Jessica

This book read a lot like an episode of Midsomer Murders (except with Americans in it). It's got shady cultists, pantomime villains, and the setting of a quaint old university town in England's south-east. It wasn't really my cup of tea, but if you like the sound of that then by all means give it a try.

This book was an easy read, but I can't say it was particularly impressive. It tells the story of Ellie, an all-American (and Jewish) schoolgirl who goes to Berlin on a school trip, touches the string of a red balloon, and finds herself instantly transported back in time to the eastern side of the city in 1988. She finds out that the red balloons are part of a long-term people smuggling operation: a clandestine magical organisation exists which creates these balloons to transport people out of dangerous places. With no obvious way to return home, she crashes in an organisational safe house with two other young people, immediately throws herself into a corny and unnecessary romance with one of them, and then gets caught up investigating a string of red-balloon-related murders.

While the bulk of the book takes place in 1988, there are also a number of chapters set 45 years earlier, where a Jewish boy relays his experience living through the Holocaust. These chapters were naturally pretty grim, but I also felt that they were by far the best part of the book. The Nazis' cruelty was viscerally clear, but we also saw people striving to resist: admiring the resistance put up by other ghettos, covertly practising their faith, communicating illegally with people outside the ghetto. This plotline could not fail to be tragic, but it was heartfelt and powerful.

Unfortunately I cannot say anything similar for the East Berlin chapters, at least not in regards to how they depicted their setting. In these, there is a lot of editorialising to keep reminding the reader that East Germany is a horrible, oppressive police state while the West is a beacon of freedom. It's an irritatingly trite take, and the book would have been better served by leaving those remarks out and just showing us what East Germany was like, you know, through the story. What did come across in the story felt like a more nuanced take, if still a bit surface-level in some respects – but perhaps that's to be expected when both POV characters in 1988 are outsiders to the country.

I thought Ellie, the protagonist, was pretty annoying. She has a really interesting plot thread to do with her Jewish faith and her family history (her grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, did not want her to go to Germany in the first place)... but it's also her POV chapters doing the bulk of the “Americans good, East Germans bad” thing. Kai and Mitzi, the other members of the trio, were much more likeable as far as I was concerned. All the other 1988 characters felt kind of generic, and the denouement lacked impact as a result. (I also thought it was unnecessary to have a whoooole thing stressing to the reader that Nazis are really, super evil, like you could have read the book up to that point and not got that.)

Despite this review being mostly negative, I did enjoy reading the book overall. The story moves along well, the prose is pleasant to read, there were a bunch of interesting passages, and I enjoyed the whole story thread about Ellie's heritage. I think I feel particularly frustrated because it was an idea with a lot of potential, but some fundamental mistakes (like the extraneous romance subplot and the simplistic depiction of East Berlin) really let it down.

Taste is subjective, and this book definitely won't please everyone (it spends a lot of time on love triangles and destiny), but I loved it. The story begins hundreds of years in the past, when a group of friends tried and failed to defeat an immortal, powerful spellcaster to prevent the forced marriage of one of their own. In the throes of defeat, they laid the seeds necessary to try the battle again at some point in the future. The majority of the book follows Gwendoline, the reincarnation of one of those friends, as she struggles with carrying out her destiny and also with a similar love triangle to the one that plagued her predecessor.

It's the kind of story that lives or dies on the strength of its characters, and evidently the good news here is that the characterisation is top-notch. The members of the core group are painfully true to life: pining after people they can't have, being indecisive, making bad impulsive decisions and regretting them, letting anger get in the way of working together to do what's necessary... their goals and motivations are often contradictory but so terribly relatable. Of particular note, I think, is the character arc of Everleigh, which was portrayed so well despite her perspective ending up so much at odds with Gwendoline's. Overall, the characters here were just utterly compelling.

On top of that, the prose was excellent: the battle scenes were tense and exciting, the kissing scenes and sex scenes (non-explicit though they are) were alluring, and for the most part the story unfolded at a great pace (although I might have preferred slightly fewer pages being given over to the love triangle subplot). I've spent a long time wishing that New Adult fiction was more of a thing, and now I've found this excellent example of it, I'm wishing even harder that it was more of a thing! This was an extremely enjoyable story.

In terms of its scientific accuracy, We Are Mars is hard sci-fi. Evidently, the story revolves around a colony on Mars. The surface of the planet remains inhospitable to life, albeit staggeringly beautiful to those who appreciate it. Life inside the compound sustaining the colony is tough, as the people there face the challenges of limited resources, crumbling machinery, and a Planet Earth that has lost interest in their project, and as such has mostly eliminated its support.

