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This novel is inspired by the 1973 case of Relf vs Weinberger, in which two young, black, poor, mentally disabled girls were forcibly and unknowingly sterilised; their mother, who was illiterate, signed X on a slip in the belief that her children were being given birth control shots.
In this fictional novel inspired by these very real events, in 1973 23-year-old black nurse Civil Townsend uncovers forced sterilisation in the very clinic she works at after caring for two young poverty-stricken girls, Erica and India and growing close to their family.
Perkins-Valdez has an incredibly good grasp of time and place, and explores this not so distant history with tact and grace. An educational and enlightening novel.
A short and sweet novel that is beautifully written and haunting. I saw this toted as ‘Annihilation but gay' which, while it made me laugh, isn't entirely off the mark. Plus, Annihilation is one of my favourite horror novels so anything that can be compared to it is a bonus in my eyes.
Like Annihilation, it begins with a partner returning to a wife after a long absence due to a mission gone wrong, and their behaviour is erratic and changed afterward. Plot wise, (from what I remember of Annihilation - it's been a few years) ‘Our Wives Under the Sea' is different after the initial concept. We get point of view sections alternating between Miri and Leah (the wife under the sea). We get the before, the during, and the after. Yet tonally it remains similar, with a familiar sense of eerie creeping dread. This is so short, I don't want to say more because of spoilers, but Julia Armfield really succeeds in packing an emotional wallop.
What I will say though, is that this is ultimately a novel about grief and love, and how those two things are intrinsically linked. It is less interested in explaining how, or why, than using horror and the ocean to explore such themes in a way that manages to be both profoundly tender and unsettling.
I'm an admittedly very casual fan of Critical Role. I followed Vox Machina semi-regularly in high school and I've listened to smatterings of the subsequent campaigns in podcast form. So while I'm not as intensely into it as some, I'd say I have a good idea of what to expect going into the brand's forays.
It's...fine. It's serviceable. It's not bad, just not very interesting. The writing is bland, though the voices of Vex and Vax are well captured. Critical Role caught lightning in a bottle with the main cast's chemistry and enthusiasm which is not captured here at all. The story is played totally straight, resulting in a novel that's generic fantasy, severely lacking in both cheek and charm. Both aspects I think are, well, critical.
There's also some incredibly odd structural choices that I would find less egregious if the actual content was more compelling. Additionally, integrating flashbacks is an incredibly difficult thing to do in a satisfying way. Each flashback should feel as though it is adding context to the present day story, be it for character's actions or behaviours, context in the historical sense or even just some good old parallels and symbolism. Here, they seemed random and irrelevant to the main action though for reasons I can't put my finger on they did engage me significantly more than the main plot (which itself is spread thin).
I listened to the audiobook version narrated by Robbie Daymond with Laura Bailey and Liam O'Brien returning as Vex and Vax which certainly improved my enjoyment. If I wasn't listening to the audio I doubt I would have finished this book. Robbie is a fantastic narrator. If you're a Critical Role fan wanting to read this book, I highly recommend listening to the audio version.
I definitely sound very (haha) critical but I'll reiterate: I thought it was fine. Painfully average. It just didn't feel like Critical Role to me.
Wow! Dawn is the first book in the Lilith's Brood trilogy. Following a war that all but destroys Earth, the surviving humans, including our protagonist Lilith, are taken in by an alien species. These aliens believe that they cannot leave the remaining humans alone lest they destroy themselves.
I've not read anything quite like this before. Autonomy of humans is explored in every sense of the word. From surviving humans wanting autonomy as a species to bodily autonomy on an individual level, Butler masterfully weaves in mediations on race, gender and sexuality for a result that is uncomfortable and stark but deeply compelling.
So many things are left unanswered however, this is written clearly to be the first in a series, and I can't wait to read the next one! How much the following books stick the landing are definitely going to influence how I look on this book retroactively. Needless to say I'll be thinking about this for a long time.
Discovered this after listening to a podcast episode on the mystery of how Homo Naledi ended up in the cave systems it was uncovered in in the first place, and finding it interesting.
Although it's said to be about the aforementioned species, only about half of this book covers that: in the first half Berger seems preoccupied with talking about his own achievements and his troubles with other scientists which, to me, read a lot like posturing, though talks about other finds are interesting.
Fortunately the last two sections are a very readable account of the discovery and recovery of the hominids found 30 meters underground in the Rising Star cave system in South Africa. It's really fascinating and details not just what was found but also the intensive and dangerous process of what actually getting scientists down into the cave entailed, as well as the lab workshops that ran afterward to categorise what was found.
Lots to talk about with this one.
The short version; a thoughtful, insightful collection of essays ranging from the personal to the academic based around the life and career of Christopher Tolkien, with contributions from his family, friends and the A-list of Tolkien scholars.
