Jessica

This book had me rapt. It was full of political intrigue and scheming, in a way that reminded me of the best aspects of A Game of Thrones (but honestly this series is more enjoyable). With all the world-building groundwork having been accomplished in the first book, this one can afford to be much faster-paced, and is all the better for it.

Much of this book revolves around the main characters' efforts to do the right thing (mostly struggle in support of the oppressed shafit, and against blind tribalism) when they live in a society filled with powerful people who want to thwart every such effort. King Ghassan is, like in the first book, ruthlessly tyrannical, but the forces conspiring against him are just as bad. It makes for compelling reading and I'm very keen to move on to the third book now, to see what happens next.

I don't want to waste too much time talking about why this book was bad, but in essence: Why was the dialogue written without contractions?! Why does the supposedly 26yo protagonist fall head over heels into giddy irrational infatuations at the slightest thing? Why do so many characters do complete 180s and change their entire course, only to do a 180 back to the original course approx two chapters later? Why did I have to sit through sooooo much infodumping, only for most of it to not really matter at all? (At least I assume it didn't matter because my eyes glazed over and I didn't really register it, and never felt like memorising all the eight houses of the Realm had been necessary.) Who actually was the villain, and what were the motivations behind anything that he did? And like, just to reiterate: How did this book get to the point of being published with the dialogue all so stilted and awful?! Even assuming it was a self-pubbed effort, was there literally no beta reader or anybody to be like, “Hey, characters are allowed to use words like ‘don't' and ‘isn't', it's cool.” Really?? I just can't. This was well below the standard I usually expect even of self-pubbed books.

Contemporary YA romance is pretty far outside my usual wheelhouse, but I had a few days left on my Kindle Unlimited trial and this book caught my eye and I went, “Well, why not?” Very glad I took the punt, because I really enjoyed this book.

The main character, Sugihara, is a 16yo Zainichi Korean, which is to say he's an ethnic Korean whose family has been living in Japan for two generations. They still don't have Japanese citizenship – they have to choose between North Korean or South Korean nationality. And the book is quite an insightful glimpse into what it's like (or was like, in 2000 when the book was first written) to grow up as part of such a marginalised community – having to report regularly to the police station to be fingerprinted, not having access to “good” jobs, having the authorities capriciously make decisions against you, etc.

But the book is also a romance: at a party at a nightclub, Sugihara meets Sakurai, a remarkably confident girl who moves quickly to woo him, and so starts a surprisingly fun-to-read teenage romance. They talk about music and book and films and Sakurai fills Sugihara in on all the dating advice being given to teenage girls, which he kinds of responds to with a cute, “oh, OK...” attitude. It's nice. The only real obstacle to their love is that Sugihara is scared that Sakurai won't want to be with him any more if she finds out he's Korean.

I will say that the book is somewhat violent. Sugihara is a bit of a delinquent who gets into fights all the time at school, and his father is an ex-boxer with the same tendency. Even his mum can be prone to flying into violent rages in this book. But the way it's written is sort of cartoony, almost for laughs, which I think a lot of readers will find inappropriate. At any rate, that's the one real reservation I had about this book. Overall it was a pretty fun, quick, easy read.

Obviously I picked this book up because I thought I might like it, but I've been completely blown away by how much I liked it. Rarely has a slow and meandering book like this been such a page-turner for me (indeed, perhaps this is the first time it's ever happened). Even though the story is full of sorrow and hopelessness, I found it addictive and enlightening about a country I knew little about, Kazakhstan.

In the main, this is a story about the man-made ecological disaster that is the disappearance of the Aral Sea. The Soviets decided to divert the grand rivers that fed this vast salt-water lake into irrigation canals, to water rice and cotton crops. The shoreline receded, exposing tons of intensely salty sand that blew away in the fierce winds, ruining the farmland that was barely viable in the first place. It would be bad enough if that were the only environmental disaster facing the region, but it's not: the salty sand is also full of highly toxic waste dumped into those rivers over decades when they still flowed; the nuclear weapon test facility in the east of Kazakhstan has left much of the land saturated with nuclear pollution, causing sky-high rates of birth defects, infant mortality and cancers; and the pesticides and fertilisers smothered over the cotton crops to make them grow at all leech their own toxicity into the environment. This book reads like an account of the apocalypse: the ocean's fish dying, the people all living with varying degrees of poison in their system, domesticated animals going wild and running off with feral packs, vicious sandstorms battering the fools still living around the sea...

The ongoing theme of this book is “man” thinking he knows better than nature, and as such destroying everything. The book does have religious overtones to it, with one of the main characters, Nasyr, being a mullah who prays continually to God to save Sinemorye, and wondering in despair whether it is God who has forsaken humanity, or humanity who has forsaken God. But you don't need to be religious to appreciate this book (I certainly am not); if you respect nature, and shudder in horror at how governments and corporations around the world wreak immense environmental destruction that would take nature thousands of years to recover from even if the damage wasn't being continually compounded on, this book will make an impact on you regardless.

The other running theme that I found interesting was the criticism of the Soviet authorities. Nasyr's son, Kakharman, begins the book as a low-ranking bureaucrat whose overriding goal is to convince the head honchos in Moscow to stop destroying the Aral Sea. There are other characters, too, like the scientist Slavikov and his son Igor, who share this goal. But the party apparatus is so stuffed full of careerists that would rather destroy entire ecosystems than admit to any mistakes, that this effort is basically futile. The book also talks about, or at least mentions, many of the horrific things that happened under Stalin's rule, like the Holodomor (where millions died in a man-made famine) and the Great Purge (where a similarly huge number were executed or sent to gulags, and since the authorities considered “criminality” to be hereditary, even children were mistreated in orphanages as “enemies of the state”). There are a number of flashbacks into the lives of minor characters to explore their lives during these times, and these passages are raw and moving. Despite a single brief section where America is described as like so amazing, they would never harm the environment! (bahaha, yeah ok) the criticism largely does not come from a place of, “and this is why the FREE MARKET and American imperialism are so great!” like Western criticisms of the USSR mostly do – instead it is with sympathy for the ordinary person, and especially the colonised person, as Kazakhs were by Russians. It's a very well-written book.