Not only does the plot look at the difficulties of trying to sustain human life in a hostile environment, but it also explores the dangers of trying to create genetically-perfect humans, a pandemic raging in a small, confined community, and some of the psychological effects of having to live in such a controlled, disciplined environment – where even such things as relationships are banned, because relationships can lead to babies, and babies drain resources that the project would prefer to reserve for the “perfect”, test-tube created, g-mods.

It manages to do all this while telling an extremely compelling thriller of a story (at least until the last part where things slow down somewhat), which is to be lauded. This is a really enjoyable hard sci-fi thriller with relevance to a lot of the topics being raised in the popular science sphere right now.

For me it wasn't quite a five-star book though. Mostly, I felt that it could have done with a bit more polish. There were a number of times that we, the reader, would be told how wise or caring or cool-under-pressure a certain character would be, when it would have been more satisfying to let those characters' actions stand for themselves. There was one specific character who ended up being quite different from what we were initially told her character was like, in a transition that didn't quite feel natural to me. The pace also slowed down considerably in the last part of the book, such that a big confrontation that you might have expected to be the climax of this book ends up being pushed off to the second in the series. Don't get me wrong – despite these doubts, I fully intend to read the second in the series – but that was a bit disappointing.

Overall, even though it lacks a little refinement, the raw excellence of the thriller pacing (throughout most of the book) and the well-researched, superbly-detailed science fiction storyline truly shine. Recommended for fans of the genre.

I'd highly recommend this to all fans of Douglas Adams. It does veer into darker, gruesome territory at times, but maintains a fairly light, humorous tone anyway. That said, this is definitely a book you need to pay close attention to. Don't make the mistake that I did and try to read it when you're very tired, distracted, or on a bus packed with boisterous private school kids, because you will get confused and have to re-read large chunks. This is a book to give undivided attention to.

On one level, this was a really interesting book. Over the week and a half that I was reading it, I spent so much time doing outside reading on the many topics it raised – the Great Fire of Smyrna (and how Greeks were pushed out of modern-day Turkey in general), the rise and fall of Detroit, race riots, “white flight”, and intersex conditions (like 5-alpha reductase deficiency, which Cal, the narrator, has). Although the book was better read in small doses, it was extremely absorbing and even once I'd walked away the themes would keep playing on my mind.

On another level, though, I'm not really satisfied with how the story was told. For a start, first-person omniscient is a weird perspective choice. Cal had an engaging voice, but there were so many times that it just got distracting that he knew so much about, say, what his grandparents thought about when they had sex. As well, the book felt somewhat disconnected. One of the other reviews described this book as being like two books glommed together – like Eugenides had written a compelling 150-page novella about Cal but then his publisher asked him to bolt a 400-page story about the Greek-American immigrant experience onto the start. This might not be what actually happened, but from reading it, you'd be forgiven for thinking it is. Both stories are interesting in their own right, but they don't really gel.

The other issue was that I felt like the story about Cal being intersex came out half-baked. The biological side was covered, and I really enjoyed the story of the younger Callie (as she was at the time) discovering the depth of her attraction to other girls and her friendship with the Obscure Object. The thing was that Cal's entire story up to and including this point seemed to be the story of a gay girl – he even states at one point that he never felt out of place as a girl, and even 25 years later still didn't feel entirely at home among men – and the decision to transition just seemed so rushed. I naturally understand why he wouldn't want “feminising” surgery, particularly given it carried the risk of him never experiencing sexual pleasure again, but his sense that he had to socially transition seemed to stem more from not wanting to be gay. Like, Cal had felt that it was wrong to be attracted to other girls, but if he'd secretly been a dude the whole time then phew! Actually it was OK to be attracted to girls all along – and in fact it proved his masculinity!

To be clear, I don't think Eugenides was trying to say that a defining feature of manhood or womanhood is attraction to the opposite sex. Really, I got the impression that he thinks gender itself is artificial, a social convention that we feel obliged to push onto people. Cal comments, towards the end of the book, that the leap from childhood to adulthood was far greater than that from girlhood to boyhood. Indeed, when he decides to transition, the changes that he makes are superficial things: a masculine wardrobe, a haircut, and learning to imitate men's body language. Cal is still fundamentally the same person he always was. I think it's also an important point that Cal's body – an intersex body – might have been atypical, but it wasn't unhealthy and didn't need artificial interventions like surgery. In the book, Cal never seems to feel ill-at-ease in his own skin: all his problems stem from other people's expectations. When he transitions, he does so because he feels his natural self runs closer to what society expects men to be than what it expects from women (including being attracted to women). However, whether as a girl or a man, the only discomfort he really feels is when he can't meet other's expectations: that is, he never gets his period or develops breasts as an adolescent, and he can't offer his lovers penile penetration as an adult, but these only pose problems in relation to others. Really, for him, gender is how society perceives him: he's the same Cal either way.

