Mandy

3.75* rounded up to 4*. Overall a fun read with a great premise that I'm interested in exploring in future instalments of the series, although the book starts a little slow and I can see the writing style and pacing not being to everyone's tastes.

As the series title suggests, we are reading the memoirs of a Lady Trent, an elderly lady who has made her name in natural history, specifically studying dragons, in her storied life. The first book in this instalment starts from her childhood and through to an expedition she undertakes as a married 19 year old accompanying her husband who is similarly passionate about natural history as herself.

The starting of the book meanders a little and it is not until about the halfway mark of the book that the action begins picking up and where the central hook of the story is established (with the introduction of Zhagrit Mat). Before this, however, you're pretty much slowly getting to know Isabella and how she managed to (sort of) reconcile her unladylike love for natural history and dragons with what society expects from her. The first half is where I would expect most people might stumble and DNF, but I do think the second half packs enough to redeem the book.

The world and premise is where this book really shines, in my opinion, with its interesting combination of historical fiction and fantasy. This was marketed as “Jane Austen meets dragons” and honestly, that checks out. The world is in a sort-of 19th century AU; Isabella as a teenager is expected to put herself out on the marriage market, attend balls, be a lady, etc. The social norms she needs to conform to are not unlike what you might read in a Jane Austen novel, or any novel of manners. The difference is, of course, the introduction of dragons being a very real and very wild animal found only in certain countries. Isabella's country of residence in this novel, Scirland, is a thinly-veiled adjacent for England. Similarly, Vystrani, the country that she later travels to in search of dragons is easily recognisable as an adjacent for Russia, with its icy climates, the names of its people (Dagmira, Ritelkin, Iosif). Much more interesting are the religions mentioned in this book. Isabella tells us that Scirland (England) are Magisterial, while those in Vystrani (Russia) are temple-worshippers, perhaps a parallel to Orthodoxy. We only get a glimpse of both religions in this book, but the elderly Isabella writing this book gives us scintillating hints that she would eventually have cause to re-evaluate her opinions and beliefs on these religions in her later adventures.

One of the bright points of this book is in the perspective. As mentioned earlier, this is written as the memoirs of an elderly Isabella looking back on her life and telling it in chronological order. Although most of the book is told in a fairly straightforward and linear timeline, where we follow Isabella from childhood up to adolescence, there are moments where our actual narrator, the elderly Isabella, breaks in to talk about how things have changed since then. Sometimes, she does so to talk about how natural history has evolved and expanded since, and how much more the present world now knew about dragons than they had back when she was a teenager. What was far more intriguing is when she breaks in to deprecate herself, her thoughts and worldview as a young person who is only just on her first adventure away from home, and how much more she has expanded her thoughts and opinions since then. I loved how this signified a larger and more complete story - how did 19 year old Isabella change, and what has she gone through between where we are reading to the person writing these memoirs?

Overall, I'd recommend this for those who are comfortable reading with classic literature and who also love a dash of fantasy and dragons in their story. If you enjoyed this, I'd also recommend reading Elizabeth Peters's Amelia Peabody series, which also has a spunky female lead from the Victorian era going against the norms of her society to gain expertise in a field traditionally not open to ladies - Egyptology in the abovementioned series. I might also mention that Amelia Peabody is told with a lot more humour and dry wit than this one, which is personally more up my alley. Nevertheless, A Natural History of Dragons has definitely captured my interest and I'm looking forward to reading more.

3.5/5. All together a fun mystery-adventure that is just a bit marred by some dialogue with overwrought accents from the English countryside and casual racism, although the latter is pretty typical of this time period and genre so I generally close both eyes though it still sometimes got a bit uncomfortable to read.

Although Margery Allingham is frequently spoken of together with the other golden age mystery writers, I'm beginning to find her works to be bordering more on adventure rather than strictly cosy mysteries in the style of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. For one thing, Allingham doesn't actually give you hints along the way like Christie and Sayers often do. The solution can come up out of left field, so if you're the sort of reader who enjoys solving mysteries along with the detective in the novel, Allingham's works probably aren't for you. Luckily though I like to cruise along and only make casual deductions along the way so the lack of hints didn't really bother me much.

The mystery in this one was slightly better than average, although not particularly fantastic or memorable. I did enjoy the whole thing about someone seeming to bring death to the people around him because he is being pursued by a notorious, anonymous criminal mastermind. There were a few red herrings around the place, however, and I thought that the resolution could have been neater with more threads tying in to the main conclusion instead of just having been dead ends all along.

Albert Campion is not exactly a favourite detective for me right now. He feels a bit like a younger version of Lord Peter Wimsey from Sayers's novels but also without as much character. Sometimes his random bursts of humour can get a bit annoying (as it is to the other characters), especially when it can be so random. Sherlock Holmes can sometimes do the same thing where he says something oddly humourous and seemingly random, but which is shown to have some connection with the mystery at hand eventually. Not so much with Campion. He does have those Holmesian moments where a random question or statement is important, but just as often it also seems like he's being random for the sake of it.

My enjoyment of this one was a bit marred by some blatant xenophobia and racism in the story. Again, this is not unusual for a book of this time period, but it was still uncomfortable to read. Spoilers for the whole book: I didn't like that Kettle, being the only “foreigner” in Mystery Mile (and only because he simply wasn't born in the same village), was immediately distrusted and disliked by everyone from all classes, from George and ‘Anry to Giles. Then we learn later that their distrust of him was indeed justified when he's shown to be a lowly agent of Simister's, and also a cowardly and spineless one. I feel like that reinforces that dreadful Other-ness mindset. Same with the way Fergusson Barber was treated throughout the novel. Even if we disregard how he was referred to as ‘the Oriental', he was constantly shown to be an importunate parasite on the good people of Mystery Mile and also something of a base criminal, all of which was once again reinforced when he was revealed to be the mastermind Simister in the end. And then of course we have “Ropey the Chink” which is just... no. I'm pretty sure Ropey is probably a shitty nickname to refer to this person's Qing dynasty queue, and of course just having him as a criminal agent who literally has no lines in the whole book and simply referred to derogatorily as “dirty” and “cunning” and all that. There's also a Japanese magician at the beginning of the book that was also described as “cunning” and ugh, it was all just tiring to read sometimes, especially since I'm ethnically Chinese myself.

Overall, if you can stomach the casual xenophobia and racism that's fairly common in a work from this era, this is not a bad read for people who are already fans of golden age mystery novels and also perhaps for people who want to get into it and would like to have more action and adventure instead of your usual armchair-detecting or solving mysteries within a closed house.

This was a perfect short re-read for Halloween this year! Fall of the House of Usher was my first Poe story and one of my very first few brushes with horror as a child, and certainly one of the most vivid. I remember it so well that I've only wanted to re-read it just a couple of times since to refresh my memory on it.

The prose in here was more challenging than I recall. I'm no stranger to 19th century works, but Poe's writing, in this story in particular, is more purple-prosey than I expected. I'm glad that I had read an abridged, simplified version as a child (with illustrations too), otherwise I'd never have understood a thing about it. Even now, I found myself having to re-read sentences and whole paragraphs to really get what was going on. In that sense, it reminded me quite a bit of the writing style of Jane Eyre, which checks out given that both are such mainstays of Gothic literature.

There's also a lot more symbolism and imagery here that I never fully appreciated, but I won't delve into it here for fear of sounding pretentious.

This is deservedly a classic in horror and gothic lit, and I'd recommend it to anyone who's interested in those genres.

Man, this was a weird read and not exactly as cosy as I would expect for a cosy mystery.