There are some reasons why you may not enjoy this book – it is quite long and mostly humourless, and it's not exactly a book where the animals are having a good time (although, as someone who hates animal cruelty and suffering in books, I wasn't “triggered” by this one – there's no real cruelty, although Kazakh society is definitely not vegetarian, and it's all of nature suffering here, not only the animals). The Kindle version seems bugged, and thinks the entire last 25% of the book is page 483, so be prepared for a book with a real length of ~600 pages or so. But man, what an entrancing 600 pages.

At first I thought I was going to like this book. Roger Smith does a really good job highlighting the massive class and racial divides in Cape Town, and the novel certainly had no shortage of unlikeable characters who you were looking forward to getting their just desserts, like Beverley or Christopher Lane. The book had some weird eccentricities (like constant descriptions of characters' genitals, or the need to tell us the intricate details every single time one of the POV characters went to the toilet...) but at first they seemed overlookable.

However, as the narrative wore on, things just got bleaker and bleaker to the point that I found nothing enjoyable about it at all. I hated the character arc of Louise, who started out as the most sympathetic character in the book before becoming a soulless sadist. It's like the author was trying to say that depression/grief makes you a violent criminal? And yes, describing genitals and toilet trips on every second page is mega-weird. This novel could almost have been called Shit People Go to the Bathroom. Just, yeah. Two stars because the first part had some merit, but after that it all went downhill.

I feel like it's easier for me to explain what didn't work for me in this book than what did. Cruel Beauty is, as many other reviews will tell you, basically a retelling of The Beauty and the Beast mashed up with some Ancient Greek mythology. It takes place within a lost part of Romana-Graecia, Arcadia, which was cursed and locked away in its own pocket universe by a vengeful demon 900 years ago. The protagonist, Nyx Triskelion, was promised at birth to one day marry this exact demon, in exchange for her twin sister Astraia being allowed to live a normal, happy life. Nyx has spent her short life thus far being trained for this event, and when she arrives at her husband's cursed castle, it's with a mission: to destroy him, and probably also herself, to break the curse keeping Arcadia isolated. Once she gets inside, though, everything gets a lot more confusing and complicated.

So... where do I begin? I will say that this is not a book with strong world-building. Arcadia is a real part of Greece, and a lot bigger than the “one village and a castle” than it seems to be in this book. We learned a lot about the differences between the gods worshipped by the nobility (Zeus, etc.) and those worshipped by the peasantry, and a bit about their festivals and funerary rites. What wasn't really that clear was the magic system that kept getting referred to (Hermetic magic...?) – how was that supposed to work? what was it supposed to do? – or who the demons were that were screwing over Arcadia's people and how they all related to each other. The mystery is a large part of the story, but it's never truly answered, imo.

Then there's Nyx herself. She's had a rough upbringing, having been raised to be a sacrifice to the Gentle Lord, and is full of resentments. In the enchanted castle, she has no idea who to trust and ceases to be sure whether to follow through on the mission she's been trained for, or whether something else is a better idea... which seems to lead to the outcome that she changes her mind every five pages. Neither of these things make her a bad character, and certainly not an unrealistic character, but it made it very hard to know what I was supposed to be hoping for. Sometimes plot developments would happen that you'd think would mark a significant turning point in the story, only for them to be completely disregarded. I spent so much of this book confused.

A large component of this book is the romance, of course, but I even found this confusing. I just didn't feel like I'd seen why Nyx started to fall in love... instead, I just had the book telling me that she had indeed fallen in love. So then I was like, well OK, I'll just accept that these two are in love now. (To be fair, it was the kind of dark romance that I really wanted to be able to enjoy.) But then the book threw a huge curveball at me (explanation cut for spoilers) so look, overall, I just don't think this romance had a lot of depth.

The ending had its fair share of confusion, but I actually found it one of the most enjoyable parts of the book. Only here did I really start to see the sisterly love that was supposed to exist between Nyx and Astraia (and I wrote more but cut for spoilers).

This review probably sounds mostly negative, but it's really more that I found this story confusing. When I shrugged my shoulders and gave up on trying to understand things, this book was enjoyable enough. I liked the duality of Ignifex (the Gentle Lord) – the malevolence but also the tenderness. Shade was an interesting character, too. I just kind of wish the story around them – the web of curses and such – had been better explained.

I just couldn't really manage to get interested in this story about the secret romance between a Palestinian man and a Turkish Jew in Jerusalem. It's very slow, and the story seems to meander a lot. The height of Elias and Lila's romance really happens early in the book, and then everything after that is about how hard their lives are, and how they can't even see each other for 19 years between 1948 and 1967. If anything, I found the character of Nomi a bit more interesting, and how she came from an utterly dysfunctional family to a (seemingly) rewarding career trying to place kids from the foster system with sympathetic families.

The other thing that kind of bothered me about this book is that it was very one-sided about the cultural background it sought to portray. The blurb and a number of reviews described this book as being told from Elias' perspective, but if so then why is Palestinian (oh sorry, “Arab”... I don't think this book uses the words “Palestine” or “Palestinian” even once) culture reduced to just tea and spiced food and, apparently, going along with it when your parents arrange your marriage to someone you barely know? Towards the end, Elias is all like, “I don't even believe in culture or religion,” and I have to wonder if that was mainly to make him more palatable to a largely-Jewish readership, because certainly none of the Jewish characters ever talk about Jewish culture or Judaism being meaningless. The book is, at least, critical of Israeli policies in Jerusalem (like the expropriation of all Palestinian-owned properties in West Jerusalem) as well as of the idea that Israelis and Palestinians can't live alongside one another (praising coexistence in Jaffa, for example). But that feels like the bare minimum that this book should've done, you know? It's almost like the author was implying that Israelis and Palestinians can coexist, just so long as Palestinians don't stand out or do anything too “Palestinian-y”. Maybe that wasn't the reason for the oversight, and rather it was just that Talshir didn't know very much about Palestinian culture (unlike her own, obviously) and either didn't want to do the research or didn't trust herself to depict it authentically or thought (since this book has been translated from Hebrew) depicting Elias' culture would set her readers against him. But eh. The imbalance was something that irked me pretty much throughout the book.

