. The corporate intrigue that irritated me in the first book but was joyfully absent from the second returns with a vengeance; as well, I continue to despise Mikael Blomkvist mostly for being infuriatingly perfect. Erika and/or Annika comment on his irresponsibility with relationships, how he sleeps around and toys with women's hearts without a care in the world, and while this is a good reason to despise him, this is also something there is next to no narrative basis for. The last book established how he's so perfect that he remains on good terms with all his former flames! What is this?

I don't know if that complaint even made sense, but it's basically a broader one about Larsson's sloppy approach to characterisation.

Anyway, the main reason I loved the first two books was that they were fun to read. They were, in large part, about a sassy and indomitable woman who took on all these men who are completely disgusting and (I would agree with Lisbeth) don't deserve to live, and wins. While it's not always straightforward, the bad guys always suffer eventually, and it makes for satisfying reading. This one just wasn't fun in the same way. Lisbeth was too incapacitated to do anything much, and the takedowns that occur seem like too little, too late at the end.

So, three stars. It should really have been edited, by which I mean completely restructured. The courtroom scene was fun though.

I watched the movie before reading this book. I watched it months ago. I'm not sure I'd have liked the book any better if I hadn't seen the movie (or, conversely, liked it any worse), but I think it's probably important to note that the entire time I was reading this book, I just had the movie in mind. I visualised the scenes from the movie. Overall, I came away with the feeling that the movie was an amazing adaptation of a pretty sweet book, and I think the movie also had a better climax - in terms of what happened the climax is the same, of course, but because the format of the book is a series of letters Charlie is writing to a mysterious someone, the climax is basically Charlie writing, “so basically, I realised that what I dreamed about Aunt Helen is true and now I've been in the hospital for two months,” which... was not really as good as the way it happened in the movie.

Nonetheless, I really liked the book.

This is a hard one to rate. If I'd had to rate it halfway through I'd have given it four stars, but the second half really irritated me, so I've decided to be harsh. Sorry.

I really like what this book is trying to do. I like the idea of telling the story of a relationship between people who meet all out of order. I like that this is a universe where you can't rewrite history, and once it's known something is going to happen then it's already happened and is inevitable. I would love to see more plots like this. However, this novel started to seriously bug me.

In large part, I ended up just not liking Henry very much. In his youth he's depicted as a callous womaniser (although only one of his “conquests” is given an actual name...) and even when he's older, and supposedly become a better person out of love for Clare, he keeps doing things that make him reflect on how Humbert Humbertish he is but doesn't like... stop doing the things. He's also rather pretentious. Mostly, I wanted to smack him.

And then there is Clare. Honestly, who is Clare? I never got a good grasp on what her personality is supposed to be like. She seems to fall in love with Henry because he's much older and magical and falls into the meadow by her house and overall, because it's her fate. This makes me feel that Henry is a bit creepy, and even when Clare and Henry meet in real time, he's much older. And much more experienced in bed. (And wow, side thought - what was the deal with Clare feeling all guilty that she had sex while Henry was out of her life for two years? I'm pretty sure Henry had no shame on his womanising whatsoever. If Clare had felt guilty for betraying Charisse that'd make sense... but Henry???) After marrying Henry, she seems to desire nothing in life but to bear his children. She has an art studio because he bought it for her but she sure doesn't seem very invested in this career. I ended up just feeling bad for her because she literally has no life outside of Henry. At any point in the book.

I mean to be honest, none of the characters came across as particularly well realised, except maybe for Henry who's that infuriating kind of “reformed” womaniser who never seems to meet his karmic retribution.

But I like the idea of a love story like this, and while the second half drags on too long and I became really impatient to finish, the ending got me in the heart a little bit. It's just infuriating that this could have been mindblowing and yet, in reality, it's just kind of problematic.

EDIT: Sorry, I just wanted to add this quote that I took special note of because it was just so ridiculous:

“Computer viruses as art.”
“Oooh.” Oh, no. “Isn't that kind of illegal?”
“Well; no. I just design them, then I paint the html onto canvas, then I have a show. I don't actually put them into circulation.”

So, unlike the first book in the trilogy, this did not live up to my fond memories of it.

I think the main problem is the plot. Second instalments of trilogies often seem a bit difficult, and this isn't the first time I've read one where there's a giant disconnect between the first half and the second, such that it seems really jarring. That's exactly what happens here. The first half is about Tally's new life as a pretty, and struggling against it – and then the second half is practically the first book redux. Only, this time around she meets a "primitive tribe" which seems to serve purely as a vehicle for Westerfeld to ruminate on the violence and self-destructiveness he sees as inherent to human nature.

