Zelse

Like most of Piers Anthony's books, it varies from interesting/amusing/funny to cringeworthy, often in the same paragraph. I find the series fractionally more enjoyable than it is off-putting, but if you aren't very tolerant of “dated” writing it's probably not for you. Forums have risen and fallen debating Piers Anthony's outlook on sex and I'm not going to go into it, but suffice it to say that his depictions of heterosexual sexuality range from strange to rather reductivist/misogynistic. Additionally, in this book the main characters are all women, and Piers Anthony is definitely not especially well-suited to writing believable female characters. If you can look beyond the imperfections, this is a perfectly serviceable light afternoon read, but many readers will probably want to give it a miss.

I read an older translation and the quality was a bit variable, but it is hard to translate these poems faithfully anyway. It did pique my interest enough (as some of them were great) to mean I've added seeking out an annotated translation to my reading “to-do” list.

Great book, though if you're looking for typical supernatural horror you're sort of barking up the wrong tree - the horror is thoroughly grounded in reality, while the supernatural element just sort of helps it along. I imagine women of a certain age might find this a hard read, but it does a great job of weaving the fundamental injustices women faced at the time (and sadly still do today) into the narrative.

...also, was anyone else irrationally annoyed by the term ‘bippies'?

Useful little book that covers all manner of distinctions, gotchas, and malapropisms. Fun to leaf through, it explains a lot of finer points of usage in an accessible manner with copious examples.

A friend of mine derided this as slop, and while it's certainly popular fiction, I was very pleasantly surprised. It's not the funniest or the best-written thing you'll read, but the pacing is masterful, and the two primary protagonists are likeable. It also doesn't shy away from the horror of the situation the characters are in, but rather engages with it without crossing over into melodrama. On the whole, this is a decent weekend read. I'm definitely going to pick up the next book in the series, even if I'm not rushing out right. this. second - a distinction I imagine many fellow readers will identify with, I think.