Mandy

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

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

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

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

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

A solid 3.75* read. This book has a number of flaws which I could probably chalk up to it being a debut work, but ultimately, the magic system and the politics of the world is compelling and engaging enough for me to consider continuing with the series.

Miles Singer is a doctor in Aeland, a country like an alternative Edwardian England, who finds himself suddenly administering emergency help to a dying man, Nick Elliot, brought in by a passerby, Tristan Hunter. Before Nick passes, he reveals that he knows exactly who Miles Singer is - both a mage and the son of a powerful Royal Knight. Miles isn't even his real name. Miles dedicates himself to find Nick's murder, at the same time finding himself tumbling back into the family circles that he has sought to escape for so long, and into the irresistible charm of Tristan, himself not just any ordinary human either.

Witchmark has a pretty rough beginning. You are quite literally thrown in to the world and so many foreign terms are bandied about without any proper explanation. It was disorienting to read, and didn't do much to feel engaging. I actually had to start writing down notes to remind me of things. The dialogue, especially at the beginning, felt a bit stilted and overly dramatic, such as when Grace, Mile's sister, swears by her own blood not to Bind him at their first meeting after he ran away from home.

The set-up of the story, the characters, and the central romance felt a little abrupt somehow, and some bits were just downright contradictory. Miles ran away from home precisely because he didn't want to be controlled by his family due to the class of mage that he was born to be. He spends a good deal of time in the first few chapters of the book running away from and rejecting his sister precisely because he refuses to be subservient to anyone. But yet, the moment he finds out Tristan's true identity (which in itself felt like a rather abrupt and hasty scene), it felt like he immediately and very naturally fell into a subservient attitude, refusing to call him by his first name despite Tristan's multiple entreaties and instead going with “Sir” or “Mr. Hunter” for a good while.

After the world is somewhat set up though, the appeal of the book comes in - this is probably after a good 25% into the book though. I enjoyed the magic system and the politics that's set up here. Grace, Miles's sister, is a Storm-Singer, something like a more powerful form of mage that's in control and who are typically bound with a member of a slightly lower order of mages called Secondaries, who mainly exist to provide their Storm-Singers with energy and power to do their jobs. Miles, himself a Secondary, is rebelling against this system, in proving that the Secondaries' “tricks”, their main magical power, shouldn't be seen as a lower order of magic and not as important, and that some Storm-Singers themselves also have the same “tricks” that only Secondaries do. The politics around this entire system is pretty tight, concise, and compelling, which I appreciated.

I particularly liked Grace Hensley as well. She is fiercely loyal to her family and genuinely cares for her brother, but at the same time she has a dogged persistence in doing what she thinks is right, even if that includes sacrificing her brother's happiness, freedom, or even at risk of her own life. I never really knew whether to like her or to be annoyed by her, which is a sweet middle spot that I really enjoy with characters. Miles and Tristan were fine, I didn't feel strongly either way with them. Their chemistry seemed a little too abrupt and quick, and interestingly enough, their romance wasn't the main attraction for me in this novel (normally it would be).

Overall, a very promising debut novel which, while suffering from its flaws, has huge, huge potential for becoming a compelling world. I'll be keeping tabs on this author!

To be frank, I only made it about 20% in to this (and it's not even a long read).

The book begins with Harriett taking a solitary walk, as Regency ladies always do apparently, and happening upon Lieutenant Jamison as he rides up to Tanglewood on his unruly steed, Wicked. She raises a hand in greeting, but the Lieutenant does not notice her and, in galloping so quickly by her, splashes her with mud.

And that's it. That's the entire premise for Harriett's sudden and deeply entrenched belief that the Lieutenant is no gentleman, even though he later attempts to apologise (multiple times) for it. Perhaps one could argue that his first apology might be construed as insincere but don't they have better things to expend their energy upon than holding grudges because someone didn't notice you on the road and splashed your dress with mud?!

Harriett felt like a spoilt child with no capacity for understanding and forgiveness, and no sense of humour in this first 20% of the book. Their immediate mutual attraction despite this misunderstanding felt contrived and unbelievable in the face of their clear incompatibility of personalities. The lieutenant doesn't do much except chuckle and laugh attractively, so I didn't really care much for him either.

This book was all sorts of things to me - confusing, frustrating, engaging, interesting. At the end of it all, I'm not sure I understood 100% what the backstory was supposed to be - I'm not even sure if we're meant to understand. It was such a weird, weird journey. It was enjoyable and fascinating, definitely memorable though I wouldn't say particularly endearing or really giving one the warm fuzzies of a new love. This was like a mish-mash of the Wizard of Oz, X-Men, and Doctor Strange and/or Avengers.

I've only ever read three books in Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children series and have enjoyed those well enough. I went into this one expecting a very different vibe from that one given that I had the impression this was meant to be more horror, more outright fantasy. I was a little surprised that the tone, the vibe of this one was very much similar to Wayward Children, especially at the very beginning when our protagonists are young kids. I can McGuire's interest in exploring that theme of childhood development and psychology, the traumas and struggles that children go through and the coping mechanisms that they put into place without even knowing what they're doing, and which may sometimes spill over into adulthood. This is still a huge part of Middlegame and though our protagonists eventually have bigger problems to deal with after they've grown up, they never quite forget or leave behind the events of their childhood.

The writing is engagingly descriptive, as McGuire's writing has always been. There's a lot of vivid imagery around here, especially when there're so much to perceive and tell in this world, like how Roger and Dodger experience their existences in completely different ways and how they intertwine occasionally. I did find that the writing got sometimes a little too dramatic and a bit repetitive, but that might just be a personal preference thing. During certain sequences, McGuire repeated certain phrases over and over again in the same passage or chapter to bring a point across. If done very minimally, I think this could drive a point cross, but I thought this was done a tad bit too much here that it dilutes the importance of each “important” phrase. Details: I got a little tired of reading, “There's so much blood.” everytime we skip back to the Book 7 interludes, and honestly I'm not really sure that the volume of blood was really all that important to the crux of the plot. What I liked much more was a bit of that repetition of, “How many times?” which I found more impactful and more relevant to the whole thing about Dodger and Roger having repeated their lives so many times, but that wasn't dwelled upon as much as “there's so much blood” unfortunately.

On a smaller scale, McGuire also uses that repetition to underline an emotional moment, for e.g. pulling a completely unrelated example off the top of my head and not quoting from the book: “... and she doesn't look back. She doesn't look back.” That's fine, I guess, I'm just not the biggest fan of that and it always sounds a bit too dramatic to me.

