WTF Archives - The Y Logs

Yzabel / April 2, 2018

Review: Wild Card

Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files: Wild Card by Jim Butcher

My rating: [rating=2]

Blurb:

Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files saga continues in this original and in-continuity graphic novel, featuring a never-before-told story set after the bestselling novel White Night and graphic novel Down Town! A bizarre double murder draws the interest of Chicago’s only wizard-for-hire. But as Harry Dresden begins his investigation, the clues lead to troubling conclusions about the possible perpetrator, and set him on a path that will place him in the middle of a conflict between the city’s three most powerful factions — a conflict that could engulf all of Chicago!

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through Netgalley.]

I put up reading that one, thinking it’d spoil me too much about some of the Dreaden Files books I haven’t read yet, but, uhm, turned out it didn’t. Or maybe I’ve ‘forgotten’ just enough details from the books that whatever may have been a spoiler, I just didn’t realise it? Oh well. Good thing in any case.

Globally an entertaining story, with high stakes of the kind you’d find in one of the novels, and a plan coming from a devious enemy who’s clearly understood how to pit people against each other. Because, as silly as it may sound, sometimes the people in charge do act in what appears to be the non-smart way just not to lose face—as much as I find it non-rational, previous plots in the Dresden Files have seen the tension mount enough for this to be believable. This was helped by pretty dynamic fight/action scenes. Also, bonus point for little Karrin and her dad.

On the downside:
– As usual with a lot of comics, I could do without the sexualised-woman-poses, many of which looked definitely weird (you know, those ‘let’s strike a sexy pose while wielding heavy weapons, it’s not as if I need my balance for that’ poses). Just like that scene in the hospital, where a character’s wounds are listed, but when you see said character in bed, well… That didn’t look like such a beaten up and bruised body to me.
– That ending. WTF? In a way, it made sense, but it was so totally anti-climatic that I kept looking to see if I hadn’t missed a few more pages in the book.

So, yes… Something like 2.5 stars, because mostly it kept me entertained, right until that odd ending?

Yzabel / September 22, 2017

Review: Darkover Landfall

Darkover Landfall by Marion Zimmer Bradley

My rating: [rating=1]

Blurb:

Darkover, a planet of wonder, world of mystery, has been a favourite of science fiction readers for many years. For it is a truly alien sphere – a world of strange intelligences of brooding skies beneath a ruddy sun, and of powers unknown to Earth. In this new novel, Mario Zimmer Bradley tells of the original coming of the Earthmen, of the days when Darkover knew not humanity. This is the full bodied novel of what happened when a colonial starship crashlanded on that uncharted planet to encounter for the first time in human existence the impact of the Ghost Wind, of the psychic currents that were native only to that world, and of the price that every Earthling must pay before Darkover can claim for itself.

Review:

Erf. I’ve started re-reading this series, because I remember how much I loved it when I was a teenager… but damn, I didn’t remember this one was so bad. (Or is it because I sometimes used to like shite as a teenager, and that was part of it?)

The story in itself is not uninteresting, all the more since it’s THE origins book in the Darkover series, but the relationships… especially the way women are viewed and treated… Wow. That was one special level of bad.

I can sort of accept a patriarchal society, women being treated as wombs, etc. in the more ‘medieval-like’ novels of the series, because 1) it fits a certain conception of ‘dark ages obscurantism’, as cliché as that may be, and 2) as far as I remember, in those books, it was often presented as something that isn’t so good: while it does remain infuriating, it’s part of the conflict underlying those narratives.

Here, though, in a group of engineers, colonists, space crew, scientists, where men and women have similar levels of skills, with gender equality laws on Earth? Nope. Doesn’t sit with me. Especially not as soon as pregnancies enter the picture, and give yet another reason for males (and some women!) to be patronising, chalk every reaction to ‘she’s pregnant’, veer towards gaslighting at times (because obviously, the guys in the story know better than Judy Lovat who’s the father of her child), and go spouting crap about how not wanting children is some sort of mental illness. Camilla’s arc was particularly painful, because, yes, she is being reduced to a walking womb, what’s with the doctor even threatening to sedate her during her pregnancy (actually, it does happen once), like some kind of stupid, ignorant being who needs to be locked for her own good. Empowering much, right?

