Mandy

I've finished this. 5/5 I don't think I fully understood every bit of it but it was all so beautifully constructed and crafted, every chapter was so distinct from the others and so compelling in their own rights. I've seen books being marvelous with world-building, or character development, but never really quite both at once and this one really did that so well. This book definitely demands rereads. I also liked that it had some really good female characterisation for a book published in the late 80s.

There were a few minor flaws here and there, like the writing could've been a little less flowery and descriptive, but that's also probably my own modern sensibilities talking. I also found Siri's story a bit anticlimactic, it somehow wasn't as compelling to me as everyone else's stories, but the Consul's second part really tied everything together. Some general thoughts of the ending: I really liked that we had a Fellowship moment at the end with the pilgrims being united for one moment in the damn book, and that's *after* they find out who the spy is too. I can't say I completely understand the Consul's motivation yet though but thats mainly cos the politics is so complex that I haven't quite wrapped my head around it yet. I couldn't really choose which one was my fave chapter - they were all really interesting and brought something new and thought provoking to the table.

I'm very glad I read this and would absolutely need to read the next one, also because I can't imagine how they would structure the next one now that we already know the pilgrims' backstories.

In all good conscience, I don't think I could give this book more than 3.5 stars if I really tried, so I'm leaving this as 3 stars. It was OK. I had a fun time. But there were so many loopholes and convenient bits to the story that it kinda took away from the overall mystery for me. I also felt like the premise of the mystery wasn't as strong as the first one, but some of the formula is still there (with Horowitz finding a way to somehow make himself the bungling sidekick through the entire investigation who accidentally spills the beans to the wrong people, and also somehow being a victim by the end and landing up in hospital).

When I finished the first book, it was with a bitter taste in my mouth about Daniel Hawthorne, the series's primary investigator, and primarily about his homophobia. I'm honestly not sure what was the whole point of adding this little character trait in. It kinda felt like a way for Horowitz to signal his “woke-ness” by telling off Hawthorne everytime he makes a derogatory remark about gay people (which is thankfully not that often through the series), but at the same time Horowitz writes himself as such a weak-handed side character that it just doesn't feel like it opposes the sentiment as strongly as he should. Plus, there is really absolutely no reason why Hawthorne's homophobia should be an element at all. It doesn't serve to forward the plot or the mystery or even to develop any character since we don't really know much more about Hawthorne even after 2 books. I don't think readers usually give abrasive characters more than a book's duration to redeem themselves, tbh.

The book feels almost a bit like a vanity project for Horowitz. Writing himself in as a character means we're forced to listen to his musings about his past projects, his inspirations, all the different TV shows and books he's ever written or been interested in, the people in his life, etc. I won't deny that the gimmick in itself is pretty interesting, where he blurs the line between fiction and reality all the way to even the Acknowledgements page right at the end, but at the same time I can't help wondering what's his objective here.

I'd probably still continue on the series because, as I said, it's serviceable and fun enough as a palate cleanser in between reads, but honestly not sure how this series is going to end up.

Pretty fun reading this one again. This one concentrated a lot more on the politics and relationship dynamics between the characters, but that's fine. I was definitely also slightly annoyed by everyone's fixation on the doctor at the center of the mystery here, Dr John Cristow. He didn't really feel like all that, but for some reason he had not one but three women trailing after him, at least two of which were intelligent and certainly out of his league.

Anyway, it made for an entertaining read but I find that I enjoy Christie's works where the mystery is more of a structured puzzle, aka And Then There Were None or Five Little Pigs. This one was definitely not within that category, but it was OK.

I did also kind of enjoy how there was a bit more focus on the romantic development of two characters which made for a pretty satisfactory ending.

Overall, decent fun and a serviceable mystery. Not one I'd recommend as a starting point to Christie, for sure, but definitely a good one for when you just need a bit of a Christie fix.

Agatha Christie is a comforting formula for me at this point, so it'll take a lot for anything by her to go wrong for me.

I'm pretty sure I've read this one but I have no memory of it. Or maybe I subconsciously did because I did kinda sorta guess the murderer in the end.

My initial guess at around Ch 24, around 2/3 through the book:
we're not yet quite at the denouement of the story and we still have no idea how Harry Castleton is connected with any of the witnesses/suspects, but i'm placing my bets on Miss Martindale, the owner of the typists' bureau. i've a feeling she's one of the jilted/duped wives of Castleton and she probably concocted this wild scheme. idk yet what her relationship is with Miss Pebmarsh and why she decided to do it at 19 Wilberham Crescent, but i'm kinda feeling that the clocks were put there to make reference to a date or something? and that Sheila is perhaps the illegitimate daughter of Castleton. i also find it very curious and sus that 19 Wilbersham Crescent backs up on 61 Wilbersham Crescent which could look like the same number if you read it the wrong way up, so i'm feeling like the Blands are somehow connected to the murder too.

And y'know what, I wasn't too off the mark. Thoughts about the ending:
I correctly guessed that the Blands were involved, and that Miss Martindale had been the murderer after all, so I feel pretty good about that. I also kinda correctly guessed that Sheila's parentage could come to light although I was off the mark in thinking that the victim might be her unknown father. I'm particularly proud of guessing that there would have been a mix-up between 19 and 61 Wilbraham Crescent, although I got the order reversed - Lamb was looking for 19 and not 61 all along - but that did lead me to suspect the Blands. Things that caught me completely off-guard was really that Miss Pebmarsh was not just Sheila's biological mother, but also a Russian sympathizer and spy. No wonder she was so cool and collected when a dead body turns up in her own house. Wouldn't have guessed even after we find out that Mr Ramsay did turn coat and went to Russia. I was a little disappointed that all the extra clocks were really just a ruse though.

Overall, this was a pretty entertaining story that did the job.

This was such a delight to read, although fair warning, there are quite a deluge of characters and gossip from the start that it takes a while to really understand what's going on.