The pacing of the book was OK, though I always kept wondering if this could have been any shorter. This is a pretty long read and while the action never quite stops and nothing is really draggy, I feel like a large part of the length has to do with the style of narration and descriptions kinda dragging things out a bit. It's not a major problem, though I feel like it could've been perhaps more compact.

Roger and Dodger are the center of this book's universe in more ways than one. We spend almost all our times with them and watching them grow up, taking only an occasional jaunt to catch up on the book's antagonists. I did really like how fleshed out they were for most of the book, where we really delved into how childhood environment and circumstances can impact the way people, even those who are almost identical in every way, grow up. As the plot develops, they both kinda lose a bit of that human colour a bit when they become more aware of their talents, but I don't think I minded that because I was looking forward to some epic magical showdown. Erin was also a surprisingly complex character - dare I say even the most complex one in the whole lot? Leigh and Reed are fairly one-dimensional but we don't spend a lot of time with them so it's OK.

This is a very minor point but I was also kinda amused and just very slightly annoyed by how this book was meant to be encompass the world, the universe, reality itself - but we're so so centered in the United States. Heck, even when we were supposed to be separating twin babies “as far apart as geographically possible” (a paraphrased quote from the book), here I was expecting them to be somewhere in like Nepal and Canada, maybe. In fact, when Roger first says he's in Cambridge, I thought, huh having them in the USA and UK is kinda uninspired but okay. But no, he's actually in Cambridge, Massachusetts, so apparently “as far apart as geographically possible” simply meant on the opposite coasts of one country. There are other less obvious bits in the story that just felt very, very America-centric. I'm in two minds about this - on one hand, if McGuire didn't feel up to writing a character growing up in a completely different culture from her own experience, it makes sense that she just stuck to what she knew and I'd prefer that to half-baked attempts at trying to stick in, say, a South African upbringing if inadequate research was done. On the other hand, the cosmic scale this plot is supposed to be operating on just falls a little flat if we're just boxed up in a single country.

The ending was fine, although I actually kinda wanted to see a lot more, but I suppose it's not a bad thing if we didn't have some miraculous deus ex machina. Spoilery thoughts: I wanted to see Dodger and Roger really come into their manifestation and start pulling Leigh and Reed apart by math and reality alone, but I suppose it's not unrealistic that, still being human in some way, they couldn't possibly grasp the knowledge of how to use all their powers right from the get-go, even when they realized their potential for it. I liked the addition of Kim and Tim to their weird little family in the end, and I suppose that they'll have more of a role to play in the sequel.

Ah, Murderbot. I've missed its jaded-ass voice, and its obsession with entertainment media is so relatable. “Why am I compelled by my guilty conscience to work, I just want to stay in my corner and watch drama serials all day” is definitely a mood.

I'm starting to think that the episodic nature of Murderbot novellas are probably... deliberate? To perhaps mirror the episodes of the serials that it loves watching so much. In any case, that's completely up my alley and my short attention span these days. This installment was enjoyable, with Murderbot teaming up with some old friends to bring down a nasty corporation.

There're definitely some interesting messages to be had if you dig a bit deeper below the surface - there is criticism about capitalism and big corporations gaining too much power, there is questioning what exactly makes humans human, and then also living through events from the perspective from a robot for whom the boundaries between AI and humanity is tenuous at best. This is the book where Murderbot catches feelings, and it doesn't like it.

I'm not a huge sci-fi reader so there are occasionally passages where I zone out quite a bit. Murderbot can sometimes get a bit technical in its narrative, but even just being there for its hilarious asides and commentary on the events and people around it, as well as the dialogue that goes on between itself and its companions is worth reading this whole series for.

Certainly continuing on the rest of the series.

4.5/5. The Murderbot Diaries sets a high standard but Rogue Protocol kinda squeezes above that benchmark and does things even better than its predecessors.

The titular Murderbot is just a little bit more sarcastic and sharp-witted, just a little bit more human, and the plot is just a little bit tighter and more satisfying to read.

Here, we see our favourite rogue SecUnit (security unit for the uninitiated) decide to go upon a mission to collect evidence to prove wrongdoing against some Big Bad Corporation, GrayCris. It leads him to what is ostensibly an abandoned terraforming facility, but is actually an abandoned illegal mining operation. To collect evidence he has to sneak aboard a team shuttle going down to assess the facility, but soon finds himself doing what he's always told himself he's done doing - protect humans.

There is so much to love about Murderbot, I don't know where to start. Is it his reluctance to get attached to humans? Is it his hermit nature and love for soap operas? Is it him blanking out half way through an intense suspenseful moment and deciding to instead spend those 6 minutes watching the TV show he had on pause in his mental feeds? It's probably all of these things.

Miki, the robot introduced in this installment, provides the perfect foil for Murderbot. It's a perfectly docile, innocent, child-like pet robot that believes wholeheartedly in the goodness of human beings, an attitude that Murderbot is simultaneously jealous of and nauseated by (”I didn't have a stomach so I can't vomit”).

I am endlessly amused by how offputtingly technical the titles of these Murderbot stories can be sometimes - All Systems Red, Rogue Protocol, etc. It calls to mind a story exceedingly burdened with technical and scifi jargon. While there is definitely some of that here, Murderbot is so relatable and so human-like that arguably I've not seen a better example of how blurred the line can be between AI and a 21st century human being.

If you haven't read Murderbot Diaries, you should. Now. It doesnt matter whether or not you are a fan of scifi because this is a protagonist anyone can identify with and enjoy.

This feels like a textbook so I find it hard to rate and review. overall, I can see why this book was and still is very important and I kinda wish someone would condense the messages in here to make it more accessible to others who aren't in academia because the messages in this one really should be read by everyone. it's almost disheartening how relevant and relatable Said's critique of global power structures still is even today, almost half a century after this book was published... I have to admit that I didn't quite understand or I wasn't in the headspace to dissect, especially in the latter half of the book, but overall it was still an impactful read, I feel like I look at society and pop culture, and all these daily things that we take for granted a bit differently now and see how Orientalism (though it is an outdated term and stems from antiquity) informs so much of our daily lives, even modern-day conflicts from WW2 to the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and most recently the conflicts in Syria and the tension between China and many other countries. This was just so eye-opening. 4/5.