After busting a cocaine syndicate, Phryne Fisher is now fully established in business as a private detective at 221B The Esplanade in Melbourne, Australia. Her reputation amongst the high-society ladies in Melbourne grows as she is beset by Mrs McNaughton, who asks for her help to intercede between her son Bill and her husband William, who both have awful tempers and are often at each other's throats - she believes Bill intends to kill his father. Indeed, when William McNaughton's body turns up with a crushed skull one day, Bill is the prime suspect. Then, there is the case of little Candida Alice Maldon who vanishes when out buying sweets.

The writing was generally all right, if a little too descriptive at time where I felt the need to skim over certain passages even though this was just a 200+ page book. This was particularly so during the last couple chapters, when we just want to know the ending of the mysteries, but there were still so many unnecessary details and sequences and conversations between the characters.

This book was clearly written with a very feminist agenda. Almost all the female characters in this book are somehow outstanding or independent or just better. There's Phryne, obviously, and then there's Dot, Amelia McNaughton, Candida Alice, and the briefly mentioned WPC Jones, Klara, and that lady in the Egyptienne gown whose name escapes me right now. It's not to say that all the male characters in this book were bad, but it's clear that there was some agenda going on here.

Phryne's promiscuity continues in this book, which I have no problems with, but I found it a little odd and slightly disturbing that she quite immediately seduces Paolo, whom she knows is Amelia McNaughton's lover. Although she had already gotten it from Amelia that she doesn't mind or care that Paolo sleeps with his models, Phryne had never actually talked about sleeping with him when she was talking with Amelia, and it seems *very* strange to go directly from a conversation with a woman you've just met and who you've just started to sympathise with and admire, to interrogate her lover but end up seducing him on a whim and sleeping with him. I also didn't really quite like Amelia's relationship with Paolo anyway, and was shocked that Phryne said that "he loves her truly" to Bill. He basically just looks at Amelia as if she was another sculpture to be captured, and loves her body for its proportions and how it "won't sag" like other women's. What?! That was super gross and disturbing. I was even grossed out by how, at the very ending of the story when Amelia picks up the rocks on the ground, Paolo tells her not to because she'd "spoil her fingers". Oh my god.

What is even more disturbing is this underlying theme of paedophilia in this book. I've always thought that the Phryne Fisher books were a damned spot darker and grittier than the TV series, but this really caught me by surprise. First, we have William McNaughton having sexually and physically abused Amelia McNaughton as a *child*, even though he is her biological father. Then, we have the child molester (aka paedophile) Sidney Brayshaw who basically thought about kidnapping Candida at first because he had wanted to probably do unspeakable things to her, but for some reason was deterred just because she had vomited on him at first. And what I found most disturbing of all is that Phryne actually agreed to send to him Klara, a lesbian who dresses up as a pre-pubescent girl to satisfy paedophiles who are about to be executed, in exchange for his silence regarding Mike's involvement in the kidnapping. What?!?! I don't mind darker themes, and I know these are realities that happened during this time period in the 1920s which aren't usually dealt with in books written in that era, but I felt like these were just too casually peppered into the story and never quite dealt with as seriously as they should be.

Thoughts regarding the ending:

For most mystery novels of this genre, there's usually some kind of twist at the end, or at the very least the culprits are one of the characters that we've been following through the entire novel, which gives you some sense of satisfaction, like you *could* have figured it out along with the detective in the novel. Not in this one though. We find out that William McNaughton's death is a complete accident because he tried to chase away some kids playing on his estate. Then we also find out that Candida was just randomly kidnapped by three people who we have never met and will never meet after they each go on their respective paths when the kidnapping is foiled by Phyrne.Not only that, but one would expect that if two mysteries were presented in the same book, they would somehow be related to one another, and that we would discover the connection near the end when the resolution takes place. But here, we are once again foiled by this book. The mysteries have almost nothing to do with each other, aside from the fact that Candida's dad, Henry Maldon, is a fellow pilot in the same flying club as Bill McNaughton. Otherwise, no characters in one mystery figure at all in any kind of significance in the other mystery.Lastly, the mysteries wrapped up far too cleanly and unrealistically. For the main mystery of the Willian McNaughton death, Phryne lets Amelia McNaughton arrange some party for the street children that she takes under her wing, she explains the answer to the mystery there - that Mickey, one of the children, had let go of a rock on a rope while they were playing in the trees on the McNaughton estate, and that rock had swung down and smashed William's skull. Mickey bursts out into tears, but is simply stoppered by Bert who "thrust a huge toffee apple into the gaping maw". After that, everyone is just happy and nothing happens to anyone because the death is ruled as an accident. Mickey goes on partying with everyone else as per normal.What?!This is considering that this party was also attended by the detective-inspector in charge of this case, and his subordinates!!! Everyone is just happy to take that solution and have absolutely no repercussions for anyone. We're expected to just be happy that no one is going to take the fall for the murder simply because McNaughton is such an odious man and deserved to die. WHAT?! I mean, I know that Sherlock Holmes had some endings where the victims were truly horrible people, but even then there was always some consequences for their murderers, somehow.Then when it came to Candida's kidnapping - I was truly bewildered that Phryne basically gave one of the kidnappers money, asked him to leave the place and start a new life somewhere else. Sure, he was one of the compassionate kidnappers and actually helped to protect Candida rather than hurt her, but come on wasn't there a better way to wrap this up than simply just letting him walk away into the night?! And it was really convenient that his wife got double-crossed and shot by their accomplice (and pedophile) Sidney Brayshaw.

Overall, this was a pretty tight novella, or maybe because the rule-based world that Lundy escapes to is more appealing to me.

Katherine Lundy disappears into a mysterious door in a tree that takes her to the Goblin Market, a world where the concept of “fair value” rules over everything. Need a place to stay? You need to provide an item or a service to return fair value back to the person who puts you up for the night. She meets an owlish young girl, Moon, and the aged Archivist who explains the world to her. Lundy, as she comes to be called in this world, occasionally returns to her original world especially when her adventures in the Goblin Market end badly. Soon, she needs to make the choice between one world or the other forever.

This is another “origin story” book where we find out the backstory of one of the main characters in the present timeline, and this time it's Lundy. I've just had to go and re-read a summary of Every Heart A Doorway, which I've completely forgotten about at this point, to refresh my memory on the role Lundy plays in it. In this one, Lundy shows herself to be a pretty relatable protagonist: she yearns to get away from the real world and the bullying that being the principal's daughter gets her, but at the same time she cannot quite forget the family who, flawed as they are, wants the best for her - or at least, what they think is the best.

I do wish Moon and the Archivist had a bit more memorable personalities, however. I don't remember Moon to be anything other than a mischievous owl girl who is Lundy's best friend in the Goblin Market with no other point to her storyline, while the Archivist felt somewhat like a vehicle for lore dumping.

The Goblin Market was a nice reference to the famous poem by Christina Rossetti. I last read that poem many many years ago so I can't quite remember the details of it, but I have a vague recollection that it might have been an allegory about children interacting with the “temptations” of adulthood and then eventually regretting it when they can no longer reverse things. There is a slight parallel to this in the story, but not a strong one.

Overall though, this was still a great installment for this series and I'm looking forward to the next one.

Maybe kinda nearer to 4.5 stars? Honestly this book was just such a fun time from start to end. One of the quotes on the cover of my ebook copy compares it to a “Hollywood blockbuster” and frankly I can see it. It's just got the right amount of action, humour, personality, plot, and everything in between.

While the book does have its serious moments and has a few amazing quotes, the plot flirted with being formulaic - but just enough so that you have a frame of reference to know where you're probably going before the rug is pulled under your figurative feet as Corey brings the story in a direction wilder than anything you expected.

