Lauren
This was a fun little novella with an interesting premise. It's a bit of historical fiction resting on a different choice from 1910, when there was an actual plan to bring hippopotamus ranches to Louisiana. This plan was squashed in real life, but not in this book. In this book, hippos are bred for meat and mounts, but some of them have gone feral. A British expat and his buddies are hired to clean up the feral hippo problem, and hijinks ensue.
I enjoyed the zany plot, the presence of interesting characters like Hero who uses a gender neutral ‘they' pronoun (seamlessly woven into the narrative, by the way), and the idea of the book. Some of the cliches became very old after a while (“it's not a caper, it's an operation” was something oft repeated but without the timing or charm of Locke Cole's “I'm not a third, I'm a treasure hunter” in Final Fantasy VI), and the need for this cast of misfits to be together was never quite clear. Couldn't Winslow have gotten anyone else who could shoot besides the guy who had betrayed him and now developed a gambling problem and associated debts? Seriously. Also why did they want to blow up the gate to let the hippos out, but when the bad guy wanted to let the hippos out the other way that was bad? I didn't understand the complexities of The Plan, and neither did anyone else in the story apparently.
Beyond this, it was a fun read with an interesting crew of characters. I also greatly approve of books that take the ridiculous things in history and make them possible.
I don't know what to write about this book. I loved the worldbuilding about the drowned city and how New York came through the melted ice caps and what happened to the world and the people. I loved how the story was really about all these people who live in one drowned building - the building supervisor who kept everything running, the politician who ran the union of householders, the celebrity, the finance guy, the policewoman, the stowaway kids, the two trouble-making hackers who start the book off and finish it.
But boy, were parts of this book BORING.
There were times when I skipped whole pages, not missing anything, reading a word or two here and there, maybe a sentence. The finance talk, while essential to the story being told, was awful. The ranting of the Citizen was, well, ranting. All of it was essential to the story. But boy, the story was a really boring one with fascinating characters set in the near-future world with sci-fi elements and a few delightful turns of phrase.
I guess my problem with the book is that it was too close to our reality for my liking, and our reality is really a very boring story nowadays, all tied up in stock markets and finance and bailouts, and the people doing the individual things inside of this system are the interesting part. This book keeps to that, and does it well, but for those looking for any kind of escapism at all, you will not find it here.
Nothing not to love in this story. The highlight was the main character, Fatma, and her amazing British style suit, wingtips, and cane to “look exotic”. The story is a simple murder mystery, but the world is fascinating; some kind of boundary between this world and another one has opened, and now people are living among djinn, angels, and ghouls. Definitely recommend for an enjoyable quick read.
An antebellum generation ship is heading to an unknown destination; all that survives of Earth are veiled myths, a few familiar plants, and oppressive social structures.
We follow Aster, a young woman with a very particular way about her who is a healer (or a doctor) and her attempts to navigate out of her low-class station and to find the truth behind her mother's death through coded notebooks left behind. Aster deals with guards who believe they have rights over her body, an adopted sister (ish) who is mentally ill and seems ready to destroy Aster at any moment, and a genderqueer love interest who is perhaps the most powerful person on the ship.
I enjoyed the way gender was portrayed in this book, with all kinds of representation. I really enjoyed the relationship between Theo (the Surgeon) and Aster and how their gender, religious, and caste identities were wrapped up in their relationship. It was an interesting character study throughout.
The story ends with a riot on the ship just as Aster figures out her mother's secret - she had altered the course of the ship so that, I think, it had whipped around a black hole and gone back towards Earth. Aster takes her dead “sister” to the planet in a shuttle to the planet's surface and we end with her experiencing the air and the flora around her. I have to wonder what comes next. Are they the ghosts that return to the planet, once dead and now revived? Was it really Earth or was it another planet? I also find it incredibly hard to believe that this ship would be sent off into the cosmos without a clue of where it was going. Or was the point really to send it away until the Earth recovered from whatever had happened to it? Was that ship a desperate bunch of humans who hijacked the last ship to preserve the species? There's a lot I'm wondering about, and I could spend a lot more time in this universe learning about those details.