This is an epistolary novel involving an exchange of letters between two close cousins, Kate and Cecelia, talking about their respective seasons in London and the country in an AU Regency England where magic and sorcery are a thing. The exchange is generally witty and they're both clearly feisty young ladies trying to investigate how Kate almost got poisoned by some chocolate and whether one of their friends is under a spell.

My biggest gripe with it is that Kate and Cecy have very similar voices, and the events that happen to them are so similar that they almost parallel each other. Both are harangued by a (different) brooding and sardonic man who is at turns aggravating but also seems to be looking out for them. both have a friend/cousin near them who is prettier than themselves and attracting more attention during the season, but they're totally okay with that. Somehow both also have a possibly malicious witch/wizard nearby who may be attempting to do them harm as well. So I sometimes almost have trouble telling who is where and what is happening where because there're just so many similarities!

It all makes sense when you realise that this book was written by the two authors as part of a “Letters Game”, where two people agree on characters and a setting, and then they write letters to each other from the perspective of their own character, and without telling each other what the plot is going to be so the other person's reaction to the new developments is genuine. It's a really interesting premise and one that I'm somewhat familiar with, having done my share of forum role-playing back in my day which is very much the same in essence if not in form.

This was just such a delightful, light, and quick story. I actually left it sitting half-finished for the longest time because I'll confess that I had a hard time getting into it at the beginning, but once it gets going, you just let it get going. I do wonder how they're going to continue on as there're two more books in this series, but I'm eager to find out.

wow this book was just so unnecessarily long. I felt like it could've been easily halved.

idek where to begin so here's just a thought dump. I can't believe emily ended up with valancourt in the end. what the hell was the point of du Pont then?? why was he introduced as another suitor like 70% of the way through only to be discarded at the end? I actually feel like I may have liked the ending more if we had seen a complete degradation of valancourt and we see emily learning to esteem du Pont with a more rational kind of affection. BUT NOPE.

the irony that this is called mystery of udolpho when barely anything mysterious happened at udolpho. sure, a lot of annoying, dangerous, dramatic things happened but not exactly mysterious. the chateau le blanc chapters were far, far more interesting, mysterious, and potentially horrifying than the udolpho chapters.

I felt like this book kept beating dead horses. st aubert takes ill, he's close to dying but takes soooo long to die. Emily is tortured by her aunt, and then we just keep seeing more of the same instances of how Emily is tortured by her aunt.

the book felt like it kept beating dead horses and going around in circles. sequences were just endlessly draggy. I didn't need to keep reading about montoni's cronies one more time, or how much mysterious music and singing emily hears at night. in particular, I feel like a lot of the moments of suspense felt very contrived. emily sees a line in her father's documents and is so horrified that she tries to forget it as she burns them - but we literally never find out till the end of the book what it is. emily opens the veil at udolpho and is terrified at what she sees behind it - and again we never find out till the end whst she saw. perhaps this is a modern sensibility thing but I don't find that this keeps me on the edge of my seat, I'm just annoyed that this protagonist whom I'm supposed to experience the mystery and suspense vicariously through, now knows more than I the reader so we're just on unequal footing now.

overall I still give this 3 stars cos the story was not bad and fairly entertaining - if it would just be condensed into half its size.

I'm probably a biased reviewer but this hit the spot for me on so many levels. 4.5/5.

I went into it completely blind but having heard generally good things about the book. Immediately, I was immediately caught by the trope of “female academic in a (sometimes fantasy) field in an AU of historical Europe”, which is something I've generally enjoyed in the past starting with Elizabeth Peters's Amelia Peabody series (studying Egyptology), Deanna Raybourn's Veronica Speedwell series (studying butterflies), and also Marie Brennan's The Memoirs of Lady Trent series (studying dragons). All of these female academics, as well as Emily Wilde, are generally curmudgeonly and a little prickly, with a bit of the modern 21st century “strong independent woman” vibe, but tampered with a hilariously sardonic voice that often makes their perspectives very enjoyable to read. Plus, most of these female academics are generally too busy ruminating about their field of choice in the book that there isn't too much time to keep dwelling on female independence and hitting the reader over the head with it - I prefer messages like this to be a normalized background theme rather than being too on the nose. The male love interests in these books always develop a healthy respect for the female protagonist (primarily because there would be no realistic way she could fall in love with a person who didn't), and having to keep a respectful distance from them and letting the love line develop on both people's terms.

So all that was done and great. It was only half way through that it suddenly struck me for the first time that this book was... basically a retelling of Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones, which also happens to be one of my favourite books of all time (and was before the film even came out). I later learnt that this was confirmed by the author in an interview, but I was really happy that the parallels were subtle enough that it took me half a book to figure it out, but obvious enough that I could feel the strong influence for sure even before I read any interview with the author. I've read so many HMC retellings at this point and feel that the best ones are the ones that don't market themselves as such, so I was delighted that this came through so subtly and so creatively too. As the plot develops, the book's parallels with HMC became more and more obvious, but I wasn't mad, and frankly I enjoyed the book even more after that.

The narrative of this book is generally quite slice of life, as it should be given that it is a journal of an academic in the field. There is a lot of information about the faeries in her world, but I thought it wasn't too info-dumpy and gave a lot of substance to the world-building. In particular, I enjoyed the kinds of faeries that inhabited this world too. Faeries are a pretty popular fantasy race to include in books these days, but they're often just another variation of the uber-hot elf trope. But in this one, faeries are much closer to the ones you might come across in actual fairy tales from the centuries ago. They're at best tricky to deal with, but can be downright dangerous, horrifying, cruel (and not in a oMg-sO-hOt way), and sadistic. Some of them are even described as looking like nightmare fuel. I love that, not everything and everyone has to be hot humans in a fantasy romance book.

And then, of course, there's the romance. I liked a lot about how understated it was, there wasn't any particularly huge dramatic moments, and we don't have the female protagonist conveniently but unrealistically not guessing a lot of things about the male love interest. She's intelligent and she's a scholar, so of course realistically she's going to have suspicions about certain things, not least his feelings for her long before he declares it, rather than be caught by surprise. It sacrifices the drama of the moment a bit, but I much prefer this.

