Ten Second Reviews

Semiosis

By Sue Burke

Colonists from Earth wanted the perfect home, but they’ll have to survive on the one they found. They don’t realize another life form watches...and waits...

Only mutual communication can forge an alliance with the planet's sentient species and prove that humans are more than tools.

Ooo, I liked this one a lot, especially in the beginning, which is when it was really out there.  Towards the end I felt like it became more conventional sci-fi-y with a struggle against another colony, but the beginning, where you just don't know what it going to happen next??? Fabulous!  It felt really fresh too, like a whole new idea (although I'm sure that something somewhere had the same germ (haha, no pun intended) of an idea) and even when we do get to the point where they're in constant communication together and they're pretty clear that there isn't going to be another betrayal, it's a well written story.   I'm waffling on reading the second, mostly because the reviews are iffy and frankly, this doesn't need a sequel.  But on the other hand, it was a fun, fascinating world to spend time in, and even just reading about their day-to-day survival was entertaining in Burke's hands. 

The Witches Are Coming

By Lindy West

From the moment powerful men started falling to the #MeToo movement, the lamentations began: this is feminism gone too far, this is injustice, this is a witch hunt. In The Witches Are Coming, firebrand author of the New York Times bestselling memoir and now critically acclaimed Hulu TV series Shrill, Lindy West, turns that refrain on its head. You think this is a witch hunt? Fine. You've got one.

Hmm, what to say on this one? It's undeniably funny, well-written, and passionate.  But so GODDAMN DEPRESSING. Not unrelentingly depressing, or I would have stopped reading.  But notice that West had to end the book on a couple of chapters whose throughline is basically "Don't give up! The world is not a complete dumpster fire yet! There are still some nice things (trees) even though we are rapidly killing them and everyone else and heading towards total annihilation of all that we currently enjoy - oh wait, this is depressing again."  I don't know if the intent was to energize and electrify, but all it did was depress and demoralize.  It was a funny depression though.  Okay, I'm gonna be real here: I am hungover and mentally checked out on this review.  What is my review? That I liked the writing but the message was sad and I would read something else by her, and it had nice short chapters.  Honestly what I should have done was pull quotes because they're all hilarious nuggets, but obviously, I ain't doing that.  I really liked the Adam Sandler chapter, because IT IS VERY TRUE.  WHY IS HE ALWAYS SO MAGICALLY GIFTED?? HE IS AVERAGE, MAKE HIM AVERAGE.

Ten Second Reviews

The Devil in Music

By Kate Ross

Alas, we've come to the end of our series, and I am actually very disappointed that there won't be any more - this was a pleasant delight of a set.  As before, coincidences and lucky chances abound without alluding to them, and it's a very chunky book, but you just don't seem to mind any of that.  I may at some point get the whole set to sit down and enjoy.  I really couldn't say that these are the best books in the world, but I just really had a good time with them, and in the end, isn't that what matters?  Anyway, Julian Kestrel solves another (couple) murders, this time whilst on Lake Como, which did nothing to make me satisfied with my own little plot of land.  Truly the rich are to be envied.

My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories

Edited by Stephanie Perkins

This was more of a hit or miss for me (which most anthologies are, despite my glowing review of How Long Til Black Future Month? and the, uh, next anthology, below).  It's definitely a YA & love/romance-y one, particularly at the start, which I guess I... wasn't expecting?  Now that I think about it, I think I just picked this one up in the library and didn't really look at reviews or anything, so... surprise! Here's my one sentence reviews:

• Midnights, by Rainbow Rowell: boring, nineteen year olds like each other after several years of being friends.  
• The Lady and the Fox, by Kelly Link: girl falls in love with weird guy she only sees at Christmas if it's snowing.  He's from like, three hundred years ago, so who knows how that culture shock is going to go but let's pretend they have a future together.
• Angels in the Snow, by Matt de la Pena: hispanic guy falls for white girl while he's housesitting at some rich person's place - not bad, but after the previous two, needed something stronger than this.
• Polaris is Where You'll Find Me, by Jenny Han: Um, what the heck did I just read? Young human girl raised up by Santa falls for an elf, but also has a thing where she tells lies about meeting a Scandinavian boy and also really wants to leave the North Pole. This feels like it ends on a cliffhanger, but it's crazy enough that I was starting to get into it.
• It's a Yuletide Miracle, Charlie Brown: Ah, here we run into our series second theme: depressed people.  It kinda came up with Angels in the Snow, and in this one, a young christmas tree salesman is picked up by, and rearranges the furniture for, a young lady whose father left her and her mother because they were his bigamist family.  Fun at the outset but a little too saccharine to finish.
• Your Temporary Santa, by David Levithan: another one about a depressed family, although I wasn't quite clear on what fatherly disaster had befallen this one - another abandonment I guess.  This was fine, less romance because the couple was already together, so it was just someone doing something nice, which is more of what I was looking for in this set.
• Krampuslauf, by Holly Black: trailer park girl invites a demon back to a party, and he turns a cheating boyfriend into a donkey.  Good times! Two thumbs up.
• What the Hell Have You Done, Sophie Roth? by Gayle Forman: lonely city girl gets picked up by black guy on her small town midwest college campus.  I think I gave this one more of a pass because the stories before were a bit better/different.  If this had been placed third or fourth in the book, whoa.
• Beer Buckets and Baby Jesus, by Myra McEntire: Juvenile delinquent and good girl fall for each other during mixed up Christmas Pageant process.  At least this was a little bit funnier than the other boy-meets-girl stories, but also more of the same.
• Welcome to Christmas, CA, by Kiersten White: young teen hates everyone in her small town, until she meets the new diner cook who knows what food everyone needs. I definitely thought that the cook was going to turn out to be like, an elf, or an angel, or some other supernatural being, but he was just another juvenile delinquent, but this one was my favorite by far, especially when she learns that her mother and de facto step-father have actually been scrimping and saving for her and her college fund (so obvious, but it's CHRISTMAS).  Sniff.
•  Star of Bethlehem, by Ally Carter: Young singing sensation switches places with Icelandic girl and flies to Oklahoma where she feels okay about singing Christmas Carols again. This one felt way too long, and I can't help but HATE the very end, where the local judge is telling people that apparently it would be pretty easy to undo the guardianship her manager has over her.  In favor of these people she met a week ago, I guess.  Mmmmhmmm, yeah. 
• The Girl Who Woke the Dreamer, by Laini Taylor: The Strange the Dreamer series has been on my list forever (I think I was waiting to see if more books in the series were coming out???) and this gave me the push to get it. I didn't want to read too closely in case there were spoilers for the book series, but the beginning is really interesting and well written, and it inspired me to check more books by her out, so what else do you want?