Even though it would have made the novel longer than it already is (which is almost 200,000 words – the longest book I've read so far this year), I think it could have done with more material (i.e. any material) on Cal growing up and going through young adulthood. The story ends when he's still only 15, a few months after finding out he's intersex, and aside from a few brief and woefully underdeveloped flash-forwards to 41-year-old Cal, we never really get to read anything about Cal getting to grips with manhood, the way we saw Callie grapple with what it meant to be a teenage girl. To me, this felt like a gaping hole in the story. Eugenides could even have slimmed down the 400-page “migrant experience” story to make more room for this (it was pretty verbose, after all). I think the book is lesser for not having it.

To try and wrap this all up, Middlesex is a ground-breaking, thought-provoking book, but it's also a bit of a mess and I feel like it will be (or will have been already) superseded by better books on intersexuality, the history of Detroit, and immigration (not necessarily all in the same book). It's worth reading, but I now feel like I'm on the look out for better treatments of these same themes.

This is a slow-paced, yet beautifully atmospheric and mysterious book. I've tagged it as fantasy, but it's more magical realism, set on the banks of the River Thames in 1887. There is a large cast of characters and while it was confusing to wrap my head around them all at first (taking notes helped), I was soon enough won over by their portrayals. The story is highly character-driven, which I always enjoy. No book can be to everyone's taste, but if this sounds like it might be up your alley, I highly recommend it.

I'm often a bit hesitant to start reading a space opera. There are lots of ideas and concepts the genre can explore that I find fascinating, and yet a lot of the genre seems to revolve around cardboard cut-out characters and “whose gun is bigger?” petty one-upmanship. Thankfully, that's not at all the case here!

Embers of War is set in a universe some years after an large-scale war that ended in a continent-spanning massacre on the planet of Pelapatarn. The impact left by this war continues to be strongly felt. There are a number of POV characters, including the sentient spaceship Trouble Dog, which had been the one ordered to fire missiles in the massacre of Pelapatarn, and seeks to redeem herself through service with the House of Reclamation – an altruistic organisation that sails through space on a shoestring budget, saving those in danger.

The plot revolves around a rescue mission – a ship carrying hundreds of people has been shot down in a hotly contested solar system where the “planets” consist of gigantic sculptures. Aboard the Trouble Dog, Sal Konstanz and her 2IC Alva Clay are sent to search for survivors. Joining them is a “medic” who turns out to be an unqualified 19-year-old whose father pulled strings to get him a gig. At a stopover point, they pick up two further passengers – Ashton Childe and Laura Petrushka – whose motivations are unclear and loyalty is questionable. Ashton, in turn, is on a mission to recover one specific passenger: Ona Sudak, a poet, although what makes her so important is something he doesn't know.

What impressed me throughout this book was the sheer depth of the characters. These are people (and a spaceship) who carry the emotional baggage of past tragedies around with them. You get to see their soft, vulnerable sides as well as their hard-as-nails businesslike sides.

I also appreciated the bit of philosophy that came through in the book – from the dilemma of whether or not it's right to commit a massacre to end a war, to questions of redemption and how possible that is to achieve, to Nod's conception of the circle of life. I'm not saying that any of these things were explored in great detail, but the inclusion at them at all added a nice humanistic touch (if you can say that about a book where there are many sentient beings other than humans).

Overall, this was a really enjoyable book. There is a sequel already out, which I've duly added to my ever-expanding TBR list.

My sister bought this book years ago for a university literature class and since then I've been begging her to let me borrow it. Finally, she came through with the goods – and what an amazing read it's been!

Marjane Satrapi moves elegantly through topics like the Iranian Revolution, Islamic fundamentalism, the Iran-Iraq war, “exile” and return. She's able to convey so much with so little: the weight of Iran's history and traditions, the brutal regime they lived under and feared before the revolution, and the brutal yet different regime that replaced it; the tragedy of war; the alienation of living in “exile” and the alienation of returning afterwards.

I also adored Marjane herself, as depicted in this memoir: precocious and sassy as a child, unable to restrain her outspoken tendencies as a teenager, and a rebellious young adult who keeps pushing the boundaries of respectable behaviour. She is a flawed character – selfish at times, and especially as the book went on a bit judgemental and withdrawn – but I found this refreshing. I feel like a lot of the time, male characters are “allowed” to be like this, and I appreciated seeing a female version for once.