Holden and Miller make such a great duo, each complementing the other's flaws and crabbiness. Holden is almost your stereotypical white knight, believing wholeheartedly in his ideals with an almost annoying naivete even when it leads him to make decisions that screw people over. Miller is your jaded detective straight out of film noir, coming to terms with the fact that people now see him as a has-been and that he's not as ahead of the game as he thinks himself to be. When they do eventually meet, they both dislike each other for obvious reasons but do come to form a partnership that is convincing and, dare I say it, even heartwarming.

Naomi is also one of the stand-out characters that I've become fond of, much more so than either Holden or Miller. She's just the right amount of spunky but without trying to behave like she's a #girlboss or that she's independent and doesn't need companionship. She's not even above admitting that she has a crush. She's literally the voice of reason in the whole book - we might as well have Holden and Miller wearing “What Would Naomi Do?” bracelets.

I also loved the Solar System politics in this one. It's a little confusing at first but quickly becomes legible. Although human beings have colonized Mars and the Kuiper Belt for so long that the descendants and now-natives of these planets/asteroids have become their own faction with their own cultures and even physical builds, there's something still innately human about all of them and Corey utilises this humanness to build up some very realistic politics between the 3 major forces of the Solar System.

I'm a pretty new reader in science fiction but I've come to enjoy it because I liked how philosophical and abstract a lot of it can get. Leviathan Wakes is nowhere near as philosophical as other sci-fi books and series, but it's taught me how a damn good space opera can read on the page too. Absolutely will check out the rest of the series.

I went in expecting some epic sci-fi to the tune of Dune, but I was pleasantly surprised that this book was probably one of the more digestible epic sci-fis I've read. It doesn't mean that it's simple though. This book is incredibly replete with things to think about, it's just conveyed in a fairly legible manner. Martine almost hand-holds us the readers into this amazing world that she's created, but shows us with every sentence some sharp observation to think about in relation to colonialism and cultural imperialism. Definitely going to continue on to the sequel (upset that this is not a longer series!)

Honestly, I'm so confused by this book that I barely even know how to write a review about it. I remember being properly creeped out by an abridged version of this book that I read when I was much, much younger, so I was looking forward to reading the unabridged version this time now that I'm older and much more attuned to 19th C writing than I used to be.But, boy, has Henry James stumped me.This is my third book with an unnamed narrator in a row and I still have a few more coming up. But anyway, an unnamed narrator answers an advertisement to apply for the position as a governess to two young children at Bly Manor. She starts to see two apparitions on the grounds around the place, and then what follows is so... hard to understand that I literally had to Wikipedia the book after finishing it to get an idea of what on earth just happened. It isn't that the plot got convoluted, it's just that James's writing style is so dense and murky - and this is coming from someone who loves, loves, loves 19th C writing!!Are the children evil? Are they not evil? Are they possessed? I have no idea.Who are the ghosts? Was Peter Quint paedophilic? What were their relationships with the children before their deaths? How did they die? Why are they still haunting the manor? I have no idea.And then, the ending. THE ENDING. It was so abrupt and even at that point, I had no idea whether Miles was in cahoots with the ghost of Peter Quint to try and kill the governess - or something?! Why did Miles die??? What did the ghosts have on the children???? Why did she send away Flora for and why didn't she allow children see each other before that? I HAVE NO IDEA. Honestly, it's so hard to write this review because I only had a very thin idea of what was going on as the plot progressed through this book. Suffice it to say that I respect it as a horror classic that it supposedly is, and I'm envious of people that enjoyed and appreciated it a lot more than I did because I really wanted to, but I'm probably not going to revisit this one and I didn't get much of the horror fix I had been hoping for.If you want more haunted houses, I'd recommend Edgar Allan Poe's [b:The Fall of the House of Usher 175516 The Fall of the House of Usher Edgar Allan Poe https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1387708966l/175516.SY75.jpg 15570703] and I'm also currently reading Shirley Jackson's [b:The Haunting of Hill House 89717 The Haunting of Hill House Shirley Jackson https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327871336l/89717.SY75.jpg 3627], both of which would probably be much easier to understand and would have more horror elements than this one did.

Oh man, this book. This was an emotional wrecking ball. I lost count of how many times I've cried and teared up while reading this book, and any book that makes me confront these emotions and thoughts automatically gets 5 stars.

When I first picked up the book, I almost DNFed within the first few chapters because it seemed a little flippant and superficial. We have Lori talking about a client who is constantly complaining about how everyone around him is an asshole, and then Lori herself venting about what a sociopathic asshole her ex-boyfriend is. It all felt a little mundane and almost like high school drama. As the book progresses, however, my impression of it changed dramatically. More and more stories are revealed about not just the clients that Lori sees, but also about Lori herself. We see the rawness of her clients in her practice, and herself when she goes for her therapy sessions. I appreciate the structure and the pacing of the book, as if we are also put in Lori's position, being both therapist and therapy client at the same time to Lori. We hear Lori at first like a new patient, barging in with an immediate and seemingly superficial problem (reeling from the anger of a breakup), but then as the book goes on, we get to know her better and understand how it stems from much deeper fears and anxieties that many of us can very much identify and relate to.

All the stories of the clients talked about in this book touched me in some way or other and made me cry, but it was especially John, Julia, Rita, and Lori's own story that hit the hardest. By the last few chapters of the book, I again felt like DNFing for a completely different reason: I felt exhausted that it was making me confront so many of my own fears and anxieties and hitting so many raw spots. I reminded myself, however, that this is the discomfort that therapy is supposed to make you feel, and confronting them will eventually help me deal with it better. That's not to say that I think this book is a replacement for therapy, of course, but it might make give you some introspect into some deeply hidden raw spots that you have been running away from for so long that you barely realise it's still there anymore, and which may then serve you to bring to therapy in the future.

So overall, I highly recommend this book (and therapy) to just about everyone. It does deal with many triggering topics which can be hard to deal with for a lot of people, but I think that that is the whole point of it. This book is likely to make you feel uncomfortable, pensive, and even pained, but it also offers some hope and commiseration - you're not the only person who deals with these fears, and these are stories of people and how they've pieced themselves together after some truly horrible experiences.

This is more of a collection of random Agatha Christie short mystery/suspense stories. They were entertaining enough, but I found that most of them tended to revolve around the same few plot lines. For example, “The Girl In The Train” and “Mr Eastwood's Adventure” revolved around a genteel young man who is cast out by a rich older relation and gets into a scrape of sorts, and finds himself making his fortune through the exact same ‘unexpected' way (won't spoil it for people). Then “The Rajah's Emerald” and “The Manliness of Edward Robinson” revolved around jewellery (it's always jewellery if it's not money or an inheritance in Agatha Christie) that are misplaced in the exact same manner. The very similar plot lines and undeveloped characters lead me to wonder if these were almost a sort of reject pile for Agatha Christie. That is not to say that they weren't entertaining though.

“The Listerdale Mystery” and “Philomel Cottage” were the stand-out stories for me, especially the latter. I even went to Google the story after that because the ending was rather uncharacteristically ambiguous, but I liked the whole air of horrific suspense throughout. It was a little reminiscent of an Edgar Allen Poe short story.

“Jane In Search Of A Job” reminded me strongly of The Case of the Red-Headed League in the Sherlock Holmes canon at its beginning, but later it panned out in a very different way and I enjoyed it too.