So basically, you get accidentally pregnant (not through any fault of hers—ghost wind was to blame, same for her partner), while you thought your contraceptive was doing its job, you don’t want to have a child, but you’re denied an abortion. OK. Not cool. In the context of colonists stranded on a hostile planet, that poses an interesting conundrum (= it’s obvious that either they need to spawn as much as possible, or they’ll die in one or two generations). However, was it really necessary to lay it in such rude and demeaning ways? The Battlestar Galactica reboot has a similar subplot, but the episode about it was at least treated with much more gravitas and moral ambiguity.

It is also important to note that, no, Camilla didn’t sign up for this, so treating her as a spoiled kid throwing a tantrum was inappropriate. Putting it back into context: she’s an engineer and programmer, she signed up to be part of the ship’s crew during the trip, not to be a colonist meant to help populate a new planet. And even in the event of staying on that colony, it would’ve been in a society where she would’ve had a few years to make the decision.

I have no idea if anyone considers this book as a ‘feminist’ work, but if you do, please stop. This is not feminist, it’s patriarchy at its worst: insidious.

[To be fair, I didn’t remember this book as being the best in the series either, nor my favourite at all, so I’m still going to try rereading 2-3 others.]

Yzabel / June 7, 2016

Review: Dear Amy

Dear Amy by Helen Callaghan

My rating: [rating=1]

Blurb:

Margot Lewis is the agony aunt for The Cambridge Examiner. Her advice column, Dear Amy, gets all kinds of letters – but none like the one she’s just received:

Dear Amy,
I don’t know where I am. I’ve been kidnapped and am being held prisoner by a strange man. I’m afraid he’ll kill me.
Please help me soon,
Bethan Avery

Bethan Avery has been missing for years. This is surely some cruel hoax. But, as more letters arrive, they contain information that was never made public. How is this happening? Answering this question will cost Margot everything . . .

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

Entertaining but not much more than that, I’m afraid. I liked reading this novel, only the mystery wasn’t so deep, and I kept wondering why other characters didn’t challenge this or that plot point more.

It started well enough with Margot, our narrator, struggling in her personal life: her ex-husband wants the house, she’s pondering her own anxiety-related issues (not to mention “shouldn’t I go off my meds now that I’m feeling better?), and one of her former students has vanished in strange circumstances. On top of her job in posh St. Hilda’s school in Cambridge, she also manages an agony aunt column, “Dear Amy”, in a local newspaper. So when letters are sent to her mailbox at said newspaper, from a girl who was abducted and probably killed some twenty years ago, this only adds to Margot’s confusion, while nevertheless pricking her curiosity. There could be a life at stake here… and perhaps even more.

The original abductee, Bethan Avery, was never found, and it’s clearly weird for her to be writing letters, all the more because, from their tone, it seems she’s still captive! So is she a victim, or an accomplice? I thought this was quite a challenging premise. I still think it is. However, two issues arose while I was reading:

1/ I found it easy enough to guess the outcome of the mystery around Bethan.
2/ This part of the novel led to several plot holes that were never filled. For instance, it was never made clear whether the police tested the letters for fingerprints, and too many people either dismissed them as a prank, or didn’t wonder enough about how Bethan-the-captive-girl could’ve sent them. As a result, it diminished their importance, made the whole thing seem far-fetched, and I think that’s part of what allowed me to sense what was wrong here, and take an eductaed guess (turned out I was right).