In English these were originally published in two volumes, and of those I'd say that I preferred the first slightly over the second. The second volume did remind me somewhat of the 2011 film Circumstance, as another depiction of youth culture and rebellion in post-revolutionary Iran. Regardless, Persepolis as a whole is well-deserving of its stellar reputation.

This is one trip of a novel. There are a lot of interesting ideas and it was enjoyable to read, but at the end I feel vaguely confused, like when you wake up from a satisfying rollercoaster of a dream and then realise that actually none of it made any sense.

I guess it'd be too harsh to say that none of this book makes any sense. It's told in the first-person, present tense by Ces, a new arrival to a closed environment of a science experiment called Sound. In this place, food starts to lose all flavour and people lose their desire to eat, because the only thing that truly satisfies is loud, live music.

The world outside Sound seems to have gone to hell in a handbasket, with references to massacres, food shortages and other great disasters. The world inside Sound isn't very nice either, but you get the impression that people volunteer to be here because it's the greatest chance at security they have.

The story follows Ces as things in Sound go from bad to worse. I think I made a mistake trying to read this book on public transport – distracted is not what you want to be when you try to read this. There are too many characters to keep track of and, as mentioned, the plot is rather dreamily confusing. It's definitely interesting, though, and there is a satisfying conclusion.

A truly brilliant book. With a wide ensemble cast this is a novel with a lot going on, but it's interwoven well and told at a brisk, yet not rushed, pace.

As the title suggests, this is a story about time travel. There are a ton of interesting details about how that works in this universe: for example, there are no paradoxes, you can't go back and change time, every action that future time travellers have taken in the past is already accounted for. You also can't travel to before the existence of time machines, or to after their presumed destruction in the twenty-fifth century. Time machines in this universe are all under the control of a bureaucratic organisation called the Conclave, with a callous and somewhat sick culture. As you might also expect from the title, the effect that time-travelling has on an individual's psychology is also a big focus of the book.

But it's not just a book with some fascinating premises at play – it's also a book with strongly-developed, compelling characters and an intriguing plot. The main plotline concerns a murder – a twist on the “someone is shot dead, clearly not by themselves, in a room locked from the inside” trope. The victim of the murder isn't even known until over halfway through the book. There are a number of other interesting subplots too, dealing with work, family and love (the latter particularly in regards to a lesbian main character).

The only criticism I can really make is that it wasn't exactly a page-turner; with so many bite-sized chapters I felt pretty comfortable putting this book down at any old time before diving in sometime later. As such this is perhaps more of a commuters' book than one you'd sit down to read in one sitting. In case it's not clear, this is a very weak criticism; lots of meritorious books lack that compulsive, “I must binge this whole thing now” quality and sometimes it's nice to have one you can savour (and commute with without anguish). Highly recommended!

This book reads a lot like someone wrote up whatever happened in their RPG game – especially for the first 40% or so where the main trio are journeying ever-deeper into a dungeon, fighting rats and enchanted skeletons and stuff.

I guess the core plot is OK, but the book is extremely slow and the characters all feel pretty generic. There's a lot of emotional whiplash too... like there's a scene where they have to fight umpteen mooks at once, and they're all having a great time knocking them out but then they accidentally kill one and this is The Worst Thing Ever. Then very late in the book, they're all crying and upset about something Very Bad that's about to happen, but the evil person doesn't know their names so this immediately cheers them all up and they have a good giggle, even though the Very Bad Thing is still just about to happen. So, eh. I think this could've been saved with some rewriting, but clearly it wasn't.

Black Mamba Boy follows a boy named Jama as he struggles through crushing poverty and war in a number of locations: Yemen, Somalia, Eritrea, Egypt, Palestine and England. It's almost more of a travelogue than a novel; we follow Jama as he goes to different places and sees and does different things, but there's no real rising tension or climactic conclusion. Still, depending on your tastes that may well be no deterrent to you.

Blackout is a really enjoyable YA dystopian novel, set in a near-future UK where the government has been replaced by the dictatorial Board. The Board has successfully used “us and them” politics to demonise supposed drains on the economy – including, apparently, the entire country north of Birmingham. A massive wall has been erected to keep those parasitic Northerners out of the South, although most of the North's population has died anyway, after the Board shut off all supply lines. Life in the South is no picnic either, marked by harsh poverty, authoritarianism, and a fearsome criminal underworld. The gloomy, oppressive atmosphere is well-depicted over the course of the book.