This was an unsatisfying ending. There were a lot of plot elements introduced out of the blue and a sudden deus ex machina at the end. Overall, this book and this series is very inventive and a fun ride to read through, but the story seemed like a lot of random events and actions that didn't make any sense. The rest of my review contains spoilers.
I do not understand at all why the conflict between the Meduse and the Khoush escalated, and any hint of an answer we got was supremely unsatisfying. Using amazing earth-based connections to call up a terrifying spectacle that startles the leaders into making a pact of peace, and then it just randomly going to hell and everybody dying afterwards? WTF? What was that even for? Was it just a way to kill Binti?And where did that magic come from? Deep culture? What even was that and why did it have meaning to these other two peoples who had mostly contempt for the Himba? Also, seriously, suddenly the space fish ships have babies and they have powers to restore health and body parts to people, and share consciousness? Bonds? Where did this come from? I would have preferred an ending where Binti had actually died.I did like the sense of home and identity that came through in this. Binti connecting to her various roots, always deeply with her Himba identity through the dress and skin covering, that was a nice touch in this story. Even though she discovered different identities in different parts of herself (and gained them through questionable means), she still stayed connected to her roots. That was a very powerful part of this story.
This book was full of horrors and trauma, as it should be. It was hard to read, mostly because it captured ways of thinking that are horrific and yet, when you read it, you realize that people must have been this way during this period and even today. There book contains some sections that are commentary on today's society in America. The main issue I had in this book was the jumping around in the narrative, the small leaps forward and back in time. That made it hard to follow at points, and while I appreciated the small interludes peeking into the lives and histories of characters other than Cora, these were inserted weirdly and further disjointed the story. In sum, I thought the story was a good one but something was off about the flow of the book for me at least.
I am not sure what the change in the Underground Railroad was supposed to do in this story. In this telling, the Underground Railroad is made up of actual trains running through tunnels under the earth. This causes some people to mark this book as sci-fi, but that genre doesn't fit here. I think the purpose of this change was to separate this story enough that it is clearly a fictional world, even though it is built on this one.
Overall I can't say I enjoyed this book, but it was a good read.
Read for a book club thing at work, given a free copy to do so. While there were some helpful exercises and templates for interaction in this book, these were overshadowed by a sense of “those with power always win” with a sort of token warning that you should do something else in abusive situations. Often the advice for truly abusive (and some possibly illegal) situations at work was to just leave... and let the person in power continue to abuse people. That really put me off of this book. That is a dangerous mindset to be in and a worse one to encourage! Perhaps in the past year or so, sensibilities have changed dramatically and people who have power are no longer just allowed to keep getting away with things. Also the ableist “dimwit” language was incredibly disturbing.
I did find a few helpful ideas in this book, but I would not recommend it. Hopefully there are better books written more recently.
This book is tied to [b:The Black Tides of Heaven 33099588 The Black Tides of Heaven (Tensorate #1) J.Y. Yang https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1485291538s/33099588.jpg 53763120], and don't make the same mistake I did and take too much time before reading the second. I had forgotten many of the details of the first one, and while I've read many folks saying that these two books can be read in any order, I don't believe that this one can stand without Black Tides - or at least it wouldn't be as meaningful. I get to this conclusion from my experience basically forgetting what had happened previously, and not really understanding what was going on. I remembered the parts of the world building - the gender neutral pronouns, the idea that kids choose their gender at a certain age, the idea of the Slack as a magic system - but I had forgotten what had happened to Mokoya and Akeha and where things stood at the end, which made this book a strange experience. This book I found somewhat less enjoyable than its companion because of the monster hunt aspect of it, but also the way that much of the plot seemed to rest on Mokoya flip-flopping whose story she believed and who she trusted. She seemed to trust the people of the Tensorate - who took advantage of her and basically abused her - by instinct, many times missing what were very obvious lies that frustrated me. The character interactions here - which were very powerful in Black Tides - rang false to me this time.The world building was fantastic, though. The idea of grafting the souls of people onto animals was fascinating - the turn that the naga was the princess's mother, that the raptor was Mokoya's daughter - was beautiful and not something I expected. I also found the introduction of the lowered gravity areas and the people whose bodies adapted to them intriguing. I want to know more about this fascinating world!