Night Shift Dragons is the final instalment in a trilogy that has mainly gripped me with its kick-ass futuristic fantasy setting, the Detroit Free Zone. If you like, you can read my review of the first book or my review of the second book before coming back for this one. While I did enjoy it, I felt like this final instalment was the weakest of the lot, mainly because the awesome setting took a backseat and its dystopian nature was really walked back. Note that from here on out this review will contain spoilers for the previous books.

Following on from the end of Part-Time Gods, Opal Yong-ae has spent the last two months in a pocket dimension of sorts, in hiding with her comatose dad, the fearsome dragon Yong of Korea. She's also started training to become a priestess of the Detroit Free Zone, as in a sworn servant of the deity who is the actual city itself. What these two things mean is that we see a lot less of the city than we did in previous books (even once she leaves hiding, she doesn't travel around too much) and yet we also see a lot more of the DFZ at the same time, because the deity spends at least half the book talking to Opal in her mind. The capriciousness and willingness to sacrifice citizens on the altar of the free market that we have come to associate with the DFZ is mostly gone; instead, we get a lot of justifications about how if the worst excesses were just toned down a liiiiiittle bit, the DFZ would actually be great because it's a city of “freedom”. I found this pretty hard to reconcile with the criticism of neoliberalism in just the last book.

There were definitely some good things, though. Opal comes across as substantially more mature than she was in the first two instalments, almost as though two months of learning how to use her magic properly has given her the assurance she needed that she can be a competent adult after all. Her relationship with her dad definitely takes priority here over her emerging romance with Nik, which didn't bother me, but seems to have disappointed some other viewers. On the other hand, while I was fine with the place where her relationship with her dad ended up, I did feel like we got there way too easily. I mean, this is the guy who's spent two books trying to ruin her life with a bad luck curse, and he was convinced of the error of his ways within a few pages?! It felt like it mainly worked out that way so the tension between them couldn't be a problem as they dealt with the main plot of this book.

That plot involves a fighting arena that is unquestionably one of the worst excesses of the DFZ. Basically, this Gamemaster convinces people to sign up for fights to the death, particularly preying on the homeless and vulnerable. These fights attract huge crowds, huge enough to sustain not only on-site gambling parlours but also brothels and strip clubs?! A worthy villain to fight against, but it really seemed like Opal and the DFZ wouldn't have bothered if not for having a more selfish motivation to go in. I dunno, I guess there's nothing much Opal could have done alone, but all the DFZ's excuses for her inaction were annoying, and then Opal's excuses for the DFZ's excuses...

I've got distracted while typing this up, so I'll try to boil things down to the essentials. Like the first two books in the series, Night Shift Dragons is a fast-paced romp of a read. Opal Yong-ae did grow as a character and her storyline ended up in a good place. However, I was disappointed by the lack of exploration of the city in this book compared to the first two, and even more disappointed by the justifications for free-market callousness where previously this was called out. Three stars from me.

I came across this book a while ago, and promptly added it to my “Want to Read” list, intrigued by its Middle Eastern setting and use of Islamic mythology. Unfortunately it then languished on that list for much longer than it deserved to. Well, not any more! Finally I've taken the plunge into The City of Brass, and despite the slow first half, I ended up riveted and really excited to read the second book.

The plot itself, if you reduce it to the essentials, is perhaps not the most original. It begins with Nahri, a professional con artist in nineteenth-century Cairo, with magical powers of healing and no recollection of her childhood. One day she's attacked by malevolent demons called ifrit, and saved by a haughty magical being named Dara, and through this discovers she's actually some kind of long-lost Chosen One to a magical society she knows nothing about. Dara insists that, for her safety, he he has to take her to the city of Daevabad (and then her storyline slows right down because the journey takes up a huge fraction of the book).

The other POV character is Ali, a young prince (second son of Daevabad's king) who wants to help the oppressed shafit, residents of the city who are of mixed magical and human descent. He's a devout Muslim, someone who (at least at the start of the book) wants to assume the best in everyone, and painfully naive. He ends up feeling caught between loyalty to his family and his sense of justice, and I found him a really compelling character.

So you know, Chosen One outsiders to hidden magical societies and junior royals with consciences are not the most unique fantasy characters out there (not that lacking uniqueness would make them unenjoyable). However, the setting and world-building of this story are just incredibly absorbing. I'll admit that the world-building can feel very dense, especially if you (like me) are not very familiar with Islamic mythology, because then you have that to absorb on top of the history and politics of the kingdom of Daevabad. That said, I think it's well worth persevering! The book's last section is action-packed, and since all the groundwork has now been laid, I'm excited for how eventful the next instalment might be without so many hold-ups to explain the lore.

S.A. Chakraborty wanted to pursue an academic career in Middle Eastern history before life intervened and she eventually turned to writing, and I think that background is evident in the richness of the world she's created here. On top of the mythology she draws upon, there's also a lot of interesting stuff in the different tribes of Daevabad, the tensions between the different groups living in the city (which I could imagine mirroring other cities with long histories of diversity, like Jerusalem or Istanbul), and so on. I came to really enjoy the character of the king, calculating and ruthless, but you can follow his tyrannical logic, too. In fact, despite Ali's efforts, this is not really a story about good vs. evil at all, but about power. A lot of Nahri's story, too, becomes about how she can play the game before the other players play her.

So, I think I've made it clear that despite some slowness in the first half, I really enjoyed The City of Brass. If you like worldbuilding-heavy stories, I think this is well worth the read.

I was enjoying this for the first three-quarters or so, but then it rapidly got too squicky for my tastes. It starts out as a rumination on preteen/early teenage girl life, with Lizzie and Evie as close as close can be until the latter suddenly goes missing. So far, so similar to The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone (which I only read a few months ago, and did a great telling of this kind of story). However from there, The End of Everything morphs into something more reminiscent of Lolita, with a steadily increasing amount of emphasis on pubescent girls getting inappropriate attention from fully-grown men (not wanting to spoil too much). But see, in Lolita, the whole point of the story is that Humbert Humbert is completely fucking delusional in his belief that Lola has knowingly seduced him. The End of Everything has missed this point, and plays its story straight as one of mutual attraction and seduction.

Now, Megan Abbott's storylines are usually pretty dark and twisted and I certainly wouldn't say enjoying this one means you must be a bad person. It was just too dark for me. However, I do think the blurb did the novel a disservice by not making it clear what the core theme of the novel was. No one sells Lolita as, like, an odd couple fugitive novel, and in being more disturbing this one needs the warning much more! Some people in the comments of other reviews have claimed that if you warn people what the central theme is then that's a “spoiler”, but wtf, people need to be able to make informed decisions about what they read too.

