Emily
i loved it, but it is probably the weakest of the three, only because it is a journeying tale and those by their nature can be a bit monotonous and slow. it picked up in the very end though, holy shit, i was a little disappointed that the end of the red ships was told in hindsight in like 3 paragraphs. i loved loved loved the way it went down with carrod, then burl, and then will and regal. hell yeah fist pumping good good good. the very last bit, where fitz puts his quill aside and narrates his current life, i have to be honest, i was super surprised to learn he was still a young man, all through books 1 and 2, and 95% through this book, i had pictured him as old as chade, back bent over his desk, eyes cloudy with age and memory. but he's like yeah, just a few years have passed (!!!)
I love a good gothic manor story, and this hit the mark so well. My only minor critique is the 17th-century journal entries, which function well as narrative, but mechanically didn't work for me. The language of a journal entry is too constraining, and Purcell needed to abandon it almost entirely in favor of a more narrative style in order to maintain the pacing of the twin storylines. As story, it worked great, but every time it was a journal chapter my mind was a little distracted by how distinctly un-journal-y it read.
loved it. it was a little slow to get going, despite the writing being really lovely without being too florid or ornate and the characters being super interesting, but it wasn't until after around chapter 10 when the happenings in the world really began to take shape, and after chapter 17 when i became wholly emotionally invested in Fitz. but once i was, whoo boy was i ever emotionally involved :'(
I bought this based solely on the scant info that it was a ghost story set in the arctic, and I am so glad I did, it was excellent. At times the structure of the book being almost entirely journal entries by our protagonist strains credulity (I'd find myself occasionally pausing to wonder why anyone would write a particular phrase or thought down), but it was never more than a momentary blip in the flow of atmosphere created by the passing days and increasing isolation Jack experiences. The buildup of dread is so well paced, interspersed with moments of warmth and beauty that keep it from becoming unbearable. If you're in the mood for an really gripping ghost story, this should top your list.
The story was pretty compact and contained, which surprised me, given how fleshed out the show felt, with characters more fully realized and storylines more cohesive. That being said, it was a perfectly good short story and a great basis for the more detailed show that came later. The art was gorgeous, if slightly visually confusing at times.
I have a real soft spot for the 90s horror-adjacent movie The Prophecy, which also deals with the war in heaven, so I was already kind of primed to like the premise of this. I thought the pacing was fantastic, basically as soon as it got going, I was on the “just one more chapter” ride.
I liked that it simply took as real the beliefs of medieval christians, and used their art about devils and angels to describe the hell that began unfolding on earth. I've also kind of deeply studied the black death and was super impressed by how well researched this book felt. It did falter a little because of that, when it tried to think through the Jewish communities living through this nightmare, given that it takes it for granted that Jesus was the messiah, and I think Buehlman was probably wise to not delve too deeply into the implications of that.
Cuckoo is a pretty masterful exploration of the tides of despair/isolation/grief and hope/longing/connection that traumatized, brutalized children experience. The different children's responses to trauma all feel so real and fucking heartbreaking in a million little ways. The book was scary on a surface level with actual monsters, and much scarier below the surface with monsters of the mundane human variety who lurk everywhere in plain sight.
pp. 170 “Euphoria, picked at like a blister, voided itself.” What a sentence.
“He hadn't been able to love her, his soft round wife with her wavy golden hair and ruddy cheeks, the product falsely advertised by the thin, hollow-cheeked woman in their wedding photo, and he hated that John hadn't minded at all, that his fat wife and his fat son had adored each other, had even sometimes been happy in spite of the cold, looming presence of his martyred disapproval.” The writing makes me stop and stare at a wall for a little bit sometimes. Heartbreaking, beautiful, painful, hopeful.
The writing was fine, good even (though not anywhere near King's best), but the characters were very shallowly drawn, and the heart of the story was an old guy saving the lesbian couple in town from anti-gay animus. It felt very straight male Savior.
And then there was a tiny, unrelated short story about an old guy and his dog and an alligator tacked onto the back of it? I am so completely befuddled, I do not understand what this is or why it was published as a standalone work.
I wish goodreads offered half stars because this was more like 4.5 for me. It was just a masterclass in lean, but evocative world building. I know that there's likely more grandiose things for Ged on the horizon, but I quite liked how his hero's journey was really all about just growing out of being a socially anxious teen into a functioning adult. Even at my age, that's the kind of YA story I need in my life haha
More like 3.5 stars.
I liked it, but didn't love it. It really takes its time ramping up, and all of that time is devoted to the introduction of four distinctly unlikable characters. However I also found myself loathing Eleanor in Jackson's original work, so maybe it's intentional. Regardless, it hardly makes for endearing reading.