Look, there are some books that you just kinda enjoy without really quite having a complete grasp of what's going on. This is one of those books. The writing is dense, the plot is nebulous at times, and it kept giving me that feeling like I was that one person in a conversation that had no context, no backstory of what's going on, and not getting the references or inside jokes. Nevertheless though, when you do eventually get some semblance of a plot driver about 30% through, the story becomes very compelling - although you'll never quite feel like you have a thorough grasp of what's going on, just an approximation at best.One of the most confusing things of this book, especially at first, is also the use of pronouns. Our narrator Breq is unable to distinguish gender identifiers in people (as per the Radch society she comes from), and so uses “she/her” on basically everyone. At first it just made me feel like everyone she was coming into contact with her female-presenting, but then other non-Radch people that she meets will use he/him on the same person that Breq uses she/her on, Seivarden being the earliest and most prominent example. This got a bit of getting used to, but at least the narrative does have Breq reflecting about this difference in gender identifiers in different societies/cultures/languages, so it's easier for us the readers to get used to it.The plot itself takes a long time to crystallize into something remotely clear enough to follow (about 30-40% of the book), but it does get pretty compelling after that point. There's definitely action here, and it also asks a lot of very thought-provoking questions about colonialism, imperialism, and when would the ends justify the means, in this case the act of making ancillaries. Having just read [b:A Memory Called Empire 37794149 A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan, #1) Arkady Martine https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1526486698l/37794149.SY75.jpg 59457173], I thought the themes in this book were very similar but dealt with in a very different way. While Empire had a clear stance against colonialism, Ancillary is not quite so clear-cut, and in so being I think it leaves a wider space for debate and thought.Despite how confused I was for most of this book, I would certainly be continuing on the rest of the series.

Man, I'm at a loss to know how to rate this book. I enjoyed myself so much in the first half, but the enjoyment dwindled steadily in the second half. The first half read like a silly but entertaining rom-com with so much promise for light-hearted fun and romance, but then the second half got bogged down with unnecessary melodrama and the tropes that I hate the most: noble idiocy and lack of communication.

Our heroine, Judith Law, is on her way to continue her drab genteel impoverished existence as her grandmother's companion when her public stagecoach meets with an accident. Lord Rannulf Bedwyn happens along to assist the group, and our couple form an instant and strong attraction to each other which culminates in a few nights of mutually consensual passion under false pretences. Eventually, Judith gives Rannulf the slip and continues on her way to Harewood Grange to live as the poor relation to her Aunt Effingham while waiting on her grandmother, Mrs Law. Little does she know that Rannulf was also on his way to his grandmother's estate, Grandmaison, where she is neighbours and close friends with the family at Harewood Grange. Chaos ensue.

The first half was great. I loved Judith and Rannulf immediately. I loved Judith because she wasn't a wilting flower that couldn't do or decide a thing for herself - she knew she was destined to lead a pretty boring life and wanted some adventure while she had the chance, and she wasn't afraid to take it when it presented itself to her. Of course, the part where she agrees to spend the night (and a few more) with Rannulf in the beginning does require some suspension of disbelief because obviously Regency-era ladies would generally not behave that way, but whatever. I loved that both of them lied about their identities during their first encounter, and I was excited to see how things went down when they eventually met each other again under their real names.

I loved Judith and Rannulf and their respective grandmothers, but aside from them, pretty much every side character in the book was annoying. Aunt Effingham and Julianne were your typical evil stepmother and stepsister, one being cruel and jealous, while the other was just wholly self-absorbed and narcissistic.

Even more annoying was Judith's brother, Branwell Law, who is such an archetypal well-meaning spoilt brat - the sort who just obliviously and naturally expects the world to bend over backwards for him simply because that's how the natural order of things have always been for him, simply because he is a son and is completely unaware of his own privilege. He's not exactly malicious and probably does love his sisters, but that sort of ignorance makes him even more annoying to me.

Where the book really flagged for me was the introduction of Horace Effingham, a son from Sir George Effingham's first marriage and stepson to Aunt Effingham. He is a leering lecher that really got under my skin and is actually so viscerally repulsive that his existence and machinations in the book kinda dampened my enjoyment of it somewhat.

The second half of the book was where everything started going downhill for me. It starts from the ball at Grandmaison and the discovery that Mrs Law's jewellery had been stolen. The missing Branwell is suspected and Judith is immediately taken as his accomplice because some evidence is found in her room. This was a turn for the melodramatic that I really didn't need. Then after that, Judith had to suddenly become a noble idiot and start consistently running away from everywhere. She first runs away from Harewood Grange in order to pursue her brother, only to be caught up by Rannulf who takes her to Bedwyn House in London. Then comes the very tedious and unnecessary chapters of them trying to locate Branwell in London but with no success, and then having the repulsive Horace Effingham trying time and time again to pin the burglary on Judith and Branwell simply because he was so offended that Judith had fought back against him when he attempted to rape her at Harewood Grange. After Branwell is found, obviously knowing nothing about the burglary and having actually just been attending some week-long gambling party, Judith decides to run away AGAIN, because she's just oh so much beneath Rannulf that she has to save him from the madness of proposing to her. She even tells him earlier that she doesn't love him, and that they were just lusting after each other with some liking beneath it all - even though she's already admitted to herself that she loves him.I JUST-WHY?!I hate the noble idiocy and lack of communication tropes SO MUCH.Even when Rannulf finally catches up to her at her family home and proposes to her, he basically has to list down every single thing he has done and obstacle he has overcome to convince her that their marriage is fine and he actually loves her. It never felt like Judith ever wanted to fight for this, and it was just Rannulf fighting for it all the way until Judith eventually caves. I really wanted to see two people fighting to come together, rather than just one person trying to be the noble idiot and the other one breaking that down in order to get through to them.

So, yeah, in the first half, this book would've easily been a 4, maybe 4.5 stars. But the second half was pretty disappointing to me, and knocked it down to 3 stars. I still enjoyed myself overall, but man, when I was reading the first half, my predictions of how the book was going to go down would've been so much more enjoyable than how it actually did.

This is one of those times where a story is so tropey that it's formulaic, but where the author unabashedly and completely leans into the trope as to make it pretty enjoyable to read.

The premise of this book is oddly similar to that of Bram Stoker's Dracula. A young, upcoming, and betrothed lawyer is sent to a remote estate to take care of a client's paperwork. He first meets townspeople who seem positively traumatised by the said estate and whatever lurks those grounds, but who all remain maddeningly reticent and silent, and simply just give him furtive scared looks and ominous cryptic hints. Lawyer has to hole himself up in the said estate to complete his work, and you probably can fill in the rest.

But whereas in Dracula there is an active malevolence that dogs the steps of Jonathan Harker, in The Woman In Black, the evil is a bit more passive. We get the sense that Arthur Kipps had simply stumbled into the wrong place at the wrong time. Arthur meanwhile constantly swings between being balls-of-steel fearless and scared shit senseless, all of which simply serves to place him in situations to experience the ghostliness of the story. The beginning of this book was also a little messy and confusing, where we are first introduced to Arthur Kipps at different ages all at once, but certainly gets better once the storytelling becomes more linear. The plot is fairly predictable throughout and doesn't serve up any mind-bending twists, but even when you see it coming, it's still executed pretty well and makes a pretty enjoyable read.

When you can see most of the plot points coming, it does take something away from the horror aspect of it. This book makes for a great verbal ghost story, and I can even see why it makes for excellent material for adaptation into the mediums of film and theatre, so it's a bit odd that in its original textual medium it falls a bit flat. I never really felt properly scared throughout even though I knew I was reading scary moments. It was scary only insofar that I can imagine it being a properly scary moment in a movie.

I'll leave more commentary under spoilers about the horror aspect of the book since it would inevitably spoil the plot, but suffice to say that this is indeed a “classic ghost story”. This is probably an excellent tale to recount around the campfire, or would make a great Halloween read. It's almost self-aware in that the story begins with Arthur being unexpectedly triggered when his family is telling each other ghost stories around the fire on Christmas Eve, which then motivates him to put down his experiences on paper. So if you go in with that expectation, you certainly won't be disappointed.