This is not an objectively bad book - indeed, if you don't think your sensibilities will be offended by the major theme then you can expect the reward of a well-written thriller with some real relatability for anyone who's ever been a 12-13 year old girl. But also know that if you are interested in that kind of story, The Van Apfel Girls does a very similar thing without the Lolita element, and I thought it was better.

I've shelved this as science fiction, but what struck me as I was reading it is that it really comes across as a psychological horror. The protagonist, George Orr, has an ability that he considers a horrible curse: when he dreams, sometimes, he wakes up to find the dream has come true. Having got in legal trouble for misappropriating/misusing dream suppressants, he is sent to a psychiatrist, Dr Haber, who sees this ability as an enormous boon. He uses hypnotherapy to put George under and instruct him to dream all manner of things – which, then, become reality.

The novel examines all kind of dystopian and apocalyptic scenarios: war against extraterrestrials, a pandemic that kills most of the world's population, volcanic eruptions, and above all a recurring theme of heavy-handed state control over people's lives (and life and death itself). And it does all this with a tone reminiscent of that kind of nightmare where you're dreaming horrible stuff, and you think you wake up, but then realise you're still trapped in the nightmare. Dr Haber represents a brilliant villain, outwardly effusively charming but coercively keeping George under his control. And, of course, like many a classic villain he has grandiose, noble ambitions – world peace! an end to overpopulation! full health for all! – but no real qualms about the sinister ways he would achieve them.

Overall, a really good, dark little book, especially for those who enjoy the theme of creepy nightmares.

I was wiping away tears by the end of this book, it moved me that much. I had to have a bit of a giggle when I got to the acknowledgements and it said something about how flattering it was that one of the early readers cried at the ending, because it was like, “Hey! Me too!” This is definitely one of those books that got me invested emotionally – which shouldn't be that surprising, because the first one, Long Grows the Dark, completely sucked me in with the tension between its four main characters.

So ordinarily I wouldn't dream of rating a book that got me to cry any less than five stars, but Slow Wanes the Night did have one flaw, which was that the first half felt so slow. Like, so slow. I suppose it was purposeful, dwelling as it did on the loneliness of the main characters after the bittersweet ending of the last book, making it incredibly exciting when the barriers between them started falling away in the second half. And it's not like nothing was happening, either. Things happen. Everleigh was battling to gain respect as Starford's new ruler, and also investigate some supernatural menace; Gwendoline and Niles were trying to search for four lords of the land, while the emotional distance between them grows to become a yawning crevasse. There was good stuff there, it was just a bit too slow to hold my attention reliably.

Thankfully, like I say, everything switched gears in the second half. The main characters have to actually start dealing with some of the fears and resentments keeping them apart, as their enemies become much clearer and more threatening. The atmosphere electrifies! There's a skin-crawling scene where the “baddies” reveal themselves, and then an incredible sex scene shortly after. The climax (which takes up the last fifth of the book) is all so tense and unpredictable, it had me glued to my screen for the hour and a half it took to read it. And then, yes, the epilogue reduced me to tears. I'd hesitate to call it “bittersweet”, but there was a real note of sadness to the happy ending that I found very moving.

Overall, this is a worthy follow-up to Long Grows the Dark, even if the first half demanded a little persistence from me. The ending is just brilliant, making this a must-read if you enjoyed the first book.

I wasn't completely sold on this novel in the beginning, but man did I get more and more sucked in. This is a novel about time travel, and in particular about how an amoral bureaucracy has established a hardline monopoly over time travel. In this the book is somewhat similar thematically to The Psychology of Time Travel, which I also really enjoyed. However, in Here and Now and Then the emphasis is less on the world-building and ensemble cast and more on one singular POV character and his emotional turmoil as the bureaucracy's bungles and subsequent callousness put his family into jeopardy.

At the outset of the story, Kin Stewart is apparently an ordinary suburban dad, happy husband to Heather and devoted dad to 14yo Miranda. The secret he's hiding, though, is that he's actually a time-travelling agent from 2142, stranded around 20 years ago after the equipment that had been supposed to return him home broke, and the agency he worked for failed to pick him up again when they were meant to. The agency's protocol stated that he was supposed to lie low and remain uninvolved with the world until they could collect him, but come on – for 20 years?! Kin gave up on all hope the agency would retrieve him, and let himself live his life. In what is described as a survival mechanism (because, in this book, human psychology can't handle remembering two different eras of time as “the present” without medicinal aids), Kin forgets all about his life in 2142, but doesn't forget his semantic memories about being a time traveller, working for the agency he works for, the internal policies and hierarchies of that agency, etc. Or at least, not immediately. Concerned that he might be forgetting some of it, he writes down everything he can in a journal. He is also beset by strange headaches and black-outs, which he passes off to his family as untreated PTSD.

But then, one day, a strange man (Markus) appears to return Kin to his “home” era in time. Kin is, as you'd expect, extremely reluctant to go home. However, since Heather fails to be persuaded to uproot their lives to go into hiding from some mysterious threat, and Markus assures him that his abrupt disappearance from the 2010s will be “clean”, Kin acquiesces and lets himself be taken home.

What follows is a story that really surprised me with its emotional strength. In his home era, Kin is reintroduced to his fiancée, Penny, and even though his memories of her come back, the emotional intimacy and warmth is something Kin has to rebuild from scratch. From his new desk job, he can't resist looking up what happened to his family after he left, is horrified by what he discovers, and then concocts a scheme to intervene through emails without his employer finding out. When his employer inevitably does find out and sacks him on the spot, he is forced to intervene through even more drastic measures.

Overall, this is a really compelling story about a man trying to do what's right by everyone he cares about, coming up constantly against the unfeeling coldness of the bureaucracy he works for. The book doesn't set its expectations too high – Kin isn't trying to bring down the whole establishment, he just wants to save his daughter – which gives it all an intimate feel. And the characters feel realistic and I surprised myself by how strongly I cared about them by the story's end (except Markus, that guy pissed me off to no end). If you like time travel plots with an emotional punch, this is a good choice.