So overall I really enjoyed this one. I am a little worried about the sequel though - often times a book that uses a tried-and-true formula from another book tends to flounder when it has to carry on from there onto a sequel because then they're on a bit on untested ground, but nevertheless I'll definitely be reading it when it comes out next year.

This book has given me a lot of mixed emotions. I almost DNFed it at the beginning because the protagonist, Valkyr or Kyr as she's not-so-affectionately known by her teammates, was so so so intolerable and annoying. It was only because I put it down and read another book that annoyed me even more that I eventually went back and finished this. Indeed, Kyr remained unlikeable and annoying for at least the first half of the book. Almost every other character was more interesting and easier to listen to on page than Kyr was.

I mean, I get that there was a reason for Kyr's unlikeability, and it makes her overall character arc/development more satisfying. But I also kinda wish that the annoying parts weren't quite so long as half the book, or that we got more of a hook, something to keep us hanging on to the hope that Kyr's going to get better at the end. When she was annoying, she was really annoying. A whole lot more annoying than Avicenna was, and he's supposed to be the most annoying person on the whole ship.

The book kinda sorta improved after that halfway mark, I guess? Until then I thought the book was moving along in a very predictable sort of fashion, and a lot of my guesses sort of came true. Until they didn't. And then they really didn't.

The second half of the book was a really wild ride. The concepts that they're using isn't incredibly new but there's still something inexplicably fresh about some of the corners of world-building here. Even now that I've finished it, I still can't 100% tell you what exactly happened because I'm just as lost. Sometimes I'm not even sure if Tesh knew fully the details of what was going on either. Nevertheless, it was all right in the way it played out. Not incredibly mind-blowing in the end, but also not unsatisfying.

Spoilery thoughts about the ending: I thought Jole's death was such an anti-climax. After all that, they didn't even have a proper showdown? But I appreciated the foreshadowing and how Jole's death mirrored that of the soldier Kyr thought about when she first went down to the core with Avi in the earlier parts of the book. I thought it was Magnus deserved more character development, but with so much time jumps in the book, it's really only Kyr that gets all the development since everyone else pretty much starts anew whenever the Wisdom reset her to another moment in history. I thought the ending dragged on a bit too.

Idk man. I couldn't really appreciate the writing style here, I thought the pacing was way too slow and the time jumps were too confusing for me. I also don't really gravitate towards war novels in general because the topic is particularly depressing to me, but I was curious to see what this book would bring to the table, having been fairly popular for so many years. But IDK MAN.

I don't really know what to say about this book... I think I went in expecting the wrong thing entirely. I thought this would be a study on feminism and the emancipation of women, but the author probably isn't that interested in that. I later read someone say that three words summarised Gissing's whole body of work very aptly: “Not enough money.” This book is actually much more about how people landing in this awkward class that was still high enough on the socioeconomic ladder to demand adherance to conventions and rules, but also not rich enough to afford them comfortably, and yet not poor enough to completely disregard those conventions.

Most of the characters here are pretty annoying, both men and women alike. All are selfish and self-centered to some extent, but it is true that the book does a pretty good job at depicting how their lives are almost destined to be ruined simply because all of them had Not Enough Money. I particularly detested Edmund Widdowson... before he married, he was already such a creep, and he only got worse after marriage. What a pain.

While there may be some interesting feminist ideas here, it's strongly comingled with a sense that Gissing may not quite fully agree with the emancipation of women himself, even though most of the female characters here advocated for it. It was sometimes as if their activism was being ridiculed, or that they were shown to actually still want to be in that dependent, submissive, wifely state, no matter how much they protest against it. It's a subtle thing though, so it wasn't ostentatiously annoying. Plus, the women here were also annoying in many ways, different from the men. I couldn't stand Rhoda Nunn and the way her story played out just annoyed me even more.

All in all... this book was just weird. I kept on trudging on with it, strangely fascinated by how annoying all these characters were to me. If studying the struggles of the lower middle socioeconomic classes in late Victorian times is your thing, this book is perfect. Not, however, if you want to read anything about the emancipation of women though.

Somewhere between 3.5 to 3.75. The premise of this one was really great, so many chaotic moving parts but it somehow came together in the end really nicely. We have Lan Tran, a donut-selling alien bringing her family to escape her war-torn planet. We have Shizuka Satomi, a violinist casually known as the Queen of Hell who has made a deal with the devil to send him seven souls in order to get her own back, and she's already done six. Then we have Katrina Nguyen, a trans female protagonist running away from a life of brutality, oppression, and exploitation because she also just so happens to be a prodigy with the violin.

Everything meshes together really well and the book has a lot of heart. It also has a very strong message against the repression and exploitation of queer people, especially those from the trans community. I support this message, but I also found that it was too on-the-nose here, and sometimes almost felt a bit didactic. But I acknowledge that perhaps this on-the-nose-ness is necessary in order to reach out and perhaps help some teens out there struggling the same way Katrina did, and to provide just that bit of encouragement and affirmation that they are seen, and that's great for them. Personally, it dampened my enjoyment a bit which is why my rating is the way it is, but hey, if this book does some good in the world, I'm all for it.

TW: Suicide, murder

I think it's fair to say that I'm getting pretty addicted to Higashino's mysteries. They're both comforting and refreshing at the same time. They use some pretty familiar formulas from the cozy mystery genre, but at the same time the solutions never fail to surprise me, and that's such a delight for me as someone who has read and re-read the Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes canon multiple times and have been “trained” to suspect the least likely character.

Unfortunately more than 90% of Higashino's works aren't translated into English, but luckily for me, they are mostly translated into Chinese and I'm able to read in that langauge. This is one book that doesn't have an English translation so bear with me as I try to give my own translation of the case titles here. This is the second installment in the Galileo series, following physics professor Yukawa Manabu's reluctant assistance with his friend Detective Kusanagi's murder cases. (For newcomers to the series, Prof Yukawa is the titular Galileo, nicknamed as such by Kusanagi's colleagues in the police force). I hadn't even realised that this was a collection of short stories (like the first installment) until I got into it, but I was pleasantly surprised - I really love very short and contained mysteries, it never feels too draggy. In this one, a recurring theme of the short stories written here is seemingly paranormal circumstances surrounding the crux of the case, but which generally get debunked by Yukawa in the end.