Randomly picked up this book with little to no expectations because I wanted a silly formulaic palate-cleanser - and it was such a pleasant surprise to read! A very well crafted Regency romance that ticks pretty much all the right boxes while also deftly avoiding the pitfalls of having been written in the early 2000's (I'm looking at you, Bridgerton).

Kit Butler, Viscount Ravensberg, is a notorious ex-army officer determined on ruining his position and respectability in London society. In an act of defiance against his family for beginning betrothal discussions without his input, Kit decides to pre-empt them by finding a prim, proper and dullest bride he can possibly court and win amongst the ton of society. His eyes fall upon Lauren Edgeworth, recently jilted at her own wedding by her ex-fiance, and as much of an ice queen and a role model of propriety that a lady of society could be.

The two main characters here, Kit and Lauren, were actually compelling. Neither of them felt obnoxiously annoying or unrealistic. They had actual backstories and fleshed-out histories. They had actual complicated relationships with characters aside from each other, and these dynamics played a part in the overall plot and in how both of them came together in the end. Most importantly, the chemistry between Kit and Lauren wasn't instant - sure, there was a bit of insta-lust but certainly no insta-love. Balogh took her time and gave her characters space to get closer over the course of the book. Their romance felt unrushed, genuine, and - importantly - believable.

I also liked that, despite being written in 2002, a time where a lot of romance novels were still quite iffy about issues surrounding consent and an inequality of power between the couple, Balogh side-stepped these pitfalls expertly. There was clearly a conscious effort to make sure Kit and Lauren stayed equal on the playing field, and that every plot point and decision made was mutually consensual and respectful. I really appreciated that and this was what most pleasantly surprised me in the book, having read and been disappointed so many times before by other romance novels written from the same time period. From Chapter 1, we get a scene where Kit is brawling with three other men who were catcalling and harrassing a milkmaid:

“It is a simply fact of language. Yes means yes, no means no.”

Although Lauren's continued insistence on not marrying Kit by the end of her visit to Alvesley was just bordering on a little annoying and stubborn, I could sort of understand where she was coming from in that she had had her plans formed and was on the verge of accomplishing something truly out of the norm, like living as a free and single woman in Bath on her own means, beholden to no one. So when she eventually relents and agrees to marry Kit just because he tells her he loves her... it felt like it came out of nowhere? Her whole reason for not wanting to marry Kit in the first place was never explicitly about whether he loved her or not, but more because she wanted independence and freedom. So I don't know why his confession changed anything about her goals, unless she was always kinda teetering on the fence and it simply pushed her over to agree to the marriage, in which case I don't know why she didn't show more outward indecision in the first place. I think the ending would've been vastly improved if Kit had, in addition to telling her that he loved her, also explained that their marriage would not deprive her of whatever independence and freedom that she wanted, that even if they were married, she would continue to be free to set her own establishment (independent of him) in Bath if she so wanted. I don't know, something that actually acknowledged and accommodated her goal of wanting to be independent all along would've made a lot more sense to me.

Originally posted on Unravellations.

Endless Night is a relatively unknown piece of work from Agatha Christie, or at least it was to me. I'd never heard of it before, and I only found the title when I was desperate and searching through lists to find more interesting Christies to read. I'm so glad I did.

It's a first-person narrative told by the main character, Michael Rogers, one of your typical young men who can't seem to hold down a job, and simply want to spend their time as a ‘rolling stone' (someone who floats here, there, everywhere with no goal or purpose in life). We first meet him when he is rhapsodizing about a beautiful piece of land in a small town, Kingston Bishop, with a house on it called Gipsy's Acre. He is warned by a local gipsy, Mrs. Lee, that he has bad luck and should get away from Gipsy's Acre as soon as possible. However, there, he meets a girl by accident, Ellie, and they soon fall in love and get married. It soon turns out that Ellie is not just a rich girl, but a tremendously rich girl, one of the richest in America, in fact.

They buy the land and house at Gipsy's Acre, pull down the old house and build a new one, designed by his friend, Rudolf Santonix. The gipsy, Mrs. Lee, repeats her warnings to Ellie, and begins to visit Gipsy's Acre occasionally to deliver the same threats and warnings to Ellie to leave the house and property. More and more characters begin flitting in and out of the narrative at this point, mostly Ellie's relations though they are not related to her by blood. One of them even flits in to settle in their new marriage home, Greta Andersen, a half-Swedish Valkyrie of a girl who served as Ellie's companion and on whom Ellie is largely dependent on. However, strange things begin to happen at Gipsy's Acre, and Michael and Ellie begin to wonder if the curse is true.

So far, the whole premise of the story doesn't seem to have an ounce of mystery in it. In fact, the actual mystery only comes into view rather late in the book, but it is testament to Christie's writing that she is able to create a thick atmosphere of suspense and tension throughout the narrative despite there being nothing actually unusual happening. Every character left me guessing as to what their motives were, whether it was Ellie's pretentious stepmother, or even her shrewd lawyer, Mr. Lippincott. Everyone seemed to be hiding secrets. Christie expertly conveyed through a narrative in which nothing much actually happens the falseness of the veneer of tranquility and bliss in the newlyweds' country life, as well as the sense of something sinister just beneath the surface.

I felt also that Christie paid a lot more attention to character development in this book. The first half of the book or more felt like a case study on the social and psychological aftermath of a poor man who happened to fall in love with and marry a rich girl. She fleshed out the psyche of the main character, Michael Rogers, rather well. I liked that it differed from her usual style of concentrating largely on the mystery at hand rather than the characters involved. Here, I felt that I understood their human predicaments much better than her usual sort of characters. One thing to note, as well, is that Christie is a lot less censored in this book. She talks about, mentions and alludes to sex more than she usually does, and even uses ‘bitch' a few times. It added to the freshness of the tone of this book.

But the mystery also did not disappoint! I had a fleeting idea of the true solution at some point halfway through, but had immediately dismissed the idea as impossible and had nurtured other more likely hypotheses. I was then happily bamboozled by the plot twists that came thick and fast at the last lap of the book, feeling that urge to go back and re-read certain segments of the book that would now be read in a different light now that I know the solution - and this urge is always a good sign.

This book had a very good mixture of two things: first, the comforting familiarity of Agatha Christie's style of mystery, intrigue, as well as the reassurance that the ending is going to be something really unexpected, and therefore I didn't feel too much like I was wandering into disturbingly unknown territory; secondly, a freshness despite the familiarity in the way the narrative was handled. It was undoubtedly an Agatha Christie style, but yet it was still surprisingly a breath of fresh air from her usual formula, which I have gotten used to by now, having consistently read most of her books over the past year.

