Ten Second Reviews

Cut to the Quick

By Kate Ross

Julian Kestrel is the walking definition of a Regency-era dandy. He cares about little beyond the perfection of his tailoring, he lives for the bon mot, and his life has the specific gravity and the fleeting charm of a soap-bubble. At least that's what he'd like you to think. In fact, it rather suits Kestrel to be perpetually underestimated, particularly when as in this instance his weekend at a glamorous country estate is spoiled by a dead girl's body being found in his bed.

I did like this one - it was a nice break from modern day thrillers, which can be so overwrought.  This one is much more of a classic mystery, with interrogations and secrets discovered, although there is still the confrontation of the murderer, here, it's with the guise of an actual magistrate's duty.  It feels like a pretty chunky book - there's a lot to the back story, which comes out in pieces (and more than a few coincidences, but they aren't the most egregious), so it took me a while to get through it.  Overall, I enjoyed the Regency setting, and the characters, enough to look into the sequel.  Onward and upward!

Comics for a Strange World: A Book of Poorly Drawn Lines

By Reza Farazmand

 

This follow up in the Poorly Drawn Lines series was not nearly as good as the first, for some reason.  Possibly because it felt like it focused more on robots and technology than absurdist humor.  So-so, but I would get the first book and skip this one.

A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie

By Kathryn Harkup

 

This is an alphabetically arranged examination of the poisons used in Agatha Christie's books (funny: you'd never know it from the title).  I really liked this one - first of all, I never realized that Christie was a chemist, and that she kept her poison use really factual and close to reality.  Maybe this is a little embarrassing, but I barely noticed the actual murder weapon when I was reading  - it almost felt superfluous sometimes, since motive seemed so much more important (and Christie always made sure multiple suspects would have been capable of the means).  Harkup goes into detail not only in how Christie used the poison in a particular book/story, but also into the poison itself, famous real life murders, effects on the body, etc.  I have just one complaint, which is that Harkup gets into the chemical properties of the poisons more than is really necessary for most laypeople (and geez, I hope all of her readers are laypeople and not budding young poisoners looking for tips) so I tended to skim the passages about enzymes and receptors and molecules.  But the rest is highly enjoyable, although I would recommend against reading it while sitting with a dying relative receiving morphine, because it will give you bad dreams.

Ten Second Reviws

Edenbrooke

By Julianne Donaldson

Marianne goes to spend some time in the country, visiting friends that her more beautiful and talented twin sister has made, battling highwaymen, fortune hunters, catty women and flirty men. For as silly as some (most?) of Edenbrooke is, I have to confess that when Marianne overheard Philip "complaining" about her and making it sound like he hated her guts (even though we all knew it was actually the complete opposite) something deep in the reptilian, instinctual part of my brain went "Mmm, good".  The heart wants what it wants.  And my heart wants contrived situations in which two people in love think that the other person hates them.  Angst, what a delight! Anyway, 'tis a very silly, slight book, but man, sometimes that's kind of what you need. 

Darkdawn

By Jay Kristoff

For some reason all my formatting is fucking up today (like just moving things on its own) so we'll see how long I can stand it.  Long story short: if you've read this far, you may as well read Darkdawn.  It's good enough.  I read (and liked) the first one, but it definitely didn't seem like we were going to be getting into a whole thing about the Moon in book one.  Mostly it seemed like a pretty straight-forward revenge tale.  Not that there's anything wrong with the Moon, it just seems like we took a hard left somewhere.  Anyway, this book is mostly a road trip, and there is a lot (far too much for my taste) of bantering/griping/star-crossed romance.  Plus, people die like every few chapters, which takes some of the emotion out of all the deaths.  And I don't think that's intentional. Anyway, the bad guy gets super powerful on dark magic but is defeated anyway, Mia's little brother decides he can love this mysterious, murderous sister he doesn't remember who drags him all over creation, narrowly escaping death multiple times and who insists on calling him a different name and telling him he's adopted,  somehow the person that Mia loves comes back from  the dead (no, the other one) to live happily ever after, and the moon is back in the sky and only one sun, so even though like 90% of the people who met/helped Mia along the way are dead, yay? Boo on the changed solar system though, I thought three suns was cool.