In “Dream”, the case surrounds a man who claims he has dreamt of his soulmate since he was 10, and even has put a name to her. He eventually meets and stalks such a girl, but this girl was born after he began dreaming of her. The second chapter, “Ghost Sighting”, a man who drunkenly saw a vision of his girlfriend outside a friend's window and becomes worried. He calls her colleague who lives in the same building to check on her, and she indeed finds her collapsed in the bathroom, apparently strangled. “Poltergeist” deals with a house who seems to have some kind of unnatural tremor at a specific time every evening, which only began after its owner, an old lady, passes away. “Strangulation” talks about a man who is found strangled in a hotel room, but all apparent suspects in the case have iron-clad alibis. Lastly, and perhaps most memorable, is “Prophecy”, where a little girl claims to have witnessed having seen her neighbour hang herself one night, only for her family to see the neighbour alive and well the next day and in seemingly good spirits. Three nights later, the lady does in fact hang herself.

As usual, a lot about Higashino's works needs to be taken in the context of Japanese culture. There's nothing overtly misogynistic here except values that have already been deeply entrenched in the society. I usually can't stand misogyny in my books, but this one I could close one eye to. As usual, Yukawa's solutions are always outstanding in the way it catches you off-guard, and all while using physics and scientific concepts.

I already borrowed 3 more Higashino books from the library so definitely will be reading more.

I don't know if it was because I just came off another romance-focused book that didn't quite satisfy, but I kinda enjoyed this one, despite the chaotic energy. It's a novella that may actually have been served better if it had been a full-length novel. There's so much of this world to explore here, but Polk only dips in and explains just enough for us to get the gist.

Helen is a warlock. I'm not sure if it was explained or if I missed it, but warlocks seem to be magic-doers who gravitate more towards demonic arts and therefore shunned by the Church. She takes on a job by her patron, Marlowe, who also happens to be a demon, to hunt down a serial killer, the White City Vampire. She initially wants to reject the job, but Marlowe dangles a carrot that Helen cannot resist - she'll return her soul if she successfully tracks the Vampire down.

We also meet Helen's partner, Edith, who is harbouring a secret of her own, as well as Helen's estranged brother, Theodore aka Teddy, part of the religious order who shuns Helen and her kind.

Helen and Edith were really sweet, but I did kinda wish we saw more of their origins. At the beginning of the book, they were already an established item. As it was, though, I was at least somewhat invested in them, but I also wished we saw how they built up their chemistry together, instead of simply being told about how in love they already were.

I also wished we saw more of Teddy and the relationship between him and Helen. Without divulging any spoilers, they have a lot of water under that bridge, we only really see a snapshot of their relationship in this book. The rapport between them was sweet though and I appreciate that Helen wasn't solely focused on a romantic partner in the whole book, that she was equally willing to risk her life for her brother as well.

As I said, the world was pretty fascinating. From the angels and demons that we meet, to the “magic system” as it were. I was also pretty interested to know more about this angel-hosting business which we saw a glimpse of with Matilda in the asylum. I wish more was explored there!

So overall, there's a theme to my review here: I wish this book was longer, and I wouldn't even mind a longer sequel. It was a great time.

Uh okay this book was kinda nuts, 2/5. I have two big problems with it: Firstly, the friction and dynamics between characters in P&P was along the faultlines of class and socioeconomic differences. this book transposes that into differences in religious interpretations - Ayesha and Khalid are both Muslim but they both interpret their religion differently which impacts the way they live life. that's already such a can of worms. the portrayal of Islam in this one just felt a little too... idk... there's a lot in this that Western audiences may not be able to understand, and I think not enough was done to explain the meaning and significance behind these religious/cultural observances so non-Muslims can get a deeper insight into the community. Secondly, the storytelling in this one was just kinda cringey. A lot of the characters felt like cartoon villains (Sheila in particular), and a lot of times people were just making really random-ass decisions that didn't make sense, so it all felt really contrived for Plot Reasons. The plot twists right at the end of the book were very reminiscent of telenovelas, and especially because they were all just so over the top and unrealistic.

Honestly, this is really not bad. I'll definitely be continuing this series. The murder mystery in itself was entertaining enough, and had a serviceable plot twist, but it had a pretty interesting gimmick that I haven't seen before. The author wrote himself into the book, starring himself (yes, Anthony Horowitz) as the book-writing Watson to his fictional Sherlock, ex-detective Hawthorne.

It was trippy enough when Anthony begins talking about his past works and careers, even having a cameo of Peter Jackson and Stephen Spielberg, with whom he the author really did almost collaborate with on the script of Tintin 2, a movie that never got made in the end. The result is that the story almost felt like an autobiography, and lends it a really weird non-fictional air. It blurred the line between fantasy and real life. Horowitz really dialed the trippiness up to eleven, even in his Acknowledgements at the end of the book, where he thanked certain people at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for their assistance in his research, but also spoke about how they were also linked to the fictional character in the story who also attended RADA.

One contentious point in his book, though, is positioning Hawthorne, as the central detective, as being somewhat intensely homophobic. I'm pretty sure this wouldn't fly with a lot of readers, and it was also fairly obvious that Horowitz is using this potentially triggering plot point as a launchpad from which he can contrast and air his own liberal views. Yet, at the same time, it also feels like he's subscribing to these liberal views because that's just where the wind is blowing at the time, without really understanding why homophobia can be triggering to audiences - if that makes sense. It left a bad taste in one's mouth and I can't really feel any kind of empathy for Hawthorne after that, although I must confess I'm a little curious to know how Horowitz intends to somehow explain this incongruous homophobia away in later books. I'm of the belief, though, that the first book should at least contain enough teasers of what might come in later books to keep people reading, and not trust to blind curiosity alone, and this book didn't give me enough meat to keep me hoping that Hawthorne would be in any way “redeemed” in the future books. It also doesn't help that even if we disregarded the homophobia, Hawthorne is still a pretty intensely rude and unpleasant character. He's clearly based off of Sherlock Holmes, who has always had a reputation for being prickly, but while Holmes still manages to retain some endearing and intriguing quality to him amongst readers, Hawthorne is almost completely repulsive and... just not someone I'd ever like to meet.

