cyphomandra | Entries tagged with 2022 book reviews

Because I am nothing if not suggestible I just re-read Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Headless Cupid, which is still fantastic; all the characters are shown with a clear-sighted empathy, adults as well as children. As I am also predictable I re-read KJ Charles' Think of England, which is really one of my ideal books, and if I start talking about it here I'll only end up re-reading it AGAIN.

Slightly less obviously:

The Storyteller, Dave Grohl. Excellent title, and an enjoyable memoir that manages to entertain while leaving out some really major parts of Grohl's life - his first wife, for example, and his legal battle with Courtney Love. I was actually looking for his mother's book on raising rock musicians, which my library doesn't have; Grohl's relationship with his mom, who took him to jazz sessions, encouraged him, and even supporting him quitting school to go on a European tour with a band, is a bright thread through the book, and I was sorry to hear she'd died.

Grohl is great on the hardscrabble life of touring musicians, self-deprecating about his own abilities, and understandably cautious about Nirvana and Cobain. He gets across the dizzying unreality of suddenly being part of the biggest band in the world, although in the latter half the name-dropping does teeter a bit on the edge of being too much (I did love the bit where he's invited Paul McCartney over and is desperately trying to clear his house of all visible Beatles memorabilia first). His kids sound great.

Afterwards I flicked through Jeff Apter's The Dave Grohl Story, which appears to have been carefully constructed from publically available media and some very limited interviews with people other than Grohl ("X said they would answer questions on this topic only. Y said they would only answer questions that could be answered with a yes or no..."), as well as a lot of petty sniping at any more mainstream musicians, and Everett True's Nirvana, which is better but I am actually not all that interested in the lengthy recreation of the grunge/punk/alternative music scene Nirvana emerged from.

Patient, Ben Watt. Watt is half of the English group Everything but the Girl; in 1992 he became progressively and then suddenly extremely unwell, with an illness that took doctors some time to diagnose and even longer to bring under control. He was in hospital for several months and near death on a number of occasions.

It's vivid and unsparing in its exactness about the experience of severe illness and long-term hospital stays, the quirks and particularities of the hospital itself and the fragility of recovery, the uncertainty of being back home when he does leave. It's also a tribute to (and is dedicated in part to) the British NHS. It's a short book, but it resonates.

"What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.” - Thomas Browne

This is a retelling of the Iliad with Achilles as a trans woman, and, like all the retellings, some bits of it work better for me than others. It starts with Achilles on Skyros, an island home to many other trans women (kallai), where they use herbs to suppress male hormones and where Achilles has achieved some sort of peace after the relentless bullying and abuse she suffered as a child/young adult. This refuge is ripped away from her when Diomedes and Odysseus track her down, but she receives a divine gift from Athena where her body is transformed to match her true self, and it is in this form that she fights the Trojan War.

It’s a fascinating & bold take on Achilles, and it works well with the text. Deane keeps the gods as well, which I always like in Iliad retellings (although there are some alterations, e.g. Achilles’ parentage), and adds an original character, Meryapi, an Egyptian princess married to Achilles’ cousin (!) Patroclus, who is great and who brings yet another perspective to the story.

( Spoilerish. )

However. I did enjoy it; it’s engaging, even when I disagree with certain decisions. The book has, unfortunately, fallen foul of the strand of ownvoices critique that picks greedily over anything with GLBT+ characters looking for missteps, as well as constantly (perhaps wilfully) failing to comprehend the concept that depiction does not equal endorsement. It’s not as bad as the Isabel Fall incident, but it’s disturbing.

(one thing I would warn for that you might not expect from familiarity with the source material is a graphic birth scene)

I am attempting to get these out of the way so I can devote more attention to some of the September reads that I want to spend more time on (having said that, this is not exactly short! arrgh).