Nine Witch Tales

By Abby Kedabra

Man, I LOVED this book when I was growing up, some twenty-five years ago, so I bought an old copy online, and it does NOT disappoint, this book is wild. I really mostly remembered the first story, where the twelve horned witches come in to do some sewing and then send this woman on errands like, "fill up a bucket using this sieve".  But all of them are fun, and short enough you don't get tired of them: haha, the one about Kowashi's mother, who developed an appetite for eating fish, bones and all, and he whacks her on the head and realizes she's a witch demon cat, and then! Casually, at the very end it goes: "Not long after this, Kowashi discovered that the wicked cat had killed his real mother and buried her in the garden." And then it just ends. FIN.  MAJESTIC.  I LOVE IT. And the curious woman who uses the magical ointment and is dragged all over and then wakes up in a barn and gets fired because her employer thinks she's drunk, lol. There's comeuppances and escapes, and each story is a delightfully spooky and scary-but-not-too-scary tale.

 

Merlin's Keep

Merlin's Keep

By Madeleine Brent

Jani, the strange and lovely heroine, has been brought up in a remote region of the Himalayas in Tibet by a runaway English soldier. Both Jani’s past and that of her soldier protector are shrouded in a mystery that grows ever deeper for Jani when the foreign demon on a black horse comes from the south to take her away to a new and frightening world—a London orphanage. Later, when she moves on and finds the Woman in Red, Jani becomes one of the family in a Hampshire household. And it is here that her past is gradually uncovered. She becomes locked in a macabre struggle, long prophesied by the High Lama of her Tibetan youth, against the strange and terrifying powers of the Silver Man.

Merlin's Keep is still in the classic Brent style, but is a little bit less...action-filled, maybe? I say this about a book in which a young girl's protector dies in snow storm like, thirty pages in, and then she has to make it through diphtheria, orphanages, sexual harassment, poisonous snakes, sinister magicians (like real magic, not David Copperfield), dangerous trips through the Himalayas, hallucinations, tibetan bandits, snow leopards, and the East End of London.  But there's a lot less activity on our heroine's part - she is basically packed up and sent from place to place by other people for the entire book.  I think the only initiative she takes on her own steam is her trip to the East End, looking for her friend.

Brent sets this somewhere in the Himalayas, and is quite a bit vaguer on location than he/she was in Stormswift.  For example, they're not supposed to be in either Nepal or Tibet, but both are close by.  Namkhara is a place, but it's in West Bengal, too far east (ironically) to make much sense in context.  And "Chak Pass" seems made up.  It does seem like we spend less time in the foreign country than we usually do in Brent's books, which is too bad, since I was excited to  re-read this one because of my time out in Nepal.  Merlin's Keep also has a big supernatural element, which is also somewhat uncommon for Brent.  

I think the lack of action is part of the reason I don't really remember this one so well, and why it's not so much a favorite.  There's a big macguffin in the way of a precious gem which they need to steal, except that they're fated to steal it anyway, so it's not that much of a heist.  Overall, like I said, just not my favorite, plus I loved how hypocritical Jani was about the Silver Man's use of her friend in his magic spells, but Jani (TWICE) has him use it for her benefit too (first to find her friend, then to heal his blindness), so I guess you don't feel that bad about it, huh? And we're just going to ignore whatever her friend was doing in Jamaica to piss off a hoodoo practitioner, I guess.  And the vet is so weird, too, proposing to Jani because well, she's there, and this other woman he liked already got married, so may as well ask around.  Hmmmm, okay, Jan.