Absolutely loved it. I wonder why it's not more well-known!

Halfway through the book, I began to wonder if it was Michael that was the source of all this sinisterness, much in the line of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I dismissed the idea because, while in Ackroyd, the narrator was a detached observer and more of an investigator for the central mystery, Michael here was an involved narrator, getting not only physically but also emotionally and mentally into the heart of things. However, I hadn't considered the possibility that he might have been lying, or been putting on a show before he finally confessed at the end.I did actually suspect that he might've fallen in love with Greta when he met her for the first time, but was surprised when he didn't. I never thought he'd have met her earlier and then pretended to dislike her. For all his so-called devotion to Ellie, I was thoroughly shocked when he suddenly announced that he was going to marry Greta immediately after Ellie's funeral in America. Even then, I had no suspicions. I simply thought that he had transferred his affections quickly and suddenly, as sometimes characters in Christie do (I'm always amazed at how quickly they can fall in love and get married to one another). It never occured to me that Christie was going to pull a Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill with Michael and Greta.I had initially suspected Santonix, since he was described as having a streak of evil in him, but I suppose he was meant to have shown what might have happened if Michael had instead "gone the other way", i.e. the other shop, the way of good. Dedicated himself, as Santonix had, to a proper profession or career. Perhaps he may even have achieved the success and recognition that Santonix did.Then I had also suspected Claudia Hardcastle, because of the cigarette lighter that she had left in the Folly, and the fact that she had been married to Ellie's banker, Lloyd. I was really shocked when Claudia went down on her horse as well. It took me a while to figure out why she was even killed at all, but then I remember that bit in the solution where they mentioned that she smoked in the Folly and happened to see a capsule left over there when Michael and Greta had prepared to murder Ellie, and had probably guessed the whole thing.

2.5/5. This was a really difficult and complex book to rate, probably because Feynman is a really complex character. If this book had purely been him explaining Physics concepts, it would almost certainly have rated a lot higher. But it isn't. As a disclaimer, I'm completely new to Feynman. I only very vaguely know of his name because some equation or other has probably been named after him, and that's about it. I didn't even know about his involvement in the Manhattan Project (or, indeed, that it was named the Manhattan Project).

This book is essentially a collection of anecdotes, almost randomly chaptered and vaguely chronologically ordered, of events in Feynman's life that he found worth noting down. These are also not the key events however - he only talks obliquely about the Manhattan Project in its core, he doesn't even mention what project it was that earned him the Nobel Prize, and he also hardly dwells on some events that had affected him deeply, such as the untimely death of his first wife Arlene from tuberculosis. Rather, Feynman just talks on about the pranks he played on everyone or the various disciplines that he randomly decided to try out and excel at.

This was a structural flaw of the book that I struggled to move past at the very beginning. I found it difficult to follow. Stories would end and I'd feel like there hadn't been a point to the story. I couldn't grasp the timeline because Feynman, though following some vague chronological order, would quite frequently jump to a different time in his life in the middle of another anecdote to make a point. This wasn't as much of a struggle as the book went on, but I'm not sure if I just simply got used to it or if Feynman's anecdotes got more orderly as he reminisced on more recent events of his life, such as his life in Caltech after his PhD.

So since this book doesn't invite us to assess Feynman on what he's best known for—the easy explanations of difficult concepts—I can only judge him based on the values that he's showing us here, and it is difficult. As with any person, Feynman has his virtues and flaws, but oh boy are those flaws hard to read today in 2022, particularly his attitudes and behaviour towards women. While reading this book, I constantly struggled with the dilemma of whether it was fair to judge him based on a 21st century lens given that he did not grow up or was aware of the values in the 21st century, or whether I should take him as a product of his times. I'm inclined towards the latter, but some of the stories in this book makes the former really hard to ignore.

In “You Just Ask Them”, Feynman talks about a period where he decides to “start seeing people”, basically engaging in a lot of casual hook-ups, after his first wife's death. He talks about how someone gave him tips on how to “get something” (i.e. sex) from these “bar girls” without having to buy them drinks. “Treat them with disrespect”, he was told. He tried it out because he was curious like that, and it worked. But he says he never continued it because it wasn't his thing. Nevertheless, though, this whole chapter was uncomfortable to read because of how it only seemed like he treated the women he met here as just puzzle objects to win sex from by different strategies.

More troubling is the chapter “But Is It Art?”. Feynman dabbles in drawing and painting and supposedly excels in it enough to sell some of his works. The whole process of him practising drawing was interesting enough, coming from a physicist who had never before thought he would exhibit any kind of proficiency in art, but it was after that, his fixation of drawing nude (female) models that was really bizarre and uncomfortable. When he was in art classes drawing from nude models, he usually drew from “heavy and out of shape models”, but then only got interested in perfecting the drawing when a “nifty”, “well proportioned” blonde model came in. He says, “...with the other [heavier] models, if you draw something a little too big or a bit too small, it doesn't make any difference because it's all out of shape anyway”, but with the blonde, he felt the need to draw more perfectly in order to capture her beauty. That sounds incredibly dehumanizing to basically any woman out there who doesn't fit into the narrow standards of what is considered a ‘beautiful' physique, a problem that still plagues women and harms their self-image all the time everyday in this day and age. Further, he asks his undergrad students whether they would pose nude for him, when he was a professor at Caltech. If you think that's weird, there are bits where he would pretend to be an undergrad student himself to hook up with these undergrads at bars when he was a young professor. Now, I appreciate that these were wildly different times with different value systems from what we consider correct now, so the question here is how much should we excuse historical figures? If we excuse Feynman because he's just “a product of his times” then to be consistent we should also excuse the behaviour of men in other cultures from other time periods (say, ancient China) because they too were a product of their misogynistic times.

Another troubling point of that chapter is when he talks about how he imagines Madame Curie but bases her on a nude blonde model. “The message I intended to convey was, nobody thinks of Madame Curie as a woman, as feminine, with beautiful hair, bare breasts, and all that. They only think of the radium part.” I'm not in STEM, but I'm superficially aware that women in STEM have long been faced with sexual discrimination and harrassment by men in the field who treat them as objects only worth sexualizing and not to be taken seriously as scientists. There are any number of articles written about this that you can search up. It's therefore pretty problematic that Feynman would even sexualize Marie Curie, a two time Nobel Prize-winning scientist, just because she is a woman. Now I'm not against women owning sexualities and posing nude if they want to. But I certainly wouldn't want anyone to tell me how to express my femininity, or take it into their hands and decide to imagine me nude just because they think it's the best way to express my femininity according to their standards. It feels incredibly reductive and objectifying, especially saying that people shouldn't just think about “the radium part”, never mind that it was the passion project that Madame Curie literally devoted her life and death to.