Spoilery thoughts: The book felt like a textbook skeleton model of “how a ghost story should go”. We have the retrospective suspense when Arthur keeps repeating how traumatised he is from that incident in his life so long ago, then the prospective suspense when he's starting from the beginning and then talking about how everyone in that village gave him weird looks. Then of course we have the nights spent alone in the manor (usually starts off accidentally) where more ghostly incidents happen, some hints of the backstory of the ghost (there must always be one), a climax, and then eventually rescue and salvation after which the hero will certainly find out the full story of the ghost, then ending with the creepy “the ghost still survives” moment where we find out what happens in the future with Arthur's wife and son. It's a very very common horror formula and it was so obvious here that Hill might as well have written this as a casual example in a writing class.Also, the fact that the Arthur immediately concludes that the thing he's seeing is a ghost almost from the get-go and then spends the rest of the book just basically saying, “I ain't scared of no ghosts.” in his bravado kinda takes something away from the suspense. A lot of horror stories work better when there's a bit of suspense for the reader in who/what exactly the malevolent entity is, but in this one, we know immediately that these are just... ghosts, just spirits of people who are dead, so there's nothing more to know about them. The ghosts were completely unmysterious for most of the book and so there was no veil to pull down later in the book, which therefore resulted in a pretty meh climax.I might have overlooked this more if the story also gave me something a bit more with the ghost's backstory, but even there it felt rather unsubstantial. So the ghost turns out to be Jennet, a mother driven to grief and sorrow after her child dies in a drowning accident. She nurses a lifelong hatred for Alice Drablow simply because she was the one who asked them to go out on that trip to town that day? It just seems a little out of proportion. I'm by no means disregarding the enormity of grief a parent can have for a child who passes suddenly, but the way this was explained and portrayed in the book just doesn't do it justice. I can't quite understand or get behind how deep Jennet's hatred and evilness must be, or why she seems to be targeting other children around the town. For that matter, why does she target Arthur in the end, and why so long after his visit to Eel Marsh? Perhaps she was jealous of other children surviving when hers didn't and that jealousy was so strong that it eclipsed her sanity, but that was never quite conveyed and that point was never really driven home to the reader imo.

Well, Stormlight Archives have not been disappointing so far. I'm so excited to be invested in this series as it's coming out, and be at least a small part of the fandom madness and speculation. It's like a mix of that excitement and all the speculation over Harry Potter, and the number of easter eggs and cameos as the Marvel Cinematic Universe has. Anyway.

Way of Kings was great because it did such a great job setting up this amazing Stormlight world but Words of Radiance even better because we're finally expanding on what we had and things are developing and happening at last. The pacing, the absolute ridiculous intricacy of the plot, the complexity of the story, the layers upon layers upon layers of storytelling, and the tremendous interweaving of plotlines and backstories and characterwork... I really wonder how he keeps everything straight in his head.

I'm almost at a loss of how to review this honestly. This was a 1,310 page chonker but it went by faster than books less than a quarter of its size. I was speculating every step of the way and I had comments for almost every single chapter.

Kaladin was pretty infuriating for most of this book. He reminded me so much of a hormonal teenager that is just stuck in his “oh, woe is me” rut all the time. In fact, he reminded me of Harry Potter in Order of the Phoenix, where he just mopes for the entire book feeling like the whole world is against him. Kaladin was pretty much like that. The only times I enjoyed his scenes was whenever he was with Shallan, because she's the only character that actually bothered to call out his bullshit and which helped him snap out of his misery jerking for a bit.

Shallan has fast become one of my favourite characters this book. She was okay in the first book but I think I liked Jasnah better. Well, Jasnah was pretty much gone for most of this book (I called it halfway through that she hadn't actually died), so Shallan took over and boy did she grow. She's been through some shit but she still gets up and tries to make it through everyday with a smile on her lips and a quip at the end of her tongue. We spend most of this book thoroughly hating her abusive dad, Lin Davar, only to realise that he had been maligned and that it had actually been Shallan who had killed her own mom instead. It was a truth she had to confront in order to take the final step to becoming a Knight Radiant. What is it going to mean for her development in the next book? What would it mean for her that she had basically murdered both her parents, one of them when she was just six years old? This complicates her character even more and I'm really here for that level of complexity.

Adolin... I didn't like him for the first half of the book but after he finally stopped being a prick to Kaladin and decided to buddy up with him, he grew a lot more tolerable. Poor dude though. He's so intricately connected to all of the Knights Radiant, but isn't one himself. My jaw also dropped when he suddenly, randomly murdered Sadeas in broad daylight at the end. What is that going to mean for him in the next book? Not that I minded what happened to Sadeas, of course. He really had that coming for him.

I'm really excited also at the introduction of Lift. She was oozing awesomeness throughout and I'm excited to see if she's going to turn out as one of the Knights Radiant too, even though she's, what, 13?

I mean, what's there to really say? If you liked Way of Kings, you'll probably enjoy this one even more. If you didn't like Way of Kings, then this one is going to be even more confusing for you. If you haven't read Way of Kings then it's a bit of a no-brainer - go read that one first! If, like me, you need a refresher before going into this one, check out the chapter summary of Way of Kings on Coppermind (fan wiki). It takes a while to get back into the stride of things especially if you haven't read it for a while, but once things get going, they really get going. Couldn't put this one down.

This was a good solid 4-star read. I found that it dragged a little in the middle, but I was pleased enough by the ending to come away with a good impression of it.

Miryem is a moneylender's daughter who can turn silver into gold. Well, at least, she knows how to barter her silver well enough to get a gold coin back for each one. Unfortunately, her father the moneylender is too gentle and kind to collect his debts, so to prevent her family from going cold and hungry, she has to harden her heart and go out to run his business for him. Because of an ill-timed boast to herself about it in the forest, Miryem attracts the attention of the king of the Staryeks, a race of winter fae people who have been casually terrorising mortals for generations. Together with Wanda, the daughter of one of Miryem's debtors, and Irina, the daughter of a duke, Miryem has to find a way out of a supernatural conflict that threatens the lives of their people.

The characters of this book, love them or hate them, are really quite spectacular to behold (and not always pleasantly so). The female characters are generally strong, but I found them a little muted compared to the male ones, probably because they're more stable. Miryem is kind and can be generous, but generally she's calculative with her money. Wanda is unfortunately lacking in education, but she's physically strong and does what needs to be done to protect her brothers. Irina is... whew. Despite being a duke's daughter, she's downtrodden but grows increasingly... almost ruthless and manipulative as the book goes by. After all, she is the only one who can actually outmaneuver both Mirnatius and Chernobog. Honestly, at the end of the book when Irina was making these decisions to let Chernobog into the Staryek kingdom just to save her people, I was the most afraid of her than I was of the actual flame demon from Hell.

The male characters here are out of control! Wanda's father, usually known as “Da” when we see the story from her perspective, is a pathetic bullshit excuse of a human being that you would find yourself thinking violent thoughts about (and honestly, I found myself wishing his death had been even more violent than it was). But the two biggest characters here are Tsar Mirnatius and the nameless Staryek king. I spent the first half of this book thinking that these are some crazy toxic male characters, and indeed there's no denying that they are toxic. But by the end of the book, after learning more about them, you may find yourself re-assessing that. In any case, I like that they both had to be saved, quite physically, by Irina and Miryem respectively. I feel like the happy ending may not be to everyone's tastes, but I think the part of me that likes fairytales and happy endings very much enjoyed the way it played out, which is why I liked the book so much.