Nevertheless though, there's still enough of Horowitz in here to dilute the Hawthorne unpleasantness, and the murder mystery was definitely well written. There was a huge red herring but it sort of made sense and I didn't feel cheated out of it at the end when we finally realise how big a red herring it was. There was also just enough clues scattered throughout the story for the resolution to feel satisfying and like we maybe could've solved it all along if we had been paying attention, a classic hallmark of the cozy mystery.

I'll definitely try out the next installment of the series.

Damn, this was... so good. 4.5/5.

Overall, this was a great book with some great themes on not just being human but of being a living thing at all, an organism that essentially shares a common ancestor with almost every other organism on this planet. I don't know what I was expecting going into this book but having half the chapters dedicated to spiders was definitely not one of them, nor was I expecting to become this invested into spider religion, culture, and politics. The premise was really a breath of fresh air too, and thoroughly engaging. it made the book feel a lot shorter than it actually was.

I liked how from early on in the book, we're already invited to see parallels between the wireless communications invented by humans with the way spiders communicate by vibrating the web. “... the signals danced across those millions of kilometers of void...” I'm sure it's no coincidence that this fleeting line about the Gilgamesh communicating with an unknown transmitter in space seemed to be paralleled to Portia and her spider friends also transmitting signals via web vibrations to the local species of spiders in the chapter before this one. It's a really cool parallel and one i never thought of before, how wireless communications that's second nature to us in this modern age isn't so different from the non-verbal ways animals communicate to each other.

This book isn't horror at all, but I really enjoyed the earlier chapters where we see Kern communicating with the crew of the Gilgamesh. Tchaikovsky seems to enjoy this gimmick of having two columns of text that are supposed to be superimposed upon one another (he does something similar in a more recent novella, Elder Race) and it's employed to fantastic effect here. Kudos also to Mel Hudson, the audiobook narrator, who really brought out the horror of Kern's desperate madness in her degeneration into something not entirely Avrana nor Eliza.

In the first half of the book, we also kept hearing a theme of how the spiders keep “thrumming with manifest destiny” and I knew I've heard that term somewhere before in my lit classes. It's a cultural belief from the 19th century that (white) American settlers were “destined” to settle and expand in North America, including removing and eliminating native populations. this is a really, really interesting parallel to draw in this whole situation - are the spiders the settlers, or the new humans? Whose is the manifest destiny? It's also telling that the ship containing the last batch of humans is called Gilgamesh, after the epic story of a king who didn't want to die (which then calls to mind Guyen and his quest for immortality later in the book).

In the last parts, humanity honestly got on my nerves, especially Karst. Any species, including humans, have a strong sense of self-preservation and we get that Kern's World is really their last hope before extinction, but the way Karst went about it was really annoying. Immediately just saying, we're gonna go in there and we're gonna burn down everything, kill everything on it, because now it's *our* home. he embodies the inherent selfish war-mongering nature of humans and it's really annoying to me. It also smacks too much of imperialism and colonialism, and how/why humans have invaded other territories and killed native populations since time immemorial. I also loved that we see the armed conflict from the human POVs. If I had just read this book skipping every spider POV chapter, I would've 100% rooted for the humans to win against the aliens, just like in any other alien monster sci-fi movie or book. In this case, though, we witnessed and was along for the ride with the evolution of the spiders alongside the degeneration of the last human society in their arkship, so allegiances are grayer here. I found myself rooting more for the spiders in this one tbh. They are defending their home planet against humans who quite certainly want to take over for their own survival, without sharing and leaving no survivors from the native population. Weighing that against the potential extinction of the human race was really weird.

Thoughts about the ending: it was a little overly optimistic with the nanovirus being almost a deus ex machina miraculously making the humans and spiders become one peaceful harmonious society with just a single fell stroke, but even if a little convenient, I thought it was still a pretty refreshing solution to the central conflict of the book.

The world and the premise in this one has so much potential, but I just felt like the pacing was a bit too slow, and I found things really draggy by the middle. It also felt like an adult's story strongly dressed up as a children's book, because it dealt with very, very heavy topics and had some pretty violent scenes involving (anthropomorphic) animals fighting each other to the death. But yet the author used the guise of a children's book so he could do expositions and info dumps that would be excusable for children's stories but inexcusable for adults. Honestly a shame because I really liked the premise and the world and want to know more about the concepts introduced in this book, but I'm still on the fence whether I want to read the rest of the series.

Well, this was weird. I'm almost at a loss as to how to rate it. 3.5 stars maybe?

On one hand, it raised a lot of really interesting points about history - not just in the type that we study of the long-ago past, but also in the way our present is becoming history right under our noses. It talks a lot about memories, nostalgia, and the ways the past is connected to the present, and whether we can truly go back and change anything in the past.

And then right at the end, it kinda pulls the rug out from under the reader's feet and leaves you feeling like: What? What did I just read? Where did that come from?

From a sensationalist point of view, it was actually really engaging. I couldn't put it down and finished the latter half of it within a single sitting (it didn't take very long either, since it's such a short book). It definitely also offered a lot of discussion-worthy points so I'm glad I read this along with a few friends so we could really discuss this.

But ultimately, I felt like this book could've done a lot more with the very interesting points it raised, instead of dumping a complete plot twist on the reader right at the end, and without even going into the implications of that plot twist too. It almost felt like the author just... didn't really know how to end it, which is pretty ironic given the title.

I remember watching the live-action movie for this one many years back when it first came out. Aside from it being set in sunny Okinawa with a lot of shots of the ocean and something about a little boy being involved, I couldn't remember a thing about it. In fact, I had a vague impression that this one didn't even have a murder in it (I was very wrong). This book departs from Higashino's usual gimmick and serves things up to us in a more conventional formula, but still with enough twists and turns along the way. I very much enjoyed this.