I first learned about this book during my honours year in 2014. One of my classmates was working on a translation of this book, which at that time hadn't had an official English translation released. She gave a presentation where she talked about the book and a little about the political history surrounding it, and I was like, “Wow, I have to read that someday!”

It's taken me a number of years, but finally I've got there. And even better, I've really enjoyed my time with this book. I think I'd best describe it as a decidedly contemplative read: it devotes a lot of time to describing things like the smells and the tastes of Indonesian food, the atmospheres of Paris and Jakarta, and the tension between different groups of Indonesians, particularly the two camps in Paris (those allied to the New Order dictatorship, and those who fled in fear from it). Another strong thread running through the novel is love – romantic love, familial love, platonic love – with so much of the book spent showcasing the myriad close relationships the different characters have in their lives.

The story begins with Dimas Suryo, a journalist who was abroad covering a conference in Santiago when the 1965 carnage began, with the government slaughtering suspected leftists. Unable to return to Jakarta, he and a number of other exiles in the same position find their way to Paris. There they establish new lives for themselves, centred around running the Tanah Air Restaurant, and Dimas marries a gorgeous Frenchwoman (Vivienne) and has a gorgeous daughter (Lintang), and even after his divorce the three maintain a close bond. However, despite the life he's caved out for himself in Paris, he still longs to “go home”, even if only to be buried there.

There are other perspective characters, but the second main character is Lintang. Born and raised in Paris, she decides to take a trip to Indonesia when her film professor rejects her proposal to make a documentary about Algerian immigrants in France, and tells her he wants to see a film where she explores her own roots. Lintang's never considered visiting Indonesia before, because with her father being a proscribed undesirable she presumes she'd never be granted a visa. However, with the help of her boyfriend Narayana – who belongs to the “allied to the New Order regime” part of Paris's Indonesian community – she is able to get the necessary visa and travel to Jakarta for the first time. There she meets all the relatives and family friends who she and her uncles have only been able to keep in touch with from afar, and she gets involved with a group of young activists working to bring down the dictator Soeharto – and one activist in particular, the dashing Alam.

Maybe it's not a perfect book; it's not the kind of novel I've been excited to pick up and start reading each day, even though I've enjoyed it every time I have picked it up. It had a couple of weird quirks, like having to describe every major character's breathtaking attractiveness. The ending also feels like it could have been filled out a little more. But overall, I found it such a powerful story about dictatorship and exile, about the longing for home, about the bonds between people, about history and the way it can be twisted or forgotten to serve the interests of the powerful.

This was addictive reading. Immediately after I finished, I went to read reviews because it was the closest thing to talking about it with someone that I could do. As such, I've read a number of less-positive reviews of this book, and honestly, many of the issues they highlight are things I totally see. A number of massive plot points from the last book fizzle out to nothing, forgotten, and a couple of characters seem to have done unexplained dramatic 180s in terms of their attitudes to Jude. However, I did not notice or care about any of those things while I was actually reading. I was swept along for the ride.

So why did I enjoy this book so much? Honestly, just lots of great character moments. Jude's confrontation with her father figure, Madoc, felt so high-stakes and thrilling. I liked how the Jude/Cardan thing played out. It was satisfying to see Jude outwit her enemies. For me, it was a rewarding follow-up to the brilliant The Wicked King, and certainly leagues ahead of the first book. Maybe not the tightest-plotted novel ever, but still so fun.

I enjoyed this book just as much as the second one in the trilogy, Adulthood Rites (which you can read my review of here). Taking place perhaps fifty years later, this book follows another of Lilith Iyapo's children, Jodahs. Like Adulthood Rites, it's basically a coming-of-age story where the protagonist is not fully human, but a “construct”, half human and half Oankali. Not only that, though, but Jodahs is also neither male nor female – he turns out to be the first-ever construct ooloi (the Oankali third sex).

Not only is Jodahs a sympathetic character whose story is pretty interesting, but the book continues to deal with many of the same issues that the trilogy as a whole has. Is humanity doomed to tear itself apart, no matter what “fresh starts” we're given, or can we be better? Are the Oankali doing the right thing by tinkering with our genetics and cross-breeding with us to eliminate those authoritarian, destructive instincts, or is that wrong regardless of the outcomes, like the resisters believe? And also, while it's not quite as explicit about it as a book like The Left Hand of Darkness, there is some discussion of how difficult humans find it to comprehend the concept of ooloi, of someone who's not a he or she but an “it”. (I feel like these days the concept isn't quite so foreign, and singular “they” has entered into wider use, but there are still a lot of people who don't understand, and might even be hostile to, non-binary people.) Of course here there is the whole non-human aspect to it as well, where the hostility stems from a fear of difference.

Overall, this has been such an excellent, thoughtful series, ruminating on humanity's failings as well as presenting a unique and well-developed alien civilisation. The first book was a bit slow and heavy on the exposition, but the second and third have tied it all together well. Highly recommended.

2.5 stars. Honestly I was going to rate this three stars, but then the story just abruptly ended when my Kindle said I was 86% done, and I felt SO RELIEVED that I realised this probably wasn't a three-star book for me, unfortunately.

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane starts in rural China in the early 1990s, following a young girl, Li-yan, who belongs to the Akha ethnic minority. Her early life is thoroughly miserable, with her elders reminding her constantly that she's a worthless, unwanted nuisance because she's female, and her mother exasperated and frustrated because she can't even get on board with the ritual murder of babies she'll be required to perform if she's to succeed her as a midwife. In her adolescence, she's supposed to be concentrating on school because her teacher thinks she could be the first person from her village – or even from the general area – to ever make it to university. However, she gets distracted when a tea merchant from Hong Kong arrives in her village, seeking out a particularly exquisite brew from the area. She helps him out, translating for her non-Mandarin-speaking village and even providing extra-special tea leaves from a super-secret grove that her mother tells her not to pluck for this man. She also gets distracted from school by a boy in her class, San-pa, on whom she has a crush and who she manages to get pregnant with before he leaves to look for work in Thailand.

She can't raise a baby out of wedlock – only a few years earlier, her mum would have made her sacrifice it in a ritual baby murder – so she surrenders it to an orphanage in a nearby, bigger town. That baby goes on to be adopted by a white American couple and raised in Los Angeles, under the name of Haley. As for Li-yan, things with San-pa don't work out, but she does become a highly successful businesswoman in the tea industry, and ends up moving out to Los Angeles herself.