For those who don't know, anything you read from Tolkien's legendarium outside of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit was essentially pieced together and made publishable from Tolkien's notes and manuscripts through the tireless work of his son Christopher Tolkien, an endeavour which took over forty years from the publication of The Silmarillion in 1977 to The Fall of Gondolin in 2018. It was clearly a labour of love, and breathtaking in scope. Christopher Tolkien passed away in January of 2020 aged ninety-five.
There's a lot to love in this collection though I'm unsure as to how a casual fan, as it were, would respond to this. While the earlier parts can be appreciated by anyone who recognises the importance of Christopher in cementing his father's legacy (including a small memoir written by Priscilla Tolkien about her brother) the bulk of this volume, and the parts focusing on Middle-earth, is largely academic. Attention is not just given to The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, but also to more obscure stories in the twelve volume History of Middle-Earth series.
I particularly enjoyed ‘The Son Behind the Father' by Vincent Ferré which analysed Christopher's contributions and writing style, comparing passages from HoME and the published Silmarillion to draw attention to Christopher's critical contributions and how he was clearly an accomplished writer in his own right (I'd love to read a longer essay on this!). Furthermore, Brian Sibley's essay on portal images in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings tickled me in exploring an aspect of Tolkien's writings I've always found curious (where where you when I was writing my dissertation and had a piece on threshhold imagery in Moria! Kidding). The essays range in topic from maps to the forgotten BBC radio drama of LOTR to the creation of the mythology, and includes essays by Tom Shippey and John Garth. Carl F. Hostetter providing examples and analysis of Tolkienian manuscripts, detailing what a herculean task editing such papers was for Christopher, is also a highlight.
Maps, paintings, letters and photographs of the Tolkien family are also on display here in high quality.
I'm glad I read this collection and it will certainly hold a special place on my Tolkien shelf. Christopher Tolkien's impact on the field of Tolkien studies and the greater understanding of his father's mythology cannot be understated. Thankfully, that's being recognised by the experts in the field and thus relayed to those who may not have realised. We would not have much, if any, of the quantities and quality of Tolkien's work available to us now if it were not for Christopher Tolkien's time, effort and care.
And to top it all off, the name of this volume comes from a much loved LOTR quote:
“‘Don't the great tales never end?'
‘No, they never end as tales,' said Frodo. ‘But the people in them come, and go when their part's ended.'”
I can't think of many things scarier than the K-Pg extinction. It's always been something that gives me chills to think about. Our brains aren't made to grasp an apocalypse on that scale, and what's always struck me is the absolute freak nature of it: if anything had gone slightly different the last 65 million years would be completely unrecognisable.
This was a really interesting book in detailing before and after the asteroid hit. The first third of the book paints a picture of Hell Creek in the days preceding the asteroid impact, while the remaining chapters detail the aftermath (one hour after impact, one year after impact, and so forth into a million years). While the main focus is on Hell Creek, each chapter also contains a section on a different area of the planet, showing the aftermath on a global scale.
It's quite a unique perspective as most books on dinosaurs mark the end of the Cretaceous as the end of the dinosaurs, while that's decidedly not true. This book not only talks about the avian dinosaur survivors, but also the impact this event had on marine reptiles, insects, flora and fauna as well as, of course, mammals.
My pettiest quibble: it bothered me so much that it was Elektra (rather than Electra) but not Klytemnestra and Kassandra (who are still Clytemnestra and Cassandra). I did say it was petty.
Other than that this was exactly as it said it was: a re-telling. Unfortunately, there are far more interesting ones (Natalie Haynes' A Thousand Ships comes to mind). Furthermore it's called Elektra but focuses additionally on Clytemnestra and Cassandra. Clytemnestra I can understand as part of the family, but Cassandra seems disconnected and felt like the author just needed a Trojan POV. All in all, some poignant moments from the Clytemnestra sections, but ultimately underwhelming.
Not quite as strong a book as Black Sun, and unlike many readers I definitely noticed a little bit of middle book syndrome as the board was clearly being set for the finale, but by all accounts a good read.
Some twists I saw coming, some I didn't, some characters I grew to like more (Iktan really shines here!) some grew a tad annoying (will Xiala please stop pining) and the ending, as in Black Sun, feels rather abrupt. Any shortcomings however are drowned out by a fast-paced, immersive story that dives right in where Black Sun left off at a breakneck pace. The Crow God is reborn after all.
What becomes even more clear in this second novel is that the world of The Meridian is the true star of the show. Such a beautiful, well-realised world that is carving out its own place in a genre that is usually, though thankfully decreasingly so, Euro-centric. Rebecca Roanhorse has clearly put so much love and care into crafting this world, and I love spending time there. I wish these books were twice as long.
Sad to say goodbye to Geralt and friends! Although this is a full-length novel it has much more in common with the collection of short stories it takes place between rather than the Ciri saga. It can be read as a standalone, but I would recommend at least reading The Last Wish collection of stories first. If you've read all The Witcher books, you'll get even more from it!
“They will commit me to the earth, [...] Yet I also commit them to the earth. There is nothing else by which men live. Men go and come, but earth abides.”