As I recall, the first book could be preachy too, but this one is even preachier. Tally is suddenly full of exposition and philosophical ramblings, and it's just... well, it doesn't appeal very much. The conclusion of this book is literally a re-run of the conclusion to the last book. I just don't think we, as the reader, made a lot of progress.

I also didn't care much at all for the love triangle, and I thought it was absurd that kissing Zane, and falling in love with Zane should improve Tally's clarity of thought. That makes no sense. But really, nothing about the brain damage inflicted on pretties nor the cure makes any sense, and I preferred the last book which didn't spend so much time dwelling on this nonsensical cure.

I'd also have liked to have seen more on the dynamic between Tally and Shay, and the sense of betrayal that Shay has every right to feel, honestly. Then the end of the book was far too rushed – considering that the romantic subplot about Tally and David was so central to the last book, in this one they reunite and break up again in what, thirty pages? and she's excessively nasty to him too? WHAT IS THIS. Maybe more time should have been spent on this, and less on camping in the woods.

So while it saddens me to give this book such a low star rating, I can't really justify giving it any higher. It was a fast read, which made it a nice change, but it just didn't hold up for me.

This book reads like bad fanfiction. It's just terrible. It's not even fun to read, which the previous books in this series all were, even if the plots started to get holes in them and there was often too much camping in the woods. This was just miserable.

The problems started with the protagonist, fifteen-year-old Aya. This is the same age that Tally was at the start of Uglies, but Aya is not Tally, and consistently behaves like she's much younger. She is completely obsessed with achieving fame, but she doesn't seem to have any friends at all – just a small flying robot, Moggle. She does have a brother (Hiro), who seems to find her a nuisance, and her brother also has a friend (Rem, I think) who she seems to treat as a friend of her own, even though at one point in the novel he makes her swim to the bottom of a deep lake to collect the robot Moggle, instead of like, using a net or something. Oh also, early in the book she meets a reasonably famous guy (Frizz) at a party who develops a crush on her, even though he's so committed to telling the truth that he got brain surgery to make him incapable of telling lies and she lies all the time.

And you see, this lying is related to why she seems to have no friends – she is so desperate to achieve fame that when she does become part of a particular clique, it's only so she can expose their secret (illegal) thrill-seeking and somehow achieve fame that way. Which, as a plan, does not even make sense. But nonetheless, Aya seems to regard other people as mere tools to be used in the pursuit of fame, being so astoundingly self-absorbed that she is really, really unlikeable.

Also, she doesn't seem to have any parents or anything. In general, she seems very ungrounded – which again, is a huge contrast to when we were introduced to Tally in Uglies, who we knew to have parents (hell, her parents even appeared in one scene), and also friends (Peris, although he'd already been prettified). Aya has none of this background; she could almost be a robot with false memories who hadn't existed until just when the novel began. It probably would have been more interesting if that was the case.

Anyway, if Aya is unrelatable and unlikeable, so too is everyone else. Hiro just seems kind of unpleasant early in the book, Rem has the incident with the lake, and Frizz is just a walking plot device. When characters from the previous books arrive – Tally, Shay and co. – not only are they really dislikeable but they're not even in character. In the intervening time since Pretties (which, by the way, is only THREE YEARS – the entire social structure this book describes was established and stabilised in THREE YEARS, what?!), Tally has somehow gone from how she was then to a gruff and celibate type who thinks nothing about getting random teenagers kidnapped by the people she thinks are the bad guys. Just... callous.

The main plot, honestly, is pretty boring (although probably my contempt for most of the characters helped to shape my opinion), and an economy based on reputation doesn't even really make sense, although I'd be willing to forgive it that if it had done anything interesting with the concept.

There was some interesting stuff around social media gone too far (I guess) – people in Aya's city seem to have Facebook (although it isn't called Facebook) installed directly into their eye sockets, so at any moment they can look up “their” feeds, and the feeds of others, and have these things projected directly onto their eyes. Kind of like Google Glass, but weirder. So that was interesting conceptually, but it added a whole extra level onto the narration – I think Westerfeld wrote more about what Aya saw on her feed than what she saw in the actual physical world – and it meant this book had a very different feel to the three that came before it. Honestly, I think it would've been better if he'd just written a standalone novel, with better characters.

So in the end... I came away from this very disappointed. I felt like this book sullied my memory of the other ones, and particularly of the character of Tally. Uglies wasn't a perfect book, but it was interesting and I really liked it on the reread. The other books may have let it down a little, but this one did in a big way. I wish I hadn't read it. Man.

I was given this book by my mother, who only managed to read part of it before giving up angrily, declaring it was too depressing. It probably is, but I really enjoyed it, nonetheless. At least until the end, it's incredibly realistic, and depicts the everyday tragedies that are constantly happening around us. For me, Krystal Weedon's relationship with her mother was really familiar, reminiscent of my mother at her worst (which, I suspect, is the real reason she couldn't finish the book). There's a ton of unhappy marriages, parents who regret having their kids, small-minded small-town small businessmen who are callous enough to think that cutting off drug addicts (and their entire families) from any kind of help or resources is a good idea, and so it goes. It's an exercise in showing the world as it really is, rather than as we might wish it would be.