This is a definite improvement on the first book in the series, with much more detail and a stronger narrative. In this story, Binti returns home from her time at Oomza Uni with her new friend Okwu to figure out her life and try to gain understanding of all that she had learned and been through.
However, the truth is that “you can never go home again...“
Binti learns some secrets about her family and her heritage and we get an interesting glimpse into other Earth cultures.
The one issue I had with this book is the TERRIBLE CLIFFHANGER at the end. Don't do this to me! Fortunately I waited to read this book until the third installment was out, do I'm perhaps less mad about it than I would have been if I'd read this earlier.
As many others have commented, this book is a lot different than what I expected. I found the framing device of the letters from Captain Walton unexpected and helpful for framing the story. I found Victor Frankenstein to be repulsive and annoying. I found “Adam” (the Creature) to be sympathetic and his adventures in learning to be a person fascinating.
The things that surprised me the most were:
1. The actual ‘animation' scene was over in just a couple of paragraphs.
2. Frankenstein literally animates the Creature, runs away, encounters his friend who had serendipitously shown up in the same town as him on that same day and seems to kind of forget that there is a newly animated being in his apartment when he decides to take Clerval back there?
3. The Creature seems to be a vegetarian, subsisting on acorns and berries (and it must have been a lot of them to power such a large body) and could survive even in the cold and apparently could heal pretty quickly as well. If Frankenstein had one ounce of forethought in him, this could have been a really wonderful discovery, but instead, Victor is a self-absorbed douchebag the entire time and can't think about anything besides how ~ugly~ his creation is and how ~horrible~ life is now for him that he's made the creature.
4. Frankenstein actually seems to learn his lesson after one ill-planned science experiment goes wrong and decides not to go through with the second one, even under duress, for the potential even-worse outcomes. I'm shocked that Victor was able to think beyond his own dumbass self for one second.
I am struck by how horribly self-centered Victor Frankenstein is in this novel. He literally can seem to think of no one but himself throughout the entire thing. He put life into the Creature and he can't even stop to think that maybe that gives him some kind of responsibility beyond his own curiosity; he only thinks of what an inconvenience it is to his studies and his lifestyle. Even when the Creature warns that “I'LL BE WITH YOU ON YOUR WEDDING NIGHT” he thinks that, despite the Creature's habit and well-established pattern of killing all of his relatives and associates, instead this time the Creature will kill him. NO, YOU GOTHIC DUMPSTER FIRE OF A PERSON, DID YOU MAYBE THINK THAT YOUR WIFE IS AN ASSOCIATE ALSO THAT COULD FIT INTO THE PATTERN. DID YOU. NO BECAUSE YOU ARE APPARENTLY INCAPABLE OF THINKING ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE. Gah.
I really wish the Creature had strangled Victor at the beginning and then we could have just followed Adam (the Creature) around on his adventures in the wilderness because that was the part I found most interesting.
Overall, I did enjoy reading this story, and I see the science fiction in this story. I thought Shelley's writing was evocative. I just hated the main character and kind of wish he had died early in the story.
I wasn't sure what to think of this book early on, but by the end I found myself fascinated by the world and the hints of the systems that the characters live in. Being “confirmed” (assigned a gender), technology working with magic called Slack, the various religions... this world is fascinating and we got just a glimpse of it.
As an added bonus, this book relies heavily on gender-neutral singular “they” to refer to characters without a gender. It was effortless and it only caused me a little bit of confusion once when two characters who used “they” were talking to each other and I couldn't distinguish who was who (but this same thing happens with multiple “he” characters in the same scene, for example). I loved the language used in this book, not just the pronouns but the rich descriptions and the way the communication between the twins was depicted.
Highly recommend!
This whole series was amazing, but this one really capped off the series in an amazing and fulfilling way.
We finally get to know who is speaking to “you”. We finally see the meeting of mother and daughter that was the start of The Fifth Season (it feels so long ago). We read the history of the Earth and the Moon and understand the source of the magic system.
