Books read, January
May. 31st, 2019 11:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraBooks read, January
I’m jumping forward because October last year I was travelling and read far too many books, and I’m starting to forget ones I’ve read this year. Come to Grief and Silence of the Girls were my favourites of this lot.
Longshot, Dick Francis (re-read)
Sawkill Girls, Claire Legrand
The Children of Castle Rock, Natasha Farrant
Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker
High Stakes, Dick Francis
My Best Friend’s Exorcism, Grady Hendrix
Cells at Work, Akane Shimizu, v1 & 5
Scoop for Ann Thorne, Rosamond Bertram
Princess Princess Ever After, Katie O’Neill
The Mangle Street Murder, R.C. Kasasian
One Kick, Chelsea Cain
The West Wind, Samantha Harvey
Flight of the Fantail, Steph Matuku
Odds Against, Dick Francis (re-read)
Whip Hand, Dick Francis (re-read)
Come to Grief, Dick Francis (brand new to me!)
Longshot, Dick Francis (re-read). An impoverished writer (of survival books) takes on the job of writing a biography for a famous race horse trainer rather than freeze to death in his borrowed accommodation; the job, however, proves equally dangerous. Great survival details and great family interactions, and as always I can identify Francis’ books from their apparently generic titles (the arrow scene in this one is vintage Francis).
Sawkill Girls, Claire Legrand. Marion, reeling from her own family tragedy, arrives on Sawkill Rock, an island where girls have been disappearing under mysterious circumstances for years; she meets Zoey, who is ferociously angry over the recent loss of her friend, and Val, the beautiful queen bee of the school who is hiding both a hideous secret and her own queerness. The narrative switches between all three as they realise that they alone - together - can defeat the monster who has been preying on Sawkill girls for all this time.
My basic problem with this is that demonstrating how terrible patriarchy and killing lots of girls is by, basically, killing lots of girls, is never going to entirely work for me. It also loses focus in the second half with the Hand of Light, although the romance between Marion and Val is nicely done. It's very much in dialogue with Buffy, though, and it’s useful to read in that context.
The Children of Castle Rock, Natasha Farrant. This could really have been written anytime in the last hundred years - Alice, still grieving for her dead mother, and with a rather irresponsible father, is sent away to a Scottish boarding school heavy on self-reliance, where she begins to make friends and gain some perspective - until a mysterious package arrives from her father, with instructions to meet him with it on a remote island… Enjoyable and nice characterisation but the denouement is predictable and unbelievable.
Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker. Feminist retelling of the Iliad from Briseis’ point of view (the war prize given to Achilles that Agammenon insists on taking when he has to hand Chryseis back to save the Greeks from the wrath of the gods). Beautifully written, relentlessly dark; passes my Achilles test in that I find him believable and sympathetic while still being objectively a pretty terrible person. At the very end there’s a bit where Barker makes a statement about contemporary relevance that didn’t entirely work for me, which is unfortunate as it left me feeling a bit grumpy about a book I’d been enjoying.
High Stakes, Dick Francis. Toy inventor who owns horses but knows little about them sacks his trainer because he suspects something dodgy is going on; it is. The toy details are great fun and this is a get-a-team-together book with a neatly (and appropriately) clockwork villain-defeating scheme.
My Best Friend’s Exorcism, Grady Hendrix. Homage to 80s music, pop culture, female friendship and demonic possession. Takes an awfully long time to get going, as the reader (well, me) spends a couple of hundred pages waiting for the narrator to realise that her friend is possessed; this was fun but could have been much, much shorter.
Cells at Work, Akane Shimizu, 1, 5. Anthropomorphic immune cells fight to keep their host body alive! In v 1 a naive red blood cell with a tendency for getting lost bumps into a lone angst-ridden deadly killer neutrophil. n v5 a gung-ho natural killer cell (female) shows up, along with some very cute lactic acid bacteria.This is fun, cute (the platelets especially, who are small children who clump together to form a clot when tissue is damaged) and surprisingly accurate, although I do wonder what the hell their host body does all day to get them into so much trouble. I
Scoop for Ann Thorne, Rosamond Bertram. Somewhere in a series about an intrepid girl reporter, published in the 40s/50s; ghost subplot interesting, along with seeing how many caveats women had to put on themselves in order to have careers, but not massively exciting.
Princess Princess Ever After, Katie O’Neill. Reviewed earlier.