There are some good things about this book, so don't let my lack of enthusiasm discourage you if you think this book is a great fit for your interests. My own favourite aspect was probably how it depicted the rapid changes in rural China between about 1990 and 2010. Li-yan goes from spending her childhood in abject poverty to being able to make webcam calls over her laptop when she visits her village, as one example. It's the kind of thing where like, sure you could read a Wikipedia article or something about China's economic growth, but reading concrete examples of how people's lives have changed, even in fictional form like this, helps to drive it home.

But unfortunately, there were also parts of this book that I found kind of displeasing, for lack of a better word, and the good things about this book just weren't enough to overcome that. Clearly I found the murder of babies really distasteful (I know there are reasons why small human societies faced with overwhelming, harsh scarcity had such practices, but it doesn't mean I'm chomping at the bit to read visceral accounts of it!), and the vehement hatred of women and girls shown by the village elders in the early part of the book was pretty tough to stomach, too. Then later on, the book acquires a very different problem of existing in a world where everyone is a multi-millionaire with multi-millionaire concerns. There was a romance that just didn't have enough meat on it to be enticing, and even the central plotline – Li-yan's separation from her biological daughter, and their attempts to find each other – just felt underwhelming. The last chapter randomly being from Haley's perspective also felt befuddling, and I had no real sense that the book was winding its way to its ending earlier than like, one page before that end.

Overall, I felt like the other Lisa See book I read recently, The Island of Sea Women, was just a lot better, even though I wasn't in the right frame of mind to read it when I did. The story was tighter, and the historical detail (compared to, in this case, information about tea) struck me as more interesting. I'm not trying to say this was a bad book though, just one I personally didn't find the most enjoyable.

A really cool fantasy novella. It starts in the present day, where the 119-year-old Ayla (known to most as “Gran”) is hospitalised after a fall, and with the hospital staff warning that she's not really expected to recover, great-granddaughter Cass sits down to listen to one final family story – one that Ayla promises that Cass hasn't heard before. That story begins in Turkey, shortly after Turkey's War of Independence. A British soldier, enamoured with the country, is wandering around it to put off going home. At some point he becomes a farmhand on the small property of a humble, but warmly welcoming couple. Going off in pursuit of a “werewolf” that keeps picking off their flock and is undeterrable by fences, he crosses paths with a jinn and a twisted love story unfolds. It's a compelling read with surprises in store right up to the end, and easily finished in an hour or so! I'd certainly recommend it.

I didn't get around to reviewing the first book in this series, The Cruel Prince, but it's OK because I've now finished this one and this one is better!The Cruel Prince is an easy read with some good stuff in it (particularly in the third act), but I also felt like it took a long time to get going: there was a lot of going to school, and getting bullied by the prince and all his bratty friends at school, and boy drama as one of the bratty friends seems to be secretly nice and seductive but it turns out he was just pretending and is actually still awful, and so it goes. It was a huge relief that despite the short time gap between the two novels, Jude here has matured so much, now in her new position as seneschal of Faerieland.

For me the most enjoyable part of this book was the dynamic between Jude and High King Cardan, who she installed on the throne against his will at the end of the last book, as part of a broader scheme. Cardan hates the position Jude has tricked him into, and is scheming against her just as keenly. As the book unfolds, for the most part they have to work together because their short-term interests align. There's a ton of sexual tension between them, too. But even as they collaborate and flirtatiously tease one another, there's also that awareness that ultimately they're opposed... it's a really addictive love-hate dynamic.

Of course there are also other things going on. In the last book, Jude thwarted the schemes of her sort-of dad (who murdered her real dad) Madoc, and in this one he's keen to repay the favour. Jude's relationship with her twin sister, Taryn, is strained after the boy drama mentioned in this review's first paragraph. Her younger brother, Oak, is safe in the mortal world with her big sister, Vivi, but Vivi's relationship with a “regular person” is showing “Willow and Tara in season six of Buffy” levels of dodginess. The book plays with power dynamics a lot, as well as with loyalty and lies, and I just found it a really compulsive read. Even though I wasn't that big a fan of this trilogy's first instalment, I'm now really keen for the finale, The Queen of Nothing.

I liked the first book in this trilogy, Dawn, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy this book so much more. To give credit where it's due, this is probably because Dawn did all the grunt work laying the foundations for this story. It had to introduce the Oankali, their very alien biology, technology and social structures, as well as a large cast of characters which (many of them) remain relevant in this instalment as well. Now that the reader is already familiar with all of that, Adulthood Rites can move on and just tell the story. It also helps that, where the protagonist of the last book was the somewhat prickly Lilith Iyapo (not that you would blame her or anything...), the protagonist here is the somewhat more likeable Akin, her son. Akin is the product of the Oankali's plans for humanity: with two human parents and three Oankali ones, Akin is a hybrid of both species, uniquely placed to understand the outlooks and concerns of them both.

So, since the end of the previous book, the action has moved to Earth. On the one hand, there are villages of humans and Oankali living together, building the new kind of society the Oankali had envisaged. On the other hand, there are villages of “resisters”, who are determined to live without the Oankali. The Oankali have mostly left them alone, except that they have sterilised them, because they believe it would be immoral to allow humans to pass on the “gene” that makes them commit violence against each other.

Because the resisters can't have their own children, they have resorted to abducting hybrid children who look mostly human, which doesn't really make sense considering their entire goal is to have nothing to do with the Oankali, but you get the impression that Butler is making some commentary on how humans regularly try to “solve” problems with solutions that make no sense. (See: “our society is damaging the climate so badly that the long-term stability of our food and water supplies is in doubt... let's stick our finger in our ears and keep electing governments who pledge to keep on doing it!”) So, the real jumping-off point for this story is when a group of brutish resisters kidnap the very young Akin, intending to sell him for a high price to some resister family. He winds up in the care of Tate and Gabriel, who figured prominently in the last novel. They won't let him go home to his own village, and no one from his village comes to retrieve him, so he is left to grow up for a number of years among the resisters.