I can't say I 100% understood everything in this book. There was a lot that I think I missed in the second book that I would read much differently now. I might have to do a re-read of the entire series at some point, and that is not something I do lightly. I think, knowing what the end is, I would read and understand much more, and I think the books would be all the more enjoyable and interesting for that.
If you have been wondering whether to read these books, don't wonder. Just do it. They're amazing with a solid and satisfying ending.
Read on a plane, and it takes place on a spaceship, so the ambiance was there.
I really enjoyed this novella, and although it does seem like a much bigger story, the sparseness of the tale combined with the interesting point of view made for an enjoyable read. I enjoy how Okorafor doesn't shy away from plain language or putting the situation as clearly as possible - this was a fantastic feature of the other book of hers that I've read (Who Fears Death?).
This novella wraps up very neatly, but clearly sets down a foundation for future books. I'm excited to read the others.
I was recommended this book by a friend, and that friend was exactly right - this book and its “multi-potentialite” construct are perfect for me. I needed to read this about 10 years ago, but the next best thing was reading it now.
The first three chapters were super helpful with easy passages to read and helpful exercises. The last half of the book outlines several models of building a career for a multi-potentialite, only one of which I read (because the others didn't make sense for me). To that end, I felt a little bit let down that there wasn't a good solid ending, just these explorations of the constructions. I want to read more about this topic and see more case studies of how people make this work.
I would recommend this to any of my colleagues and friends who feel pulled in many directions, unwilling or unable to choose one. It helps bring some perspective.
This book was a fun read. In fact, I read it all in about 3 hours. The prose was easy and flowed nicely. It reminded me a little of [b:The Rook 10836728 The Rook (The Checquy Files, #1) Daniel O'Malley https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327619585s/10836728.jpg 15750881] which I read at the end of last year. The magic was fun and the constant flow of beast names and dinosaurs was delightful. The book is full of references to places in Southern California. I haven't really been there (except for San Diego, which is only mentioned) and I missed a lot of the references. I'm pretty sure the people were famous (Weinstein is mentioned once... ugh) too, but that's definitely not something I would catch. The plot of this book is, basically, a heist. It's a very complicated heist, made moreso by the magic system in the world where people eat bones to absorb the magic and abilities in them. Except it seems that they can eat organs, too, because one of the characters sells off his organs for this purpose. And another character consumes an organ to get powers. Yet it's called osteomancy, and yet the ending relies on the characters breathing the magic. This continued progression of this magic confused me; at one point, the characters say there are several systems of magic, and we even meet a water mage at another time. There are just suddenly all these other connected systems, which makes a little bit of sense, but they seem to just be thrown in there. The Department of Water and Power suddenly having the second most powerful mage in charge is one example. The powerful magus trying to kill Gabriel with a bomb in his boat - what even happened to him after the conflict in the Ossuary? The golems, and the city of golems, are one good exception to this. They were there all along and that this is what prompts Daniel to save the golem at the end in remembrance of his mother and the odd child that she took in his place when they 'escaped'.In all, I really liked the worldbuilding here, some of the twists in the plot seemed too twisty, and it was a fun read. I'd probably read another one if there was less flaying in the first couple of chapters... yikes.
This book was okay. It reminded me a little of LeGuin in writing style, but in the narrative and world building it reminded me of The Sparrow. This book was definitely sci-fi, but the worldbuilding aspect didn't really impact the message of the story, and therefore it felt a little disconnected to me. The story was a series of somewhat connected vignettes about a team of people doing a cultural study and exploring a planet and various cultures. The vignette style reminded me a little of Becky Chambers's “A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet” with a little less humor.
I did like the slow courtship aspect of the story, especially since it resonated with some experiences I've had. The pace of the story due to this feels a little off at first, but once you realize what's going on, it feels easy to read.
This series is so good. This book suffers from middle book syndrome a little bit, in that it didn't feel as stunning as the first one and it doesn't have a satisfying ending because, well, there is a whole third book to go!
The language in this is the immersive and familiar tone that I'm used to from Jemisin, but the pronouns and the narrators threw me off repeatedly. I do love a good second person narration and this is one of the best I've ever read, but I had to spend a lot more time and brain power trying to figure this out in this book.