To Be Taught If Fortunate

To Be Taught, If Fortunate

By Becky Chambers

At the turn of the twenty-second century, scientists make a breakthrough in human spaceflight. Through a revolutionary method known as somaforming, astronauts can survive in hostile environments off Earth using synthetic biological supplementations. They can produce antifreeze in subzero temperatures, absorb radiation and convert it for food, and conveniently adjust to the pull of different gravitational forces. With the fragility of the body no longer a limiting factor, human beings are at last able to journey to neighboring exoplanets long known to harbor life.

A team of these explorers, Ariadne O’Neill and her three crewmates, are hard at work in a planetary system fifteen light-years from Sol, on a mission to ecologically survey four habitable worlds. But as Ariadne shifts through both form and time, the culture back on Earth has also been transformed. Faced with the possibility of returning to a planet that has forgotten those who have left, Ariadne begins to chronicle the story of the wonders and dangers of her mission, in the hope that someone back home might still be listening.

This short novella got off to a slow start, and it was never really about the plot, but it was a nice change of pace for me at the moment.  I've been reading at a breakneck pace because all my chickens came home to roost, also known as all my library requests came in at once, even though I ordered them at different times and was on several different waiting lists.  So it's been a small frenzy here, and it's good to kind of catch my breath a little with To Be Taught.

The book, as you come to realize, is both a more-detailed-than-strictly-necessary-or-even-enjoyable description of what we might find on other habitable planets, and also a love letter to exploration, knowledge, and dreams of space.  The idea is that there are four astronauts who are on a decades-long exploration of four distant planets (or moons or something - I kind of returned the book to the library already).  When taking off, they don't expect to come back for at least eighty years.  Partway through the mission, they realize that Earth is no longer in contact with them for unknown reasons, and as they get deeper into space, and potentially closer to the mystery of Earth's silence, they have to decide why and for whom they are doing this - ultimately deciding that if Earth wants them to come back, they will come back, if Earth wants them to keep going, they will keep going, and they are prepared to wait forever for Earth to respond, since the question is too important to answer for Earth.  It's a little bittersweet, since it's pretty clear that Earth got real fucked and probably will not be responding, even if they'd wanted to. News alert, you're all going to die in stasis, how nice!

The part of the book that isn't taken up with philosophical questions about how much we owe to the human race is sort of a fun wilderness adventure.  The descriptions, as I alluded to above, are more detailed, and more scientifically accurate than I really even wanted, no doubt a side effect of the author's relying heavily on her mother's astrobiologist background.  My copy came with a short list of questions and answers between the author and her mother at the end, mostly about the interaction between science and science fiction, which I also found enlightening.

It's also managed to make me bookmark Chambers' other big work, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, which I guess is now just the first in a trilogy.  I like her style enough - and the Big Ideas she has - to get into more by her.  We'll see how it goes - honestly, the interaction between astronauts was not always my favorite part in To Be Taught.  It's hard to give enough space to relationships in a book where the main focus is on the relationship with Earth, not each other.  And also, obviously, when they spend years just collecting samples and then going to sleep for years to travel.  Well, I guess we'll just have to see.

Ten Second Reviews

Poorly Drawn Lines

By Reza Farazmand

This is a collection of short panel comics by Farazmand, who got his start online (and is still there, I assume).  These are mostly 4-6 panels apiece, with some longer ones mixed in.  They've got that off-the-wall humor which I enjoy, talking animals and inanimate objects, birds judging how well you sing, aliens who just want friendship bracelets, thirty-seven year-old babies with beards, weirdly tall frogs, robots who suck.  It's got a bit of that Far Side influence, but it feels a bit more Dada-esque (yeah, I know shit).  One thing I didn't like was the formatting - if you have a four-panel page, but a six panel comic, for the love of god, just make it smaller and put it on one page!  It makes it weirdly hard to figure out if the small panel is a continuation of the previous page or a new comic.  Same for the eight (or more) panel comics.  When stuff is online first, you don't have the same space restrictions you'd get if they were published in the newspaper.  So they're all different lengths.  But you gotta solve that problem when you publish - and I don't think they've quite cracked the code yet.  But overall, a fun diversion, and a good gift for someone with that absurd sense of humor.