The Animals at Lockwood Manor, Jane Healey. During WWII the natural history museum’s collection of mammals is evacuated to the titular manor, under the care of Hetty Cartwright, uptight and disregarded by her superiors and by the unpredictable and destructive Lord Lockwood. But she makes a connection with Lockwood’s fragile and haunted daughter, Lucy, that may be what they both need to escape… There’s a nice gothic atmosphere at the start, with the obligatory crumbling mansion, and I like the developing romance between Hetty & Lucy, but the pace is slow and both characters are oddly passive; the tension ebbs rather than builds. I was left feeling disappointed.

Passage Across the Mersey, Robert Bhatia. From age 10 or so I & my sister spent at least two afternoons a week at our city’s central library, waiting for our parents to finish work, and reading everything that looked even vaguely appealing. At some point I remember being in the YA section and choosing to pick up a volume from the biography section by Helen Forrester - I feel I might have started with the second (Minerva’s Stepchild, now called Liverpool Miss), but I tracked down the first one, Twopence to Cross the Mersey and read them both (and the sequels) in absorbed gulps. They’re very precise recreations not just of a specific time and place - working-class Liverpool, reeling from the Great Depression and heading into WWII - but of the equally specific anger and betrayal that Helen felt when her middle class parents threw themselves (and their seven children) headlong into bankruptcy and broke all ties with their previous comfortable middle class lives. As the eldest (and a girl), Helen, age 12, was forced to care for the others, and treated with a casual neglect that pulls all your sympathy as a reader, watching as her parents pawn her only good coat or refuse to let her attend school, and they’re a totally compelling read (obviously no one will be surprised to hear that I'm now two books into a re-read).

This is written by her son, and tells more of Helen’s (June’s) story, with some perspective from external sources; it’s also, as much as anything, the love story of June and Avadh Bhatia, the physicist Helen married after her first two fiancees died in WWII. This was the strand I found most interesting - Helen seeks to travelsto India to meet Avadh’s family for their approval, complicated just a fraction by the fact that he already has a wife and child - but it does involve a lot of quoting from letters. It did make me want to track down The Moneylenders of Shapur, her novel set in India.

The Feast, Margaret Kennedy. I read Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph entirely because I’d seen it mentioned in Antonia Forest’s Marlow series but did so on a ferry, and my memory of excellent prose is tinged with seasickness. This has a fantastic concept and is deftly executed, and now I want to read more of her stuff.
( More details about the concepts. )

Against All Odds, Craig Challen, Richard Harris. The subtitle to this is “The inside account of the Thai cave rescue and the courageous Australians at the heart of it”, which is a fairly comprehensive description. I picked this up after seeing the trailer & publicity for Thirteen Lives, Ron Howard’s take on this, and realising after checking the cast that it leaves out Challen entirely. Challen, a vet, and Harris, an anaesthetist, talk about their personal histories and how they got into cave diving, the lure of it as well as the dangers, and how they ended up in Thailand, faced with a nightmarish decision with the whole world watching. Harris is the one who must make the call to anaesthetise the boys to get them out, and work out how to do it, based on one human report of a British anaesthetist who put himself under anaesthesia in a wave pool in order to test an inflatable lifejacket and an anecdote about a seal on ketamine.

I find caving unnerving at the best of times ( for which I can blame reading The Weirdstone of Brisingamen at the age of 9) . The narrowest space they had to get through was about 26 by 70 cm; curious, I set up some chairs and cushions to approximate this. Sure, I can get through, largely by pushing with my toes, but imagining doing this under water, in the dark, under hundreds of tonnes of rock, with an unconscious boy in tow, is terrifying.

The Ivy Years series, Sarina Bowen
(The Year We Fell Down
The Year We Hid Away
Blonde Date
The Shameless Hour
The Fifteenth Minute)

This is the Ivy Years series, set at a fictional US college and heavy on the hockey. I read them in this order because I started with the m/m one; the rest are all het. I did like the world - it actually feels like a college far more than some of these I’ve read - and the characters are reasonably engrossing, although as the series progresses my belief in the convenience of events does fray.

