Dave

There is a lot about The Martian to like and I understand why there are people who absolutely love this book, but at the same time there is a lot to strongly dislike and I understand the people who hate this book at the same time.

The book feels split up into two distinct sections; section one is nearly endless logs from the protagonist, Mark Watney, section two is more of his logs as well as a look at everyone else involved in the story. Needless to say, the first part is not a joy to read unless you are really into reading the logs of what feels like a YouTube parody account that leaves comments in the voice of a mock Redditor.

Mark Watney is what Wesley Crusher would be like if he was stranded on Mars and left for dead if Beverly Crusher had somehow worked MacGuyver's DNA into the birthing process. There is zero tension in what should be an incredibly tense situation due to how effortless everything is for Watney. Not enough food to last? No problem, Watney is an expert botanist who is able to take his own shit, soil he brought with him and convenient potatoes, mix it with Martian soil and have an indoor farm that can sustain him for almost two years. Need more water? He's also an expert chemist who can create it out of thin air and have enough to last as long as he needs. He could probably end world hunger in the snap of his fingers if he wanted to, he's just that damned good.Every problem is met with a nonchalant series of jokes and asides while Watney is able to utilize increasingly convenient items in his vicinity while he rags on the poor taste of his teammates as he goes through their possessions in search for entertainment. What's frustrating is that when it's convenient for the plot to move along this innate ability to solve every problem regardless of complexity disappears from Watney's possession and he's left helpless.The big issue that I have is that I'm forced to fill in blanks and assign reasons and events to flesh out these strange holes in the plot and character. He probably had a mental break, maybe he lost his will, maybe he wasn't in class on the day when they had you clean up an experiment after a disaster to see that something might be salvageable, etc. What little is given about Watney is downright unlikable most of the time, which can make the early parts of the book a slog to get through.Things pick up when other characters are introduced and things move from the journal-based style to a more normal style of prose. You don't really get much of a feel for any of the characters, not much description about their features, personalities or lives outside of saving Mark Watney, but then again, this whole book is just about Mark Watney, isn't it? We know that Lewis and her husband like Disco and the 70's, we know that Johannsen is an attractive, younger female and so forth, but we're never given much of a reason to care about them and it kind of feels like a shame.The brief glimpses that the reader gets into these ancillary characters shows the potential for a lot more interesting, likable and worthwhile characters, but instead they are just to serve Watney and his brilliance as set dressing. I know that I'm really kind of ripping into this right now, but there were some really great things in this book as well. After around 40% or so it was hard to put down due to how the plot just flowed. There was a good sense of tension built throughout and it was genuinely exciting to read at times. There was obviously a lot of effort and research put into this book, which I appreciated and the approach kept things from being overly dry when veering into the realm of the scientific. I also appreciate the attempt at doing something different, but honestly the execution was just lacking and hurt the book overall. I'm also well aware that I just found the lead character to be abrasive and awful, but that's just personal taste and you might love him and feel a deep, soulful connection to him. I can only imagine how good this book could have been if the same level of attention to detail was put into building up the characters more and helping to create some increasing tension throughout the book as opposed to only in the second half.

Sorta lost steam after a while. Really abrupt ending.

Yes, I've never read these before and yes they are completely inoffensive.

I have a complicated relationship with Le Guin's books.

I very much love her accomplishments and contributions to science fiction, I love the concepts she tackles and I love a lot of the things she does in her books, but sometimes I find myself not completely taken in my her writing.

By the end of this book I loved it, but there were times in this short, short book where I was reading it out of obligation. I understood what she was doing in this book but it was difficult to find much of a connection to any of the characters. Again, I get what she was going for, but it didn't make for an enjoyable read because, well, I didn't care about the characters until near the end.

Frustrations aside, I've seen a lot of people come to the conclusion that this is a warning about playing god or being greedy. While I think there are parts of that to this, to say that's the point of the book seems to undercut a lot of the metaphor and allegory buried deep in there.