Feynman undoubtedly went through a lot more emotional turmoil than he let on in this book. I'm not sure how much that excuses the harmful attitudes that he shows towards women here, given that this is written in his words from a first-person POV. He seems to be reinforcing systematic misogyny towards women in his own field, despite having just broken through systematic antisemitism towards himself earlier on in his career. I might've enjoyed this book a lot more if he had been more upfront about his emotional struggles, which apparently he did have but which was not alluded to in this book at all. Instead, the book sounds like someone who only wants to look back at the “light-hearted” parts of his life and pretend the emotional parts didn't exist. I'm not sure how much of it is the idea of masculinity he grew up with (he talks a lot about how “real men” should behave), and how much is that he was still unwilling to confront the emotional struggles that he dealt with in his life. For people who are new to Feynman, it's really a toss-up how much you'd like him from this book. As it is, the only reason why I'm on the fence at all is because I searched up some videos of him explaining physics concepts and he is such a charismatic and effective teacher. If I had based my impression solely on this book, it would certainly have rated lower than my current score.

Honestly somewhere between 3.5 to 4 stars. This was still pretty darn good and if you enjoyed the first book, you're likely to enjoy this one too. But I will say that the first book does feel a bit more intense and page-turning than this one did. I was also a bit less satisfied with the ending of this one, but I still gave it a pretty high rating because 1) Avasarala and 2) that epilogue.

I have to give props to Corey for just being so masterful at writing some delightfully entertaining science fiction. Like the first book, this really feels like a TV show in a book, in the best possible way. It's the kind of TV show that keeps you at the edge of your seat as you uncontrollably binge the whole season. This isn't going to be as deep and philosophical as a lot of major science fiction works, but the entertainment value of this one is through the roof.

Avasarala is probably one of my favourite characters introduced. She's a grumpy, possibly Indian grandma who also happens to be one of the most influential political figures on Earth. She cusses as much as she breathes, but her curses are some of the most delightful pieces of savagery I've seen around. Though clearly Avasarala's job is pretty much her whole life, we also get to see her as a wife, a mother, and a grandmother. Hey, who knew career women could also have a wholesome family life? Everything about her was so relatable tbh.

I continue to like Amos more and more, and also to have a complicated impression of Holden. I like him being around inasmuch as that we get to see his heroics being continually shot down by the Rocinante crew. He's definitely got a case of annoying-heroism but I like that the book uses him to dismantle that male-protag stereotype that's all too common in SFF. I just love it whenever Amos or pretty much anyone else in the crew hauls his ass back in line. I also gotta say that I didn't look forward to reading Prax's chapters in the beginning because they were just so depressing. Maybe it's the time of life I'm at now but anything to do with children being treated badly really just gets me.

The plot in itself is actually... kinda similar to book 1? We start the book with the POV of someone who goes missing, and then the POV of someone who witnesses a massive amount of death and destruction and is generally discredited. A character in the book wants so badly to find the missing person. We then spend a lot of time in the book hunting around for said missing person, and as usual we have Earth and Mars perpetually threatening to go to war in the background. That's pretty much the same beats in books 1 and 2.

Spoilery thoughts: I am very indifferent towards Prax for most of the book, but felt that he was sus near the end. Unfortunately though there was no big reveal at the end of this book to make that pay off. Aside from his love for his daughter and botany, it kinda felt like Prax didn't really have much substance - which made me wonder if he was hiding something. It was all very subtle (and may also be me overthinking things) but I felt like when other characters like Avasarala etc. observed him casually, something always felt a little weird, or off, or just not right. However, I'm glad that Prax and Mei were reunited in the end, it's just all so happy that it leaves me a little sus, like it's too good to be true.And that's also my issue with the ending, really, and which probably made me knock a star off. The stakes felt higher in book 1 and the ending sequence to it was suitably intense. In this one, I don't think I ever felt like the stakes were as high, but I was still expecting a similarly explosive ending - it didn't happen. Holden's short sojourn aboard the Agatha King was pretty anti-climactic, and then even the confrontation between Amos, Prax, and Merrien went by pretty quickly. Nobody was in any danger in that one. I fully expected Mei to have been in some way affected by the protomolecule, if not infected exactly, but that didn't happen either. I expected her to exhibit some worrying sign suddenly after they brought her back to the ship - but that also didn't happen. I'm not sure if this might possibly be a development in later books, but my philosophy for series in general is that if there are not even hints about it in this current book I'm reading, it still counts against it as something unanswered, as not everyone would read to the end of a series.What did pull me back was that epilogue. The bit with Holden endlessly watching the video of Venus, Naomi leaving the area, and then... Detective Miller appearing. That sent chills down my spine. The reveal was done so well there and it made me exclaim out loud. What the hell is he still doing here? How is he still alive or in one piece? How did he get onto the ship without any one knowing? Is he infectious?!?!?! Ahhhhh!!!!

This is increasingly shaping up to be a series that I'll likely see all the way through to the end and good luck to me on that, seeing as how many books there are in it.

Honestly, I love Stephen Fry's sense of humour and narrative voice so much that I would enjoy almost anything that he churns out. Mythos is no different.

I first listened to this exclusively on audiobook format almost 2 years ago now, when Greek mythology was an area that I kinda knew the barest superficials about, but didn't really have any in-depth idea. This book blew my mind away. It was like a collection of amazing short stories starring these out-of-these-world characters and it was so, so entertaining. It kickstarted an interest in mythology and after I had listened to it the first time, I did a lot more digging and research.

Two years later, having discussed a lot more on Greek mythology, read up a bit more, and listened to more podcasts about them, I'm now more familiar with the stories. I can see that Stephen Fry's rendition of them are almost like a summarised version of the myths and, arguably, slightly sanitised in a way. They're still very entertaining nevertheless, and with his trademark wit and humour as the proverbial cherry on top.