This is a heavily character-driven novel, which is always my preference. Some of the characters are stronger than others (crime boss Daniel Redruth, in particular, seemed particularly one-note), but the relationships between them, usually characterised by tensions about how trustworthy anyone really is, are quite good. This is also a dialogue-heavy novel (which is fine by me), and there are regular flashbacks to show the characters' formative experiences and how the genocide of the North came about. Some of the other reviews have complained about the flashbacks being confusing, but I didn't feel that way.

The main thing that I was a bit doubtful about was the romantic subplot. The problem may have been that there was so much else going on in the novel that it didn't feel like the relationship had enough time to develop properly; most of those scenes felt a bit disjointed to me.

Overall, I'd thoroughly recommend this book. It's not perfect but it is very good, with timely commentary on the increasingly common “us and them”-style rhetoric.

Let's start with what's good about this book: the intricately detailed world-building, and the vivid descriptions that bring this world to life. At times, you can almost feel the hot desert winds bringing sand into the cities, or the gloomy cool of the underground water channels, one of which the characters use to travel between worlds. We're introduced to a complicated fantasy society, with a great number of cities within its boundaries, and pre-existing tensions and suspicions that add a lot of interest to Elabel's chapters. All of this, I really enjoyed.

On the other hand, the pacing of the book is very slow, the story is a bit confusing (or maybe it's more that most plot threads never got resolved – I guess the author intends to address them in future instalments of this series), and Elabel was the only character who really grabbed me. Realistically I wish I could rate this 2.5, but I don't think the setting alone warrants 3 stars. So this is a bit of a guilty 2 from me.

This book never really clicked for me. There were a lot of characters (maybe 30 or 40), who mostly all blend into one another, and not all of them get good explanations as to who they are or what their role is in the story. Perhaps because of this, I found the plot very hard to follow. There were a lot of subplots, and those that involved similar people doing similar kinds of things with motives/goals that were not fully clear were hard to disentangle. I know that the main plot involved some kind of betrayal against the company... and our chain-smoking, prostitute-obsessed macho man of a protagonist has to investigate this and exterminate the traitor... but then the company decides to exterminate him instead. Then there was also some poison rain or something, a slave girl with magic powers, and an old nuclear power plant with mutant people hanging out there, ready to attack people like in some cheesy FPS video game. I feel like you would need a notebook by your side to try to understand this book properly, and even then I get the sense the author is purposely leaving lots of stuff unexplained so people will buy the later books in the series. So, hmmm. While apparently this series has its fans, I'm not planning to continue with it.

As an aside, I also thought it was mildly hilarious that in Parry's vision of 2150, everyone is chain-smoking again like it's still 1950. Long-term social trends? Naw, what's that.

This Census-Taker did not start well. The beginning is slow, confusing, and nauseatingly gruesome. There came a point, though – once the narrative had actually caught up to the scene which opened the novel – where the haunting, gloomy atmosphere took over and I came to welcome the confusion.

The novella raises many questions, hardly any of which are answered by the conclusion. It's set in a small, macabre town, impoverished and largely isolated from the outside world. The narrator's father makes a habit of bashing animals to death and throwing them down a hole, for reasons which are never exactly explained to the reader, but can be guessed. He seems to progress to killing people; he seems to progress to killing the narrator's mother. The town has no real policemen, and the volunteers who stand in for them are friends with the narrator's dad and tell the boy that he must have imagined the whole thing. The story continues on.

In summary, this is a dark, atmospheric tale that you should only read if you can handle your questions going unanswered. That said, it's not too bad.

I really wanted to like this book. Indeed, there are some things I did like about it: the main characters are good, and the interplay between them is interesting. In many ways the bonus story was actually better than the novel itself (even though the novel had spoiled all the important parts), because it just examined the relationship between Lot and Bran, and was way more focused.

The main problem with this book is that it doesn't really flow. It's obvious that this was originally a web serial that's been compiled into an ebook. Events don't really seem to be caused by one another; instead, they just occur. And a lot of different, unrelated events occur, making it at times a bit confusing. I felt it could have done with way more text bridging between the chapters and explaining what was going on, how things were connected. The finale (Charlotte deciding to lure Richard over so he would turn her into a vampire, at which point she with her immunity to vampire powers could instead kill him) wasn't really built up to over the course of the book, and the only thing I noticed come up that really could have been an overarching plot (which was Lot beating up a lot of bad guys, and being asked by her priest/brother to go take down a specific bad guy who was hurting children... or something) ended up petering out into nothing, so far as I could tell.

