laurareads87's reviews
562 reviews

The Serviceberry is an essay about gift economies and the lessons nature has to offer about ways of sustaining communities that function based on reciprocity rather than commodification and fabricated scarcity. Kimmerer’s writing is, as always, beautiful. My only complaint is that I wish the book was longer – if Kimmerer ever puts out a book on this topic that is longer and covers more research (with citations), I’d happily pick it up. 

The hardcover version of this book, which I read, is lovely – textured cover, deckle edges, and beautiful illustrations by John Burgoyne. 

Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions is a great short story collection that feels cohesive while having a lot of variety genre and length-wise. A few of my favourite stories were the title story “Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions” (co-written with Nisi Shawl for a collection honouring Samuel Delany), “Can’t Beat ‘Em” (which features a plumber removing a very... interesting drain clog), “Clap Back” (featuring nanotech fashions), and “Broad Dutty Water” (a story set amidst risen water levels). I appreciated the inclusion of brief notes introducing and contextualizing each story. Definitely recommend this collection. 

Thank you Tachyon Publications & NetGalley for an ARC to review. 

Ursula K. LeGuin is one of my all time favourites. This collection gathers together essays, speeches, and excerpts spanning much of her career, from the mid-70s to 2018. All of these writings have been published elsewhere before, and I'd read many of them previously.

LeGuin is an excellent writer and her essays are very much worth reading. This said, I'd suggest someone interested in first starting to read LeGuin's nonfiction start with a book LeGuin herself compiled rather than this one, which was put together of course without her input. The arrangement of essays is a bit strange here, and some of them - particularly things like excerpts from Steering the Craft - make more sense in the contexts LeGuin herself published them than here.

 3.5, rounding up. I was happy to pick up The Mercy of Gods having really enjoyed The Expanse... on television. I wanted to try James SA Corey’s work but figured it’d be better to start with something that I didn’t already have preconceived notions about from an adaptation. 

I’ll start with what worked. I really enjoy alien species depicted as utterly non-humanoid, and this series is full of unusual species with their own physiologies and ways of communicating. The cast of main characters interact with these other species to varying degrees and the extent to which they can (or mostly can’t) understand them is central to the plot in a number of interesting ways. The Carryx, the species that attack the human world Anjiin, have translator technology, but their motivations and guiding philosophies are far from clear. There’s a lot of interesting world building here with hints of the past relationships between species and a broader galactic context, but the novel’s setting is, really, very narrow and this creates an interesting interplay between the micro context of the main characters’ immediate everyday lives and the wider context in which they exist. The pacing is good and I was consistently interested in what would happen next. 

What didn’t quite work for me here, unfortunately, was the character development. It wasn’t really until the very end that I cared much about any of the characters. Toward the end of the novel when some extraordinarily difficult decisions have to be made, the characters feel more multifaceted; however, for much of the novel they felt a bit one-note to me and I struggled to be invested in any of them. I didn’t think the romance aspects added anything to the plot. 

Overall, I enjoyed this and will be picking up the second installment in the series. 

Thank you to Orbit Books & NetGalley for providing me with an ARC to review. 

Content warnings: blood, injury detail, violence, war, death, genocide, suicidal thoughts, animal death, animal cruelty (lab experimentation), forced confinement, murder, mention of excrement & vomit 

There is much I enjoyed about Toward Eternity – it has multi-POV storytelling that spans many many many years yet feels like a cohesive narrative, it features a diverse cast of characters, and it’s beautifully written; in many ways, this novel doesn’t feel like a debut. The author has done some interesting things with technology here, effectively creating a ‘ship of Theseus’ paradox with the idea of humans being able to have all of their cells replaced with nanites, curing disease and creating a kind of near-immortality. 

What didn’t quite work for me – the insertion of the poetry felt somewhat forced and took me out of the narrative. Some points felt a bit didactic to the point that the narrative and characters felt de-emphasized compared to the ‘argument’ of the text. 

I enjoyed this novel overall & would absolutely read another work by Anton Hur. 

Content warnings: violence, death, war, genocide, mention of miscarriage 

Absolution had to be one of my most anticipated 2024 releases; having previously read the Southern Reach Trilogy (back when it was released) as well as some other titles from Vandermeer, I was very excited for another instalment and more backstory of Area X. 

Absolution is comprised of three parts: the first, ‘Dead Town,’ takes place pre-Area X and follows biologists conducting an experiment in the Forgotten Coast, the second, ‘The False Daughter, is set later – 18 months pre-Area X – and refers back directly to the first, and the third, ‘ takes place ‘one year after the border came down’ and follows the first expedition into Area X. 

This is hard to rate because I found the three sections quite uneven, and would give them different star ratings; I’m giving a 4 because I don’t want to down-rate the first two sections based on liking the third section significantly less. 

I don’t think this is vital to appreciating the Southern Reach Trilogy, nor do I think it leaves all questions answered (of course it wasn’t going to), but I do think that fans of the trilogy will appreciate this book as a chance to revisit Area X in all its strangeness. I would say I liked the first part best – it’s deeply unsettling – followed by the second, which feels a bit slower paced but Old Jim is a great character and there is a lot of intrigue. The third, wherein we finally get to enter Area X as readers, I actually enjoyed least; there are some great weird scenes but the narration is disjointed and hard to follow (for reasons that are explained in the context of the story) and this, for me, made the expedition’s experiences less impactful. 