I did have some issues with it. Mostly, I didn't like the ending very much. It seemed like the characterisation, which had been impeccable thus far, suddenly went a bit off. It's hard to believe that Krystal left her toddler brother to go wandering off near a river – she's certainly not shown as having perfect judgement, but better judgement than that, I'd think, no matter how desperate she is to get pregnant so she can escape her hellish living conditions – for that very brother's sake! And as well, much as I despised her, Shirley never seemed like the husband-murdering type, and the image of her prowling the streets of Pagford with an Epi-Pen clutched in her hand seemed a bit far-fetched. In neither case did these characters start acting hugely OOC, but they did a bit. It just made the conclusion seem a bit melodramatic and contrived, although I wouldn't say it was rushed, at least.

The other thing that bothered me was the pronunciation respelling in the Weedons' (and co's) dialogue... even words that they were pronouncing as per the standard, like “could” (which became “cud”) and “was” (“wuz”). I'm generally opposed to writers doing this to begin with – it usually comes across as patronising, and while I don't think it does here due to Rowling's obvious sympathy for the Weedons, I do think it did when she used the same technique for Hagrid in Harry Potter. Furthermore, it's unnecessary. These characters' speech patterns differed from what might be considered “neutral” English – lots of use of “ain't”, double negatives and the particle “right?” tacked on at the end of sentences, for a start. Just as an example, the sentence, “But I ain't done nothing wrong, right?” would convey the accent just as well as “Bu' I ain' done nuffin' wrong, righ'?” which is what this text probably would have preferred. Also, Rowling did this (changed the speech patterns but not the spelling) for Andrew Price's dialogue, who it seems spoke much the same way as the Weedons, and in places it got really hard to read. Mostly when Terri was speaking, which probably evokes how hard her slurred speech would have been to understand in person anyway, but still, overall the technique irritated me.

On a slightly related note, the book also has a few sections where multiple paragraph are enclosed within parentheses, and it seems like this was hard to edit because there were also a few spots where there was a closing parenthesis at the end of a paragraph with no pair that I could find. The writing feels a bit casual, but that doesn't bother me, just the apparent lack of editing.

Still, all in all, I loved this book. I wouldn't say it's slow, but a lot of the “action” is characters bickering with each other, so if you have no patience for that this book probably isn't for you. It's not usually my thing either, but I found the characters here so compelling that it worked. I really, really recommend it, and I find it kind of sad that its rating on Goodreads is so low just because of all the Harry Potter fans who read it and had their delicate sensibilities wounded by swearing and frank depictions of sex. I like Harry Potter, but this is a completely different kind of book, and yeah. It worked for me.

So this is a pretty interesting book, but it's one of those “political argument in novel form” books that I always hold to a higher standard.

The annoying thing about this book is that Marcus never actually does anything productive. Everything he does is defensive, which is valid to a certain extent, but you're never going to change the world by adamantly insisting it stay as it is. Throughout most of the book, he had no strategy to end the DHS's reign of terror. He just had strategies to hold them back for a while, and then they'd crack his defenses, and push him back. This, relentlessly. His “victory” at the end was far too neat and tidy. And the “moral of the story” that people should just get out and vote? Barf. The leaks over the last couple of months have proved that the Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans on this front. What is voting going to do?! Nothing, absent a huge struggle that seriously affects the economy.

As a novel it was a good read, though. And I can't fault it on actually understanding modern technology, which sets out apart from many other novels! So I mean, it was alright (especially since you can get it for free), but not really, REALLY good.

I did like this book, but it didn't seem very “special” to me. I'm finding it interesting to read other people's reviews and find that they're often relating the book to their own lives – dead and ex-POW grandfathers. If you feel some resonance like that while reading it, then I can see why you'd rate it highly, but the only thing that's resonating with me is these reviews.

The book itself is still good, though. Worth a read, at least.

After some reading of other reviews I decided to revise down my star rating. Like I said originally, this is another of those books I would rate 3.5 if that were possible, but it's not, so I have to find some way to lean towards.