The beauty of this novel is the tenderness and emotional nuance with which it portrays Akin's situation. It pains Akin deeply to be separated from his family – especially from his closest sibling, who he is supposed to be near during a critical bonding period – and there are some residents of the resister village who are all kinds of nasty and terrifying. But Tate is always caring towards him, and through his bond with her he comes to empathise with – even if not agree with – the resisters' position. They don't want to live at the sufferance of the Oankali, who are so convinced they know better than humanity what's best for us that they treat humans with the same condescension that we might reserve for bratty children. They want to live free, including free to make mistakes if they want. Although Akin eventually returns to his home village and the Oankali, he does so in a unique position: he has the insight into the resisters' motives that the Oankali lack, and the ability to speak to the Oankali and be listened to that the humans (including non-resisters, like Lilith) lack.

Just like the first book, this is not a story about “goodies” and “baddies”. It's sharply critical of human society, and human nature itself (or at least human nature under capitalism...), and in many ways it makes you think humanity would be better off if it gave up and acquiesced to the will of the unbearably smug Oankali. But, as in many of her other works, Butler here seems to suggest it is better to be free, to not be under the control of any other party, than it is to act in your own self-interest.

So, what will happen in the third and final book, Imago? I would guess that some kind of conciliation will have to occur between the resisters and the Oankali, perhaps brokered by the growing generation of hybrids, but it remains to be seen. I'm sure I'll be picking up the next instalment to find out sooner rather than later.

The previous instalments in this trilogy, Embers of War and Fleet of Knives, have been some of the best space opera I've ever read. Of course they deal with a future where humanity is stretched across a vast expanse of space and relies on highly advanced spaceships, but they do this without ignoring more familiar parts of the human experience: love, family, abandonment, grief... Perhaps it's a sad indictment of most space opera that this alone impresses me, but whatever, this kind of humanist far-futurism is absolutely my jam.

In Light of Impossible Stars, we are introduced to Cordelia Pa, who initially seems nothing more than an unfortunate street urchin on an impoverished, far-flung world near a wormhole called the Intrusion. Of course, it turns out that she's much more than that: her long-absentee father returns to thrust command of a spaceship onto her, and through a convoluted series of events it becomes clear that Cordelia is much more important than she thinks: in effect, she was born to be the key to save humanity.

We are also, of course, reunited with the Trouble Dog and her crew: Captain Sal Konstanz (now battling some heavy grief), mechanic Nod the Druff (now the proud parent to a small army of little Druffs)... and also many of their acquaintances from the last book, like “Lucky” Johnny Schultz and Lucy's Ghost, the spaceship in the form of an eerie young girl. At the book's beginning, crippled by the Fleet of Knives and still pursued by the former poet Ona Sudak, they're gliding and in need of a power source. Through their search, and meanderings in the vicinity of the Intrusion, they cross paths with Cordelia Pa and join forces to tackle the threats facing them.

I think this novel is perhaps the weakest of the trilogy, but not in any way that significantly dampened my enjoyment of it. I just felt like some developments/revelations in the story happened a little too conveniently. Regardless of that, Light of Impossible Stars retains many of the strengths of the first two books: the philosophy of the Druffs, some of the history of the House of Reclamation (a neutral force whose mission is to help all space travellers in danger), the strong pack mentality of the Carnivore-class warships (of which the Trouble Dog is one), their unshakeable loyalty, and the visceral pain they feel at the loss of their pack mates... all of this was just real good stuff. Powell captures the emotions of all different kinds of beings, from all different kinds of societies and upbringings, really well.

Overall, what can I say? If you like science fiction, especially space operas, and you like great characterisation, you NEED this series in your life. It is just incredibly excellent.

If you need more convincing, you might also want to read my review of the first book, Embers of War or my review of the second book, Fleet of Knives.

It's been a few years since I read the only other book of Megan Abbott's I have read, Bury Me Deep. That book was a very love-hate book for me (love the last third for being amazing, hate the first two-thirds for being so slow), but seeing as the other reviews were to the effect that Abbott had written better, I resolved to read another book by her. It's taken a long time, and in that time Abbott has stopped writing noir and started writing more mainstream mystery/thrillers, but man am I glad I did.

This is probably the most compulsive book I've read so far this year. Although on the face of it it's a murder mystery, really the most compelling thing about it is how it delves into one family, the Knoxes – their secrets, buried resentments, breakdowns in communication – and the world of competitive gymnastics. It's told from the perspective of Katie Knox, a thirtysomething wife and mother to two children – 15-year-old gymnastics prodigy Devon, and the oft-forgotten 10-year-old Drew. After a gruesome accident with a lawn mower when Devon was three, Katie and her husband, Eric, decided to enrol her in gymnastics classes to help her regain confidence in her body. Devon turned out to actually excel at gymnastics, and so Eric and Katie have come to sacrifice hugely – taking out a second mortgage on their crumbling house, or (in Katie's case) spending hours upon hours at the gym every day watching Devon practise – in the hopes they're giving her the best shot they can at making the Olympics.

But things start to unravel when Ryan, a charismatic young man who does odd jobs around the gym, is killed in a hit-and-run. It's not so much that the mystery is a real head-scratcher (it's not), but the way this event exposes so much dysfunction within the family and inside the “booster club” of “gymnastics moms” (and Eric) who fundraise for the gym. There's a ton of middle-class pettiness between the mums, vicarious competitiveness and snide put-downs made against one another's daughters. Within the family, you have Katie beginning to wonder whether the “win at all costs” mindset of competitive gymnastics is really good for Devon, while Eric becomes (from the perspective of Katie) increasingly unhinged insisting that it is. And all the while there's Drew, suffering from a fever for most of the book, noticing things that no one else feels they have the time to hear about.

So for me, what made this such a page-turner wasn't my desire to find out whodunnit, but the fact that I wanted to know what happened next. As chaos started setting in all around, I had to wonder: What was going to happen to this family?! To Katie? To Devon? Or even with some of the side characters, like Ryan's mum or his girlfriend, Hailey? That's what had me frantically flipping pages to the end.

It's not a book full of likeable characters – they feel realistic, but it's largely a world of self-absorbed people making utterly selfish decisions. That might be a turn-off for some people. I couldn't help but feel a bit disappointed by the ending, although I'll admit it was built towards over the course of the book.