I did love learning more about the Stone Eaters, understanding what happened to the moon, and finally hearing about Nassun. The world gets more complex and interesting here, and the magic system gets even more fascinating (if you can believe it). I also loved how this book valued the “feral” orogenes and the things they figure out without any formal training. I encounter the term “feral” applied to me sometimes in my professional life so it is nice to see the feral ones get some love.
Moving almost immediately to the next one and can't wait to see what happens.
This is a rich world full of wizards, warriors, minstrels, and - of course - an evil shadow that wishes to remove all of the previous things from the world. The language of this book was immersive and easy to read. The style felt like a grandmother telling a story to grandchildren.
There was something lost in translation in this book, I think. Beyond a few missing words from time to time, the style threw me off. The characters were fairly stock, not moving beyond their characterization except for sudden bursts of being out of character (for example, when the otherwise stoic Dulkancellin started telling a story after being prodded by Cucub about five times). Also, at some point, the main warrior character Dulkancellin - or maybe his small army - started to be referred to as “the Deer”, and it was quite confusing until I realized that it was a name that was given to him.
A lot of this book seems like it's leading up to a big battle, but the big battle really never comes. Instead, the enemy skulks off into the night and the heroes are not 100% victorious. I'm sure this is to leave an opening for the next book - along with the behavior of Molitzmos - but it really felt anti-climactic.
Bodoc is referred to sometimes as the “Tolkien of the Americas”. I am not sure I would go that far, but this book definitely had a Tolkien feel but with a decidedly different fantasy flavor. It was worth reading, but it fell short for me in a few areas. Maybe if I read Spanish well enough, I can give it a try in the original language...
This book is really good. It is really creative, really easy to read, and the world-building is outstanding. The setting does revolve around bio-horror, with lots of tentacles and strange creatures and the ever-progressing realization that the people you are reading about are living inside of another living thing that basically controls their bodies.
The protagonist for the story is someone who has lost her memory. It's a trope, yes, but the resolution to it is good. There is love, betrayal, sham marriages, and the bonds of friendship. I loved the band of four women who gathered together to journey through the world and the uneasy friendship they forged.
The bio-horror did almost squick me at times. The book is pretty gross. The saving point is that it doesn't get too graphic in the most horrifying places, so I was able to just skim over the grossest parts. The whole concept of the world and the systems is pretty gross and pretty scary. It comes from a dark, angry place that I think all women have inside of us. The gross factor is what makes me knock it down a star, purely for my own reaction to it.
I would recommend this book to sci-fi fans who enjoy interesting worlds and systems. I am not sure I would recommend this book as a space opera, even though I have heard it called that.
I just can't help but pick up some Scalzi when I want a book that I know will be great. After a few disappointments lately and some books that have been lemmed, and after feeling the return to fun, enjoyable reads by reading [b:The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter 34728925 The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter Theodora Goss https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1490794116s/34728925.jpg 45924715][b:The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter 34728925 The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter Theodora Goss https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1490794116s/34728925.jpg 45924715], I knew I could count on Scalzi.This book delivered. It has interesting characters who are remarkably real, from the pottymouth space lawyer/broker type to the ruler of the known universe who knows she is about to get in trouble but can't help still rolling her eyes at the annoying dude who keeps trying to marry her. The language is also delightful, including aforementioned pottymouth space lawyer/broker and the associated enormous amount of “fuck off” and following narrative “they/he fucked off” which absolutely delighted me. The beauty of this book also extends to the worldbuilding, in which the empire (which is collapsing, per the title) has a bunch of planets linked by something called The Flow which allows for fast travel between planets. The problem is that the Flow is put simply in the book - no long, drawn out physics discussions here - and also simply for the people in the universe. Therein lies the problem, because only like three people (physicists) in the whole universe truly understand it, and when they detect a problem with travel in the Flow, it's hard to get everybody to believe that there really is a problem. Without that travel, basically everybody would be screwed, and that has been demonstrated with a few ‘incidents' in the past where the Flow has, for some reason, stopped going to a planet.So it's left to a newly crowned emperox (a gender neutral term for the ruler of the known universe) to deal with this with the help of a delightfully nerdy scientist and a pottymouthed space lawyer, all the while a rival family is trying to interfere in all ways possible, including by trying to marry off one of their children to the newly crowned emperox. It's a space opera at its finest, and super fun. My only issue with the book is that it ends on a true cliffhanger, and by the time the next one comes out I will probably have forgotten everything. Also reading the author's notes at the end was sad, but for an entirely different reason. (It was written, apparently, in October 2016 just before the US election; as with so many things from that time, we look back and wish we could go back to that moment and warn everybody.)