At the core is George Orr, a man who can “change reality” through his dreams, thus he needs to self-medicate to avoid changing the world. That world that George lives in doesn't sound too great. He's lonely, depressed, anxious and clearly unable to face the reality around him. Something like asking out the girl at the lawyer's office churns inside of him into the fantastical, as does his relationship with Dr. Haber.

As someone who's met someone and immediately created a fictional future with that person it makes sense. To George, he sees multiple realities with Heather, all while Dr. Haber is there, pulling the strings to make him do stuff he doesn't want to do. This begs the question: how much of the world George is seeing and how he's seeing it actually a construct of his anxiety and depression?

This is a book that worth reading, considering and really sitting down to think about, even if a lot of the set up in the first half can be laborious without an anchor character to center the reader.

Perhaps one of my favorite books that I've read in a very, very long time.

The characters are delightful in the same sort of way that peripheral characters are in Twin Peaks, where you just want to keep visiting with them and watching their strange lives unfold.

The tale of Willie and his father was compelling, but the obvious draw was the other characters and them joking around while trying to race away from that sense of dread that has been hanging over them for so long. They know the truth, deep down, they just don't want to face it yet.

I wanted to love this book, but it was just missing some sort of emotional anchor.

I'll freely admit I watched the film first after it came out, well, most of it. In fact, I turned it off and had to revisit it later. Thematic elements in the film were interesting and I wanted to see how much of it came from the source.

The answer is... Eh?

The format of the book and the prose didn't bother me. We're reading the character's account of said events, after all. The narrative is built on dream logic and somehow I feel like this being a series that continues on sort of cheapens any metaphorical impact the story provides.

Area X's mystery hardly matters in the face of what we're experiencing, right? Our protagonist lost her husband after he went off on a fool's errand of a job, veritably pushed away by his cold and distant wife, or so she thinks. She does miss him, though, in her own way, which pulls her into signing up for the same job to explore the same anomalous area on an expedition to track down what really happened to him.

She undergoes a series of hallucinations, there's some death and a lighthouse, as well as spores and creatures that molt human flesh and doppelgang whoever is there or something. Or something. Ultimately, reading her husband's journal, entirely addressed to her, is what prompts her metamorphosis.

Again, I'm just not entirely sure how effective any of this is continuing forward with the story, but it's worth a shot.

Chaos Principle asks a lot of tough questions, all through the lens of the last detective of his kind on what remains of Earth.

Johnson immediately sets the dark tone and never relents, focusing on a grisly murder that Ansel is forced to investigate, which leads him down an existential wormhole questioning not just how own history, but modern existence itself.

Tightly plotted and written, it's absolutely worth checking out.

Received a copy via NetGalley.

A book like Desert Creatures is difficult to pin down.

There are parts that have the sparse desperation of a Cormac McCarthy novel, others that match the brutality and then parts where the writing doesn't quite live up to these high points. It's perhaps deeply unfair for a writer to compare their work to someone like McCarthy right out of the gate like this, but those are the parallels that exist within the work, so...

Our protagonist is a girl named Magdala who's stuck traversing the wastelands of the southwestern US after an unexplained incident ruined everything. In the desert, people and animals are getting desert sick and turning into fluffy trees with fruit that makes anyone who eats it sick. The folks who aren't that lucky turn into monsters. Las Vegas is the lone holdout for civilization and worships a deceased cowboy.

Through the distinct parts of the book, it follows Magdala through her transformation from a scared girl into survivor badass, although there is a reprieve in the middle following a heretic priest named Elam. We're forced to see the horrors she endured, then the sacrifices to her own humanity she needed to make to survive. Her redemption is as close as we get to a resolution, and that redemption is loaded with caveats.

There are powerful themes about beliefs, women surviving trauma and what it means to be human. This is the kind of book that sticks with you and deserves your attention.

For hyped up novels, it's difficult for them to deliver. It's never really the fault of the novel or the novelist. People fall in love with something because it perfectly aligns to their tastes, then they become a loud public advocate for it and it snowballs from there.

Needless to say, my expectations going into this one were, “this will be fine, I guess.” It was a lot better than fine. It was really good.