I feel like if I had discovered the web serial version of this, and followed that instead of reading this book, I'd have liked it all a lot better. As I said the main characters are good, and the author has a refreshingly positive take on sexuality (especially considering the novel's setting in nineteenth-century London), although I did grow weary of how many minor characters felt the need to hurl sexist slurs at Lot (like, I just felt I'd got the point by the time it had happened three times already). I don't know, am I being too harsh? I just feel like a series of short stories with these characters, each with identifiable problems and climaxes, would have been more enjoyable. So, I'm rating this 2 stars for “OK” – potential was there, but it wasn't realised.

What a quick, fun read this was. Minimum Wage Magic (awesome title, incidentally) is a futuristic fantasy book set in the Detroit Free Zone, which I gather is the setting of a number of the author's other books. As a setting, it's nothing short of brilliant: a lawless high-tech urban society with interventionist gods, a city whose geography is constantly being shuffled about, and an extreme level of density that would've put the Kowloon Walled City to shame. It's a setting that screams to have TV series set there – a show with the vibe of Joss Whedon's Angel would work very nicely.The story itself was a bit weaker, but still highly enjoyable. It follows Opal Yong-ae, a graduate of a prestigious university who instead works as a Cleaner – that is, she buys the rights to clean out the apartments of people who've been evicted for non-payment of rent, in return for being able to resell their belongings at a profit. It's not exactly a common career path for someone with her levels of education, but Opal has her reasons: a massive debt to pay, and a strong inclination to live in hiding from the one she's repaying it to.At the outset of the book, Opal has been suffering through a five-month dry spell of not being able to make enough money back from the apartments she Cleans to cover her costs. So, when she gets one containing a dead man and a lot of interesting, mysterious magic, she senses profit to be made. She bids hard on a related apartment, and in so doing attracts a lot of attention: firstly from the bad guys, who are interested in the product of the magical ritual she's trying to piece together, and then from Nik, a fellow Cleaner who also likes profit and can sense that Opal is in over her head.And it is Nik, if anything, who makes up the one thing I didn't find satisfying about this book. From the moment he offers to help Opal, he's really the one who does everything. He knows where to go, who to see, and what needs to be done, while she just kind of tags along. At the end of the book, he's even the one who has to cover Opal's loan repayment, because she hasn't actually figured out a way of doing that despite it being her overriding goal throughout the whole book. The good news is that this is the first instalment of a series, and it is possible (though we shall see) that Opal's character development – becoming a capable person who can largely manage her own affairs – will be a major theme of it.Overall, this is probably a three-star book that gets kicked up a star due to its ridiculously awesome setting. I guess it's worth noting that while this is the first book of this series, there is another set in the same place, namely the Heartstrikers series that starts with [b:Nice Dragons Finish Last 20426102 Nice Dragons Finish Last (Heartstrikers, #1) Rachel Aaron https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1389049309s/20426102.jpg 30107715]. I don't know that dragons were really the most gripping part of this setting for me, but for more time in the DFZ it might be worth a try.

I feel bad leaving such a harsh review on a book that presently only has one other review, because that sways the average rating a lot and other people might not hate this book as much as I did and I'm kind of fucking things up for the author here. And yet, try as I might I cannot find any reason to give this book a second star. This is probably my most hated book since I read Dune.

The main reason I hated this book is the completely garbage morality tale the author felt obliged to impose on every single female character. Literally every woman in the entire book, with maybe one exception, eventually realises that the only true path to happiness is to quit her job, have a bazillion babies, and devote every second of her waking life to doing domestic chores for her husband. The only exception is a minor character who retires after a long career with Child Protection Services, and I'm mostly just assuming that she was happy with her life.

This novel leans really hard on the madonna/whore dichotomy. For all those female characters who haven't yet realised that the meaning of life is being a domestic slave for their husband, they fill their time with all kinds of sexual improprieties. I don't actually believe there's anything wrong with eschewing relationships and just having loads of casual encounters if everyone's on board with that and doing it safely... but this author sure seems to. This author also believes that “sleeping your way to the top” is an actual thing, and has two separate female characters do this (and what a coincidence, these are also the only two female characters with jobs that pay well). What's more, the male characters in this novel get even lousier characterisation: all of them are either embodiments of evil (like Emma's pedo-murderer uncle), or paragons of perfection (the Christian preacher dudes and that boyfriend Emma cheated on because ~she's a whore lol~).

There's a lot of other stuff that annoyed me in this book, too. Emma becomes obsessed with reading her uncle's boxes and boxes of diaries, because she wants to find the “answer” as to why he killed her mother and molested her. She finds the answer on day 1 (it's not like it's really deep or complex), but keeps reading for years and years on end anyway. She has a ton of “symbolic” dreams which are not really symbolic so much as they are extremely bleeding obvious. The ending to this book is extremely bleeding obvious (and I am that person who never figures out who the murderer was in a whodunnit until the denouement). The maid characters aren't very good – one of them randomly resents and snaps at Emma for reasons that are never explained, while the other is given terrible dialogue that doesn't match her linguistic background at all (she doesn't use any indefinite articles, even though Spanish – her native language – has these and uses them almost exactly like English does).

