cyphomandra: fluffy snowy mountains (painting) (snowcone)
One of us knows, Alyssa Cole
The decagon house murders, Yukito Ajatsuji
Invisible Emmie, Terri Libenson
Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir
Outofshapeworthlessloser, Gracie Gold
Running a love story, Dom Harvey
The duke at hazard, KJ Charles
Dungeon crawler Carl (audio)
The night war, Kimberley Brubaker Bradley


One of Us Knows, Alyssa Coles. Although she’s still doing romances she is also now doing thrillers - this is the first of them I’ve read. Kenetria Nash, who has DID and a life she’s managed to effectively wreck, finds herself taking a job as caretaker to an historic home on an island, a decision made by an alter who is now absent. The house seems to be triggering memories, and then people from Ken’s past show up, bringing new dangers with them. The thing I liked most about this was that it is explicitly set during the pandemic; otherwise it’s a little predictable. Readable, though, and I will look out for her other thrillers.

The Decagon House Murders, Yukito Ayatsuji. A university detective club (all using the names of famous writers) travel to a remote island with a ten-sided house and a bloody past. Overnight, someone puts out nameplates - First Victim, Second Victim, Detective, Murderer, etc - and then the bodies, obligingly, arrive soon after. This does have a good mystery and the one-line reveal is very nice, but balanced against that is a near complete lack of personality in all the characters. It made me think about Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying, which also has a great text-based reveal, but Levin is much stronger in character and tension (which interact anyway in this sort of murder mystery; you want to be worried about who will be killed next rather than being a little unsure who they were). Interestingly one of the indistinguishable two women is called Orczy (the other is Christie) - I hadn’t been aware she’d done detective stories and will have to have a look.

Invisible Emmie, Terri Libenson. Middle school graphic novel. Quiet shy Emmie and outgoing athletic Katie meet up when Emmie accidentally drops an embarrassing note that is found by unsympathetic classmates. There are some nice bits in this but the twist doesn’t really come off and overall it’s just okay.

Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir. Ryland Grace wakes up on a spaceship, not knowing why he’s there or what he’s supposed to do; gradually he works it out, makes first contact with an alien race, and saves humanity. This reminded me of being in my teens and reading sf for the cool high concept ideas, when I would probably have enjoyed this more. The main character - a high school science teacher whose brilliant ideas about alien life were rejected by the mainstream science community, who have been forced to come crawling back to him for help - is pretty irritating, and his big character reveal - that he did not volunteer for the mission but was press-ganged into it - does not actually have any effect by the time it arrives. I did like the alien.

Outofshapeworthlessloser, Gracie Gold. Gold won multiple medals and championships as a figure skater, including Olympic bronze; she did this despite (or perhaps because of) severe mental health issues, abusive coaches, and a sport with destructive expectations of perfection and femininity. It’s very strong on mental health and self-knowledge; it is also candid in admitting she doesn’t have the answers, and everything is a work in progress. (TW: Gold is raped by a fellow skater; she is also friends with another skater who is very helpful with her recovery and return to the sport, and then kills himself the day after being suspended by US Figure Skating after multiple accusations of sexual assault, and the book covers her confusion and shock at this double revelation).

Running: a love story , Dom Harvey. Dom is a radio DJ who ran as a kid, then took it up again as an out-of-condition adult and became obsessed with trying to beat the 3 hour mark for the marathon in one of the World Majors. This book finishes with his attempt in Berlin, where he gets a PB but fails to break 3 hours; subsequently he does break that time in Tokyo (there’s a later edition of this book that adds a chapter to include this, which definitely works better as an ending). It is not great writing, is obviously intended for the radio fans market, and it’s not that helpful about running, but it did make me interested in Dom’s mum, a longtime marathon runner (the whole family runs), who fitted her runs in around everybody else when the kids were young, and is still running marathons in her 70s.

The Duke at Hazard, KJ Charles. Unassuming Cassian, the Duke of Severn, loses his heirloom ring to a strange man in a secret liaison; he then takes a bet from his cousin that he couldn’t survive as an ordinary person in the hope of getting it back without anyone finding out (and also in the hope of getting his relatives to actually see him as a person). He meets Daizell, disgraced and excluded from society by his father’s crimes, eking out a living as a cutter out of shadow portraits, and hires him to help, but Daizell doesn’t know who Cass really is… This was perfectly enjoyable but I do prefer my KJ Charleses with a bit more bite to them (also, England appears to be populated by about a dozen people, given how frequently everyone bumps into each other). I did like the bit where Daizell demonstrates to Cass exactly how prone to misinterpretation the description of a coat as “mulberry” is and the card game exposure is great.