Look, I really, REALLY liked the first quarter or so; it was extremely surreal but fascinating. But then the storyline slowed the fuck down and after that it wasn't anywhere near as gripping. It was still interesting, just very slow. To be honest, I found I found the main plot – the conflict between the gods – kind of boring. I vastly preferred the more human subplots, like Shadow's relationship with his wife, or the goings-on in Lakeside. I guess it turned out that the goings-on in Lakeside did pertain to the gods, but only at the very end so I won't count that! As an exploration of “America” and its culture and traditions it was also interesting – I generally liked the flashbacks. I also appreciated that the traditional woman killed in the first 10% of the book to fuel the male protagonist's growth didn't actually go away, although there was still something that vaguely bothered me about the characters. After reading some other reviews, I think it's just that I was never really invested in most of them. Like I said, the human characters were more relatable, but the gods (and Shadow himself a lot of the time) were really detached and blasé about everything, which got boring.

So yeah, I did like this book, but mostly on the strength of the beginning. Admittedly, I was reading the longer “author's cut” rather than the somewhat slimmed-down version that was originally published, and maybe I should have read that one, even if the author himself prefers it longer. I don't know what parts were actually cut out in the original edition, so I don't know! But I do suspect that it might have progressed a bit faster, and been a bit more compelling to read.

So nine years on, I've finally finished this series. It looks like I never reviewed any of the previous instalments (not even the two I read last November), so it's hard for me to remember them to work out how this compares.

In its own right, the first 30% or so was really funny, but after that it got rather serious. I found the plot much easier to follow than either of the previous two books, but it was actually a very serious plot about feeling like your existence is pointless and trying to find your purpose in life and, oh yeah, trying to raise a maladjusted teenager who appeared out of nowhere and brandishes weapons a lot.

I feel like I have to rate this book at least as highly as the fourth one, so three stars it is. But it was a strange one.

Un libro poderoso de dictadura y resistencia. Me gustó inmensamente, pero todavía tengo el sospecho que me habría gustado más en inglés. Había tantos personajes que tenía dificultad distinguirlos al empezar, y por esta y otras razones estoy segura que me perdí muchos detalles. Algún día me gustaría leer una edición inglesa, y obtener una mayor comprensión del libro.

A pesar de eso, por obvio lo disfruté. Es más realista que algunos otros de Allende, más como [b:La isla bajo del mar|6631038|La isla bajo del mar|Isabel Allende|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1320472711s/6631038.jpg|6825396] que [b:La casa de los espíritus|18273129|La casa de los espíritus|Isabel Allende|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1375291014s/18273129.jpg|25738731]. Combina una historia de resistencia contra un régimen opresivo con una historia del amor (aunque probablemente se podía adivinar esto por el título), y es una lectura compulsiva. En partes puede ser lento, y como he mencionado lo encontré tan difícil al comenzar. Pero esto podría ser una falta de mi castellano, no del libro (tendría que ver después de leerlo en inglés). Hasta aquí, creo que es una de las mejores obras de Isabel Allende (¡pero tengo que leer muchas más!).

I liked Purple Hibiscus, but I think I was spoiled by reading [b:Half of a Yellow Sun|18749|Half of a Yellow Sun|Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1327934717s/18749.jpg|1651408] first. That book is so grand in scope, and this one is much smaller. It really just explores the insular world of fifteen-year-old Kambili, who grows up in a very wealthy, but stifling and abusive, household in Enugu. This you can tell from the blurb.

For me, a lot of the most interesting things were on the margins of the novel. I really liked the character of Kambili's cousin Amaka, who's outspoken and fiercely attached to Nigeria, talking contemptuously about the US in comparison. Another (very minor) character has studied at Cambridge, and tries to discourage Kambili's auntie from emigrating on the basis of white racism. I guess what I'm trying to say is that my favourite part of the novel was the political commentary, but this was much less extensive than in [b:Half of a Yellow Sun|18749|Half of a Yellow Sun|Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1327934717s/18749.jpg|1651408] or her anthology, [b:The Thing Around Your Neck|5587960|The Thing Around Your Neck|Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1320413162s/5587960.jpg|5759301].

I found it hard to get attached to Kambili; I kept getting frustrated that she never stood up to anyone (not even her cousin), even though this makes sense for someone who's been raised in the environment she has. Even by the end of the book, while she's grown somewhat, I wouldn't exactly describe her as a strong character. Which is fine, because a lot of people are like that, and I wouldn't criticise the characterisation exactly, but it did frustrate me more than it made me sympathetic. I found her brother Jaja more interesting, overcoming that rearing instead. As for the character of her father, I didn't really understand him. He seemed to throw money around too indiscriminately for someone who despised anyone who wasn't a devout Catholic... did he only bother telling his family his opinions on religion? Considering he made such a big deal of them, that would seem weird, but it's the only thing that makes sense.

I thought the ending was brilliant.

All in all, definitely worth reading, although I'd probably prioritise her other books.

This is an intensely unpleasant book to read, but there's lots to talk about regarding it, so bare with me.