This is one of those novels that covers a long period of time, focusing on the relationships between two characters, Sadie and Sam. There is a third character, Marx, who's in the mix, but Marx is more, in his own words, an NPC of sorts. He's there as the muse and support for both characters, sometimes more, sometimes less, but a pivotal part of their lives.

Sadie met Sam when her sister was in the hospital with leukemia. A nurse saw her, bored in a waiting room daily, and pointed her towards a playroom set up for the kids, where she met Sam, an odd boy who was playing Super Mario Bros. It turned out Sam hadn't spoken to anyone in weeks after getting in a horrific car accident that mangled his foot and killed his mother. There was just something about Sadie and Sam that worked.

So, when they met up again years later in Boston while they were both in different colleges, Sadie handed off a student project videogame she was working on led to Sam and his roommate, Marx, playing it and finding it amazing. A bulk of the novel focuses on the creative relationship that ensues between the three, with Sadie and Sam creating a super popular, mildly artistic game, while Marx helped manage operations, which blossomed into them forming a game studio, developing more games together, and having the friction that creative partners always run into.

There was never a romantic relationship between Sadie and Sam, something they both mull over numerous times in their lives, but realize they're already partners even when they are furious at each other, coping with the loss of a shared loved one, and dealing with all of life's complications. There are parts that are heartbreaking and prescient. What happens to Marx is... well, I wasn't quite sure if it was necessary, but it served its purpose, I suppose.

I enjoyed that it showed a realistic creative relationship without feeling the need to dip into a basic love triangle kind of thing. Creative relationships are real, different, and can be intense. Sometimes that's enough of a story worth exploring, and this one was.

If you're looking for the usual Murakami experience, this is perhaps not what you should be looking for.

It's much smaller in scope, although the execution remains immaculate. There are excursions into different points of view, with most of the book taking place with Mari and the small cast being in third person, but occasional glimpses into Eri, Mari's sister, and her long slumber from a first person (we) perspective through a television screen. These passages involve a faceless man and an ominous sense of dread that leaves you with questions at the end of the book.

For a small book, there's a lot to unpack, such as the relationship between Mari and Eri, two sisters who went through a few traumatic experiences together, culminating in being stuck in an elevator together, before they drifted apart into different lives. Eri is a sleeper, always asleep, never awake, while Mari has a difficult time sleeping and finds herself out and about.

An encounter with one of Eri's classmates leading to needing to swoop into help a Chinese girl at a love hotel adds texture.

There's clearly an interplay between the girls going on here, where they're two parts of a whole, a yin and a yang. All while the male characters prove to leave both Mari and the reader feeling uneasy or downright disgusted with them.

It's very clear to see this is a short book about trauma, the people who inflict it, and what it does to the victims. You have to go digging for answers, which won't bode well for some readers. If you're willing to put in the work, though, it's an interesting read.

Not quite as good as I remembered it, sadly.

To say it's difficult to nail down exactly what a Locked Tomb book actually is would be an understatement.

For a series that I actively avoided, it's become something I very much enjoy. Being an artist and answering to yourself in the face of a passionate fanbase is bold. Gideon the Ninth was a fun book that had a lot going on for it and nobody would have blamed Muir for merely recreating it with the same cast of characters and continuing on with a linear story. Instead, Harrow the Ninth happened, which veered so far off course that you were either there for the ride or ejected, dejected that someone who wrote one of your favorite books isn't playing the greatest hits.

Nona is another very different book.

I'm gonna write stuff and it'll potentially be spoilers.

After the ending of Harrow, there were expectations of what we were getting. We were getting Harrowhawk coming to her senses, Gideon was indeed going to play a part, now we know more about Lyctors and John Gaius's bonkers empire. Hell, we've fought resurrection beasts and heralds. We've got our world-building down pat, but then again, who the hell is Blood of Eden that Camilla is hanging out with?

It turns out, none of this is very easy and this series explores love, trauma and the impact both have on individuals, groups and the greater community. Nona is, in a lot of ways, a shell. Nona is someone we care deeply about and want to be doing cool, kickass things, but in the wake of nonstop trauma, Nona is also Nona. There are locals kids she hangs out with, she's not very smart but she's a teacher's assistant to keep her busy and she's got her found family of Camilla and Palamedes sharing a body and Pyrrha Dve holding things down for everyone. They're in a bombed-out city on the verge of awful things and there are a lot of potentially familiar faces being referred to by different names.