The Mangle Street Murders, R.C. Kasasian. First in a Victorian (UK) detective series with a highly strung personal detective and his argumentative goddaughter. Okay. I didn’t really warm to the characters and don’t feel an urge to read any more.
One Kick, Chelsea Cain. Killer beginning; a farmhouse is attacked by armed forces and Beth, a young girl, breaks away in order to completely wipe the family’s computer records; at which point, it’s revealed that Beth - originally Kathleen - was kidnapped and brainwashed by a ring of pedophiles, and she’s now erased all chance of the FBI capturing the rest of the ring. After a break we take up with Kathleen (now Kick) as a damaged adult, skilled in martial arts and trying to track down other abducted children; a mysterious, well-funded and deeply annoying man, Bishop, breaks into her house to offer her the chance to save more children, but it’s a quest that leads right back into Kick’s own past…
I liked quite a bit of this. Not Bishop, who is underdeveloped as well as irritating, and Kick herself edges plausibility with her “I know 47 ways to kill you with items in this room” internal dialogue and her final decision to donate one of her kidneys to her pedophile captor to save his life. Also, sensitive readers should be aware there is an elderly dog in this book who does not survive. This was planned as a series but has got caught up in a publisher shift/rights issue; I would have said I would probably try the next one but I tried the first of the author’s other series and I am so not the audience for mesmerising serial killers and the dysfunctional cops they toy with, which has put me off a bit. Maybe I should dig out her Mockingbird comics, which got a massive MRA backlash for suggesting feminism might be a good idea.
The West Wind, Samantha Harvey. A body is found in a medieval village; Reve, the village priest, investigates and tells the story, working backwards through the days leading up to the discovery. The strength of this book is the characters and the way they make up a distinct, different community, and I liked it a lot. Nevertheless I was completely flung out of the whole story when the priest “let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding” and I was suddenly awash with fanfic flashbacks (and not just fanfics!)
Flight of the Fantail, Steph Matuku. Group of teens on bush trip have bus accident in off-limits part of NZ; their phones don’t work and the rescue effort is a) slow and b) keener on wiping them out. And the surviving teens themselves are starting to develop strange powers (and suffer psychic nosebleeds). I liked quite a bit of this and it’s a fast ride, but there’s a bit of that tendency some authors have to kill off their cast when they can’t manage them all, and the reveal is obvious.
Odds Against, Dick Francis (re-read)
Whip Hand, Dick Francis (re-read)
Come to Grief, Dick Francis (brand new to me!)
For Chocolate Box I wrote Stalk On, a Sid Halley & Sapphire and Steel crossover forthisbluespirit, and so I re-read the first two and read the third. Sid Halley is one of Francis’ two series characters (Kit Fielding got two books) and it’s fascinating seeing him evolve over time, both within and without the books (the first was published in 1965 and the third in 1995). I tried reading Under Orders, written after Dick’s wife and co-writer Mary died, but I found a massive fall-off in writing quality, and I haven’t gone near the one written by their son Felix.
I like the first two a lot for having Sid fail and break (physically and mentally), but Come to Grief just blew me away, and in fact writing this review made me get it out from the library again and start re-reading it. It has one of my favourite tropes, a main character who has chosen to be ostracised and blamed by society in order to serve a greater good; in this case, Sid is pursuing a former colleague, a friendly, outgoing jockey & public figure who Sid (and practically no one else) believes is mutilating ponies. The book starts with the trial in progress and the jockey’s mother having just committed suicide; no one is going to get out of this unscarred.
I’m jumping forward because October last year I was travelling and read far too many books, and I’m starting to forget ones I’ve read this year. Come to Grief and Silence of the Girls were my favourites of this lot.
Longshot, Dick Francis (re-read)
Sawkill Girls, Claire Legrand
The Children of Castle Rock, Natasha Farrant
Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker
High Stakes, Dick Francis
My Best Friend’s Exorcism, Grady Hendrix
Cells at Work, Akane Shimizu, v1 & 5
Scoop for Ann Thorne, Rosamond Bertram
Princess Princess Ever After, Katie O’Neill
The Mangle Street Murder, R.C. Kasasian
One Kick, Chelsea Cain
The West Wind, Samantha Harvey
Flight of the Fantail, Steph Matuku
Odds Against, Dick Francis (re-read)
Whip Hand, Dick Francis (re-read)
Come to Grief, Dick Francis (brand new to me!)
