octavia_cade's reviews
2467 reviews

Oh, this one's fun. I do like it when urban fantasy turns up in unexpected places, and a small farm is, by virtue of being rural, one of those places. Nonetheless, here we are, and the obsessive type of farmer illustrated here is deeply entertaining. An infant river deity turns up in a field, hailed by prophetic foxes? Well, the boy needs a home, and think what he could do for the soil matrix!

It's like Country Calendar but with gods. There was an episode on a couple of weeks ago about raising baby vines for vineyards. I don't think Dionysus is turning up in rural New Zealand any time soon, but you never know. 

I think I could read a whole novel of Vanessa puttering around her parents' place at Christmas time, just wandering the local woods and searching for evidence of the supernatural, armed with schnapps and gingerbread. It's very unlike it in everything else, but it has that Christmassy effect that I always get from Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising which, since it is nearly that time of year again, I shall soon be pulling out for my annual read.

Also, the neighbours are holding a Christmas party in a few weeks, and I promised to bring gingerbread. I do like gingerbread. 

This was pretty cool - a collection of speculative fiction (plus a couple of essays) themed around social justice movements. It is named, of course, for Octavia Butler, who has never written a book I didn't love; the works here follow in her example. It's a fantastic idea for a collection, and the execution broadly lives up to it.

There were, it has to be said, a small handful of pieces here that I just bounced off. These are far overshadowed by the rest of the book, however. A lot of the stories here are good. Some are absolutely excellent, and the effect of them all together is compelling. Of my favourites, though... I really enjoyed "Revolution Shuffle" by Bao Phi (liberating American internment camps amidst a zombie outbreak); "The Token Superhero" by David F. Walker (navigating superhero status while Black); "Black Angel" by Walidah Imarisha (a fallen angel intervenes in police brutality); "The Long Memory" by Morrigan Phillips (memory keepers are isolated and brutalised in order to remove social safeguards); and "Runway Blackout" by Tara Betts (shapeshifting models refuse to conform to imposed beauty standards). As you can see, there's a fantastic range of approaches here, and that's something I find very appealing. That's the advantage to an anthology over a collection, a lot of the time - there are so many different authors coming from so many different perspectives that there's bound to be something for everyone. 

I'm reading through the stories in the Tales from the Folly collection, and while I'm enjoying them, I'm noticing that Aaronovitch has the habit of some fairly abrupt ends in his stories. Not in all of them, to be fair, but it's happened more than I'd like and it kind of makes me want to reach into the pages and say "But what about this bit?" Granted, he's probably not that interested in how Abigail explains everything to Babs, but being hired by her to investigate the weird uncle was how the story got started to begin with!

Babs deserves a little more for her forty pounds, is what I'm saying. 

I read the first few volumes of Locke & Key a while back but never finished the series, so I'm starting over now just so I don't forget anything. I do remember that Bode was perhaps the least interesting of the three siblings to me, and he's still not that exciting. What I really enjoy about this issue, though - and about the series in general, from what I recall - is the relationship between the three kids. It's dead-on realistic in the way that they talk to each other and I find it deeply entertaining. 

Another of the Rivers of London short stories; this time a historical one set in the 1960s. I enjoyed it, but I have to admit that I prefer Peter Grant as the protagonist - I find him effortlessly funny, whereas I feel that this should be funny but isn't... like it's trying a little too hard to be humorous. The only time it felt as if it was a Rivers story, tonally, was the Deplorables criticising the house as unfit for a baby at the end.

That being said, the fabric imagery down in the basement was really cool. I liked that, and the history behind it. 

This just isn't that great, I'm afraid. Kirk comes across as an absolute prig - though in fairness I think he is meant to - and the character strokes are very broad. It is a children's novel, but there's a broad streak of didacticism here that makes it quite a tedious little read in places. Carey has done some great Trek novels for adults, but she's missed the mark on this one for me. 

I have to agree that relocating to a place called Lovecraft in the wake of violent tragedy is probably a terrible idea. Especially if you're a teenager. Can you imagine the English classes? That's real horror right there, being forced to slog through the collected works of Mr. I'm Scared Of Everything. Having to read The Mountains of Madness is enough to make anyone want to end it all... out of sheer bloody boredom.

Snark aside, this is a strong opening issue. The kids are sympathetic, and I like that the aftermath of their father's murder is sensibly far more focused on their emotional responses than it is the more genre elements of the story, although of course they exist. Tyler, especially, is an appealing character, and I always like a mysterious house.