What positive things can I say about this book? Well... the depiction of the setting, Maine, was quite thorough and good. The pace of the novel was quite brisk overall, as well (although there were some pacing issues – events told when they should've been shown, while everything to do with the uncle's diaries just dragged and dragged). There was some realism in having the main character's friends drift in and out of her life, rather than having an ironclad group that remains equally as close forever.

Overall though, I could not recommend this book. Perhaps if the author had been a bit more upfront about the overtly Christian conservative messaging, I could've avoided it in the first place. It is categorised that way on Amazon, despite none of the blurbs or promotional tweets or the author's own website mentioning this (which is why I didn't notice until it was already too late). Unless you're the kind of Christian who thinks all women should be housewives, I recommend avoiding this book.

This novel had me seriously questioning my recollection of the first two novels. I remember thinking that they were so good, and then this one was just... somewhat mediocre.

Perhaps it was a terrible mistake to let so much time pass between reading the second and third books? By the time I started this one, I'd entirely forgotten that the previous book had ended on a cliffhanger, and I spent the first few chapters trying to remember what was going on. The characters didn't seem as compelling as I remembered them being. Other reviews have said that with the exceptions of Rhy and Holland, not a lot of character development goes on here, and that is true. Then between about 10%–60% of the way through the book, the plot progresses so slowly and it takes seemingly forever for the characters to decide what to do about the major problem facing them. Once they finally get an idea, they take detour after detour on their way to pursuing that idea. There are random chapters from the POV of minor characters who aren't even in the same London where the bulk of the action is happening, but a parallel one where nothing much is happening. It all just dragged so much, and it was hard to motivate myself to keep reading.

Then, from about that 60% mark, things started picking up. I wouldn't say I loved the book from that point on, but at least I felt engaged. I'd give this book 2.5 stars if Goodreads let me, but it doesn't really deserve a mere 2, so I'll round up.

I mean, there are good things about this book. The prose is high-quality. The system of magic is still interesting, although (and this might be because it's been two and a half years since I read the last instalment) I was never fully clear on what the actual limits were on what the main characters could do. You have a bit of ordinary, non-magical conflict between rival kingdoms in the world of Red London, which seemed a bit more interesting than the magical conflict, and exposed more interesting world-building. As I said before, Rhy goes through some interesting character development (considering he was never exactly my favourite character in this series), while Holland is just consistently this book's best character, from beginning to end. Lots of depth to him, darkness but also softness.

Overall, though, I feel relieved to have finally made it to the end of this book, and glad to have finished the series.

This is a wonderful book. Written in the first person, it tells the story of Richard Garay – a half-English gay Argentine – in such warm, intimate detail that you end up sucked in right through to the end. It starts slowly, with so much seemingly irrelevant detail that the first half can get a bit tiring, but it picks up.

Fundamentally, this is a story about Richard's longing to be loved and accepted for who he is. His parents were unable to give this to him, and despite a series of casual encounters which he very much enjoyed, he couldn't get it through his love life either until he found Pablo. The passages detailing his love for Pablo, their sweet domesticity, the simple happiness of being in one another's company, are some of the most enjoyable in the book. However, set in the 1980s, the spectre of HIV/AIDS rears its head and interferes in their blissful relationship.

As well as being a universal story about love, and a “gay” story about HIV/AIDS, this is also a story about Argentina and the tumultuous changes it was going through in the 1980s. This never becomes the main focus of the story, despite Richard being in prime position to observe the changes going on. Early in the book he describes being disturbed from a sexual encounter by lights going off and on at a police station across the street, and all the cars with their bonnets open so the power can be piped into the building. He asks his lover for that evening why, and the answer, of course? Because someone is being tortured inside. Later he tells a group of Americans that he hasn't known anyone who was harmed by the dictatorship, only for a classmate to interject with quiet indignation, and say that he's not sure how he can say that, when a mutual classmate of theirs was abducted and thrown into the ocean.

For the latter part of the novel, Argentina is transitioning to democracy, and selling off all its institutions to wealthy businessmen in North America and Europe. It's known by everyone that this policy will lead to mass suffering in Argentina, but people shrug their shoulders and figure it's simply what must be done. The picture Tóibín paints of Buenos Aires is bleak and cold, that of a worn-down city which lacks the energy to make anything better of itself. It's sad, but vividly portrayed.