Fell Down has a paralysed (via hockey accident) heroine and a temporarily injured (hockey playing) hero, who meet in the campus’ limited accessible accommodation. Hid Away has the daughter of a man recently arrested for serial sexual abuse of the young hockey players he trained, who is hiding under an alias at the college while she tries to avoid her parents’ attempts to drag her into the court proceedings, and a hopelessly overcommitted hero who is hiding his younger sister at the college, having taken her away from their drug-addict mom. The Understatement of the Year is former teen boyfriends who split after a gay-bashing incident meet up again in college on the same hockey team, and I really liked how it showed how both of them had and hadn’t dealt with their trauma.

Blonde Date is a novella that hooks up two (het) side characters, The Shameless Hour has Belle, the hockey team’s manager, characterised in the previous books as the sex-positive PR manager for the hockey team, getting slut-shamed and bullied in a super disturbing frat sequence (after she gets an STI and notifies her last sexual partner, he spikes her drink, strips her, and gets the other frat boys to write all over her), and her relationship her downstairs neighbour, a sweet Dominican virgin who doesn’t do casual sex, which never really cohered for me, and then The Fifteenth Minute lost me entirely with its famous actress/computer hacker/expert gamer meets hockey game DJ who has been falsely accused of rape. In hindsight I’d say read the first three.

She Is Not Your Rehab, Matt Brown & Sarah Brown. Matt is a Samoan New Zealander who is a survivor of childhood family violence and sexual abuse; as an adult, he has painstakingly put himself back together from the damaging methods he used to cope with this, acknowledge his own vulnerability and address all the emotions he’d suppressed, and now he works as a barber, counselling men on how to do the same. It is aimed specifically at heterosexual men who are using the women in their lives to externalise work that they should be doing themselves; each chapter is a “She is not your” - mother, shame, saviour, hired help, punching bag etc and contains stories about himself, his clients, and his partner, Sarah, who is an integral part of the book. It’s a powerful book and it’s valuable work.

I read some great books this month and two of them had heroes called Ambrose.

The Darkness Outside Us, Eliot Schrefer. Ambrose wakes up on his spaceship knowing his mission - to rescue his sister, Minerva, who was the first settler on Saturn’s moon Titan and whose distress beacon has finally activated after a long period of non communication. He can’t, however, remember the launch itself, and he is surprised to find that his spaceship is twinned with a vessel from the other main Earth power - and contains an astronaut from there, Kodiak. Aided by the ship’s operating system (OS), they must prepare the ship for the rescue mission.

But the gap in Ambrose’s memories is not the only oddity. As they approach Saturn, more and more discrepancies become apparent between what they are told by the OS, and what they observe for themselves.

I really liked this book - it’s YA, gay romance, and it’s space horror, where a significant part of the horror is the sheer unbelievable vastness of space itself, set against the claustrophobic existence of a two-man spacecraft. Everything else is a spoiler and so I am going under this cut - ( Significant spoilers. )

Awfully Ambrose. Lisa Henry & Sarah Honey. Ambrose is a struggling actor who supports himself and his faded former TV star mother by being a Bad Boyfriend; going on terrible dates with people & their relations in order to get rid of family pressure to be in a relationship or make the next partner seem so much better by comparison. Liam, who has a supportive but pushy family, hires Ambrose to get his relatives off his back, but their relationship starts turning real.

What I really liked about this was the setting, which is not just Australian and not just Sydney, but is very specifically in Newtown (and then Liam’s family’s vineyard in the Hunter Valley), as I spent two years living on the fringes of Newtown and a lot of time in it, to the extent that at the start of chapter 4 the characters are on a road I walked up and down most weekdays, and I felt warmly nostalgic. The characters are as specific as the setting (there’s an Australian glossary at the beginning) and Ambrose’s bad boyfriend act - and the cracks and tension that arise in it - are great.