I've also recently read Gaiman's retelling of Norse mythology and find it interesting to compare the two. Gaiman, I could tell, was more interested in the storytelling. Fry, however, is more interested in how these myths have impacted our everyday lives, specifically how they have strongly influenced English as we use it today. Instead of just fun little stories, it felt like Fry strove to show that these myths have played a much larger role in our pop culture than a lot of us realise. He makes connections between these gods and stories and things that we see everyday and know the meaning of so instinctively that we may not have realised they came from Greek myth - for example, the staff and the serpent symbol synonamous with modern-day medicine being a reference to Asclepius and the serpent he saved which had then whispered the arts of healing into his ear.

Definitely a good read if you're at all interested in Greek myth. If you're a beginner, the engaging way Fry tells these stories will keep you entertaining from start to finish. If you're a veteran at Greek myth, the humourous way he retells and interprets these myths may still put a smile to your face.

This was a pretty fun romp that serves as an origin story of Lift, a character that's likely to become more important later on in the main series of the Stormlight Archive, as well as establishing some other small little nuggets of lore.

The refreshing thing about Lift is how she just doesn't seem to take anything seriously, not even her own powers, or the fact that she has a sentient being that only she can see following her around and nagging her all the time. She's only in her pre-teens and often behaves that way, but sometimes she displays thoughts and maturity that are beyond her years, and makes me wonder whether Lift has a lot more in her past and history than what is even shown here. Sometimes, though, I found her wilfull rebelliousness and nonchalance a little wearying but overall it wasn't too bad.

Wyndle, imo, was the star of the show. BranSan enjoys creating quirky little side characters and it's clear that he had a lot of fun here. Wyndle is some sort of plant being, but essentially behaves like a very reluctant babysitter to Lift, bemoaning that he was selected for this task of accompanying her and fondly reminiscing on how he could have been a gardener instead of this. His presence really adds a much-needed voice of reason while still maintaining the light-hearted comedy of this story.

There's definitely even a mini-Sanderlanche in this one, with some small plot twists here and there. I'm looking forward to seeing more of a character introduced in this novella that grows to be more important towards the end of the story and, I hope, will be more prominent in the later SA books, aside from Lift and Wyndle, of course.

Hovering between a 3.5 and a 4* for me, this book explored some really fresh new grounds sorely lacking in popular fantasy novels these days. It called back to the Hong Kong gangster movies and dramas that I grew up watching, blending it with elements of wuxia, martial arts, and superhuman abilities.

This book follows the Kaul family, legendary heads of the No Peak clan, in a world where jade is a heavily coveted gemstone, not so much because it's worth money but because they imbue superhuman senses, strength and abilities to those who come into contact with it. The ability to harness these abilities from jade has been naturally specific to the genetics of the Kekonese people, but now, there emerges a new drug that's said to be able to increase this “jade sensitivity” in the non-Kekonese.



This book went from a 4* at the start because of this refreshing new premise that I've never seen replicated in any fantasy book before, but then wavered down to an almost-DNF around the 25% mark, before it picked up to 3* and up after I got past the 50% mark, which was when things really got exciting.

The reason why the book went down to an almost-DNF was probably because of mismatched expectations. I had gone into this expecting the magic and fantasy elements to be very much in the foreground, but this was very much not the case. It was the clan values, the gang politics and intrigues, and the politics between different sets of people that pretty much took center stage here. The magical properties of jade served mainly as a backdrop for all of the above to happen. Most of the time, jade felt more like a magical-realism manifestation of something abstract in real life, like dignity or brotherhood or loyalty. The book centers around jade, but it's really barely a magical system in itself. The realisation of this was what almost made me drop the book.

A quick side note to jade: I really enjoyed that it was so unpredictable. Touching jade typically gives people some kind of euphoric rush of power, but different people in the story have different levels of jade sensitivity, with some being far more susceptible to the addictive properties of this rush, while others are completely dead to it. I like that jade was dangerous as well as powerful. It was a raw, natural element in itself, and entirely out of the control of the people who wielded it. You could just as much die of jade oversensitivity or jade withdrawal, as it makes it easier for you to kill others with the powers it gives you. In effect, it behaved a lot more like a stimulant drug than a magical gemstone.


None of the characters are really 100% likeable in the story, which I'm not mad at. The main characters aren't bad people in themselves, but a lot of them make bad decisions, or react poorly to certain situations. I like that. I find more and more that I'm not into overly likeable main characters, and the fact that these main characters have actual blemishes on their figurative resumes makes me appreciate the characterisation all the more.

Once I got past my mismatched expectations, though, and once I started getting sucked in to the real meat of the book, which is all the family dynamics and gang politics, I started enjoying myself much more. This is especially so after the halfway mark of the book - even though I was devastated that Lan died, because I had thought him the best of the siblings and a cinnamon roll in his own right, his death did really kickstart the action and that was when the book actually started getting gripping for me - I had bemoaned how long the book was in the first quarter of it, but I binged it so hard after the halfway mark that I finished the entire book in less than 24 hours!

Y'know what, I was prepared to give this book maybe a 4 stars until the ending hit me straight in the feels and I cried throughout the last 10-20%.

It's not even a particularly sad ending. Pratchett keeps the action and the plot light-hearted and completely absurd throughout the entire book. But Reaper Man really showcases how masterful he is in writing about such complex, deep, and abstract thoughts in such a light-hearted and absurd way. (Huge kudos to Nigel Planer whose narration of the audiobook and performance for each character significantly amped up my enjoyment of this book)

Reaper Man's plot is fairly simple - Death has been sort of “suspended” from his work and has gone to seek work elsewhere. In the meantime, all around Discworld, lives are ending but Death isn't there to take it away, resulting in an overabundance of life force which makes things happen.

The humour here is still very much on point, but what struck me as the biggest difference between this one and the first book in the series, Mort, is that it's more - introspective somehow? It's funny that this book is more philosophical and thought-provoking than actual philosophy or self-help books.

I don't know if it's just me being emotional or hormonal, but the themes in this book and the semi-abusrd way Pratchett dealt with them just went straight to my feels. This review is all over the place because this book is truly one of a kind. I'll end it with some amazing quotes:

Alone of all creatures in the world, trolls believe that all living things go through Time backwards. If the past is visible and the future is hidden, they say, then it means you must be facing the wrong way. Everything alive is going through life back to front.

“If people knew when they were gonna die, they'd probably lead better lives.”IF PEOPLE KNEW WHEN THEY WERE GONNA DIE, THEY WOULDN'T LIVE AT ALL.