Witnessing this through Nona's eyes is something that would only work via prose, as readers are familiar with a lot of the characters. Nona is, after all, only six-months-old in a nineteen-year-old body. It's complicated. This means even when we're familiar with characters, like Gideon, either Gideon has massively changed by all the events she's suffered through, or Nona feels intimidated by Gideon and sees her as a cold, impassive person, which is in contrast to how Harrow would see Gideon.

The biblical tract-style chapters of John's origin story punctuate all of this. These chapters break up the narrative while providing valuable context how this all began. We get to see how John was working on a cryo project as a part of the greater FTL escape plan to get as many people as possible off of Earth. Somewhere along the way, John discovers he's able to reanimate dead bodies, amasses a literal death cult, becomes a global figure that's helping keep a powerful president looking like he's alive and starts committing atrocities with a downright laissez-faire attitude. Somehow, this results in John and his cohort getting access to a suitcase nuke, John discovering the wealthy were planning to abscond while leaving 99% of humanity behind and that old softie John ends up starting an end-game style nuclear war, his powers reaching an apex where he single-handedly reaches out and slaughters every last person he can reach.

These chapters, especially in the context of where this book sits in the series where the emperor was slain, Gideon returned in Harrowhawk's body to fight, we discover Gideon's parentage and all of this other stuff, helps to frame exactly what this series is and who these people are. So much of what we experienced prior in the series was dream-like, odd and detached. Nona's reality, in contrast, is grounded and post-apocalyptic. Nona is living in the wake of the destruction, with the battered remains of the people who mattered to her. So, is Nona an awakening from a fairy tale, or a reprieve from the surreal reality of the nine houses, the river, the resurrection beasts and the heralds?

... does it even matter?

By far my favorite Emily St. John Mandel.

There's an inherent meta quality to this novel that makes it feel different from the rest of her work. In the wake of the popularity of Station Eleven and then the follow-up, The Glass Hotel, which was perhaps more divisive among readers, this book was more of an examination of how the author is coping with writing a book about a deadly pandemic just a few years before an actual deadly pandemic hits and having that book become not just successful, but almost oppressively so.

St. John Mandel's followup, The Glass Hotel, was, in a lot of ways, a more interesting book to me. More of a contemplative piece about greed, human nature and the difficult of just existing. Not to say Station Eleven wasn't about those things as well, but there are readers who see things through different lenses, not that of theme but tropes.

There were readers disappointed that The Glass Hotel wasn't another post-apocalyptic book, that it wasn't giving them a similar story, if not a follow-up. As an author, it's difficult to not internalize these things.

Certain ‘spoilers' follow.

Sea of Tranquility features a prominent author, Olive, in the future who wrote a book about a deadly pandemic and was on a book tour promoting said book because of an upcoming film adaptation of it, while a deadly pandemic was blossoming in a part of the planet. This author lives in a colony on the moon and spends ample time throughout her sections feeling dislodged from reality while traveling from hotel to hotel.

Hotels play a big role in St. John Mandel's work here, huh?

There are gonna be folks that label Sea of Tranquility as a time travel novel, which is perhaps fine. There is time travel elements involved here, namely a character named Gaspery who worked as a hotel security guard (cough) until his sister, an agent at the Time Institute (the same Time Institute that the author stand-in's husband was helping design) who has a theory that certain glitches appearing in different points in history prove simulation theory, where they are living in a computer simulation. It was something Zooey and Gaspery's mother deeply believed. I should note that Gaspery is named after a character from Olive's work.

Gaspery isn't introduced as a point of view character until the second half of the book, with him appearing throughout the first half as a strange figure to the different characters, including Edwin St. Andrew, a British expat in Canada after going on a tirade about the ill-effects of colonialism and his family essentially kicking him to the curb. He has a hallucination in the woods in Caiette. Yes, that Caiette, where Vincent from the Glass Hotel, filmed a video her brother used for a visual art piece, including a strange “glitch.”