Horribly Harry, Lisa Henry & Sarah Honey. So I then bought the sequel, in which Ambrose’s flatmate, Harry, who thinks he’s asexual, has taken over Ambrose’s job, and manages in the process to upset the brother of one of his bad dates so much that the guy empties a strawberry smoothie over him - and almost kills him due to Harry's strawberry allergy. Jack, the brother, has dropped out of university to work as a mechanic, and is overwhelmed with guilt to the extent that he ends up moving in with Harry - and Harry, much to his surprise, develops romantic feelings for Jack. I didn’t like this nearly as much - it’s not that it’s bad, and I do really like Harry’s long-running battle with a particular volunteer at his local op shop - but it was less compelling than the first book and the characters felt a lot younger, or at least a lot more immature. I will still snaffle the third one when it comes out, though (the Bad Boyfriend mantle is inherited by the remaining flatmate, Tristan, who has a no repeats approach to sex & dating), and it might be time to try the authors’ fantasy series.

Worrals Flies Again, WE Johns. Worrals is, once again, bored with her mundane job of ferrying fighter aircraft in WWII, but fortunately one of the Intelligence Branch shows up looking for a pilot who is fluent in French (Worrals conveniently spent a year in France before the war) to station herself in a dilapidated French chateau and fly urgent messages back to Britain. But when she and Frecks arrive (in their tiny plane with foldable wings, the better to hide in wine cellars), German soldiers are already in residence in the chateau, and Wilhelm von Brandisch, head of the Gestapo in occupied France, is sniffing around the area… Less flying and more spying in this one, and it rattles along swiftly, with plots and counterplots; Worrals has to be on her toes at all times, as do the readers. I totally fell for the bit with the booby-trapped landing field.

Vessel, Lisa A Nichols. The Sagittarius NASA space mission to an exoplanet on the other side of an Einstein-Rosen bridge is assumed lost - until Catherine Wells, the pilot, and the only one left of the six member crew, returns after a decade to a husband who’s moved on and a daughter who is now an adult. She has no memory of what happened after they landed on the exoplanet - yet, back on Earth, she starts losing time, and experiencing sudden violent rages towards suddenly unnatural seeming colleagues. Another mission to the same planet is about to launch, and the only one Cath can trust with her worries is Cal, a NASA scientist who thinks Cath knows more than she’s saying.

What this is good at is all the detail of an actual NASA mission, the jargon and day-to-day working lives of the staff and scientists. What this is bad at, unfortunately, is the plot, which is obvious, and the characters, some of whom have potential that doesn’t come off. Cath as an ambitious pilot whose husband washed out of training and who chose to leave him and their daughter for the mission is an interesting character, but never seems to quite click into place, and the relationship with Cal didn’t work for me at all. Also, while all the NASA stuff seems quite convincing, when I am in a position to comment on the science of a particular aspect it is clunkingly wrong. And capping it all off is the ending, in which the book just stops without committing to a resolution. It didn’t help that I read this right after The Darkness Outside Us, but even so.

The 143-Storey Treehouse, Andy Griffiths & Terry Denton. I have retained very little of this as it just isn’t for me but the bit where strange creatures called hobyahs kidnap the characters in order to put them in bags and poke them with sticks was nicely child-level horror.

The Boys from Brazil, Ira Levin.
Hallowe’en Party, Agatha Christie.
Towards Zero, Agatha Christie.
The Long Call, Ann Cleeves.
The Registrar, Neela Janakiramanan
Percy Jackson & the Titan’s Curse, Rick Riordan.
Percy Jackson & the Battle of the Labyrinth, Rick Riordan.
Truth and Measure, Roslyn Sinclair.
The Fourth Monkey, JD Barker.