Through The Woods

By Emily Carroll

 

This is sort of the antithesis to Poorly Drawn Lines: short stories instead of panels, arty illustrations instead of block characters, horror instead of comedy, confusing instead of straightforward.  I got this because I wanted some spooky stuff to read, and they were definitely - atmospheric - but I felt like a lot of them were kind of ended the same way: you have a set up with a spooky premise (I killed my brother but he's standing right there drinking, a lady is hearing a chilling song in the floorboards, my friend has a cloud thing that has arteries over her head, my mother warned me about the piano-teeth monster, etc), and then the character takes further action (goes down a hole to follow a monster [in several stories, actually, they should probably stop doing that], cracks open the walls and finds body parts, discovers someone is missing, etc) there's maybe like a little more explanation or clues about what's going on, but mostly not, and then we end with, like an ominous close up (of the monster, of the piano teeth, of the beating heart cloud, etc) but honestly, some of it (most of it) is so confusing, I can't figure out enough of what's going on to be scared.    For example, in the piano teeth one, Emily follows Rebecca down a hole and see her face come off into red worms, and then she leaves and hits her head and comes to back at the house, where she talks Rebecca out of using her body as a sack for Rebecca's red worm babies.  But then at the end, we find out Emily has piano teeth too.  So..... is she already a red worm monster? Did Rebecca change her mind and use her body anyway? It's so weirdly obtuse.  And the one where the brother is killed and then comes back, the narrator follows him down a hole he's been digging, and then sees... someone sleeping on the ground? The wolf the brother killed earlier? The brother is the wolf? Totally unclear. Anyway, beautifully illustrated, but a bit obtuse for me.   

Ten Second Reviews

The Tiger's Wife

By Tea Obreht

In a Balkan country mending from war, Natalia, a young doctor, is compelled to unravel the mysterious circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. Searching for clues, she turns to his worn copy of The Jungle Book and the stories he told her of his encounters over the years with “the deathless man.” But most extraordinary of all is the story her grandfather never told her—the legend of the tiger’s wife.

I liked this one alright when I thought it was going somewhere, i.e., all the stories would somehow relate to one another, but it ended up not really doing that, so for me, it kind of petered out.  It did manage to elicit heavy sadness at the end of the Tiger's Wife portion, so kudos, I suppose, but nothing else really gelled for me.  Did we ever really find out why her grandfather was tramping all over the (other) country?  He was looking for the Deathless Man (in all the right places), and couldn't just wait for like, his patients to die? Was he actually trying to meet up Natalie, also for reasons unknown? Unclear.  This made me look up like, reading guides to The Tiger's Wife, trying to figure out what the point was. It was interesting how the setting of The Tiger's Wife feels more fairy-tale like than many actual fantasy books, despite (or because of?) being based in war-torn eastern Europe. There's definitely you know, motifs and shit, about animals, and war, and medicine, and society, the kind of book you teach a class about in high school.  It was well written, but wandered too much, without sufficient payoff, to be truly great.

Magic for Liars

By Sarah Gailey

When a gruesome murder is discovered at The Osthorne Academy of Young Mages, where her estranged twin sister teaches Theoretical Magic, reluctant detective Ivy Gamble is pulled into the world of untold power and dangerous secrets. She will have to find a murderer and reclaim her sister—without losing herself. 

I liked the beginning of Magic for Liars, before you realize what a terrible PI Ivy is (although of course she still manages to solve multiple mysteries, so she's somewhat of an idiot savant, I guess), but then Ivy started doing that fashionable PI thing of drinking too much and sleeping with possible suspects, and also (not a small thing) telling like, everyone who asks, all about the murder case she is working on.  Even though, as she stresses at one point, the murderer is definitely someone in the school.  And yes, in case you were wondering, she does tell her sister (who by the way, committed the crime) like, every minute detail about the case, including showing her the love notes these students were passing which prove one of them got pregnant.   With almost no prompting whatsoever!  Even if her sister hadn't killed a fellow teacher, that's a huge invasion of privacy.  I liked the premise, but was disappointed by the almost deus ex machina way that Ivy ignored everything about her sister which would have pointed her in the right direction.  For someone who was a PI for fourteen years, it just seemed really sloppy and not clever.  Also, after all that, she still covered up for her sister not only accidentally murdering her lover, but also botching an abortion on a student.  Their whole relationship did not make sense to me.  It's an okay read, but sort of felt frustrating, like the plot and character actions and decisions felt less organic than it should have. 

I'll Never Tell

I'll Never Tell

By Catherine McKenzie

Twenty years ago, seventeen year-old Amanda Holmes was found bludgeoned in a rowboat at the MacAllister family’s Camp Macaw. No one was ever charged with the crime.