To start off, this book is not set in Okinawa. It's set in a rural seaside town called Hari Cove, with stunning beaches and a thriving marine ecology. Some of its residents are going head to head with a mining company who is proposing to start drilling operations in the ocean to retrieve precious minerals found on the seabed. Hari Cove is dealing with such industrial threats to its main attraction (the ocean), but also falling behind on tourist numbers and the like. The problem becomes one not just of preserving the marine ecosystems, but of sustaining the town itself.

One might think that this book would go hard on the environmental message here, but to my surprise that's actually not the case. Yukawa, our central “detective” figure and the titular Galileo, is hired by the company doing the mining in Hari Cove as a scientific expert and consultant. It appears that the company is actually not the villainous money-grabbing corporation that is usually the case in plots like these - they are investing money and effort into conducting surveys of the seabed and developing technology to ensure that the mining disrupts as little of the marine ecology as possible. But the residents are still concerned - how little can you disrupt marine ecology when you're going to be mining the seabed? We see a group of residential marine activists passionately debate the topic with the mining company.

On his way to Hari Cove, Yukawa meets Kyohei, a pre-teen boy who is about to spend his summer vacation with his aunt and uncle, Shigehiro and Setsuko, who run the Green Rock Inn. By some coincidence, Yukawa also arranges to stay at the Green Rock Inn during his time at Hari Cove. Though usually annoyed with children, Yukawa finds some joy in conducting science experiments with Kyohei, and teaching him how to do his mathematics homework. Shigehiro and Setsuko's only daughter, Narumi, also helps out at the Green Rock Inn and strikes up a friendship with Yukawa, even though she is part of the group of marine activists who are in the midst of opposing the mining operations at Hari Cove. Being a failing rural town, the only other guest at Green Rock Inn is a quiet elderly man, Tsukahara, who is later discovered dead on the seawall with a head injury.

The pacing of this book is a bit slower, and we spend a lot of time delving into the characters, their interpersonal relationships, and eventually their backstories. I never found this book draggy, however, and unwittingly finished most of this in one day. The chapters were short, and that helped it to feel choppier, even though we're not actually getting a lot done. We also see the resident police duo again, Kusanagi and Utsumi, this time conducting their half of the investigation from Tokyo rather than Hari Cove. I liked that this book had more time to talk about something other than the murder - that is, about tourism in rural towns and the importance of preservation of marine biology. I also found it interesting that instead of being hard-hitting with environmental activism, the book settled for a more neutral stance in which it encouraged open-mindedness amongst both sides so that compromises can be reached. That's certainly different from what we're used to in media nowadays.

The characters in this one were also quite memorable, particularly Kyohei and the unlikely friendship he strikes up with Yukawa. Given that Yukawa is basically an iteration of Sherlock Holmes, prickly even at his best, it is endearing and wholesome to see him somehow develop a soft spot for the boy, in his own prickly way. We also get to see a bit of development on the other characters in the novel and sympathize with each for different reasons. There aren't really any particularly unlikeable characters in this book, every one of them having insurmountable reasons for their actions.

Overall though, a great installment to the Detective Galileo series, and certainly would recommend to any fan of murder mysteries.

This was a fun enough ride, but I also constantly felt like I was just skating on the surface of some deeper meaning that I'm too dense to decipher, and therefore also just skating on the brink of some deeper appreciation and enjoyment of it.

The Imperial Radch series by Ann Leckie is spectacular. The core ideas and premise in it may not be a breath of fresh air by this point, but the way Leckie constructs those tropes from ground-up and pushes them to its limit will certainly make the books in the series stand out in one's mind, no matter how many iterations of the same tropes one has read before.

But there's also a denseness to Leckie's writing that is not the easiest to parse. It requires the utmost attention as you read it, maybe even demands re-reads to fully understand the intricacies of the world Leckie is building and the nuances of the character interactions here. That is probably why I felt like I was skating on the surface all the time, even more so than I did with the first book.

While the first book, Ancillary Justice, was also dense, it had a lot more action going on so there were moments of re-grouping where we had time to catch up with the information given to us. In this one though, there isn't really that much movement happening. Our ship protagonist, Breq, has now been made Fleet Captain by the Lord of the Radch herself. In such a position, she makes her way towards Athoek station ostensibly to protect that system as a delegate of the Radch. She doesn't tell people that it is also the hometown of her late captain, Lt. Awn, where she intends to find Awn's sister to make amends. Along the way, Breq makes friends and enemies amongst the various races living on Athoek, and serves justice as she understands it.

There is a lot more politics about imperialism here, and the friction not only between colonizer (Radchaai) and the colonized races, but also the friction between colonized races, depending on how closely they have formed alliances with the Radchaai and therefore have moved up the socioeconomic hierarchy. It was all reminiscent (and perhaps deliberately so) of British imperialism and therefore of my own Commonwealth country and history, something that I honestly did not expect from this book. I appreciated the thoughts and discussion the book had on whether Breq's so-called justice was futile and in fact detrimental no matter how well-intentioned.

Overall though, this book was okay. It's a hard one for me to rate. I enjoyed it, but at the same time it didn't blow my mind - and yet, I'm not even sure if I just need to read it closer and harder. I feel like I missed a few points here, and I keep thinking it's entirely my fault for not having paid enough attention while reading, given how popular and beloved this book is. Definitely will read the next one though.

Having read a few Higashino novels in quick succession, I've come to realise that the gimmick he uses in each one seems to be the same or very similar. What does make this one stand out for me, though, is the actual solution itself. Higashino is not so concerned about the whodunnit but the howdunnit. I watched the live-action adaptation of this book in the Japanese drama “Galileo” so I actually already knew the solution deep in my brain but I had forgotten about it and it caught me off-guard again by how insiduous the solution was. For that, I'm giving this 4 stars.