Longshot, Dick Francis (re-read). An impoverished writer (of survival books) takes on the job of writing a biography for a famous race horse trainer rather than freeze to death in his borrowed accommodation; the job, however, proves equally dangerous. Great survival details and great family interactions, and as always I can identify Francis’ books from their apparently generic titles (the arrow scene in this one is vintage Francis).
Sawkill Girls, Claire Legrand. Marion, reeling from her own family tragedy, arrives on Sawkill Rock, an island where girls have been disappearing under mysterious circumstances for years; she meets Zoey, who is ferociously angry over the recent loss of her friend, and Val, the beautiful queen bee of the school who is hiding both a hideous secret and her own queerness. The narrative switches between all three as they realise that they alone - together - can defeat the monster who has been preying on Sawkill girls for all this time.
My basic problem with this is that demonstrating how terrible patriarchy and killing lots of girls is by, basically, killing lots of girls, is never going to entirely work for me. It also loses focus in the second half with the Hand of Light, although the romance between Marion and Val is nicely done. It's very much in dialogue with Buffy, though, and it’s useful to read in that context.
The Children of Castle Rock, Natasha Farrant. This could really have been written anytime in the last hundred years - Alice, still grieving for her dead mother, and with a rather irresponsible father, is sent away to a Scottish boarding school heavy on self-reliance, where she begins to make friends and gain some perspective - until a mysterious package arrives from her father, with instructions to meet him with it on a remote island… Enjoyable and nice characterisation but the denouement is predictable and unbelievable.
Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker. Feminist retelling of the Iliad from Briseis’ point of view (the war prize given to Achilles that Agammenon insists on taking when he has to hand Chryseis back to save the Greeks from the wrath of the gods). Beautifully written, relentlessly dark; passes my Achilles test in that I find him believable and sympathetic while still being objectively a pretty terrible person. At the very end there’s a bit where Barker makes a statement about contemporary relevance that didn’t entirely work for me, which is unfortunate as it left me feeling a bit grumpy about a book I’d been enjoying.
High Stakes, Dick Francis. Toy inventor who owns horses but knows little about them sacks his trainer because he suspects something dodgy is going on; it is. The toy details are great fun and this is a get-a-team-together book with a neatly (and appropriately) clockwork villain-defeating scheme.
My Best Friend’s Exorcism, Grady Hendrix. Homage to 80s music, pop culture, female friendship and demonic possession. Takes an awfully long time to get going, as the reader (well, me) spends a couple of hundred pages waiting for the narrator to realise that her friend is possessed; this was fun but could have been much, much shorter.
Cells at Work, Akane Shimizu, 1, 5. Anthropomorphic immune cells fight to keep their host body alive! In v 1 a naive red blood cell with a tendency for getting lost bumps into a lone angst-ridden deadly killer neutrophil. n v5 a gung-ho natural killer cell (female) shows up, along with some very cute lactic acid bacteria.This is fun, cute (the platelets especially, who are small children who clump together to form a clot when tissue is damaged) and surprisingly accurate, although I do wonder what the hell their host body does all day to get them into so much trouble. I
Scoop for Ann Thorne, Rosamond Bertram. Somewhere in a series about an intrepid girl reporter, published in the 40s/50s; ghost subplot interesting, along with seeing how many caveats women had to put on themselves in order to have careers, but not massively exciting.
Princess Princess Ever After, Katie O’Neill. Reviewed earlier.
The Mangle Street Murders, R.C. Kasasian. First in a Victorian (UK) detective series with a highly strung personal detective and his argumentative goddaughter. Okay. I didn’t really warm to the characters and don’t feel an urge to read any more.