My other gripes in general concerned:
– How the characters weren’t so much fleshed out as placed there like “token psychological thriller chars” (the psychologist, the potential love interest who helps the narrator…);
– The handling of mental disorders, both through the narrative and through other chars (that Greta psychologist was rather inept);
– Some cliché plot devices, like the culprit’s actions (creepy but could’ve been handled better), or both landline AND mobile phone cut at the same time (is GSM cover so bad around Cambridge, and do all batteries die so quickly? I never kill mine like that, and that’s after spending commuting time playing games on it…);
– And, to be honest, I didn’t really connect with Margot or anyone else in the novel. Mostly they were too infuriating, in one way or another, and didn’t redeem themselves much through other actions or personality traits.

That said, I liked parts of the second main arc (the abducted girl one). It highlighted the plight of all the murdered girls, as well as Bethan’s. It allowed for a thrilling intruder-in-the-hope scene. Its ending was sort of predictable, but somehow that didn’t matter too much, because it’s kind of what I wanted to read anyway.

On the side of writing: I don’t know if this was because I read an ARC—maybe this was changed in the published version—but often present and past tense mixed in a scene or even a paragraph without the narrative justifying it, and I found this jarring.

1.5 stars? I can’t say I hated this book, but it’s a mix between “OK” and “slight dislike”—I really wish the idea at its root had been handled better…

Yzabel / March 3, 2016

Review: The Painted Ocean

The Painted Ocean by Gabriel Packard

My rating: [rating=1]

Blurb:

When I was a little girl, my dad left me and my mum, and he never came back. And you’re supposed to be gutted when that happens. But secretly I preferred it without him, cos it meant I had my mum completely to myself, without having to share her with anyone. And I sort of inherited all the affection she used to give to my dad – like he’d left it behind for me as a gift, to say sorry for deserting me

So says eleven year old Shruti of her broken home in suburban middle England. But hopes of her mother’s affection are in vain: speaking little English, and fluent in only Hindi and Punjabi, Shruti’s mother is lost, and soon falls prey to family pressure to remarry. To find another husband means returning to India and leaving Shruti behind.

Meanwhile at school a new arrival, the indomitable Meena, dispenses with Shruti’s bullying problems and transforms her day to day life. Desperate for companionship Shruti latches on to Meena to the point of obsession, following her through high school and on to university. But when Meena invites Shruti to join her on holiday in India, she has no idea how dangerous her obsession will turn out to be…

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

There were merits to this book, for what it denounced (oppression; rape; manipulative people who drown others in words the better to confuse them; humans demeaning other humans to the point of making them look like animals). Unfortunately, I thought the story overall was too implausible, and the characters not compelling enough for me to really care.

The first half of the novel was decent enough at first, depicting Shruti’s life in England as an 11-year old kid whose father was gone and whose mother was torn between her life with her daughter, and the family’s honour. This is made most blatant through the Uncle Aadesh character, who wants her to go back to India and marry another man, however the price would be to put Shruti in a foster family… and leaver her there. Terrorised by the prospect of being kept away from her mother, Shruti makes bad decision upon bad decision, managing to land herself in, well, a foster family.

And I guess this is where things started to go downhill, because for the whole story, Shruti struck me as a pushover and a not so smart person, which didn’t made her sympathetic nor made me root for her. Meena wasn’t better, mind you: her way of ending the bullying Shruti suffered was efficient but ruthless, and her idea to teach Aadesh a lesson was just mind-boggling (what sane 12-year old girl would come up with that? Why did Shruti not reflect upon that when she was grown-up?). It didn’t reflect so much the life of South-Asian people in the UK than make me wonder why I should care, and this was really too bad, because I wanted to care, and I wanted to read more about Shruti’s experiences… if only they hadn’t been so improbable and/or based on silly decisions on her part. I guess that’s obsession for you: it makes you dumb.

More than anything, what bothered me seriously was Shruti’s voice. It fitted her as a 11-year old girl, even though all the “cos” and “like” and “And I was this. And I was that. And then we did this. And then that happened.” quickly got on my nerves. However, it was definitely weird when she kept that voice as a 18/19-year old woman, and when she went through the traumatising experiences of the second half of the novel, it was… disturbing. Not in a good way: in a “see a child being raped” way. I don’t particularly like reading about that. Rape is terrible enough as it is.