The narrative structure was OK, but may not be to everyone's fancy. It's told from a first person POV, but it switches fairly frequently between characters. We get at least 2 characters' POVs every chapter. There also isn't a clear indication of whose perspective we're reading from, which is probably a deliberate decision, but that also means you need to pay more attention to the context of what you're reading to figure out whose voice you're reading now. I thought that the POVs would be fixed between the 3 main female characters, but I was surprised later on with the POVs of some other side characters (namely Stepon, Mirnatius, Magreta - especially Mirnatius. I wouldn't have expected to see the POV from one of the "villains" of this book).

If you live in a country that experiences winter, this is a great book to whip out and read during that season. It's a book that takes place in and almost celebrates winter to some extent, with a dark fairytale vibe and a fairytale ending.

This book is wholesome. This book is the definition of wholesome. I'd recommend this to just about anyone, but especially those who has a passion for books and English literature. I'd even say, keep this book for a bit of a rainy day, when you're feeling like you're sliding into or already in a book slump, this book will lift you right out of it. It's so short but so impactful at the same time.

The premise of this book is exceedingly simple. Helene Hanff, an American writer, writes to a bookseller in London specialising in second-hand antique books, and so strikes up a correspondence with Frank Doel, the staff at the bookseller's in charge of responding to her, which lasts for 20 years. You could easily spoil yourself if you tried to Google anything about this book or about the author because this is a story about a part of her real life, so I'd suggest going in completely blind if you can.

Helene's casual witticisms and affectionate jibes at Frank were just such a delight to read, especially when contrasted with Frank's classic British reserve, which took a much longer time to thaw out. By her warm generosity with him and the rest of the staff at the bookshop, Helene also begins correspondences with other staff there and even with Frank's wife, though her primary correspondent is still Frank. Their relationship is all the more wholesome because there's nothing illicit or romantic about their genuine affection for one another, they both clearly held each other in very warm and platonic regard.

I suppose it's also because we're reading about real people writing real letters to each other, but Helene and Frank's personalities just really jumped out of the page for me. This book is so short and we see comparatively so little of them compared to regular fiction books, but they have so much more life and vividness to them than most other books I've read. It didn't take me many pages to get very much attached to both Helene and Frank, as well as their friends and family.

Ultimately, this book really highlighted how beautiful it is to find people who share the same interests as you do, even if your only contact with them was sending each other letters and parcels across thousands of miles, and maybe seeing the occasional photograph. This justified Internet friends before the Internet existed. I feel like this book also showed how important it is to be kind to customer service staff because even though your relationship with them may start off as being transactional, they are ultimately human beings with their own thoughts, interests, friends, and family and I think even nowadays so many people forget that when they're the customers. Helene's beautiful friendship with Frank, his family, and the rest of the staff at the bookstore only really started because she saw Frank as a human being first, sending him and all the staff generous food parcels that she could barely afford, even when Frank was trying to maintain that polite distance between staff and customer.

The ending: I had a great feeling through most of the book that it would end with one or the other dying. I didn't know which because I went into this book completely blind as I usually like to do. Frank's death certainly came out of nowhere and it was all the more tragic because it was so sudden and unexpected. He had been meaning to send Helene the Austens at Christmas, but he died before then. I had to really stop myself from crying because once I start, I know I won't be able to stop. I felt so so so sad for Helene that she didn't even manage to meet Frank in person before he died, and according to one of the epilogues, when she did eventually manage to make a trip to England, even the bookstore was gone. At the very least, I'm glad that she probably managed to meet Nora and the kids. Ugh, so sad. To me, that really highlighted the importance of not putting things off because you just never know whether they'll still be there by the time you get round to doing it.

In summary - just read this book, especially if you love reading in general. Read it when you're feeling down, or just read it whenever. You won't regret it.

This was just really imaginative and I enjoyed the universe. This is probably the first time I've come across a Chinese/Vietnamese-inspired space opera and I'm really all for it. Throw in the fact that this is also a wild, wild adaptation of Sherlock Holmes and I am sold.

Because this is a novella, a lot of details remains a little fuzzy and unexplained. How exactly does a shipmind work? Do they have corporeal bodies? Were they all human beings at one point but somehow got transitioned into being a shipmind? I only have very vague answers to all these questions. I'm not sure if they're explored further in the other novellas in this universe, but there doesn't seem to a sequence or order to read these books, so I assume that it remains equally nebulous.

The mystery isn't really the crux of this book IMO. It's a plot driver, but I think the book is primarily interested in its world and setting. We learn a fair bit about the brewers of serenity that make concoctions to help regular human beings traverse through the deep spaces of unreality. Are these brewers exclusively mindships? I've no idea.

This is such a short read that I'd definitely recommend it for anyone who's remotely OK with reading science fiction, or what I would like to call space fantasy. Again, not everyday that we have Vietnamese space opera either so hopefully that should knock this book up a few notches in your TBR.

4 to 4.5 stars. Sanderson does it again and reinforces my impression of him as one of the most consistently solid writers around. I started off this book a little nervous honestly and kinda wasn't completely feeling the book until about 25-30% in. I ended off very much satisfied and probably going to pick up the next one.

I guess relative to Sanderson's other works, Skyward might be considered a YA in that it has teenage protagonists and has a bit more action and less political maneuvering as in his adult fantasy novels. But as you might expect, there are none of the tired old YA tropes here. I spent a lot of the book trying to predict what was going to happen and I thought I had the book in several instances, but Sanderson somehow finds a way to subvert my expectations and give the plot a twist I didn't see coming. The only one development I guessed correctly was thinking that Spensa was going to eventually eject in some dire situation, have her plane wrecked, and then eventually fly in on M-Bot to save the day in some epic final battle, but there were at least ten more tropes that I had guessed but didn't happen.

Our main protagonist Spensa had a really good character arc. She was almost insufferable at the beginning with her blustering naivete, even though I suppose she had somewhat good reason. She did eventually develop as a character after her experiences in the book and grew pretty tolerable by the end. My favourite character is probably Cobb, but only after M-Bot and Doomslug. (I also wonder if M-Bot is a call to Martha Wells's Murderbot, or if it was just a huge coincidence?) I also liked that Ironsides was morally gray at best.

The world was pretty realistic overall. It is 100% believable that humankind would find a way to continually stratify their society into the more and less privileged (and geographically so in this one) no matter how much of a pickle they end up in, and that the more privileged ones would always find a way to make situations balance in their favour. What I found the most bizarre about this world is their obsession with cowardice. Even from the very beginning, I thought it odd that they labeled Spensa's father a “coward”. Sure, you could conceivably label a deserter as a coward, but it was just so odd that everyone was so hung up about that, and showed the same treatment to Spensa. I guess it might be because the society was such a militaristic one, but I just couldn't get past it. And to for some instructors/pilots to view the act of ejecting oneself from a plane when it's beyond salvaging as cowardice?! That's just wild to me.

Thoughts on the ending: Can we say deus ex M-Bot?! There were some tropey parts about the ending but it was written so satisfactorily that overall I'm not even mad. I kept imagining the ending of the movie Independence Day, where the small lone ship flies into the mothership to prevent it from destroying Earth. It kinda felt like that was going to happen when Spensa was about to dive into the lifebuster but I guess not. I liked the answers we got and while it still raised more questions so that the rest of the series can go on, I didn't feel like we were just left on one big cliffhanger, or like this was just one half of a full book. I'm glad it didn't happen that the Krell were the original inhabitants of Detritus and that the humans were the invaders. I've just recently read a book where that happened and I would not have been pleased if that had been repeated here. I'm glad also that we did find out what happened to Spensa's father, but also that we have more to explore re: Spensa's “defect”. I'm guessing it's some kind of weird telepathic connection but I doubt that it stops at the Krell, it's probably much bigger than that.

