Jet Silver
This bugs me. Every time Lily reveals her past to a man, this happens:
Lily: So, Man I Do Not Even Have a Close Friendship With, here is my matter-of-fact story of why I have boundaries and won't let you push. I was kidnapped, restrained for days, gang raped and tortured. I'm only telling you this because you're making it impossible for me to get on with my life until I do.
Man: Huh. Let's have sex. *begins touching without asking*
Seriously. And I want Lily to be all, OMG, are you for real? How dare you not use your words and ASK if I would like be closer to you, especially after what I just told you five minutes ago?
But that doesn't happen and that makes me ARG. Especially since the men in question are all some stripe of profession that means they deal with assault victims in their jobs and should know better.
Also the slut shaming should stop. The way Lily thinks of Deedra is just gross.
This is one of those times I really wish that books came with trigger warnings. It's well done - better done than I have ever seen in a genre book - but Lily is a rape survivor, and her past is very much a part of her everyday life. I kind of loved this book because I so rarely see a survivor's story done in a way that seems realistic and respectful. I kind of hated it because it was so real. But I really, really liked Lily.
Dresden has jumped the shark. It's fallen into the trap that so many supernatural procedurals do - progressively and exponentially overpowered characters, steadily expanding retinue into a cast of thousands, and increasingly ludicrous enemies and plots in order for the overpowered character to have a “believable” adversary.
It's no longer a loner-solves-a-case series, it's an EPIC BATTLE FOR ALL OF EXISTENCE! EVERY BOOK! series. Which is not inherently bad, but it's a very different beast and it handles differently.
I felt like the jokes were very forced in this one, as well.
And then there was what really pissed me off about this book. Suddenly, Harry - who I will admit has never been brilliant about not being a sexist dick, but was not so bad after the first couple of books - is suddenly all, "A woman! Rape rape rape! I could totally rape you! Right now! I'd love to! But I won't because I am a Good Guy, and you should give me many cookies for that." It happened every single time a woman is on the page, with the exception of Lacuna (who still has a paragraph devoted to her hotness) and Murphy, who he'd rather kill, apparently. Oh, and Mab, but he's already slept with her, so. It was extremely off putting, as was the fact that the first thing Harry says about every single female character is how hot she is. ALL OF THEM. AAAAARRRRG. Dude is seriously disturbing. I'm making someone else read the next one first so I know how much skeeve I have to brace for. I predict that things with Molly go from "iiiiick, creepy" to "oh no you didn't".
Loved it! My favourite read of the year so far. I'm so glad for the Australian Women Writers Challenge, because I never would have found this book otherwise. It's not my type of book at all, except that it really, really was. I ripped through it in a day.
The sense of place was just wonderful, and I fell a little in love with the Pilbara along with Lena. The characters are memorable and engaging, and the romance was full of tension and spark. I say that as someone who is decidedly not a romance reader.
Loretta Hill has done a skillful job in the slow reveal of Lena's character, her secret, Bulldog's secret, and the progress of the Pilbara project. All of the storylines in the book are engaging and tied up in a satisfying way.
I loved Hill's use of Australian slang and dialect to give her characters their own distinct voices, and I really enjoyed Lena's solutions to her engineering problems - social and structural.
This is a smart book, with likable characters, great pacing and all kinds of spark.
It's not that this is a bad book, or the writing quality is any less than the usual from Ilona Andrews, but I feel like I've read the same story three times now. Not sure I'll come back to the Edge series. I don't think I'm all that interested in another go-round of the story of the dirt-poor, tough-as-nails Edger woman meeting the super-spy untamable loner man who comes to disrupt her life with his mission against the Hand. And then they get married! And move to nice houses in The Real Magic World!
The research is thorough and some of the chapters excellent, but the writing overall is far too academic to be readable. For myself as a non-academic reader, it was slow and painful going with bursts of brilliance.
The chapter dealing with cyberpunk was a standout and the whole book worth reading just for that. I also enjoyed the tracing of fannish history through the years.
I was excited to find this, during a post-Christmas Melbourne bookshop crawl. I'd wanted to go to one of the live Women of Letters events when they were on, but it was never possible. This is a project of Marieke Hardy (who I've followed since the days of her blog, Reasons You Will Hate Me and through her time as a presenter on Triple J breakfast radio) and Michaela McGuire. Even better, the Women of Letters project supports a charity I'm very fond of: Edgar's Mission.