Hand does a very good job once they're in the house of ratcheting up the tensions, both supernatural and interpersonal. And once things get going, they really get going, perhaps to the detriment of the book's climax. Early in their stay, as the characters delve deeper into Hill House, they experience a disquieting vastness of changing scope and layout. The house feels enormous, like a threatening dark forest. A walk down a hallway felt like it could last hours.
But as the story nears its final act, the scope of the house narrows (much like a particular hallway behind a particular tiny door). The upper floor becomes a site returned to again and again, a layout that wouldn't be out of place in any suburban ranch house. Three bedrooms at the top of the stairs and a nursery down the short hall. The house becomes small, fixed. And while it's clearly still a Very Bad House, the features that make it so unsettling are forgotten in a rush to wrap up the so-longed-for action.
What a profoundly sad book. Beautifully written with an engaging, novelistic style that reminded me of Erik Larson, particularly Dead Wake, his account of the sinking of the Lusitania. In that book and this, I found myself hoping against hope that the history I knew would turn out to have been wrong, and that the people depicted on the page with such human empathy and compassion would in the end, be saved. It was not to be, and I'm left with a real feeling of loss. Having previously not known much more about Garfield than the fact that he was assassinated, I have come away from this book with a real respect for him, and a sad sense of what this country might have been, had he lived to serve his full term.
Probably not the book for you if you're looking for concrete money advice. That being said, I loved it. Like looking into a mirror. It is truly eye opening to see someone with my exact fears and anxieties around money (and similar avoidance behaviors of same) discuss her efforts to overcome or even acknowledge them. Plus, there's a delightful soupçon of socialist seasoning that makes the whole thing really sing 😙👌
On the surface, this is a delightful collection of pearl-clutching Victorian scandals, which titillate today just as they did over 100 years ago. The author writes in a way that mimics, to a degree, the breathlessness of Victorian scandal journalism, including the language that often condemned victims of domestic abuse as the authors of their own destruction. Story after story describe female homicide victims as having been promiscuous, or nags, or possibly insane, based (apparently) on the surviving testimony of their murderers (most often their husbands, boyfriends, or former such).
It ended up becoming rather tedious to read tale after tale of women horribly abused, presented in gossip magazine style, with little to no analysis of what any of it meant to contemporaries, nor what it means today.
On their own, each tale could easily be a bit of ghoulish fun, being so far removed from our own time. So perhaps reading a chapter here and a chapter there would be a good way to experience this book, but I can't really recommend reading it cover to cover, as I did.
Kind of a perfect pop history, written in a refreshingly conversational and often funny tone, which appealed to me largely because I agree wholeheartedly with both the author's sense of frustration at human folly (demonstrated time and again throughout the history of disease), and her passionate optimism that humans can and will do better. Be better.
I know that it is unfair to judge a work outside of the moral structures of its time, but the deep, unrelenting racism of this book make it basically unreadable (or at least totally unenjoyable) in a modern world. It turns what could have been a tingling tale of dread into a tiresome, pointless tirade about the horrors of Asian immigrants (from the point of view of an Irish American no less, who only a generation before had been as unwelcome in the USA as rabid dogs!). Utter garbage.
The British Library, 9th-century books, ghosts, robots, magic, archival retrieval systems...it's as if this book were written specifically for me!
It's quite a clever bit of advertising, offering this short story on Audible for free. I had never heard of the Peter Grant series before, and now my interest is definitely piqued.
What an unexpectedly thoughtful and compassionate book this was. I began it hoping for a fun bit of fluff about American haunting, with perhaps some vaguely interesting surface history attached. But what I got instead was a keen examination of the ghost story as a cultural instrument, a means of talking about painful histories, a tool equally adept at both subverting and reinforcing the positions of the marginalized. An excellent gem of a book.
Quentin is such a self absorbed, nasty jackass, like a walking m'lady embodiment. It would make the book almost unreadable, if the author doesn't also appear to dislike him as much as the reader does. It results in a kind of conspiratorial read, like the author is nudging you in the ribs and going “Can you believe what a dumb prick this guy is??” And you keep reading, going “omg, I know, it's nuts!”
I really enjoyed this second book in the Bell Forging Cycle. The first book, The Stars Were Right, was a wonderful introduction to the main character, Waldo Bell, and his business associate and friend, Wensem. And as much as I liked the slightly claustrophobic feel of the multi-level city of Lovat, I enjoyed this open road tale even more.
I tend to like a traveling story, where I can follow my characters as they make their way through unfamiliar landscapes, and discover new places and people (and monstrous nightmares!) with them. Old Broken Road totally delivered on that score. I absolutely loved the newly introduced character, Taft. She was just wonderful, and I would very much like to share some whiskey with her.
Man, I'm really looking forward to Red Litten World.