Gaspery appears to Andrew masquerading a priest, asking him about what he saw in the woods.

Gaspery also appears as an interviewer with Olive when she's on her book tour, meets with Vincent's brother and old friend and we're all sort of in a churn here with the characters from The Glass Hotel.

The first half of the book establishes the importance of The Glass Hotel and its cast of characters, as well as Olive and her Station Eleven-ish work, on top of her mounting fear of the encroaching pandemic. All throughout, we see Gaspery and it's unclear as to why.

When we find out later he's a time traveler tasked with uncovering the mystery of these glitches, including interviewing a violinist in a futuristic Oklahoma City airship terminal, that same violin music present in each instance of someone encountering the “glitch,” things get more complicated.

Gaspery's job is to gather data and investigate, not interfere. But he does. Because his humanity won't let him meet with Olive and know the pandemic will kill her days later, or Andrew, depressed after his time at war, meets his own untimely demise. This causes a ripple effect where the Time Institute frames him for a murder in the past, sends him to prison to rot, but his sister instead gets him to somewhere he'll be safe... where, and this is all a spoiler or whatnot, he becomes the old man violinist with a surgically altered face so the Time Institute won't find him.

It's not a simulation, it's just Gaspery intersecting with himself in time multiple times over in the same place.

But that's just the plot, right? What's interesting to me is what this all means.

I've read other reviews that are disappointed with St. John Mandel's return to talking about a pandemic, which is ironic considering The Glass Hotel received a lot of praise, but also a lot of criticism for not following in Station Eleven's footsteps. In a way, it almost proves the exact point of this book. Actually, it does.

What does it mean to be an artist who has always existed within their own space, allowed to work as they wish and create different kinds of work, only to become successful and suddenly people want more of the same from you? There are passages where Olive is running through criticisms of her books in her head that come from readers, critics and interviewers, about how her endings aren't impactful enough, or how certain characters don't meet certain expectations, or how certain tropes weren't present and so on. She's on a book tour for a book that she wrote a while ago, only popular again because of a film adaptation (cough Station Eleven on HBO cough) and, well... you get the picture.

Many of the “problems” readers expressed with The Glass Hotel were revisited here, although key mysteries (like what happened to Vincent) are never addressed (thankfully!). This was an entire work about the literal impact of fictional characters on the real world, about the inability to change the past and the conflicts an artist creates for themselves throughout their career.

... written during a pandemic by an author who studied pandemics to write a very popular novel about a pandemic.

An author who feels like she's from the fucking moon, witnessing people make the same mistakes from history and feels powerless to make any sort of positive impact on anyone because people are nitpicking not the stuff that matters to her about her work; the characters, the themes and the messaging, but the surface level.

I love it.

No one on their death bed professes to wishing they'd worked more, eh, Stevens?

Beautifully written and contemplative, this book suffers from perhaps being a tad too much in the head of the protagonist. While we're given a bittersweet plot payoff, the entire book built to that and it was to be expected.

The giant blocks of text that serve as flashbacks or detailed explanations of objects or settings tend to be more grating than beautiful the longer the book goes on. At times these reprieves can be useful to get into the mind of Stevens and how he views the world. Other times? It's belaboring a point that's loud and clear already.

I enjoyed this well enough, though.

I'll admit, I had my reservations about The Hacienda early on.

Earlier on in the book it felt like it was going in a very well-trodden direction that I'm just not super into. Seeing taglines like “Mexican Gothic meets Rebecca” sets a stage, which perhaps makes perfect sense considering the material, but also makes the earlier parts of the book seem almost rote and overly indebted to said works.

That is, before Andres becomes an important character in the book. The interplay between Beatriz and Andres is crucial framework here. A lot of authors do the thing where one character knows all the answers the other is searching for, only for us to inhabit their heads without ever an inclination of what these may be. Cañas avoids this masterfully by introducing Andres later in the book and keeping him engaged in the ‘now' of the action.

By the time he's forced to reckon with the past and analyze it himself, it feels natural and earned, as opposed to obfuscated through narrative trickery. That's not easy to pull off and most authors fail at this.