Now, after their parents’ sudden deaths, the MacAllister siblings return to camp to read the will and decide what to do with the prime real estate the camp occupies. Ryan needs to sell. Margaux hasn’t made up her mind. Mary believes in leaving well enough alone. Kate and Liddie—the twins—have opposing views. And Sean Booth, the groundskeeper, just hopes he still has a home when all is said and done.

But it’s more complicated than a simple vote. The will stipulates that until they unravel the mystery of what happened to Amanda, they can’t settle the estate. Any one of them could have done it, and each one is holding a piece of the puzzle. Will they work together to finally discover the truth, or will their secrets finally tear the family apart?

This one had an interesting premise and structure (I particularly appreciated the table of everyone's locations, especially when you realize that the characters themselves filled it out) but for me it fell apart a bit at the end.  We had like three "false alarms" of seeming to identify the attempted murderer and then realizing that no, it was actually someone else! At least twice (that I can remember off the top of my head), someone goes to confront the person they think is the murderer by themselves, and I mean, everyone's family is weird, but like, if my newly-realized half-brother was accused of murder and then suspiciously fled the scene, I would not then paddle out towards the deserted island where he decamped to have a heart-to-heart with him.  Although, to be fair, without any actual evidence, how are you going to call the police on that?

And to be honest, the whole half-brother thing didn't do much for me, I mean, they allude to the fact that their parents didn't seem to want any kids, so after having five of their own, they discover that Mr. MacAllister had a baby with a prostitute who is now like eight years old, and they just... act as surrogate family together?  Without any of the other kids (including the incredibly nosy one) finding out? Okay, Jan.  

I think there could have been a whole book on how creepy and dysfunctional Mr. MacAllister was: first with the secret baby having, and then the whole, "treat you like my son, and you are my son, but I won't acknowledge that and when I die, you'll get to fight over who inherits with my other son and all of my daughters, one of whom you want to bone" thing, and the the double whammy of both spying on all his children (with actual surveillance!) and enlisting his pseudo-son but actually his actual son to do the spying.  Phew.  Like, is Mr. MacAllister a psychopath?  I also didn't really follow the whole thing about how he assumed his son (Ryan) did it, and then the police did a DNA test, and somehow that cleared Ryan, but Mr. MacAllister didn't see the DNA test, so he still thought Ryan did it, but then somehow the DNA test was in his spy file after his death, so he had to have seen it at some point, but yadda yadda yadda.  

Finally, I hated the identity of the murderer.  You going to tell me that a fifteen year old girl bludgeoned a seventeen year old girl with a canoe paddle and then just like, sat on it for twenty years?  Clearly got her genes from the Mr. MacAllister side of the family.  I mean, they didn't even add that she was incredibly jacked or anything, to make it more realistic, although maybe the fact that she walked away from a horse-car crash that killed the driver of the car was supposed to be a clue that she was superhuman.  

I kid, I kid.  I did enjoy the lead-up to the denouement, it was a fun setting, and the number of characters was good - I didn't have any difficulty trying to keep anyone straight.  They were all easily distinguishable from the others, and each had their own little quirks.  It also got me thinking about what I'd do if, for example, I had five siblings and one of them murdered someone and then twenty years later committed suicide.  Like, do you say anything to the grieving family and tell them who did it?  Obviously here, the MacAllisters just... didn't say anything.  I mean, it is going to be hard to explain why you didn't say anything EARLIER about seeing a blonde girl whacking another, but that's sort of on you.  Amanda's parents deserve the same closure you all got. 

Ten Second Reviews

The House with Chicken Legs

By Sophie Anderson

This is like a middle school reader version of Baba Yaga, where she adopts like an eleven year old girl and then shit happens.  I will be very honest: I did not finish this one and only sort of limply flipped through the final pages (Baba never comes back?!).  Among other things, a kid from the Lake District in England tells our heroine Marinka that he is really into " soccer". It brought me in mind of the first Harry Potter book, in which things just got semi-randomly changed for an American audience (because we do not know what a philosopher is, I suppose) and that was twenty-three years ago (sniff) and we've all come a long way since then, and frankly a little cross-cultural contamination is good for the soul anyway.  Let's raise some fricking cosmopolitans.  Anyway, this may be impolite, but I want to shout out to Nine Witch Tales which is actual witch horror for middle school readers, because back in the 60s they didn't care about "mental health" or "not terrifying young readers".