So, I came across this book because I realised I knew almost nothing about Australian literature, and my mum agreed that it was pretty obscure before crying, “Oh! But you know, at the start of the twentieth century there was a whole bunch of socialist women writers, Marxists, feminists, I think you'd really like them.” She gave me an old textbook of hers that outlined some of these writers, and Katharine Susannah Prichard was one. The critic writing the textbook really didn't like her work, describing it as ruined by her “crude Marxism” (in later years she actually supported the Soviet Union's repression of artists and writers, so I could see how her crude Stalinism might sully her work), but he conceded that Coonardoo was a classic.

It was first published as a serial in The Bulletin in 1928, and was extremely controversial because (by the standards of the day) it humanised Aboriginal people, rather than conforming to the prevailing idea that they were pests to be more or less exterminated. As a result, Prichard (who was white, I should make clear) had trouble getting the book published with publishers recognising that while such a controversial book would make them a tidy profit, it'd offend so many comfortably racist white people that they were uneasy about it. Evidently the book was published, though.

This is more or less what I gleaned before reading the novel, and since I was coming it at with that background, it was really disappointing.

Perhaps it was anti-racist for 1928, but by modern standards it really isn't. In Prichard's own introduction to the book, she echoes Engels in probably the most problematic things he ever said, describing Aboriginal people as primitive, unevolved versions of Europeans. She's clearly sympathetic to them, but that doesn't excuse the way she writes them, as “noble savages”. At some points, she even outright refers to them as animals, for instance describing Coonardoo's eyes as “the bright beautiful eyes of a wild animal in their thick yellowy whites”. It's not exactly that she's ignorant, either – the book demonstrates that she was familiar with the language Aboriginal people in the area spoke, as well as with their traditions, spiritual beliefs and so on (I can't vouch for how complete her understanding is though, only that she knew a lot and made use of it). It's that she's more of an ethnographer, trying to show off this “exotic” type of human – objectifying them, not treating them as subjects. This made me uncomfortable throughout the book.

Despite being the titular character, Coonardoo isn't really the main character of the book; that would be Hugh Watt, the white man who owns this cattle station, Wytaliba. And despite the blurb describing their relationship as one of “love”, it isn't. For Hugh, he (and his mother before him) are disgusted by the sexual exploitation of black women by white men, and he's determined not to be like that, but he becomes so fucking possessive over Coonardoo anyway that he does something far worse. Even if he didn't, possessiveness is not love. As for Coonardoo, her characterisation is so awkward it's hard to know what to say. She seems to objectify herself; she's been raised from childhood to be a faithful, unpaid servant, and she is. She looks after Hugh, dotes on him, allows him to have sex with her when his mother's death leaves him deeply depressed. Later in the novel, he “claims her as his woman” (i.e. asks her to sleep in the house) so that Sam Geary (owner of a neighbouring cattle station, who represents the sexually exploitative white man the Watts despise) won't get her, and she's bewildered – and, it's later revealed, hurt – that he won't have sex with her the way that men do with “their” women. This is awkwardly written, though; she spends more time “confused” than she does visibly upset about it. From the little we get her thoughts, her concerns are always how best to serve Hugh, and I don't see this as “being in love”; this is submitting to her servitude.

To the extent that they have a relationship, it is totally that of dominator and dominated. I don't think a relationship between a white cattle station owner and his Aboriginal domestic servant could be anything else. They're so unequal (and don't even speak to each other all that much) that you could never call this a love story; a story of a dark and twisted one-time sexual relationship, perhaps.

The ending of the novel is the worst part of it. Sam Geary, who's been lusting after Coonardoo all novel long, turns up at Wytaliba unannounced and rapes her. Once Hugh finds out, he beats Coonardoo to a pulp and throws her into the campfire, because apparently she betrayed him by getting raped. He then expels her from "his property", and she stays away – not because she thinks it's a good idea to avoid Hugh if this is how he'll treat her, but because she wants to follow his wishes, as she's always done. This part of the book talks about how she doesn't understand how she displeased him, and that kind of thing – she blames herself, just as he blames her. It's distressing.

I do think that Prichard did a good job with the characterisation of the white people, particularly the white women. Some of them were extremely unlikeable, but their characters made sense (with the possible exception of Hugh). They were also, for the most part, very different from one another (which, for instance, the Aboriginal characters were not, although they did at least have proper names). The novel depicts a whole range of different types of racism that white Australians in the early twentieth century could be instilled with. It also depicts a lot of different kinds of women, from working-class women who betray their roots and become obnoxious wealthy socialites, to women who want to escape being stifled by bourgeois expectations and be free. The parts of the book that focus on these themes are much less uncomfortable.

So, to wrap up this lengthy review... this book is very much a product of the time and place it was written in. Prichard may have been progressive for that context, but for ours, this book is a painful read. I couldn't say I recommend it, but if you have particular interests that this aligns with, then go for it.