I enjoyed this read. A collection of letters written on given topics by Australians of note, generally in the arts field, and organised into sections by those topics. Because of its letters format, it's easy to pick up and read a letter or two, then put down and let that process.
As is to be expected when 60+ different contributors are involved, I enjoyed some letters much more than others.
The topics ranged widely, and with varying numbers of responses to each one. The first section, “To the night I'd rather forget”, sets up a common thread. Because the letters were originally written to be performed at the stage events, and because many of the contributors have a background in comedy (and Australian comedy does so love the mocking of the self), many of the letters are written as if they might be material for a stand up routine. Many of the contributions in the book hold the writer's failings up for ridicule, which is very well done in some cases, but is not something I enjoy very much of. I preferred the contibutions from women with different backgrounds, particuarly Noni Hazelhurst (“To my ghosts” and “To my first boss”), Megan Washington (“To the best present I ever received”) and Joan Kirner (“To my turning point”).
Certainly, some of the topics were more intruiging than others. “A love letter” was the most responded-to prompt, with seven contributors, and together with “To my twelve-year-old self” seemed the most overdone of the topics - which is not to say the letters were of a lower quality, just that the topics have been done so many times before.
I loved the sections for “To my first pin-up”, “My first boss” and “The moment it all fell apart”.
I thought that the collection could have done without the two sections for men, “To the song I wish I'd written”, and “To the woman who changed my life”. Two of the six letters in the “Changed my life” section are beautiful, true celebrations of a treasured woman in the writer's life - one a sister and one a wife, from Ben Salter and Eddie Perfect respectively. The other four are male-centred dreck, and the first one is for some reason written to Desdemona as if from Othello, by way of Paul Kelly. Why is a letter from a fictional man to the fictional woman he betrayed and murdered in here? Other highlights are the one to woman-as-monolith (No, really, the whole thing is addressed to “Woman”), the one about my-wife-is-awesome-because-otherwise-I'd-be-dead-of-my-own-stupidity-but-I-wish-we-had-more-kids (hi, Bob Ellis, you misogynist old asshat), the childish offering from John Saffran (parody song about thinking his girlfriend's mother is hot), and the self-indulgent plea to be forgiven by an ex courtesy of Tim Rogers.
I would have loved to have seen women's responses to the “To the woman who changed my life” topic.
Still, I very much liked this taste of so many different women's voices, some whose work I knew of, and others who were new to me. It's an engaging, funny, honest, shocking and beautiful collection of works.
I was so very pleased to discover Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher detective series, set in 1920's Melbourne. I was so surprised by a book featuring a no-nonsense female lead whose best friend is the only female doctor in town (specialising is safe abortions), a maid employed after Phryne exacts revenge on her behalf for a sexual assault, and their adventures as they take down a back-alley abortionist. What! The writing probably doesn't deserve five stars, but my joy at this explicitly woman-positive cast of characters does.
It took a while to get into this book. I found the chopping between characters and times and the same character within times (especially as they are known by different names in different times) to be a bit hard to follow. It wasn't until half way through that I felt really engaged, but the second half was gripping and I immediately ordered the second book in the arc.
Blackout is more in line with Doomsday Book than To Say Nothing of the Dog. That is, people are people, no matter what they live through.
In past Oxford Time Travel novels I've enjoyed the chaos of Oxford, but this time I found it annoying. Just, someone explain to me why this future society in which there is commonplace time travel there is no functioning system of instant communication? No cell phones? No pagers, if you must be a little archaic? I found it irritating that so many plot points hinge on one character not being able to contact another at a critical juncture, and so much Oxford time is spent in physically rushing from building to building searching for someone, or in leaving messages for them with inevitably unreliable message-takers.
I loved that the books stays focused on the historians in the past, and we never have any idea what's going on in Oxford once they're back in the past. I'm very interested to see what the conclusion to the story will be.
I loved this book. It's a wonderful story about friendship between women, and the closeness of a small town.
But. But. It's the story of the friendship of white, well-off Louisiana women, at least one of whom from a plantation background, and at least two of whom had black maids and wet nurses in their homes. I would really like the text to give more acknowledgment to the black women whose labour made their lives possible. The characters are for the most part oblivious, although there is a little more thought from Sidda, the younger generation character.
There's this one exchange right at the end, where the younger-generation lovers are staying in converted slave quarters. Sidda says she feels guilty, staying in luxury within walls that had seen such misery. Her lover replies that they must have seen a lot of joy as well, and then no more is said. I really dislike that kind of casual excusing of slavery as “not all bad all the time”. It added a sour note to a beautiful book.