Those same experiences were also too far on the bizarre end of the spectrum: flying to the other side of the world, getting embroiled in such situations, people treating others like slaves, manipulative games… All those kept piling up upon each other, to the point where my suspension of disbelief was all but suspended by a thread, which broke quickly soon after that. If it had been less unbelievable, and more subtle, it would definitely have had a strong impact; but there’s strong, and there’s overkill. I wanted to feel for Shruti, and ended up just wondering why she couldn’t see through anything, why she thought like a kid (using a stolen passport and thinking that’s a good idea? Well…), why anyone would make such decisions, really. The ending was interesting; it would’ve been better if it hadn’t been so rushed—I honestly couldn’t believe how Shruti managed to get where she did, in so few pages (considering how non-savvy she was, she should have died ten times over).

I may have appreciated the story if the bizarre setting had been peopled with characters I could enjoy reading about… but it wasn’t.

Yzabel / December 25, 2014

Review: Science… For Her!

Science…For Her! by Megan Amram

My rating: [rating=1]

Summary:

Megan Amram, one of Forbes’ “30 Under 30 in Hollywood & Entertainment,” Rolling Stone’s “25 Funniest People on Twitter,” and a writer for NBC’s hit show Parks and Recreation, delivers a politically, scientifically, and anatomically incorrect “textbook” that will have women screaming with laughter, and men dying to know what the noise is about.

In the vein of faux expert books by John Hodgman and Amy Sedaris, Science…for Her! is ostensibly a book of science written by a denizen of women’s magazines. Comedy writer and Twitter sensation Megan Amram showcases her fiendish wit with a pitch-perfect attack on everything from those insanely perky tips for self-improvement to our bizarre shopaholic dating culture to the socially mandated pursuit of mind-blowing sex to the cringe-worthy secret codes of food and body issues.

Part hilarious farce, part biting gender commentary, Amram blends Cosmo and science to highlight absurdities with a machine-gun of laugh-inducing lines that leave nothing and no one unscathed. Subjects include: this Spring’s ten most glamorous ways to die; tips for hosting your own big bang; what religion is right for your body type; and the most pressing issue facing women today: kale!!!

Be prepared to laugh about anything in this outrageous satirical gem.

Review:

(I got an ARC through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.)

I was hoping this one would be funny, with pokes to some “girly” magazines and their “silly” articles, yet also real scientific data in it—like a textbook with serious information, only in the shape of articles, lists of tips, etc.

It wasn’t the case. It only looked the part… until I started reading it.

Science here was reduced to a bare minimum. Nothing any high-schooler wouldn’t know, nothing really interesting, nothing to learn here. So the Earth is orbiting around the sun: big news. Reproduction: I learnt more about it in the anatomy book I got when I was 7. Either you really don’t know much about science and this is going to be useless, or you already know a bit, and it won’t be of any use to you. If there’s a middle-ground in that muddle, it’s a very thin and invisible one.

The rest didn’t save the book: it was just too heavy-handed to my taste. Like using plaster coating instead of foundation. Too full of fat jokes, rape jokes, wife-beating jokes, mean jokes, tasteless jokes in general, that went on for far too long, again and again and again. After the Nth iteration of “I can’t get over my boyfriend” and “here’s a dick” and “fat ugly bitch” and so on, I was glad I had had a few drinks in me to keep on reading. (Note: I’m only a social drinker, and a moderate one at that. When I need booze to get me through a book, it’s bad, bad news.)

There’s humour, satire and political incorrectness… and then there’s just too heavy and thick to bear. Hey, wait. Thickium: the one element you won’t find on the periodic table, because it’s atomic number is so high it actually fell off said table. See? I can do science, too.

It takes real skill to properly satirise any subject. I don’t think that skill was anywhere to be found here. In the end, I just wasted my time. (And probably would have wasted it much less if I had read an actual issue of Marie Claire, Elle, or whatever, instead. Unless the US versions of those magazines are really so much worse than the French ones, in which case I won’t ever touch them with a ten-foot pole.)