Fatal Inheritance

By Rachel Rhys

This one was certainly nicely atmospheric - and I don't mean it's suspenseful or thrilling, but that it feels nicely of the time and place, i.e., 1948 post-war French Riviera.  I went along for the ride, but I did have some bugaboos: Eve's a doormat until she needs to be otherwise for the sake of the plot, and then she'll quietly subside again.  I never really got a feel for her personality - is she chafing, is she demoralized, is she seizing her opportunity here, what is it?

And the solution to the mystery bugged too.  So her mysterious inheritance is basically unrelated to the "accidents" which keep befalling her, since those are just about the lost Nazi art smugglers who want to get into the house.  And the art is in Guy Lester's house because...? I never made the connection of when and how it got buried behind the wall, and why it needed to be removed conveniently when Eve was still in the house.  Smugglers really demand punctuality and courtesy when removing stolen items, I guess.

But the tagline, "She didn’t have an enemy in the world…until she inherited a fortune." isn't really true: she didn't have an enemy because she inherited a fortune, she sort of just managed to wander into a criminal ring simultaneously with inheriting a fortune.  It's not a very surprising mystery (you know who is mysterious and angry but falling in love with her, and who is mysterious and nice but secretly using her very early on, and the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad thing that Guy Lester did is clear about halfway into the book, although they save the "revelation" for much later) but it's not a bad piece of fiction, and it's such an interesting setting that the novelty at least, should keep you going until the end.

Bad Blood

Bad Blood

By John Carreyou

In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup “unicorn” promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work.

A riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley.

I finally finally finally got back into reading again (you may have noticed that recent reviews were lackluster, if I even finished the book at all) thanks to Bad Blood.  This one was re-energizing, and you kinda spend the whole thing doing that, "What. the. fuck??" look that I always reference from Chris Rock in Nurse Betty when he sees his dad, played by Morgan Freeman, dancing with no one on the side of the Grand Canyon. Just that sense, you know, that someone very close to you has lost all of their marbles. In this case, that WTF applies to all the people who fell for the cult of Holmes.  For years!  For years they went along with this, although to be fair, it was both a very desirable and beneficial pitch, and also it wasn't immediately apparent that it was rotten to the core.  Although it seems like even a slightly more than cursory look would have taken care of that...?

In retrospect you go, how did they sucker this many people for this long? And the answer apparently is, a combination of complete intimidation of those over whom they held power, and complete ingratiation of those who could have destroyed them.  It's incredible!  When I first heard about it, I definitely gave it a brush off:  pfft, who cares about whether another start-up is toxic and also lied to consumers.  Same shit, different day.  But no!  This was an incredible and incredibly engrossing tale of malignantly bad behavior.  Props to Carreyou for his work, he takes an almost ten year long journey about medical devices and makes it captivating from beginning to end.

For all I've complained in the past, I feel like I have to praise Carreyou's organization of his book, which is both chronological (thank you for an easy to follow and logical progression!) and, because he knows you forget people who only pop in and out occasionally, heavy on the "John-who-ran-the-Edison-room" reminders about who the various people are.  Thank you, Carreyou, for recognizing that I can only retain so much at one time, and minor characters' names and identities in books is not one of them.

Like Five Days at Memorial you kinda leave the book doubting that the villains of the piece even realize that they are in fact the bad guys.  As in that case, Elizabeth and Sunny seem to have kind of doubled down on the position that they've done nothing wrong, although I suppose anyone who has the brazen confidence to do it in the first place doesn't have a lot of room for self-doubt or even second thoughts.

The one thing I wish we'd gotten in this is a bit more wrap up of where the key players stood, particularly (for me) George Shultz, who practically disowned his grandson for whistleblowing this whole house of cards to the ground.  I can't say for sure that I'd have the wherewithal to do what he and Erika did in reporting the misdeeds, but to be personally punished for doing right strikes me as so unfair.   So much collateral damage done.  And for what!  A miracle product that didn't work? Such dishonesty in professing to care about people's health while actually causing harm indiscriminately.  Not to mention poor Ian Gibbons, who carried the shame of it to his death.  It makes you mad, it gets your (forgive the pun) blood up!  And this, for god's sake, explains why regulatory bodies, while annoying, are absolutely and completely necessary.