I wanted to like it. I liked the last one. Perhaps I'll like the next one. I'm still interested in the world and the characters, but as a mystery-based story this failed. It was glaringly obvious this was Resident Evil: Fairies as soon as April's history was related. Also glaring obvious what was happening after the first mention that Terrie and Alex are never in the same place at the same time, let alone the third, and Toby still has to wait for the reveal. Christ.
But what got me the most was the utter lack of both detective ability and understanding of human nature. Eliminating a suspect on the basis of a third party telling you the suspect was the victim's “best friend”, and you believe no one would ever kill their “best friend”? Without even interviewing the suspect? And you're a professional PI? Really?
Also, the really really obvious tampering with the phone system? That Toby knew about from day one? Not ignoring that might have been a start.
Frustrating, author, frustrating. Will read the third book and see how that goes.
As a rant, it's an excellent one and very funny in parts.
I had issues with the ableism of it, and I'm not sure what to do with the anti-gay slurs. Which seem ... not to be slurs to Solanas? Which doesn't give her the right to use them.
Read as a parody of the typical women-hating rant found in an awful lot of books by Manly Man, it's brilliance. Read literally, it's horrifying in parts and very, very clever in others.
For a 60-page work, it's generating more thought than anything else I've read this year.
Huh. Well, I'm glad I picked up Book 17 before I picked up Book 1. Full of typos, to start with - embarrassing! This is a forth edition!
See, what I liked about Imitation in Death was that there was a great story, with excellent characters, and the heroine did not spend as much headspace on sorting out her omg confusing love life as she did solving the murder mystery.
If I'd started with this book, I wouldn't have continued with this series. Dallas falls for a suspect in her murder case, which I could maybe forgive, if he didn't exhibit reams and reams of controlling, pre-abusive warning signs. Christ! The man disregards Dallas's boundaries all over the place, both the ones she has made clear to him and that ones that one hopes not to have to make clear, such as don't break into my apartment and wait for me.
In almost every scene that Dallas and Roarke share, he decides if and when Dallas will leave his presence, disregarding what she wants. Dallas is shown over and over clearly stating her boundaries, Roarke overruling them, and Dallas giving in because, I don't know, as a woman written in a romance genre, she “knows” that this pushy man knows better than she does what she wants and needs? Yeah. Bloody disappointing.
Dallas is in most other ways an excellent feminist character. The rest of her personality doesn't match with failure to read warning signs like this - and she's a cop who tells us she's had plenty of experience with domestic violence. She knows better than to hook up with a man who doesn't listen to ‘no', over and over again.
But the series gets better. I wonder when it turns the corner...
A fun, fast read. I enjoy Kismet rather more than I did Valentine - probably because Kismet lacks the abusive partner plot.
This time around, there's police corruption, nightside politics, genetic experiments, bio warfare, and class warfare by way of body snatching. The storyline sent Jill out on her own by cutting her off from the force and sending Saul out of town. Perry doesn't even show up more than once. Instead, Jill gets Theron as a deputy and a visit from hunter Leon of Texas when she needs help.
I like that Saintcrow calls out overt racism by characters in her text. I like that if she's going to write a canonically racist character, then another character will call the racist behaviour by its name.
I thought this installment was a cut above the last two in the series, although that could just be my relative boredom with crime fighter's love lives - I do tend to enjoy the story more when the lover is out of town.
My main impression when reading this book was that Crichton must have been having marriage trouble when he wrote it. It comes through. In that, “Wow, Author, I'm not sure you meant to show your issues off quite so publicly, and I'm sort of embarrassed on your behalf,” sort of a way.
Also, plot holes. Still, a page turner, if not even managing to be internally consistent. Or have characters react in plausible ways. Or, or, or.
Greg Bear did this plotline much much better, though. Blood Music, if you liked the concept but thought Crichton fumbled it.
Kind of cute story, but I found it boring. I love Willis' Oxford Time Travel universe, but the rest of her work seems to be hit and miss for me. I'm in awe of the research she does for her work, and that's probably the most enjoyable part of this story for me.
I liked the linguistic shifts for this near-future world, and the film references worked into the narrative, but the story itself didn't go anywhere for me.
Connie Willis' research for books just impresses my socks off. The short stories themselves don't always.
I found it hard to decide what to call this, because it's not really science fiction - except in the sense that it's fiction about science.
The story didn't really hook me. I liked the resolution, but the story read to me more like a sitcom than what I was expecting.
Still, hating Flip was good fun.