So this is the first of Miéville I've read, and I have to say it's made me keen to read more. This even though the book is very complicated, and the denouement had me frowning in confusion – I feel like the last quarter all unfolded too fast, or else that I wasn't taking enough time to read it.

But regardless. This is more than a crime novel; it's an illustration of this weird concept Miéville has come up with, the uneasy coexistence of the cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma. These cities don't just intersect, but parts of them (the “crosshatched” areas) are parts of both, and citizens of each city go out of their way to “unsee” or “unsense” whatever's taking place in the other, lest they “breach” – the most grievous crime that exists in this society. It's really complicated, but as you read the novel it becomes clear how things work. It also becomes clear that the cities are kept apart as much by nationalism, capitalist ideology, as by geographical quirk; the fact that this setting is not quite divorced from our own world, and comments on social issues affecting our Eastern Europe as well as the one here, appealed to me.

So for fans of fantasy or crime fiction (but preferably both) I really recommend this. Just to comment on the quality of the Kindle edition though, for some reason it always shows the name of Besźel as “Besel” (sometimes broken between the ‘s' and the ‘e' over a line break), and the font had me thinking Ul Qoma was UI Qoma until about halfway through the novel. I can't really blame the publisher or the Kindle platform for my inability to decipher ‘Ul Qoma', but misspelling ‘Besźel'? Seriously? I guess Miéville depicted a place just too foreign for my Kindle, hey...

Perhaps the tragedy of Adichie's writing is that [b:Half of a Yellow Sun|18749|Half of a Yellow Sun|Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1327934717s/18749.jpg|1651408] is so brilliant that if that's the first of her works you read, everything else ends up disappointing. And doubly disappointing because I really like Adichie, the political comments she makes and such, and I really wanted to like this book... but it fell flat for me.

I've mentioned in a number of previous reviews that I get uncomfortable when a novel is a thinly veiled political polemic. Mostly, I get uncomfortable when the narrative gets twisted and contorted to fit an agenda (even if I agree with that agenda!!) because I appreciate good story-telling too much. Anyway, I don't think Americanah is as bad on that front as some other people have made out, but it has some issues. At least half the book is random characters (many of which appear once or twice) discussing issues of race, which isn't really a problem, until the climax of the book is derailed by a group of random, never-before-seen businessmen discussing the problems of the Nigerian economy. Or I mean, I guess it's a slight problem in that the plot of the book ends up feeling very thin, even though it isn't really, just because the plot gets dealt with so fleetingly and sparingly just so more space can be given over to these observations. And it's not that the observations aren't interesting, or even uninterestingly written. They just get in the way of the telling of the story.

Then some of the characterisation is very weird. There are some characters (ahem, Shan) who are just bizarre – superficial reproductions of an archetype, I guess (in this case, the self-absorbed academic), and in Shan's case she has some weird magnetic pull that makes everyone in her presence worship her, so not only is she annoying herself, but she makes every single character who shares a scene with her annoying too! Magic.

As for the star-crossed lovers of the blurb, they bothered me for different reasons too. I agree with someone else who's reviewed this book who said that Obinze just does not have the personality of a wealthy businessmen. No one in the real world would “make it” having a conscience like that. Ifemelu on the other hand might (if only she weren't a woman...!); I started to intensely dislike her when, from the moment she returned to Nigeria, she revelled in her upper-class status and started to treat every service worker she met like shit. I would like to think that Adichie's politics are good enough that Ifemelu's characterisation was deliberate – that she was including some subtle commentary on class in a very unsubtle treatise on race. (Lack of subtlety not necessarily being a bad thing – I agree with one of her characters (even though it was probably Shan, ugh) who thought the insistence on “nuance” was usually a way of pandering to the fragile feelings of the privileged.) Anyway, hopefully that was indeed the intention, rather than a weird blindspot when it comes to the reality of class society.

It is a mystery to me why the blurb is what it is (i.e. misleading); Ifemelu and Obinze rekindle their romance 88% of the way through the book, and it's safe to say that the so-called “toughest decisions of their lives” are not the crux of the story. Nor existent, in Ifemelu's case. It looks like the paperback's blurb is better. Still, this isn't really a story about love; it's a story about globalisation and race. There are some lovely quotes about how those things intersect. At one point late in the book, Ifemelu comments that if her American boyfriends had come from the same cultural background as her, she's not sure they'd have had anything to say to each other. That had some resonance with me, although not fully.

Hmm, I got really distracted from this and I'm not sure how to wrap it up. I would still say it's worth reading, especially if you don't have a Tumblr and don't read similar observations on race all day every day. (Speaking of which, I'm surprised I haven't seen Americanah quotes floating around on there!) Just don't get your hopes up, because if you're not expecting brilliance like I was, you'll probably enjoy this much better.