Overall, this is an excellent book which – despite its slow start – I would highly recommend.

If any lasting harm had been done to Kleinkat, I'd have rated this book one star, I swear to God.

So, I read this book to learn a little bit more about the history and cultural background of South Africa, which I'm travelling to in just a few days and where my partner's family is from. Philida is a reasonable book for that, but it wasn't really a particularly enjoyable story. There is a lot of senseless cruelty (against cats and humans) which might be accurate for the period, but is unpleasant to read about. Philida herself is a good character, but everyone else in the story is rather shallow and often inconsistent. Frans Brink was particularly contemptible. It's not like there was nothing interesting or good about the book, but there was a lot dragging it down. Two stars.

There is a lot to like about this book. It deals with the potential environmental catastrophe facing this planet, from over-pollution to the collapse of food production. It imagines what human societies might look like after the crisis, with some in dome cities, others taking their chances scavenging in the poisonous wilds, others yet trying to establish free colonies. It also examines another interesting question, that of what is consciousness – can you transfer it into a computer system? Can you make copies of consciousness – make duplicate people? The pace of the book is brisk, with just enough description to bring its various locations vividly to life – humid biospheres, creepy fields of eyes...

This novel's downfall, I felt, was in the characterisation. While the setting and background information were thoroughly established, the characters and the relationships between them were not so convincingly portrayed. There was an entire romance that developed over the course of one “then a few weeks passed” paragraph. David Sparks himself lacked a strong identity, which is of course the point of the book, but it made him a less-than-gripping protagonist. Most of the side characters seemed to lack depth, too. There are a lot of things Aicher did well, but strong characterisation was not one of them.

Overall, your enjoyment of this book is going to vary depending on what you want to get out of it. If you're looking for a philosophical futuristic mystery with an ominous warning about where our society's wanton environmental destruction is taking us, then jump right in – it's excellent at being that. If you were hoping for more of a character-driven tale through the future, then recalibrate your expectations. I enjoyed this book, but it wasn't all I'd hoped it would be.

I've read both of de Robertis' previous novels, [b:The Invisible Mountain 5981625 The Invisible Mountain Carolina De Robertis https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1320552093s/5981625.jpg 6155001] and [b:Perla 12303508 Perla Carolina De Robertis https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1333576681s/12303508.jpg 17280681]. I adored them both. These tales of dictatorships and strong, decisive women have stuck in my heart for years now. I was disappointed that I did not enjoy The Gods of Tango the same way. I think primarily, it was a case of my expectations being too high – this was still a good book, and dealt with a theme I find interesting (namely, women in history refusing to comply with the norms forced on them by virtue of their sex)... it just didn't meet the dizzying heights of the others.So. This novel tells the story of Dante, who starts out as Leda, a seventeen-year-old widow who's just travelled across the seas from small-town Italy to Buenos Aires to be with her cousin-husband, only to discover he'd been shot dead at a protest just before her arrival. This poses a problem, since for a single, working-class woman in 1910s Buenos Aires, there is no way to keep oneself afloat besides prostitution, a fate Leda naturally wishes to avoid.So she reinvents herself. She takes a violin she brought over from Italy and her husband's clothes, and becomes Dante. Through persistence and a highly fortunate prodigious talent for the violin, she joins a tango orquesta and earns a living as a professional musician. She quickly adjusts to the masculine world, one of boozing, smoking and whoring. She finds other women alluring, irresistible, but is distressed by her inability to truly be intimate with them, seeing as she can't ever risk her secret being exposed. At last, she meets another woman, one who found a different way of transgressing those feminine gender norms, and they share a happily ever after together.Put like that, I very much enjoyed this story. On the other hand, the plot moved very slowly (and the entire first half held nothing that you didn't already know from the blurb, which seemed like a poor choice on the publisher's part) and the characters were less than strongly portrayed. At times I felt like the author got too caught up in her beautiful melodic prose (and really, it is lovely) and forgot to ensure the plot was rock-solid. There were a couple of sections where she switched to the point of view of another character, not Leda/Dante, when that wasn't really necessary. There was a fairly prominent subplot that ultimately proved pointless (all we learned was that sometimes girls are raped by their fathers... was that necessary?). The ending seemed to move a bit too quickly, and be a bit too neat. I felt that Leda/Dante herself was a bit of a cipher, someone who adapted her entire being to her circumstances rather than having a strong core identity of her own... which was, perhaps, the point, but I found it somewhat unsatisfying.Overall, I'd call this a worthwhile read if the themes or setting particularly interest you, but the story itself seems a bit on the weak side. A solid three-star book.