Regardless of that, though, I really enjoyed this book. In its skewering of “teens doing competitive sport at high levels” culture, it treaded some of the same themes as Barracuda, and with its dark tone and treatment of domestic dysfunction it couldn't help but remind me of Gone Girl, either. All good books, and I'll definitely be back to read another one by Megan Abbott.

I've fallen behind writing reviews of the books I've been reading this year, so I thought I'd try to write some shorter reviews just to catch up.So, Imagining Argentina is one of the books Goodreads has been recommending to me for yonks, because I've read a number of other novels set in South American dictatorships in the same period – [b:Of Love and Shadows 16532 Of Love and Shadows Isabel Allende https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386919975l/16532.SY75.jpg 205630], [b:Senselessness 2635557 Senselessness Horacio Castellanos Moya https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1406349559l/2635557.SY75.jpg 2660267], [b:The Story of the Night 193897 The Story of the Night Colm Tóibín https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347773763l/193897.SY75.jpg 1441368], and most of [a:Carolina De Robertis 2740834 Carolina De Robertis https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1566398184p2/2740834.jpg]' work – and those are all fantastic reads if you're considering picking up this. This book, obviously, deals with many of the same issues as those: political repression, disappearances, torture. But it also has a bit of a different feel about it. It certainly has some magical realism vibes, with the main character, Carlos Rueda, blessed with some clairvoyance enabling him to reveal the fates of many of Buenos Aires' disappeared. But it's also, if I can say it, a little less engaging than the other books I've mentioned. The many vignettes within are, I think, emotionally impactful in isolation... but they're all rather disconnected from each other, so the novel feels a bit disjointed and lacks a compulsive, “must read more!” quality.I want to be clear that I did like this book, and it's as good a reminder of the regressive bloodlust of right-wing regimes as anything else. Parts of it have certainly stuck in my mind: there is a subplot where one of the fates Carlos Rueda reveals is that of a boy who “disappeared” in Nazi Germany, which has stuck in my mind, and some of the commentary on how the Argentine regime saw it as their duty to “purify” the country of all “subversive”, left-wing influences before they could leave the way clear for a restoration of democracy. Really, lots of parts. It just wasn't the kind of book that keeps you reading anxiously to the end.

It surprised me that I ended up enjoying this book; even at the halfway mark (300 pages in!) I was grumbling that it was so dry and unengaging that I thought it'd barely scrape two stars. However, the more advanced the spider civilisation became, the more interested I became in the story, and by the last third or so I found it a real page-turner.

It's also one of those cerebral books that tries to provoke thoughts more than it does entertain. Children of Time is set deep into the far future, and is mostly about humanity's tendency towards self-destruction. At the very beginning, Doctor Avrana Kern is attempting to begin an experiment on a terraformed world, whereby monkeys will be infected with a nanovirus to hasten their evolution, in the hope that this results in a version of humanity without the same flaws. The experiment is sabotaged by a member of her own team, so the monkeys never land, and instead the planet is populated by ants, spiders, and other creepy-crawlies – with the nanovirus taking root in the spiders. Avrana Kern herself manages to make a getaway while everyone else on her team is killed, and places herself in suspended animation, anticipating rescue.

Rescue never comes. The conflict that destroys her team ends up also destroying Earth, and nearly all of it – just excluding a thin band around the equator – is covered in ice. Humanity's numbers dwindle precipitously, and as day-to-day survival takes up so much of their time, they lose the cultural and technological knowledge that Kern's generation had. Once the species stabilises enough that they can build their technological base back up again, they cause global warming and discover that the permafrost had been covering oodles of nasty poisons. To escape that, they have to put as much of humanity as they can into suspended animation, and send them out into the stars in pursuit of a new, habitable planet, on a vast ship called the Gilgamesh.

The half of the book that focuses on the humans details the struggle of the Gilgamesh's crew to find a planet they can land on. They find Kern's planet, but the AI of the computer keeping Kern's suspended body alive denies them permission to land. And so they remain in space, generation after generation, with the egotists on the crew plunging them into a series of petty, destructive conflicts and with the machinery of the ship slowly but steadily deteriorating beyond the ability of the crew to repair. The main perspective here is that of Holsten, a classicist who periodically comes out of suspended animation to despair at how humanity is falling back into the self-destructive habits of the Ancients before going back into deep sleep again.

Meanwhile, on Kern's planet, a sophisticated arachnid society is emerging, and flourishing. Like I said, I found the first half of their plotline, where they're mainly fighting wars against ants, really boring, but they got exponentially more interesting once they had an actual civilisation going. The spider society is no utopia – one of the major threads running through the book is male spiders' struggle to be given respect and authority on par with females (or at least enough that the females will stop killing them after mating for sport) – but the depiction is sympathetic. Honestly, it's remarkable how well Tchaikovsky has depicted this society which is profoundly non-human, but still made them understandable, and even relatable, for an obviously human readership.

There are definitely some aspects to this book that some readers will find unsatisfying. The ending is a bit of a conceit, if a conceit set up from early on in the book – despite what the cover might suggest, this is not “hard sci fi” in a scientific sense. Most of the human characters are extremely unlikeable. The universe it presents is, mostly, bleak. And overall, its merits are way more that it stimulates the mind rather than grips you by the feels... so if you prefer books that you have more of an emotional investment in, this is not ideal. It is, nonetheless, a very accomplished book that I'm glad to have read, even if it was rough going a lot of the time.

Not a conventional mystery novel – while the first chapter describes two young girls going missing, every chapter thereafter is from the perspective of a different person on the remote Kamchatka Peninsula. Most of them don't know the girls at all, and as such the news of their abduction becomes just part of the background noise to these many different characters' lives (until the last chapter, from the perspective of the girls' mother).

There is in fact a resolution to the mystery, but that's not the main reason to read this novel. Its real strong point is its elaborate depiction of this remote and troubled part of the world. Through its wide range of perspectives, a number of different issues are touched upon: misogyny, racism, the legacy of the Soviet period and the post-Soviet economic crisis, homophobia, elitism, the difficulties of being young in a remote area (the lack of job opportunities, or a large enough pool of people to date that you don't “have” to settle for a less-than-ideal option...). It's very interesting and skilfully done. Don't go into this expecting a real mystery novel, but if you like literary fiction exploring social issues in different parts of the world, this will make a great read.