Ayane Mashiba seems to be the perfect housewife to her husband Yoshitaka. Hiromi is Ayane's assistant at the patchwork school that the latter owns and runs, but she is also secretly Yoshitaka's mistress. One day, while Ayane is off to Hokkaido visiting her parents, Yoshitaka keels over dead by poison. As the police investigates, they uncover more and more secrets within the married couple's lives and the people around them.

This might be the first book that we see Detective Kaoru Utsumi, a new female detective on Detective Kusunagi's team, although because translations are not done for every Galileo novel that Higashino has written, so at least in English we've missed Det. Utsumi's first appearances. By this time, she seems to be on good terms with our titular Galileo, physics professor Dr Manabu Yukawa, and perhaps even sees things more eye to eye with him than his old friend Det. Kusunagi. In the live-action drama, Det. Utsumi is the female protagonist opposite Yukawa, and Kusunagi is only a supporting character at best, unfortunately. Det. Utsumi is not a bad addition - she has strong opinions and isn't afraid to voice them, even to her male superiors. In a society like Japan where gender stereotypes and hierarchy is still strong, her character is a welcome change. Despite this, though, Utsumi sometimes still perpetuates some slightly problematic attitudes towards women, like denigrating “female intuition” and being in line with Yukawa and Kusunagi's opinions that women were illogical.

Ayane and Hiromi make very good pieces in this puzzle. There's enough drama between them and the deceased Yoshitaka that gets unravelled in the story, which also serves to humanize both of them. It's also good that this didn't completely devolve into a “the other woman is solely/mainly to blame when the husband is unfaithful” situation, which is still a common attitude in Asia unfortunately.

Shoutout to the audiobook narrator, David Pittu, for this one for bringing so much life and distinction to the voices for each character, especially Yukawa, Kusunagi, Utsumi, Ayane, and Hiromi. He even managed to give the voice of the police section chief, who only occasionally appeared, a distinct identity.

Excited to read more Higashino novels, as always.

I wasn't engaged by this book at the very beginning, probably because it featured side characters from the Stormlight Archive so far whom I'm not that interested in, and seemed to be primarily set aboard a ship. Naval stories aren't my most preferred subgenre and I've read a few consecutively recently so I wasn't thrilled to be honest. But Dawnshard really turns things around.

In this one, Rysn, who has generally been relegated to interludes in previous Stormlight books, is now sent on a journey by Navani Kholin to investigate the mythical island of Akinah, from whence a ghost ship devoid of its crew had appeared. She embarks on the voyage accompanied by Knights Radiant the Lopen and Huio, as well as her assistant Nikli. Secretly, Rysn was also given to hope that Akinah might provide an answer or treatment for her ailing pet larkin, Chiri Chiri.

This is a short enough novella and, at least past the 20-30% mark, makes for an entertaining read. Rysn and the Lopen have not been interesting characters to me thus far which made the beginning of the book drag a bit, but by the end I definitely appreciated them a lot more than I had in the whole series (even if I wouldn't say they're new favourites).

Unlike Edgedancer, where we're introduced to a prominent new character who will be playing a significant part in subsequent Stormlight Archive books, Dawnshard doesn't do any such thing. Instead, Dawnshard introduces things and concepts that are entirely different from anything we've read before in the series thus far, which leads me to believe that this is a set-up not for the rest of the SA books in this first arc, but really a taste of the second arc to come (books 6 to 10). Sanderson has mentioned before that SA will split into two arcs like that, and it makes sense to me if the second arc was going to concern a very different type of magic system set in the same world.

That's as far as I will say without going into spoilers. Also that I always visualize the Lopen as Pedro Pascal.

This is a compilation of mystery short stories by Agatha Christie featuring several of her famous detectives like Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Parker Pyne, Harley Quinn, and Tommy and Tuppence. There were some here that I don't feel like I've read before, but also some that I'm fairly sure I've read in other short story collections. The theme of the short stories collected here is, as the tagline says, “love stories”, although I find that term to be loosely defined here. Basically any mystery that features any sort of possible romantic couple qualifies.

The book was palatable enough, and true to Agatha Christie's tried and tested formula. I might've rated this lower because of how formulaic it was, but tbh the formula is what I read Christie for - it's comforting and I know everything will be solved in the end and the story will progress according to a certain pattern.

Perhaps the most standout story in this collection to me is “Magnolia Blossoms”, one that I haven't read before. It's not a mystery at all, doesn't feature any detective, and is really just a piece of drama. It features an enigmatic and almost undecipherable female protagonist, Theodora, who is caught between her husband and her lover. Because it's not a mystery, it doesn't follow any of Christie's usual formula and it had me wondering what was going to happen and how. Spoilery thoughts: Because Theodora was so wooden and unexpressive at the beginning when she was eloping with Vincent, I was certain that there was something sus with her. But then she turned around and went back to Richard despite not having any affection for him at all, simply because she felt it her duty as his wife to be with him in his time of need. Then finally, the ending where she walks away from Richard and chooses to be alone instead of going back to Vincent really caught me off-guard and had me intrigued by her.

A good read if you are already a Christie fan and looking for a palate cleanser from other genres and books, but not something I'd recommend to people just discovering Christie for the first time.

This was really such a trip. A great book and one I would highly recommend to any fan of sci-fi. This is definitely what I'd classify as pretty dense sci-fi though, so if you're not familiar with the genre or not in the mood for it, this probably wouldn't be something you'd pick up.

The premise of this universe was just fascinating. We're here millions of years into the future, where the human scions of time long past have made clones of themselves called shatterling which, while biologically human, could persist for millions and millions of years, their duties to keep watch over the other emerging and falling civilisation around the Milky Way Galaxy. In particular, we are concerned with Campion and Purslane, two clones from the Line created from Abigail Gentian, the house from which cloning technology was invented in the first place. In rushing towards a Line reunion, Campion and Purslane pick up an unexpected guest from the Machine People (essentially robots), introducing himself as Hesperus and apparently with a bad case of amnesia.