3.5* rounded down to 3*. This was a fun little story that packs supernatural entities, a mystery, and some exorcism action. The only reason why I would rate this a little lower than the other short stories in the series is because it seemed to be a standalone side adventure rather than as a piece of the overarching puzzle. It didn't seem to have a sense of awe that pervades the other stories, but that might be due to the lack of Angels in this one. Nevertheless, it was still pretty fun in itself.Agent Hamed, from the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities, is sent in with new recruit Agent Onsi to investigate a report of a haunting taking place in one of Cairo's tram cars. They run around Cairo trying to figure out the identity of this phantom, with the aid of enigmatic waitress Abla.If you aren't already familiar with the Dead Djinn Universe, this series takes place in an AU fantasy steampunk version of Egypt in the 1930s or so. It's spectacular and refreshing. All the characters are Egyptian, a good number of them are Muslim, and even the fantasy aspects of this series takes a lot of cues from Middle Eastern mythology and Islamic lore. This series already gets bonus points for being so refreshingly different from ye olde conventional Euro-centric fantasy stories.I particularly enjoyed the dynamics between Agent Hamed and Agent Onsi. It starts off first as that of an unwilling mentor tutoring an overenthusiastic but inexperienced junior, but later develops into a mutually respectful partnership. I'm slated to read the latest book of the series very soon and hope very much that we see more of them.There was a whole plot thread here about a suffragette movement happening in Cairo, and the book seemed to want to do something with it but it wasn't really clear (to me) what that was. This thread was also pretty deliberately interwoven through the main sequence of events, with our two agents in the forefront trying to solve the problem of the haunting, and concludes just as the investigation does, so I'm pretty sure Clark is trying to draw some kind of parallel here - I just can't figure out what!This is a fun addition to the Dead Djinn Universe, but I wouldn't recommend this as a starting point. Rather, [b:A Dead Djinn in Cairo 29635542 A Dead Djinn in Cairo P. Djèlí Clark https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1459173382l/29635542.SX50.jpg 49993780] did a better and more impressive job overall in introducing the world, the setting, and the range of supernatural entities that is at the series's forefront (I'm particularly thinking of Angels, which interest me the most in the whole series, even more than djinns despite the series title).

Overall a great read and a great entry into the Cosmere universe, which I am loving with every book. I read this after [b:The Way of Kings 7235533 The Way of Kings (The Stormlight Archive, #1) Brandon Sanderson https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388184640l/7235533.SY75.jpg 8134945] from the Stormlight Archives.Siri is the youngest daughter of the Idrian king and has spent her life believing that she's the runt of the Royal children. Her eldest sister, Vivenna, lives her life in picture-perfect decorum, perpetually in training to eventually be the bride of the God-King of their neighbouring country, and historical enemy, Hallendran. But Vivenna and Siri's places are switched. Siri, who has little to no idea about the politica intrigues behind their two countries, finds herself neck-deep in the sinister watchfulness of the Hallendran court and the husband she had never wanted, while Vivenna struggles to find her place now that everything she had trained herself for has crumbled before her eyes.I love how different the world is but yet there are underlying motifs that isn't explicitly explained or shown to you, but you could just about pick out or sense so that you know instinctively that you are very much in the same universe as the events in Stormlight Archives. That's fantastic overarching world-building in my book.I've been on the lookout for a good colour-based magic system for a while now, since Brent Weeks's [b:The Black Prism 7165300 The Black Prism (Lightbringer, #1) Brent Weeks https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327921884l/7165300.SY75.jpg 7534979] whet my appetite but which I DNFed for other reasons. In a sense, Warbreaker kinda filled that void, but also not really. It's not as intensely colour based as The Black Prism was, where different wavelengths of colour actually had different magical effects). Rather, Warbreaker purported that magical power lay in something called Breath, or BioChroma, which living persons could possess, give away, use to heighten their senses, or imbue them into inanimate objects/dead things to Awaken them.I took an extraordinarily long time (for me) to finish this book primarily because of my own personal life, rather than because of the book itself. However, I did find that the middle 20% to maybe 40-50% or so sagged a little for me. As usual with Sanderson books though, the last bit of the book from 70% onwards is as good as a non-stop read for me, with all the revelations hitting you fast and furious. Some twists you could probably see coming, but some would hit you out of nowhere. For fans of his other works, there are also some easter eggs here that may leave a nagging suspicion at the back of your mind - “Where have I heard this before?” - and then when you double confirm your suspicion in another book, you realise just how many hints Sanderson has planted around the continuity of his universe in all of his books.Character-wise, Sanderson doesn't disappoint. Although she wasn't my favourite character, I personally enjoyed Vivenna's character arc the most. Everything she has known and believed her entire life is tested to its extreme, and her character development was the most stunning. I enjoyed the whole discussion about beliefs, about how every side thinks they're fighting for the right one, and how one person's austerity could look like luxurious extravagance to another. I liked most of the other main characters in the book as well. Lightsong was also another stand-out in the cast - he's irreverant, his humour is on point, and I loved how mercurial and unpredictable he was. (Ending spoilers) Most of all, the scene at the end where he finally realised that he had in fact been Returned for a reason, and gave his life to save the God-King - that was just amazing. I loved that Llarimar was his brother, and that he wasn't just some manipulative fanatical priest trying to stamp Lightsong into the mold of the god he wanted him to be, but that he truly believed in him because he had sacrificed his life to save his daughter. Also, I loved how the God-King did a 180 from his reveal, and that he is not in fact a tyrant but a poor cinnamon roll. He's probably my favourite character after that, but Lightsong is a close second.

Firstly, what the hell was that ending?! I was expecting more closure, and was in fact waiting for the next chapter on my audiobook and then... it ended??? WHAT.

Overall I felt like this ending summed up my feelings about this whole book. It felt like it was going somewhere but I couldn't really quite figure out where, and just kinda meandered a lot. It was engaging but at the same time the pacing could've been much tighter.

There were definitely a lot of messages here that was interesting and at least I felt like it was fairly cohesive, but at the same time... it didn't feel impactful enough for me. I liked what it was saying about late-stage capitalism and expected that to tie in somehow with the origin/mechanism of Shen Fever but... it didn't. I wanted it to talk more about some very interesting ideas it brought up, like how the glossy designer labels are all manufactured in third-world countries! While the book wasn't too disjointed and was somewhat coherent in that I can definitely see a motif critiquing capitalism but I just had trouble figuring out what the whole post-apocalyptic situation was for and why Candace had to be pregnant and all that. I was left feeling like I was teased for something more interesting than it really was.

The plot itself was pretty engaging but yet I found myself wishing it would hurry up. The pacing could've been a lot tighter. I only took 3 days to read it but somehow it felt like forever and I was wondering why I was spending so long reading this book. When I was reading it, it was engaging and I found myself trying to form theories on what the author wanted to say through these plot and thematic devices used. All in all I feel like there was a lot of good stuff here but it wasn't tied together very well and I wasn't left feeling like I learnt anything new here.

Also, Shen Fever was eerily prescient about the Covid pandemic, even more so than Station Eleven was.

I'm not sure what I expected going in to this book but it turned out really entertaining and well written. This is heavy on the action and does rely on knowledge of the more popular European fairy tales and nursery rhymes for the entertainment to come through. It's chock full of action but does manage to pack in some pretty impressive character development for a book that doesn't seem apparently concerned with it. The ending seems to set things up for a sequel so I'm hoping that will happen.