The night war, Kimberly Brubaker Bradley. I really liked her The War that Saved my Life duology. This is also WWII, where 12 year old Miriam escapes the round-up in Paris that takes her entire Jewish neighbourhood, to end up in a convent school in a small French village near the border with the free French zone. She is desperate to leave, but also determined to find her Paris neighbour’s young child, given to her to protect but taken away by the nuns to give to a local childless family. This story makes the bold and unexpected decision to add the ghost of Catherine de Medici as a major character, who is only visible to Miri (her chosen gardener) and I don’t think it works. I spent the second half of the book getting increasingly irked by this and it was not helped by an epilogue that had a surprising number of people survive.

Dungeon Crawler Carl, Matt Dinniman, audiobook by Jeff Hays. I do not usually listen to audiobook (except with the kids) but I love this series and the audiobooks are meant to be good, so I plunged in. It’s great. Hays somehow manages all the voices (there are various effects, eg on the AI’s voice and when the characters are speaking in chat - Donut always chats in all caps and Jeff conveys this expertly) and the YouTube cold reads I’ve seen of him swapping between characters aare amazing. The slower pace also makes me think about bits of the story a bit more and appreciate the world building. I think there is a full cast version of this out now as well but I’m now in the third audiobook and I feel I am incapable of dealing with new versions of the voices.
cyphomandra: (balcony)
Just finished:

The Martian, Andy Weir. I saw the movie first because reading a sample on-line made me unsure whether I could handle the narrator at book-length, but in many ways the book narrator ended up being less annoying than the film. This is probably mostly because I’m not all that fond of Matt Damon, and even when he’s doing survival puzzles in space I still have to look at him, whereas the book narrator tends to be much more tolerable when the author is caught up in the technical details and not trying to give him a personality. Watney is supposedly the catalyst that makes the astronaut crew function; he is also that annoying guy at the party who will not shut up about his pet topic and his personal brilliance, and who keeps trying (and failing) to come up with funny one-liners. There’s almost no suspense about whether the rest of the crew will be happy spending another year and a half in space to rescue Watney, so they must inexplicably find him more appealing, but then it’s not a book for interpersonal conflict, or even for anything much outside of Watney and his fight for survival. The bits not from Watney’s point of view are barely 2-dimensional - I kept envisaging stick figures in empty rooms holding up bits of cardboard with their names on them.

In terms of book versus movie I preferred the book - the dust storm sequence is particularly effective, and I also liked that Mark loses contact via Pathfinder. The final grab - hmm. The movie does oversell this, but the book undersells it because it takes the action away from Mark, and there’s not enough for it to work as a team redemption (it could, possibly, have worked if the key manoeuvre was made by Lewis). The book doesn’t return to Earth: I didn’t like Matt Damon lecturing at the end of the movie, but I did like that you saw he’d got back. In both cases, I wanted something between.

Neither book nor movie explain why Mark is going through every other crew member’s stuff looking for personal items and has nothing of his own. I am still bugged by this.

My Friends the Miss Boyds, Jane Duncan. First in the series. I will come back to these. By contrast to The Martian this is positively bursting with a sense of place, period and character. It’s a sad book without feeling grim or even downbeat, which is an interesting achievement, but it is limited by the narrator being a child, and I’m looking forward to the next ones.

In progress:

My Friend Muriel, Jane Duncan. Second etc. I like that we move very briskly through the second world war with only a few paragraphs referencing her time in Air Force Intelligence, most of which are about the batty arguments she gets into with her highly strung co-workers. She is quite casually brutally in assessing her own personality as well as others - not as much so as Doris Lessing in her memoirs, but it reminded me a bit of the approach.

Parenting from the Inside Out, Daniel Siegel and Mary Hartzell. How your own experiences (especially but not only those of your childhood/being parented) influence your own approach to parenting; recognition, understanding and allowing the potential for change. I like Siegel’s other books and this is useful but a bit more wordy and less specific than his later works, or so far anyway.

Coming up:

Expect a swathe of My Friends. Also, I suspect that the Ancillary books are going to lose out to a re-read of the Captive Prince series, because book 3 is OUT IN FIVE DAYS, OMG.

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