One Kick, Chelsea Cain. Killer beginning; a farmhouse is attacked by armed forces and Beth, a young girl, breaks away in order to completely wipe the family’s computer records; at which point, it’s revealed that Beth - originally Kathleen - was kidnapped and brainwashed by a ring of pedophiles, and she’s now erased all chance of the FBI capturing the rest of the ring. After a break we take up with Kathleen (now Kick) as a damaged adult, skilled in martial arts and trying to track down other abducted children; a mysterious, well-funded and deeply annoying man, Bishop, breaks into her house to offer her the chance to save more children, but it’s a quest that leads right back into Kick’s own past…
I liked quite a bit of this. Not Bishop, who is underdeveloped as well as irritating, and Kick herself edges plausibility with her “I know 47 ways to kill you with items in this room” internal dialogue and her final decision to donate one of her kidneys to her pedophile captor to save his life. Also, sensitive readers should be aware there is an elderly dog in this book who does not survive. This was planned as a series but has got caught up in a publisher shift/rights issue; I would have said I would probably try the next one but I tried the first of the author’s other series and I am so not the audience for mesmerising serial killers and the dysfunctional cops they toy with, which has put me off a bit. Maybe I should dig out her Mockingbird comics, which got a massive MRA backlash for suggesting feminism might be a good idea.
The West Wind, Samantha Harvey. A body is found in a medieval village; Reve, the village priest, investigates and tells the story, working backwards through the days leading up to the discovery. The strength of this book is the characters and the way they make up a distinct, different community, and I liked it a lot. Nevertheless I was completely flung out of the whole story when the priest “let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding” and I was suddenly awash with fanfic flashbacks (and not just fanfics!)
Flight of the Fantail, Steph Matuku. Group of teens on bush trip have bus accident in off-limits part of NZ; their phones don’t work and the rescue effort is a) slow and b) keener on wiping them out. And the surviving teens themselves are starting to develop strange powers (and suffer psychic nosebleeds). I liked quite a bit of this and it’s a fast ride, but there’s a bit of that tendency some authors have to kill off their cast when they can’t manage them all, and the reveal is obvious.
Odds Against, Dick Francis (re-read)
Whip Hand, Dick Francis (re-read)
Come to Grief, Dick Francis (brand new to me!)
For Chocolate Box I wrote Stalk On, a Sid Halley & Sapphire and Steel crossover for
thisbluespirit, and so I re-read the first two and read the third. Sid Halley is one of Francis’ two series characters (Kit Fielding got two books) and it’s fascinating seeing him evolve over time, both within and without the books (the first was published in 1965 and the third in 1995). I tried reading Under Orders, written after Dick’s wife and co-writer Mary died, but I found a massive fall-off in writing quality, and I haven’t gone near the one written by their son Felix. I like the first two a lot for having Sid fail and break (physically and mentally), but Come to Grief just blew me away, and in fact writing this review made me get it out from the library again and start re-reading it. It has one of my favourite tropes, a main character who has chosen to be ostracised and blamed by society in order to serve a greater good; in this case, Sid is pursuing a former colleague, a friendly, outgoing jockey & public figure who Sid (and practically no one else) believes is mutilating ponies. The book starts with the trial in progress and the jockey’s mother having just committed suicide; no one is going to get out of this unscarred.
no subject
Date: 2019-05-31 03:20 am (UTC)That is aggravating. What happened?
I have read Odds Against and Whip Hand but not Come to Grief; I will borrow it from my mother directly.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-02 09:05 pm (UTC)I think it was mainly me - I was enjoying drawing my own parallels and then it felt like I was shoved into them (if it were Cassandra as viewpoint I would totally be fine with it!).
I have read Odds Against and Whip Hand but not Come to Grief; I will borrow it from my mother directly.
I hope you enjoy it!
here from network
Date: 2019-05-31 08:34 am (UTC)Cain's Mockingbird series has a great first volume, I Can Explain, which she wrote as a kind of puzzle box, and then she got completely screwed by stupid giant comics events and My Feminist Agenda got derailed and then chopped off. It's also 3 issues of Cain, 2 issues of BENDIS because they chopped her off that badly. I highly recommend the first volume, though, and the art is great and the covers are amazing.
Re: here from network
Date: 2019-06-02 09:07 pm (UTC)I think she's actually finished the next one (Kick Back) as well, which is so aggravating. Hopefully she can get the rights sorted.
I will have a look for the Mockingbird volume - thanks for the info!!
no subject
Date: 2019-06-01 02:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-02 09:11 pm (UTC)Ha! As opposed to Lee Child's Jack Reacher series, which I find completely forgettable, Dick Francis books usually have a very apropos titling scheme (as long as I can remember the A plot. I am currently trying to remember which one has the guy with six (?) kids and a wife who likes babies but has very little time for him, but all I can remember about the A plot is that one of the kids is trapped in a racing stadium with rapidly approaching danger at some point (bomb? fire?), which is not enough!)