This book takes on the structure of a series of fairy tale and nursery rhyme retellings, but told through the perspective of a band of scoundrels called the Bastard Champions who go around taking up jobs for coin (getting Cinderella out of a disadvantageous bargain with a fairy godmother, for instance). While it may look like a collection of unconnected short stories, these stories actually take place in chronological order as the Bastard Champions plod their way through the land attempting to track down the notorious Blue Fairy. The action of the book is not sanitised either and can be fairly graphic and violent, although the tone is always pretty light-hearted and never too grim.

We follow fearsome trio Jack, Frank, and Marie in their journeys across the land, each of them harbouring their own curses and secrets. I enjoyed how we plunge into the action first and see the scoundrel state they've all landed up in in the present time, but slowly the adventures become a pretext for us finding out more about each of their backstories, peeling their characters back layer by layer.

Just like its main three characters, the book does have a core of fairy-tale optimism and naivete, despite its external facade of cynicism and violence. Instead of your whole “happily ever after”, we get the sense that book truly believes in the strength and power of friendship against all odds.

A short and fun read that I'd recommend to anyone who enjoys fairy tale retellings with a dash of adventure, action, and a charismatic trio that we can get behind at the center of it all.

I remember watching the movie first, being really obsessed with it, and then being somewhat disappointed by my first reads of this book. This was also many, many years ago. I decided to pick it up again this time knowing that I now have some distance from the movie and also that my reading preferences and tastes have changed in the intervening years, so I was curious to see if my opinions may change. Boy, it sure did. I think I might've rated this around 3 or 3.5 stars before but I'm bumping this up to 4 and even 4.5 stars.

In the village of Wall somewhere in Victorian England, Tristran Thorn sets out to find a fallen star to impress his lady love, Victoria Forrester. He goes through the Wall from which the village derives its name, into Faerie. He doesn't understand why Faerie seems so familiar to him, or how he's managing to find his way to the fallen star without any guidance, but he does. He just didn't expect the star to be a very, very sassy lady made even more irritable by a broken leg from falling from the sky. He attempts to convince her to come back to Wall with him to be presented to Victoria. Along the way, they meet several witches, unicorns, devious brother-princes, and lightning-harvesting pirate ships in the sky.

The events of the book and the movie were generally almost the same, so I really need to give Gaiman some props for having come up with such a rich, beautiful, fairytale-esque story that translated so well into the movie that I still love. What is the point of contention here, and what really drove me to have such different impressions of the book during my first and current read, is everything else - the storytelling, the setting, the whole vibe of the story. While the movie is light-hearted, campy and family-friendly fun, the book has a distinctively more adult-fairytale feel, which I was disappointed with before but now am delighted by.

This book also explores the idea of consent and boundaries that was way ahead of its time, and which also sadly did not translate into the movie.

“I was a wood-nymph. But I got pursued by a prince, not a nice prince, the other kind, and, well, you'd think a prince, even the wrong kind, would understand about boundaries, wouldn't you?”“You would?”“Exactly what I think.”

I also kinda weirdly love that parting scene between Yvaine and the old lady that used to be the witch-queen. Even though she's done so much harm and killed the poor unicorn, somehow Yvaine found it in her to be just the right amount of forgiving - not to the point of trying to save her from her sisters' wrath, but also just letting go of the past and leaving her be since she's lost the capacity to harm her. I did kinda wish that Lady Una would've been the next Ruler of Stormhold, that would've perfected the book for me.

I knew this book was going to either make me drag my feet through it, or I'd have a good time overall. I'm glad that I fell into the latter category.

I derived enjoyment mainly because the book appealed to my existentialist side, exploring how meaningless life can be if we don't create our own meaning for it. Most of pop culture explores the explosive and dramatic importance of humans and humanity (which I don't have anything against), but I also find it refreshing to read something that's just so quietly and timidly insignificant, even though it's sad and a little horrifying to think about. Admittedly, I don't really read a lot of existentialist books so I can't say how this one stands in that subgenre but from where I am, at least, I did enjoy the whole ride and found myself going through this a lot quicker and with more engagement than I expected.

The writing had a weird effect on me. It was straightforward to the cusp of being boring, but, for some weird reason that I cannot quite name, it sucked me in and I found myself even rereading some passages so I don't miss out on what it's trying to say. That being said, I can absolutely understand people finding it boring and for that reason I wouldn't recommend this book to just about anyone.

Stoner is not a flawless character by any standard. He's pretty much just an average person who isn't deliberately malicious and doesn't aspire to much in life. He'll never be a villain, a hero, or even any other kind of sterotype, because he's so in the middle. There are, I'm sure, millions of Stoners out there in all of human history but because their lives are usually drab and unexciting (from a pop culture standpoint), it's usually never memorialized. I think this book is trying to do that.

Stoner makes good and bad decisions, he randomly experiences leaps of epiphany and seems to find a personality, only to later shrink back into himself and retreat from confrontation or making a stand. Most books might have their heroes as a Gordon Finch who enthusiastically signs up for war and achieves all these accolades in academia, so it's interesting to see things from a perspective like Stoner's, who consistently shrinks away from things. He's the sort of person no one seems to remember for very long after he's gone (like the depressing first few passages of the book), but I think what the book does is to show us the inner workings of all these nameless, faceless people who have faded into the backgrounds of society and time, and that they, like any hero or villain in life, are also trying to create some meaning for themselves if it isn't as flamboyantly or colourfully done.

This book was also just as much about Edith and Grace as it was about Stoner, because, going along with the customs of the times, as the head of the household Stoner would inevitably dictate the course of his wife's and daughter's lives, whether he wanted to or not. Edith sadly doesn't seem to have a happy childhood - the theory that her father sexually abused her is one I only read about after I was done with the book but I buy it, everything does click into place - and, in so doing, she sort of pays it forward and asphyxiates Grace's childhood. Stoner doesn't intervene. Sure, I was annoyed at him for not standing up for Grace more and it's not an excusable reason, but it's also pretty real.

In the end, this book is about an ordinary, flawed person trying to navigate an ordinary, flawed existence. He makes some good and some bad decisions along the way, accumulating some accolades but which is outweighed by a ton of regrets and missed opportunities. The beauty in it is that I think most of us are more like Stoner than we realise or than we admit to ourselves.

I'm not familiar with scifi and usually don't gravitate towards it as a genre. I also read the first book in this series a pretty long time ago. Therefore it took me a lot by surprise that I slipped back into Murderbot mode so quickly and easily when I started on this one. The world, the setting, the characters all came rushing back to me almost as soon as I got started, which is a great sign.

Most AIs in fiction tend to have a Type: deadpan humour, making digs at humans for being slow, inconsistent, illogical, and quirky, and also speaking in an oddly detached way that hammers in the fact that they are robots.

Murderbot, though, doesn't quite align with that. The whole novella is told from his (? a gender or pronoun is never specified so this is an assumption on my part) perspective after all, so we are the most privy to his thoughts. Murderbot feels a bit like an extremely introverted human quite often, despite being literally a killing machine. All he wants to do is just curl up with his entertainment media and watch dramas all day long, and the way he shared that hobby with ART in this one was pretty damn precious.

In this installment, Murderbot makes a bit of a pilgrimage to a particular site that holds deep significance to him but which has been erased from his memory data. While I don't think we learn a whole ton of information in this book, I'm enjoying these bite-sized novellas in the way I enjoy a TV series with shorter but self-contained episodes that contribute to an overarching plot.

I'd always recommend Murderbot to anyone who enjoys sci-fi, and even to people who don't but who enjoys a quietly snarky and subtly humorous character study.