Death travels inside that space where time has no meaning. Light thinks it travels faster than anything, but it's wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds that darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

3.5/5. As far as intentions go, this was pretty well-executed. The book felt like it was introducing fantasy politics to a younger audience. There was just enough complexity and twists to the central intrigues, but a lot of things felt a little simplified or resolved too quickly for my tastes.

Although I said “fantasy politics”, there's actually nothing fantasy about this book at all. There is no magic system or any kind of supernatural phenomena here. This book is a sort of AU historical fiction since it seems to be set in a pseudo-medieval setting with a court, ruling government, and royal family typical of that time period. Honestly I was a little surprised given that Fantasy is the top-voted genre fort his book here on Goodreads.

The characters barely really grow on you. I probably cared the most about Imogen, being the one female character of any note in this book (the betrothed princess whose name I can't remember may also be a contender if she had appeared more), but otherwise I really didn't like most of the other characters. I did come a bit close to caring about Sage's outcome but it was fairly obvious that nothing bad was going to happen to him because the entire title and series seems to be about him. The other two boys in the story, Tobias and Roden, were supremely unlikeable from start to end and I haven't changed my mind about them yet.

Thoughts about the ending:

I had some fleeting thoughts about whether Sage was Jaron through the book but always dismissed it as too weird a development. Apparently I should've listened to my gut. So this is the not-so-false prince! The twist was a little tropey but I thought it was still well-executed. The lead-up to the grand reveal was pretty exciting and I was really looking forward to how Jaron was going to not only unveil himself but how he was going to serve it to Conner. The actual serving was not bad but a little disappointing. I liked how we got everything tied up neatly, why Sage was so upset about the imitator's gold, and the final reveal that Conner was also behind the deaths of the royal family, but I also really wanted something even more dramatic and more oomphy. I can't tell what's going to happen with Amarinda and Imogen but I hope it's not going to be some weird love triangle... I liked that this book had no romance in it. I also thought it was a very odd development that Roden turned out to be the “turncoat” in the end and somehow Tobias is the one who immediately swears fealty to Jaron. Maybe this was meant to be another twisty moment considering that Sage's relations with both had been the opposite for the entire book, only to have the turn tables right at the end, but I thought the development didn't make sense and didn't have any lead-up.

Overall, I did enjoy this book for what it was and I feel like I'd recommend it to people who want to get into court/political plots but are intimidated by the seriousness and complexity of so many of them.

Yeah, I got about 15 pages in before I was like, “Wait, what's happening?”

In that short span of time, we see Anna of Kleves having sex with her cousin, a teenage boy that she had literally only just met about an hour ago. Already, he starts professing his love for her before they barely had half a day's worth of conversation. When he starts to kiss her, she says no, but he insists and she lets herself enjoy it. I'm just SO confused!! I later read other reviews that said that she gives birth to an illegitimate child by her cousin and has a secret family on the sidelines when she's going through the whole Henry VIII debacle and honestly, I'm not really here for it. I am increasingly fascinated by Anna of Kleves because I like that she made the best of a shitty situation, swallowed her pride and managed to keep her head down long enough to not just avoid a beheading by Henry VIII, but even to become a pretty well-respected lady of the court. I liked the fact that she remained single throughout her life but in so doing survived almost all the wives of Henry VIII, and even some of his children. I get that there is probably very little material on Anna of Kleves to work with, so I was already expecting some creative storytelling to fill in the gaps but having sex at 12 years old and then having a secret family on the sidelines is just too much for me to handle. That Anna would go against her entire worldview that's been drilled into her since she was born just for a teenage boy she's barely met for more than a few hours and had little conversation with, and her uncle's bastard son too - I just cannot. Even if we allow for her being only 12 years old, it's still so so hard to stomach.

What a sweet, wholesome book. This made me cry. 4.5/5 stars.

Count Rostov is a Former Person placed under house arrest at the Metropol Hotel in Moscow, when the Bolshevik government takes over Russia. There's a whole lot of Russian history happening in the background here which I'm still not super clear on the details of so I won't dwell on them in this synopsis. The book sees Count Rostov spectating and indirectly participating in the political upheavals of the nation through the comings and goings of the visitors of the hotel.

This was a beautifully written book that perfectly balances the fairly sweet and casual ramblings and small domestic adventures of the Count in the foreground, while still somehow keeping the atmosphere poignantly oppressive and dreadful with Towles giving us relevant historical context that doesn't feel like it was too shoehorned in.

Through the Count, we meet the various characters of the hotel - Andrey the maitre d, Emile the head chef, the Bishop, Marina the seamstress, and some memorable long-term guests. This isn't a book to go in expecting an intricate character ensemble. Instead, we see everyone through Count Rostov's eyes. Indeed, we are really only privy to his perspective - we see Russia's history unfolding through his lens, the differences between his former life as a member of the Russian nobility to his current state being essentially incarcerated indefinitely in a hotel.

The Count, and almost by extension the entire Metropol Hotel itself, essentially functions as the single spot of constancy in the entire novel. This book spans a long time period in history, almost 30-40 years, during which Russia's leadership changes hands a few times. The world outside the hotel is ever changing, and all the characters the Count (and us, by extension) meets eventually wander out into the wider world to be subsumed by it, but the hotel and the Count never seems to change.

The highlight of this book for me occurs in the second half, which I will elaborate further in a spoiler below. In summary, it is a beautifully written non-romantic relationship that turns up in the Count's life unexpectedly, which deepened the poignant bittersweetness of this whole book for me. I'm talking about the Count and Sophia's relationship. I really liked that "indulgent father" vibe that he had with Nina, but who knew that it would be magnified a hundredfold with the more amenable personality of Sophia? The chapter "Adulthood" drove me to tears. There wasn't anything outstandingly sad about it, but even that semi-hilarious conversation where the Count was upset about how low the back of Sophia's dress was, and how the Count had to face up to the fact that Sophia had now crossed the threshold of becoming an adult woman in her own right - everything just gave me so much feels.

Overall, a really brilliant read whether you're interested in Russian history in the early 20th century, or just want a wholesome and bittersweet story to lose yourself in.

I was so excited to start on this series but I couldn't make it through a few chapters. The female protagonist is supposed to be a 30 year old lady apparently yearning so much for adventure she's trade places with her “twin” in an alternate dimension, and then immediately finds herself getting married to a guy whom she can only use two words to describe: scary, or hot. Those two words were repeated to no ends to describe his every change of expression or perfect features.