This book isn't incredibly long but it felt like it, because there were so many things that happened. It probably also felt long because the chronology in this book is whack. In order to be spacefaring travellers, the shatterlings also have to reckon time on an astronomical scale. Interstellar travel takes light years and this book acknowledges it. They spend millenia traveling around the galaxy, and I wouldn't be surprised if the events of this book spans at least a million years, if not more. I'm an astronomy nut so I was pretty happy nerding about stuff like this, and the imagination of how humans might be able to overcome that hurdle in interstellar travel (in this book, by stasis technology that essentially slows time down for your body alone, so a hundred thousand years may pass in what you subjectively experience as a minute).

So I was intrigued by the premise and technology and universe that this book already set out, but I was also equally fascinated by the plot. We are introduced to Abigail Gentian at the beginning as a little girl, supposedly heiress of a large, rambling mansion, and whose only playmate is a mysterious little boy. We know she is the progenitor of the Gentian Line, to which our protagonists Campion and Purslane belong, but there're all sorts of questions raised about how she came about to create shatterlings in the first place, and how to connect the dots between Abigail and the creation of her Gentian Line.

The chapters in this book constantly shift between Campion and Purslane's perspectives, and I think it was deliberate that the author never explicitly mentioned whose point of view it was, and you had to infer that as the chapter went on. It wasn't confusing or difficult, but it certainly blurred the lines between Campion and Purslane, which I think was the point - they are clones after all. I didn't mind that change in perspectives, but it also drove home the slight unease I felt about Campion and Purslane's romance. It almost felt a bit... incestuous? Nevertheless, despite being clones, they were both distinct enough from each other that I was able to tell them apart most of the time.

Spoilery thoughts: I guess the reason why I wouldn't give this a straight 5 stars was because I thought there were a lot of questions not answered by the end, or a lot of loopholes in the explanations. My hype for this book started fading once we found out from Hesperus about the First Machines. It didn't make sense to me why the Machine People would form such a strong association with this ancient robot civilization that they've never even come into contact with before, simply because they were robots? I just felt like if we ever found out there was some ancient human civilization that got wiped out, I don't know if humans would care that much, honestly. And the Machine People had never been under any direct threat from the organic civilizations thus far, so it felt like they were poking a hornet's nest without any impetus to do so.Also, I'm not sure if I missed it but I don't really know what was the role of Palatial in this whole story? I was expecting there to be some link between the simulation story and the one we saw played out. While we did see certain parallels between Purslane and Abigail as the princess, I was quite confused overall about why we had to go through all the Palatial sequences. I was convinced that the little boy was Valmik, and perhaps he is? But we never really got a confirmation of that. We also don't know which shatterling Abigail became, but I guess that was meant to be a deliberate non-answer. I would guess it's Purslane though.Why didn't we get more explanation about the House of Suns? Who started this House? Who recruits people into this House? What was the point of going through all this effort to make sure all the Lines didn't remember the genocide that they committed? I just struggled to see the point of this secret House and all the stuff they've been doing for 6 million years. I really expected a lot more about them considering this whole book was named after them.Lastly, that ending just felt way too abrupt. I can understand when an author wants to leave a bit of an open ending, but I felt like that was the wrong point to end a story. Hesperus sacrificed himself to save Purslane, we can be fairly sure that the person inside Hesperus is Purslane, and then... what? How are Campion and Purslane going to start a new civilization in Andromeda? It seems like they're essentially stranded there, right?

Nevertheless though, I overall really enjoyed this book and was super glad to have picked it up for my book club, I don't think I would have otherwise heard of it at all. Would definitely check out more from Reynolds.

3.5/5. Having read Turton's “Seven and a Half Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle”, I had an idea of what to expect going into this one. Turton excels in mystery and atmosphere, but falls a little short in characters and writing style. This one was essentially that, except that, while the mystery was serviceable and definitely more interesting than your average run-of-the-mill contemporary mysteries, it still didn't match up to the confounding brilliance of Evelyn Hardcastle. While I read Evelyn Hardcastle almost entirely in one sitting because it was such a page-turner, I took almost a whole 2 weeks to finish this one, and never felt quite as much compelled to continue except when I just wanted to get this over and done with.

Honestly, it could also just be the subject matter for me. I don't think I particularly enjoy books that are excessively to do with ships and sailors and the like. If it's a mystery on a ship, and using the ship simply as a setting to have these people isolated at sea together, that's totally fine. But in this book, the layout of the ship, its crew, its fleet and all of those technical naval terms played a somewhat larger role than I would otherwise have liked. That could have contributed to my finding it more difficult to engage with the mystery than Evelyn Hardcastle.

The characters in this one were also hard to root for. I didn't feel particularly sympathetic towards anyone in this book, and a lot of times I found characters' personalities and decisions to be unrealistic and bewildering, and their dialogue sometimes stilted and unnatural. I found that sometimes things happened almost too conveniently too. A lot of the things that happened, both in the backstories of the characters as well as within the events of the book, just felt exaggerated and contrived for the purpose of creating a colourful mystery. I found this also to be the case in Evelyn Hardcastle (I barely remember any of the characters in there now), so there's no surprise here for me.

I felt like the book could also be shorter too. Despite all the action, I felt like some parts of the book really dragged for me. Plus, I felt like the major events of the book could have been more squeezed together to create more bated-breath tension, but the lulls in between each major event felt a little too long. There were a lot of details that I also kinda missed in the book because there're so many details, and I often found myself wondering, “Wait, how did we get here?” from one chapter to the next.

The resolution of the mystery also somewhat felt a little contrived but I was satisfied with the solution of the mystery. Some parts of it I had guessed or wasn't surprised at, others were a little more interesting and unexpected. Overall it wasn't incredibly mind-blowing plot twists, but it was definitely still satisfying.

I still gave this a 3.5 though because Turton really does a sinister atmosphere really well. One could almost feel the filth and the squalor that the crew of the Sardaam were living in. Despite my complaints about the mystery, there was still enough substance to it to make me at least want to finish the book, instead of being completely apathetic as to the solution, so that's at least a bit of a win.