It's a genuine treat to watch everything unspool, the characters interact and how complicated everything is both in Mexico at the time and in the lives of these characters thanks to European colonizers and their own histories.

This series really slumped for me. I bought this book ages ago and just never read it.

I'm glad that I went back and read it, it was good for what it was, but this series feels like it's being dragged out.

I suppose the best way to sum this one up is that it's “fine.”

While it starts out strong, it devolves from there. The early narrative shift makes the plot twists that the plot hinge upon predictable almost from the get-go. The villain's motives aren't unveiled until far later in the story, when the villain presents themselves. If it was a character the reader had any sort of affections for it would've perhaps been more effective, but as it stands?

Meh.

There's little feel for Travis and Maggie from earlier in the story to make the reader feel any connection with either character or want any sort of catharsis. What kept me going was that it's well written and flowed really well.

Bee ended up being the star of the book, making Theo and Calla's chapters fine, but at times Call didn't seem to have much of a role in the plot and her chapters were brief and just there to keep the POV order in place. But yeah, Bee was good.

This would probably be a 2.5 if Goodreads allowed it.

Man did I try to enjoy this. The world building was exquisite but what's a world without a story or worthwhile characters?

KSR can write, but I just don't agree with with this concept of weighing detail over characters or plot.

This book has me filled with conflicting thoughts.

First off, I haven't read Powers since Galatea 2.2, which I read in college. I remember my core takeaway from Galatea 2.2 was that Powers was a skilled wordsmith who perhaps suffered from a problem of over-inflated ego to create a book that inward and self-congratulatory. Even the photo of himself in the back of the book etched itself into my mind as “ugh, this guy.”

So when Overstory got heaped with praise, I didn't bother. Now this one happened, and I gave ole Richard Powers another chance.

I'm glad I did. Richard Powers of 1995 is a different Richard Powers than 2021, although he's still using that same black-and-white photo from ages ago. I get it, my Goodreads profile photo is from 2012. We all freeze our view of ourselves in our mind at some fixed point where we looked a certain way, I suppose.

This book had a lot of heart to it and yes, a Richard Powers book gave me potent emotions, which was something. Listening to an interview he did a few weeks ago with Ezra Klein (oh lord) it was clear this Richard Powers was more introspective of the one from the past that I delved into and reaffirmed my personal beliefs on. Throughout ‘Bewilderment' we're treated to the character Theo, who's clearly a stand-in for Powers, which hey, I get it. Anyway, Theo has a son, Robin, who's neurodivergent. Theo, a scientist himself, dislikes the idea of his son on mind-altering drugs, although increased incidents at school are leading them to a path with very few options.

I'm gonna stop here and just say, if spoilers bother you, there's plenty from here out.

Ah, until a doctor pal of Theo's deceased wife emerges to talk about this therapy system he's created, an iteration on something both Theo and Aly had strapped themselves into before to scan their brains. This could do the trick and solve Robin's problems by allowing him to do tasks within this machine alongside the brain scan of his mother.

Powers is still playing with the idea of technology and how it cohabitates the planet with us, for better or for worse. Theo himself is working to simulate what life on other planets could look like, with his bets on a satellite imaging system in the age of, well, let's just say it, Trump. Robin goes into this therapy and goes from having violent outbursts about how we're ruining the world, an attempt to both emulate and pay tribute to Greta Thunberg (who is in the book under a different name), who mellows out a bit and tries to find his own ways to impact the world. Only, his secret therapy isn't a secret for too long when the good doctor decides the world needs this technology, or... he needs money through licensing agreements.

Robin becomes an internet sensation because of his feel-good story and Theo feels guilt for allowing his son to become a spectacle, even if Robin sees this as a way to get a message out to more people. The conservative gov't cuts off funding to both the therapy program, puts the doctor under investigation, then cuts off funding for Theo's eyes-in-the-sky. Robin starts slipping and, ultimately, things go terribly wrong, leaving Theo alone, with his only hope being this therapy in a stripped-down version of the good doctor's office alongside scans of his deceased wife and son.