The Boys from Brazil, Ira Levin. I feel that this is highly likely to be one of those books I read in Reader’s Digest Condensed form (my grandparents had a subscription; I still remember the absolute betrayal I felt when I realised what "condensed" actually meant) but I certainly didn’t remember any details beyond the central gimmick. Unfortunately it takes over 2/3rds of the book for the main characters to discover this, so there is a certain amount of waiting for everyone to catch up and this does not work as well as it does in his The Stepford Wives. The central character, Yakov Liebermann ( a Nazi-hunter based on Simon Wiesenthal) is well-drawn (I also appreciate that when he’s phoned by a complete stranger with a wild story his first reaction is to ignore it). The conclusion - hmm. Chelsea Cain has a rather bloodthirsty intro that appears to trample all over at least half of Liebermann’s point, and that may well explain why her thrillers don’t work for me (do I read thrillers because I want revenge on bad guys? No, I read them because I want to see people cope with terrible situations. The two things may run together but it’s not the same). But I can also see her point in this situation, and I think Levin could too.

Hallowe’en Party, Agatha Christie. Poirot and Ariadne Oliver, and a girl drowned in a bucket bobbing for apples. I have read this before but still only worked out about half of it; it’s a solid later Christie, and the cruelty of the murder is well done.

Towards Zero, Agatha Christie. An Inspector Battle book, in which the murder of an elderly woman in a seaside house turns out to be the working out of a much older plot; the romances in this are rather simpering but there's an ultimate reveal that is still effectively chilling, and it all hangs together nicely.

The Long Call, Ann Cleeves. First in a series; DI Matthew Venn has recently returned to his childhood home of Devon with his husband, having been cast out by his parents, members of a small religious sect, initially for daring to question the religion as much as for being gay. At the start his father has just died and Venn was unable to attend the funeral; then, a body is found on the beach, and a young woman with Down’s Syndrome (who attends the day centre Venn’s husband runs) goes missing. Very solid on setting and did not stack up the bodies, did feel a bit claustrophobic/small townish, competent handling of plot with some interesting threads left for later books.

The Registrar, Neela Janakiramanan. Emma Swann, daughter of a famous (male) surgeon and younger sister to another (male) surgical trainee, gets a training registrar job in orthopaedic surgery in an eminent fictional Australian hospital. The writing is fine but I’ve read too many other similar books for the plot elements to have any freshness (the predatory senior doctor who grooms her into a relationship, the suicide attempt by a colleague, the exploitation of trainees by management, the misogyny and racism baked into the system). There’s one genuinely disturbing scene (with the staple gun) but otherwise Yumiko Kadota’s memoir is less well written but actually a better piece of work. In particular, Emma in this is an odd void as a main character; it’s hard to believe she existed before she walks onto the page.

Percy Jackson & the Titan’s Curse, Rick Riordan
Percy Jackson & the Battle of the Labyrinth, Rick Riordan
I listened to these as audiobooks with the kids but was rather distracted, so reading the hard copies has been helpful. Things are getting darker and it’s going to be interesting to see how he finishes the last one (in this series).

Truth and Measure, Roslyn Sinclair. Expanded, updated with tech references, and names changed, this is the first part of Telanu’s Truth & Measure series, her Devil Wears Prada Andi and Miranda fic. It’s still good and in some respects I prefer this version (in addition to being more modern I think it feels as though there’s been less careful surgery to the screen version of Miranda and so the power dynamic does not unnerve me quite as much), and I will be reading the second volume shortly.

The Fourth Monkey, JD Barker. Indistinguishable detectives hunt gimmicky serial killer interspersed with chunks of serial killer’s diary, in which any sort of coherent narrative or character development is consistently bludgeoned into pulp with SHOCKING TWISTS. First in a trilogy that I shan’t pursue.

In video gaming I have finished Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West, both absolutely fabulous RPGs set in a future Earth many years after the destruction of our civilisation. The backstory is painfully on point quite often, and sometimes playing this was less escapism and more inevitable despair, but it's still a fantastic game and Aloy is a great character. I am currently casting around for a replacement; am trying the FFVII remake, but it's not quite hitting the spot yet.