For the last five or six years I have been making my way through the things that inspired Neil Druckmann when writing The Last of Us series of games. Some I had already seen/read such as The Count of Monte Cristo (not apocalyptic but thematically relevant) or the 2006 film Children of Men. Some I had heard of and have since read (ie. The Road) and others I hadn't heard of before. Earth Abides, a 1949 novel by George R. Stewart, was amongst the latter.
The novel follows Isherwood “Ish” Williams (the tlou fan in me was already pleased) an ecologist who emerges from working on his graduate thesis in isolation to discover civilisation has collapsed after much of humanity has succumbed to a plague. What follows is an exploration of an earth without humans; not only what it looks like across Ish's life as the survivors cope, but also how without the influence of civilisation the remaining plants, animal and nature are free to adapt and flourish.
Ish travels coast to coast, California to New York City and back, eventually building a community of survivors and struggles reconciling ideas of the old world with the new. What things that were once so important remain so? What does it mean for Ish to be, in the end, the Last American?
Needless to say, I loved this book. Haunting, evocative, but despite it all containing a ribbon of optimism, it's one I'll look forward to reading again in the future.
“...if they looked down upon the earth that night, what did they see? Then we must say that they saw no change. Though smoke from stacks and chimneys and campfires no longer rose to dim the atmosphere, yet still smoke rose from volcanos and from forest-fires. Seen even from the moon, the planet that night must have shown only with its accustomed splendor—no brighter, no dimmer.”
There's been so many successful Greek myth retellings (sooooooo many) and while I'm a fan, I admit I have been sitting by quite impatiently waiting for Norse myth to get the same treatment. Well here we are.
Gornichec tells the story of the Norse gods from the point of view of Angrboda, the giantess who is known for mothering Loki's children: Hel the ruler of the dead, Fenrir the wolf and Jormungandr the world serpent. She is barely more than a footnote, named in Eddic poetry as a giant and a mother to monsters, and nothing else. Here, Gornichec reimagines Angrboda as having a significant but forgotten role in not only her relationships with Loki and their children, but others amongst the Aesir, with consequences reaching as far as Ragnarök itself.
I deeply enjoyed this debut novel and found it a fairly easy read. While I have a huge love of Norse mythology (I did write my dissertation on it in part after all), I imagine this would also appeal to fans of Madeline Miller and other similar authors. Just maybe, if you have the time, become familiar with Norse myths first as once you do it's so obvious how much time and care Gornichec has put into this story. I really hope she has something else to share with us soon!
Absolutely sublime. A really powerful story set in 1870s Texas about an ageing Captain tasked to take a little girl, raised by the Kiowa, back to her birth family and the bond they begin to share on the long journey. Jiles' writing transports you and you'll wish it was longer than 200 pages. I'd give it 6/5 if I could; it's just that good!
(Reread 12/05/23) 3.5/5. It's always fun when the Universal Church of Truth are involved. And Gamora and Nebula's story/backstory continues to be just so damn SAD. A who's who of gotg antagonists show up (the aforementioned church, a certain cosmic elder and also the big guy himself, Thanos) and Gamora and Nebula's relationship is well drawn.
In a lot of ways this reads like a YA book, and as someone who is not into YA, I had niggles. I did think that the duo decided to work together too quickly. It's also written in some nebulous time period where the events of Gamora (2017) didn't happen or haven't happened? Never ever try and make sense of gotg timelines I suppose. It's all about picking and choosing what you like and ignoring everything else.
I did like this book. Worthwhile if you're a fan of the characters, though not necessarily required reading.
(04/06/22) Still so much fun!
* Three Trees to Midnight 4/5
* Down Among the Dead Men 3.5/5
* The Horror of Hormak 4.5/5
* Callback 4.5/5
* Luck in the Gardens 5/5
* Hunger 3/5
* Murder by Death Mages 3.5/5
* The Streets of Minrathous 3/5
* The Wigmaker Job 5/5
* Genitivi Dies in the End 4.5/5
* Herold had the Plan 4/5
* An Old Crow's Old Tricks 5/5
* Eight Little Talons 5/5
* Half Up Front 4/5
* The Dread Wolf Take You 5/5
(23/04/22) Yes, still a page turner. A few more niggles this time around but not enough to lower the rating. Moreso this time it struck me how good this book would be for beginners to fantasy; it manages to be sweeping and present a realised world without being an 800 page brick (800 page bricks remaining, of course, my favourite kind of fantasy book). Onward to book two!
(22/02/21) A great start to what is (hopefully!) going to be a great series. Feels like a breath of fresh air in the genre and truly original, with world building inspired by the pre-Columbian Americas. The opening chapter was certainly memorable, propulsive and shocking and had me gripped from the start. Characters are fun, pacing is solid, lots of questions left in the (somewhat rushed) ending feels a tad annoying but the knowledge this was first in a trilogy let me let that slide.
“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”
Devastating.