This story is... well, look. It's difficult to be an American writer of certain sensibilities without synthesizing what's been happening in the United States into your work. The COVID pandemic wasn't present, but cows contracting a neurological disorder that was set to wipe them out happened, crops were dying, it was all in the same vein of our slow-burning late stage capitalism-fueled apocalypse. As I said, this was a much more human Powers, and the story was touching, but when I start digging beneath the surface for thematic elements, a lot of it is still stuck in the past.

This book was an Oprah's Book Club book, which doesn't surprise me. It embodies modern liberal ideals and, from a comfortable distance, criticizes modern society while eschewing any sort of solution or blame. In the interview with Klein, the subject of capitalism came up many times, with Klein hemming and hawing with “I'm not an anticapitalist” nonsense based on his own brand of free market neoliberalism, while Powers seemed comfortable criticizing capitalism. Still, a lot of his views are informed from “unplugging” from his home in Silicon Valley and moving to the Smokies, where he reconnected with nature. The problem is... that's from a place of privilege that few of us can do. We can visit whatever nature we can find in our area, but uprooting and moving into the woods isn't feasible for most.

The critical eye towards technology and media is right there, with no better example than his cell phone. Theo's phone plays a prominent role throughout the story, from doomscrolling news feeds to emergency SMS messages from the president about nonsense right down to playing a pivotal role in the book's finale. Theo's phone couldn't save them. On their fated walk down to a river that Robin's deceased mother loved, Theo discovered about his telescope project being kaput via a text message chain. Then, when he needed service to call for help, it wasn't there.

Theo's continued existence is, in part, from his refusal to abandon technology and fully embrace the world like his wife and son did. The message being sent is rather grim, though, as both of them died in perhaps misguided attempts to defend or protect nature, no matter the cost. All while, Theo continues to live on, a firm believer in the ideals espoused by the people he loves, but not enough to give his life for them. His only way forward is to once again embrace technology to remember his family.

While there are obvious issues of modern society on display, a lot like modern liberalism, Powers cannot find a solution outside of “trust science” and “don't be a bad guy.” The book seems like it's on the verge of saying more than that, but ultimately ends with a message that anyone attempting positive change ends up eaten alive, while the rest of us are left pinning our hopes on incrementalist centrists.

Oh, and why do I read Goodreads reviews? I saw a few claiming this book felt “antivax” because he didn't want to give his kid psychoactive drugs and I just... why?!

I enjoyed this book a lot, though, and Powers remains an immensely skilled writer who I now have to return to later on.

The Goldfinch is a very good book that achieved some very high accolades and has led to some pretty crazy debates about how lofty of a tome this truly is and how worthy it is of our praise.

I'll admit that I was a bit taken aback at just how popular The Goldfinch became, considering that Tartt's previous books, The Secret History and The Little Friend were very good, but never sparked such passionate debates in the literary world. I had enjoyed both The Secret History and The Little Friend enough to where I'd recommend them to a friend to read, but I'm not sure that I'd ever say that they were my favorite books.

The first few hundred pages of The Goldfinch are easy to get enamored with; Tartt paints a vivid picture of Theo's world and the tragedies that ensued and the language feels well-crafted and polished. I'm not sure what happens, but eventually that feeling begins to wear off and I found myself reading another Donna Tartt novel, which is absolutely not a bad thing. The narrative is rather straightforward and while well-crafted, there are times as the book moves on where it feels less special.

She is able to build this anxiety and fear over what will become of Theo early on, with him making mistakes as children his age are prone to do, which eventually leads to an adulthood that he was never properly prepared for. At times I was delighted at the attention to detail and awareness involved, like Theo's relationship with Boris being very subtly on that line between best friend and lover or how Theo's relationships with Mrs. Barbour and Hobie were special to him, but he was unable to ever find a way to express it.

Everything was building up to an interesting conclusion when the book kind of ran out of steam near the very end and coasted in to the finish on fumes. That's okay, it was still a very good book and very much worth your time. Stop complaining about the length and just enjoy the ride.

This is perhaps one of the most beautiful books I've ever read.

Hard stop.