You know what else is always repeated? “That is so... cool!” Oh my god. The female protagonist uses this whimsical exclamation for every single thing, even something as huge as being whisked away into a different dimension. She sometimes changes it up with “awesome” but I don't count that one. I could've handled it the first one or two times but by the 3rd time onwards I had had enough.

Props to Tillie Hooper for the narration, however. She did her best valiantly and her voice acting at least perked up the lifeless dialogue and lines.

This was a fantastic and comforting reread of one of the early Marples.

Colonel Protheroe was never beloved by any of the inhabitants of St Mary Mead and more than one person had cause to wish him dead. When he is found by the Vicar shot in the head in the study of the Vicarage, suspicion turns on any number of people in the village who had motive and opportunity. Of all the old cats in the village, it is Miss Marple, neighbour to the Vicar, who takes the most active participation in the case.

The writing style felt a little... almost basic sometimes. The sentences were short and to the point, but I think it's this that makes Christie such an easy and comforting read, and such an accessible classic. It's really the plot and the amount of weaving together storylines and motives that makes any Christie novel stand out. I haven't read this one in years and I thought I had a vague memory of who the culprit was - I was completely wrong! Not only that, I had also completely forgotten how all the red herrings in the story were resolved and it was fun revisiting this mystery with completely new eyes.

For Christie's detectives, I've always preferred Poirot over Miss Marple, but in so doing, I think a lot of the Miss Marple cases don't stand out in my memory as much so they're definitely still worth revisiting. Miss Marple isn't bad, but I just take issue with her philosophy that everything follows some kind of pattern that has already been done before. It's not inherently false, but a lot of the parallels she makes also feels a little too convenient.

3.5 to 4 stars. Having read a few novels by Higashino from both his Galileo and Kaga series, I have come to expect great things from him. The last Kaga book I read, Malice, was simply outstanding, while others like The Devotion of Suspect X was incredibly This one, unfortunately, came up a little short. For Higashino's high standards, it was a little underwhelming, but as a mystery novel this was still pretty good.

The mystery centers around the murder of Mineko, a recently divorced woman living on her own in Nihonbashi. The book takes a while to get going, but it's incredibly engaging when it does. Instead of the typical formula where we either see events leading up to the murder, or having the murder happen very early on in the story, we instead start the story with the investigation but without any actual details as to the murder.

Most of this book is pretty much Kaga going around the different family-run businesses in the neighbourhood of the victim's home and asking them things. We get to learn tiny bits and pieces of the murder itself and about the victim through the accounts of these people, but mostly we get to see slices of their lives and the problems that they deal with. Though Kaga is interested in what they know about the victim and the events of that day, he takes the time to do little bits of side investigation to help them solve the small issues plaguing them, mostly domestic disputes. Because of this, the book is pretty episodic which honestly works for me.

We only really get to know about the murder, the victim, and her background very late into the book, within the second half. When we eventually get round to solving the actual murder, it does feel a little - straightforward. The conclusion of the mystery didn't really surprise me, and I didn't feel as mindblown about it, as I am used to feeling with Higashino. Nevertheless though, I enjoyed the way we dipped into the daily lives of all the families in the neighbourhood to slowly and gradually build up a picture of the victim.

Definitely going to read more Higashino after this.

It took a while for me to get into this because I've never read a “cosy” mystery set in a Canadian small village before, but it definitely grew on me before the halfway mark. I somewhat guessed the culprit and their motivation early on but wasn't confident of my guess until it was finally revealed - and it was pretty satisfying to get it right!

Gamache and Beauvoir were a pretty nice police duo. Gamache in particular managed to stand out from the bevy of cozy mystery police inspectors/detectives in a million mystery series out there primarily because he's “softer” than a lot of the others. Detectives in these kinda mysteries tend to be strait-laced and logical to a fault, sometimes to the point of sociopathy (see: Sherlock Holmes), but Gamache... isn't. He homes in on the human aspect of the crime, he immerses himself into the village life while still making it clear that the purpose of his presence is to investigate the crime. He's interested in humanity, psychology, and sociology, and actually talks positively about feelings, emotions, and intuitions, something that a lot of cozy mystery detectives would never touch with a ten foot pole.

I didn't enjoy the first few chapters tbh, where we open with Gamache being called to the crime scene, but then we suddenly go back in time to relive some events that happened before the crime was committed, but this was never explicitly denoted in the text. This does seem to be Penny's writing style of choice. Sometimes we're happily experiencing events in the POV of one character, who would then maybe look over at another character and suddenly we're reading the POV of this second character without it being explicitly stated that the POV switched. It threw me off a lot at the beginning but I got used to it, and thankfully this doesn't happen so often as to become annoying.

The village characters were all blending into one for me at first, and I found my engagement with the book dropping whenever it was all of them gathering at one spot. It got better eventually as the book went on and we found out more about each character to give them more of a distinct personality and identity. By the end of it, I came to appreciate some of the side characters who I was either completely indifferent to at first or even repulsed by.

A particular side character whom I just got increasingly frustrated and bewildered by as the book went on was Agent Yvette Nichol. Given that we actually spend a small bit of time in the book knowing about her backstory and family before she is thrown into the action with Gamache, I thought she might turn out to be a fairly important character in the process of solving the mystery. I thought I would be seeing a classic mentor-mentee relationship unfold between Gamache and her through the story. I was incredibly bewildered that neither of this turned out to be the case. In fact, her last few appearances in the book were so frustrating I kinda hope that she was just a one-off mistake and wouldn't come back in any of the other books. Spoilery thoughts on her and also on the ending: I thought she might actually grow from being an insufferable twit to becoming a bit more humbled and bit more wise by the end - but no, she was still an insufferable twit at the end. I thought she'd finally realise she was the problem when she saw her reflection in the window, but no, she put that blame on Gamache. That moment was the exact moment I gave up on her character. I also thought, OK, maybe she would turn out to be the insufferable twit who happened to have a stunning intellect that far outstripped everyone else's, even Gamache, because she seemed to have an idea of who the culprit was right from the start but was keeping it to herself. So when she finally said it was Peter Morrow, I believed her. But no, it turned out to be Ben, who was one of my first few suspects... So she's still an insufferable twit who is also WRONG. So what is the whole point of her in this story!?

Overall, I was happy with the experience of reading this book and it did give me some pretty nice quotes to think about, especially when Gamache speaks to Myrna about the idea that life is a series of losses, and how people adapted to that determined how happy and adjusted they can be with life. I will be continuing the series.