This book, like most of the other Connie Willis books I've read, starts off slow but by the end it has me reading quickly wanting to know the end of the story.
The story follows Ned Henry, a time traveling historian, as he attempts to recover from his failed efforts to find the Bishop's bird stump, a relic necessary for the rebuilding of the Coventry Cathedral. He is sent back in time to a supposedly safe place to rest and recover, but encounters an entirely different kind of problem. Shenanigans ensue with an engagement that shouldn't be, a hidden identity, seances, dogs, and one very delightful cat.
Overall, I enjoyed the book, but there were a lot of references to historical events that I wasn't certain about. For example, I'm sure the conversations between Colonel Mering and Professor Peddick were very interesting, but I could not follow them, and there were an awful lot of them. They seemed, after a while, to be part of the fabric of the time and the interactions, but I couldn't help feeling like I was missing something. I felt a little bit time-lagged myself, and maybe that was the intent.
I would recommend this book to anyone who has enjoyed Willis's other books, or anyone who has an interest in history, cathedrals, or cats. The depiction of the cat was incredibly spot-on, though I had to suspend my disbelief at how well-behaved the cat was. I would be so lucky to have a cat as well-behaved as Princess Arjumand.
This book was a delightfully monster-filled mystery to read just before Halloween. Not scary at all but rather intriguing, this book details the adventures of the women of popular monster tales - Frankenstein, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Rappaccini's Daughter, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. These women have all been briefly mentioned in their original canon, but here their stories are fleshed out (literally, in some cases) and they are given their own agency and life after the stories of their creators. Throw in a little Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson and you have a murder mystery combined with a monster and adventure story. I also enjoyed the style of narration of the book, with a traditional adventure narrative interspersed with commentary from the characters themselves watching over the shoulder of the writer. It's a bit confusing at first, but the commentary adds a wonderful overtone to the story and helps cement the relationship between the women of the book.
This book is also an ode to the Public Domain. Because the originals are all in the Public Domain, Goss transformed their stories into something new and wonderful. Taking inspiration from these classics, she spins a new tale that is a delight to read and even more wonderful as inspiration. What other gems of stories are hiding in these old works? What new, creative things can be done with them because of their copyright status?
I would certainly recommend this delightful book to anyone, and I'd definitely read more adventures from this crew!
Everything I want in fantasy/sci-fi. Terrific world building, fascinating societal structures, people who are truly of the world they inhabit (not transplants from ours).
This book also had something that is missing from so much of the genre: diversity, but diversity that fits in this world and not ours, yet is still recognizable. Moreover, the characters comment on this and embrace it. This is present not only in skin tone and race and gender, but also sexuality and family structures.
I was struck by the timelines of this book and the unexpected reveal that characters who we thought were different are the same. This was a brilliant book, and I enjoyed every minute of it.
What to say about this book? It's clever and even funny at times. It's a delightful romp through inter-species politics with some social commentary thrown in.
The premise is clever, and the title is appropriate on so many levels. The ending is also clever with a nicely set up legal loophole in the world as we know it.
The first half of this book, though, is kind of a snooze. A lot of the characters blended together for me, and for a while I forgot who was on each side. Having similar characters called “Creek” and “the Geek” and then two separate entities named Ben and Brian just made me confused for quite a big chunk of the book, at least until the plot really started moving. And there were some parts of this book that were clever just to be clever. The whole “Church of the Evolved Lamb” was one of those kinds of too-clever stories.
However, I did enjoy it once I got past the first half. In Scalzi fashion, it wraps up nicely at the end. That was a particular delight.