So here is what I knew about this book before I went in – it's confronting, it's a major work of Black feminist (or womanist) literature, it's been banned in a lot of times and places, and Alice Walker refused to allow it to be published in Israel out of support for the BDS movement.

So there's our starting point. It's also probably useful to know that it's set in rural Georgia over the first half of the twentieth century, spanning a period of 30 years, because I didn't know this when I started out I was guessing a much earlier setting. It is a confronting book, especially the beginning, which is a seriously brutal way to start a book. It actually squicked me quite a lot so it took a long time for the book to grow on me, but by the end, I really liked it. Probably what turned things around for me was Celie's pursuit of happiness – with the help (and love!) of her friend Shug, she's able to stop being someone who horrible things happen to all the time and start to be her own person, which I appreciated.

There's a lot in here, and a large cast of characters; I hadn't actually expected that the narrative would make it to Africa and comment on female genital mutilation practices (as well as the relationship between Africans and African-Americans). But it did. I hadn't really expected it to be so spiritual either, but it was that too (and that's where the title comes from, too – reflecting on the wonder of the colour purple). Indeed I would say spirituality is the thing this novel seeks to impart most of all; the need to accept God is no white man, but inside and a part of everything. I'm not really sure about that, honestly, but taking wonder in the natural world is something I can understand. I was less keen on Celie forgiving her long-time abusive husband. Sure, I guess it shows there are reasons why lower-class or marginalised men abuse – alienation, feelings of powerlessness – but just on an emotional level, I did not like it.

The novel also attracts some comment for its “subversion of gender roles”, but honestly it just depicts people as they are (or were), which often is not totally in line with gender roles, even when that pressure is there. For instance, Harpo tries to be a violent, domineering husband because that's what he's been taught, but every time he tries to beat his wife Sofia, she bashes him nastily and he can't manage it. He clearly feels insecure about this failing, which just makes him even more anxious to be violent, and so it goes. But I think Walker is good about not just vilifying men on an individual level, but showing what pressure these alienated, downtrodden men are under to conform to this model. Even so, I don't think forgiving them is necessary! And while some women “subvert gender roles” by being confident and assertive, it's not like they're living without the context of an extremely patriarchal society, and they're often punished for it. So I would describe the characterisation as realistic, rather than “subversive”. Although I guess those are the same thing sometimes.

Overall, I'd highly recommend this. It was political but never forced, dealing with racism, women's oppression, abuse, lesbianism, and ended on a positive note in spite of the horrifying beginning. Well worth persevering.

This is a brilliant, if imperfect, book. It's probably the first time I've come across any work of fiction that depicts an Australia I actually recognise – modern-day Melbourne, a city of migrants and vast, sprawling suburbs, and not the usual rural bush society populated almost entirely by Anglo-Celtic stock. A novel that doesn't pander to nationalist mythologies about this country? Hell yes.

And as a Melburnian, it was refreshing to read a novel where characters catch up for a drink at Federation Square, catch the tram along Smith Street, or grimace at the industrial wasteland that is large parts of Altona, all described as casually as New York writers make reference to the urban geography of New York. I'm not so parochial that I'd like to just read novels about my home city all the time, but it's really nice to see it depicted for once, and so thoroughly and honestly. If anyone ever asked me what the best novel is for getting a sense of Melbourne, until further notice I would say this one.

The story is told through eight chapters, each from the point of view of a different character. It begins with a suburban barbecue in which a man hits someone else's child, but this is only the source of some of the conflict in the book. Every marriage is unhappy, every character is flawed and has their own problems from before the barbecue even happened. The novel is character-driven and intensely focused on relationships and work – i.e., the exact things that people spend the majority of their time focused on – and a lot of people hate it for these reasons. It tells the story of people who, many of them, are not likeable. Even for those who are likeable, they make really bad mistakes; they're not perfect. Basically, this is a novel about the real world, unfair and cruel, where almost everyone is prejudiced and does bad things.

After the first few pages I found it very readable and engrossing, but it's not perfect and the first few pages are some of the worst offenders; if I'd just picked it up idly at a bookstore I would not have bought it, and then I would've missed out on so much. The first pages just describe Hector shitting in great detail, which is a bizarre way to start a book. I don't usually complain about “crudeness”, but the first few (I'd guess three) chapters of this book just seem gratuitously so. After that, they either got better or I stopped noticing. Either way... be warned, but don't let that deter you.