I had a few hurdles to overcome early on (was okay with demons, then we got a donut-slinging starship captain and I absolutely exclaimed “oh c'mon” while reading), but I'm thrilled to have continued on.

If I had to sum this book up, it would be that it's a story about very specific outsiders who face systemic, western-society induced hurdles that prevent them from being their true selves. While there is a literal Faustian bargain here, most of the characters are living in the same reality. One where demons are making deals with musicians for souls, starship captains from a far off empire are trying too hard to be perfect to gain acceptance, a luthier grapples with her family's generational misogyny and a trans runaway faces nonstop discrimination and somehow the core conceit for this entire story is the game UnderTale.

There's a lot to digest here.

What happens, though, is we get to see how love, encouragement and community can help. Maybe it can't heal these wounds and make the awful people go away, just like it can't make the mysterious “EndPlague” the empire faces stop, but by sharing beauty and love, in this book's case through music, it can reach other people and help them feel like they aren't alone.

Isn't that the point of art? I know it always was for me.

I can't recommend this book enough.

Since discovering Mexican Gothic I've run through all of Moreno-Garcia's catalog and, seeing this and anticipating her next book, it was a no-brainer. I'm not sure this one connected that well, though.

This one was in between. Technically a novella, it was short enough to be able to push through and told a simple, but effective story. Using genre tropes and her always on-point description, she's able to create a recognizable world within short order.

The lead character was where things suffered. This was a revenge story and the protagonist is bent on destroying her spurned lover. Everyone around her seems willing to help, but only because they're afraid of her. It creates a strange dynamic where you can understand why she's mad, but it doesn't make for enjoyable reading.

My biggest issue was with the ending. The ending redeems our characters, as endings tend to do, but our protagonist makes a decision that we, who spent the entire story understanding her motives and past through the narration, had no idea she was planning on doing. The ending was great, mind you. It redeemed the story for me, but it made the narration inconsistent, which was either a symptom of a novelist attempting to keep a story short by shearing off information or just intentionally omitting it for a surprise ending.

NK Jemisin is perhaps the best working genre writer alive right now.

When you read it, imagine Joe's voice in your head and it all makes sense.

If there's one thing I really love about Silvia Moreno-Garcia's work is that she's willing to take risks and not just stick to the same ideas all the time. After the success of Mexican Gothic, most authors would say, “I've found my niche” and stick to it.

Instead, she released Velvet Was the Night, a taught political thriller; Return of the Sorceress, a dark fantasy novella; and now Daughter of Doctor Moreau. While even in her earlier work there are clear through lines in thematic content, she's not afraid to experiment with genre.

This book has been called a ‘retelling' of the Island of Doctor Moreau, but I'm not sure that quite fits. It takes the basic idea of a European scientist experimenting on animals to create hybrids, as well as a few of the characters, and tosses the whole thing into a blender with very SMG themes of settler colonialism's impact on Mexico, treatment of women and wealth imbalances.

Chapters alternate between Carlota, the daughter of Moreau, and Montgomery, the new mayordomo of the compound. The major conflict throughout the book revolves around the wealthy Lizalde family, who are funding Moreau's experiments to get cheap labor, and the lengths Moreau is willing to go to with them to not have his funding cut off. Montgomery is a sad, conflicted drunk who has developed feelings for Carlota, while Carlota is a doting daughter who just wants to do the right thing, even if that means marrying the younger Lizalde to keep things flowing.

Spoilers ahead.

If you're aware of the original story, the puma-woman was Moreau's last experiment, and also his undoing. There's some clever conceptual play going on here where Moreau's perfect experiment was ‘saving' his daughter through his tinkering. We aren't clued in to the extent of it until the end, which shouldn't come as a surprise to readers paying close attention. Carlota is forced to become her own woman and cope with the heavy emotions of that transition from childhood to adulthood, including love and overcoming an overbearing parental figure.

Montgomery, on the other hand, is forced to deal with the fact he's still alive and that Carlota needs to figure herself out. This can't be some sweeping romance of a guy saves girl and her hybrid friends and everything works out, which is nice.

Well worth your time to read.