I would not suggest reading this first; it doesn’t feel straightforwardly like a prequel and for that reason I’d suggest at least reading Annihilation, if not the entire trilogy, before picking up Absolution. You could read this first – particularly the first section which feels relatively self-contained – but I don’t think I’d have gotten as much out of this text had I not read the trilogy first. 

Content warnings: violence, gun violence, death, animal death, injury detail, drug ab/use, blood, gore, body horror, cannibalism (graphic) 

Tom Benjamin’s Your Tarot Toolkit does something that few tarot books manage to do: it functions as an intermediate to advanced level tarot book without bringing in too many extraneous topics. Often, finding a non-beginner tarot book means finding a book about tarot and something else – tarot and astrology, tarot and numerology, tarot and social justice, tarot and creative writing – with the ‘something else’ really being the only point of new information for experienced tarot readers. Here, Tom Benjamin has written a book that is wholly tarot-focused that specifically caters to a readership already familiar with the usual beginner book fare – major/minor arcana structure of a deck, what a spread is, etc. – but looking to build their skills. This is a book that will be of particular interest to those giving, as the subtitle suggests, ‘clear, precise, confident readings’ – the author’s approach is very much geared toward reading to discern specific answers to specific questions so that querents leave the table (or the zoom call, or the email) feeling like they’ve gotten what they asked for. The vast majority of the book is focused on reading for others, though I’d argue that the principles – the importance of a clear question, the importance of the spread matching the question, and so on – equally apply to reading for oneself. I appreciate that the example querents are diverse (in terms of names, relationship structures, life circumstances, etc). It’s a book I’d readily recommend to readers looking to expand their skillset who feel like they’re past needing beginner-level books.

I will be posting a more detailed review in video format to YouTube on my channel Aquamarine18 Tarot & Books.  

 I really wanted to like Out of the Drowning Deep, as it has a lot of elements that I tend to like – an automaton as one of the POVs, a mix of human and non-human characters, and an interesting setting in the Bastion – but it ultimately fell flat. 

I think some of the issue here is that there are too many themes for a novella this short. It’s like the author decided to write a book that tackles religion, memory, trauma, and addiction while also being a murder mystery and the result is that none of it really worked. The mystery’s resolution feels almost like an afterthought and it’s hard to really care about when none of the characters directly involved in the murder are developed enough to feel any investment in. It was almost a locked room mystery, but some characters being able to teleport in and out took away the element of pressure that a locked room provides. Some of the relationships are described in intense terms – Angel’s feelings about Scribe IV in particular – that make zero sense given the brief duration of the characters’ knowing each other, and the characters all seem to have a single trait – Angel looks scared all the time, Quin is traumatized, the Sisters have strayed from their god – that is repeated over and over, resulting in one-dimensional characters. Of all the characters, Scribe IV the outdated automaton is absolutely the most interesting; I think that if Scribe IV had been the sole POV and the murder had been the focus (rather than so much of Quin’s backstory) this novella would’ve definitely worked much better. 

I will say, some of my disappointment is probably tied to the marketing. I definitely don’t think this novella is remotely comparable to any of the authors (Chambers, Wells, el-Mohtar and Gladstone) that the blurb compares it to, and the description emphasizes a “race to find out who really murdered the Pope” while way too much of the plot is quite disconnected from this aim. 

What I did like about this was the world-building. The Bastion is a really cool setting, and the backdrop of the Pope’s conclave is interesting context. Unfortunately, the plot and characters are a lot less interesting. 

Thank you to NetGalley and Titan Books for providing an ARC. 

Content warnings: religious trauma, addiction, suicide, death, death of a parent, grief 

Le Petit Prince est un livre très spécial. Je ne lis pas souvent des livres plus d'une fois. Celui-ci, je le lis presque une fois par an. Quand je me sens triste, Le Petit Prince me soutient.

"Regardez le ciel. Demandez-vous: 'Le mouton oui ou non a-t-il mangé la fleur?' Et vous verrez comme tout change..."

3.5, rounding up. The Gods Below is the first novel that I’ve read from Andrea Stewart. In the world of this novel, gods and mortals coexist, and the world has been divided into a series of regions with fairly strong boundaries between them. One by one, the regions are being remade: in a remaking, a wall of black ether spreads across the land, leaving the terrain lush and green, killing many mortals and irreversibly physically altering the rest. The novel begins with two young sisters, Hakara and Rasha, attempting to flee a remaking. 

There is a lot about this novel that I like. The magic system is well thought out and the world-building is rich and compelling. I like novels with multiple POVs. I also feel like the backdrop of the novel is well thought out; the dynamics between the different regions and the cultural and religious elements of each one are well developed and make sense. The prose flows smoothly, the pace is pretty consistent, and I was interested to see where the different plotlines would end up. What doesn’t quite work for me here is some of the character development. I was significantly more interested in some characters than others, including amongst the POV characters; two of the POV characters I found so extraordinarily narrowly focused on a single motivation that they fell a bit flat for me. 

On the basis of this first installment, I’ll definitely check out the second book in The Hollow Covenant trilogy. 

Content warnings: violence, blood, gore, body horror, death, animal death, murder, religious bigotry, classism, grief, abandonment, gaslighting, xenophobia, brief mentions of excrement & vomit