The other thing that can make the book hard to get through at times is the uncompromising, unrelenting depictions of sexism. Most of the men in this book are so sexist that a lot of the other reviewers on this site have whinged it's not believable, which I can only wish was true. Still, Hector's and Harry's chapters are both hard to read on this front, especially Harry's (who in addition to being incredibly sexist, seems to be a fascist who hasn't yet discovered his true self). Connie's chapter is, I think, also powerful as it takes the opposite side, that of the vulnerable eighteen-year-old girl. The scene in which she loses her virginity is perfect, and painful reading in all the right ways (also, amazingly aware considering it was written by a man). The novel depicts domestic violence, emotional abuse within relationships, and just so much, really.

Even if most of the men are hard to like, I was moved by Manolis' chapter, which begins when he reads an obituary in the paper for a friend he had, but fell out of touch with long ago. The chapter is about the ravages of time, the tragedy of losing contact with people who were once your closest friends, and perhaps even about the lack of belonging anywhere – living in Australia with imperfect English, but knowing that the Greece you left no longer exists. It was quite removed from the rest of the novel, but I liked it a lot.

I thought the ending to the novel was jarring and unsatisfactory; mostly, I did not believe that Ritchie was in a frame of mind to attempt suicide, regardless of how much Connie humiliated him, and it seemed mostly a narrative device to get Connie and Ritchie to reconcile after she'd lied to him and he'd betrayed her trust. Relying on what seemed to be a very out-of-character act seemed like a cheat, especially disappointing in a novel where the characterisation was otherwise excellent. For certain characters, the ending seemed too neat and easy, and I was saddened by the endings for others (mostly Rosie, left friendless and moving to a small country town with her drunken, abusive husband when her only crime was being too underconfident to stand up for herself). Not that it's really a bad thing to have a novel where not everyone gets a happy ending... but still, that last chapter was the weakest of them all.

So I'm giving this four stars, because of the flaws I mentioned. This is still a brilliant portrait of modern-day Melbourne though, highly recommended to anyone who hasn't read it already.

It would be such a stretch to say I liked this book, but it's thought-provoking and reasonably left-wing. Set in Thatcher-era London, it follows 36-year-old Alice, a member of a kind of cultish, dubiously left-wing sect who lives a really miserable life, even though she won't recognise it herself.

So this is a very depressing book to read – it's mind-bogglingly slow, and I spent most of the book frustrated with Alice for refusing to make use of any opportunities that arose to make her life better. For one thing, she's stuck in a horrible relationship, a sexless one designed just to give cover to her secretly-gay partner, who twists her wrists any time he doesn't get his way and takes all her money, by stealth or by force, and blows it all on pointless shit until they have no money for like, any bills. (Ah, but as we will get to, paying bills is bourgeois!) She's stolen so much money from her parents to fund his lifestyle that by the beginning of the novel, her parents are sick of her and want nothing to do with her any more. It is just unbelievably frustrating to read about someone who screws her life up like that.

Secondly, the politics of this sect (and, by extension, Alice) are really terrible, which kind of contributes to the terribleness of her life. She condemns basically anyone with a white-collar job as “bourgeois” and “middle-class” (which, to her, are the same thing) and it gets to the point that she condemns people as bourgeois for like, owning furniture, or wanting to not live in a squat. She herself gets condemned as bourgeois by other members of the sect for wanting to live in a squat with hot water and electricity. At one point, she turns down a white-collar job offered to her because she doesn't want to live in a flat she actually pays rent on, which according to her only bourgeois people do. In her mind, the true representatives of the working class are people like the members of her sect, none of which have seemingly ever tried to get a job, and instead live on welfare as a point of principle. Their complete and utter lack of a genuine class analysis leads to the kind of political activity you might be able to guess: unable to work within the working class, organising and strengthening it, they resort to “propaganda of the deed”-style terrorism which kills and injures working-class people and cements them as eternally irrelevant.

I feel like this is a book that would be very easy for right-wing people (or even, say, feminists who are hostile to genuine left-wing politics) to take and say, “hey, look! this PROVES that communism is a terrible idea and communists are terrible people!”, similar to 1984. In this sect, the women make the tea and the men do all the “real work”; many of them (including Alice) are anti-intellectual and think it's bourgeois to read, especially to read anything you might disagree with; they dismiss any idea that “the personal is political”; then there's all the “propaganda of the deed” stuff. Like 1984 though, I don't think this book is really hostile to genuine revolutionary politics, but rather to various badnesses that “Marxism” has been used to justify. The Good Terrorist is hostile to terrorism, isolating oneself from ordinary people, being wilfully blind to sexism in the name of “class struggle”, and so it goes. But it never tries to defend Thatcherism, the cops are mostly thuggish, bureaucracy unfeeling, and the IRA are depicted positively. If anything, I would call it a book of despair. Which I guess is what Orwell wrote too.

Rating this book is hard, since as I'm sure I've made clear I didn't particularly enjoy reading it, even if I think it has merit. Since I can't give it two and a half, I'll give it two. It wasn't a bad book, just slow and frustrating to read.