en-US Sat, 10 May 2025 04:38:36 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Review7557448425 Sat, 10 May 2025 04:38:36 -0700 /review/show/7557448425 Peter gave 5 stars to Overgrowth (Hardcover) by Mira Grant
It is interesting how new books echo each other. Overgrowth is the second book I've read this month where the female protagonists is certain she is an alien brought up as a human. Unlike Beautyland however, where the alienness may be a metaphor, delusion or true, there is no doubt here. Anastasia Miller is very open that as a child the original Anastasia Miller was abducted by an alien plant, which then grew the version narrating the book in a pod. If you ask her, she will openly tell you that, exasperating her teachers to a minor degree, and delighting the few friends she has. The problem is her alien plant overlords has seeded Earth with their duplicating pod plants, and thirty years later or so are now coming to pick up their progeny, and destroy Earth.

Overgrowth is a fascinating look at an alien invasion from the perspective of an unwitting advance guard. Much of the first third has to deal with this dual personality that Stasia has, on one side she is a customer service operative for a big Sillicon Valley tech company, living with her friends and with a scientist boyfriend away doing research. On the other side she starts having odd dreams, and when a signal is picked up from space, she knows exactly what it means. We get to discover her birthright with her, and her latter poisiton as a fugitive, scientific subject, and slowly turning alien. And in the last third of the book we get to watch the invasion in full, how Stasia feels about people getting wiped out and nature vs nurture plays out.

Grant has put in a lot of work here, her alien world-building is terrific, and whilst some of the chase sequences in the middle section seem a little scrappy, they certainly convince from people trying to work on the fly, not least when they realise their friend - who is slowly turning into a carniverous plant - was always telling the truth. I did feel that some of that midsection was a little long, the book could do with being a little tighter in places, not least because while a lot happens in it, it still feels like it is padded. That is a minor quibble though, it was a thoroughly original take on the alien invasion and one that makes sense, while Grant quote The War Of the Worlds and the Fermi Paradox with a comfort that knows she has thought about how this all fits together. Never trust someone with Audrey 2 pajamas. ]]> Review7552553769 Thu, 08 May 2025 03:42:33 -0700 /review/show/7552553769 Peter gave 4 stars to Vanishing World (Hardcover) by Sayaka Murata
Reading books in translation can often be simple, but it becomes much more difficult when there are different societal norms and practices in the home country. Sayaka Murata's Vanishing World, as translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, is a tricky one to translate because the future Japan it exists in has changed with regard to how core family relationships are organised. We follow our lead character Amane through her life, from her natural birth - which in this society is unusual as most people are artificially inseminated. Indeed it is a little frowned upon to have actual sex at all, and certainly as Amane grows up it becomes increasingly taboo for married couples to have any sort of physical relationship. At the same time people fall in love all the time, though often just with fictional anime characters, often designed to fulfil that role. As she grows up Amane describes her first love - Lapis - a lead in an anime who she has her first sexual relationship with (though much discussion is had about it just being masturbation). She later finds a fellow fan, who she has her first actual physical relationship with, though since everyone is fitted with contraceptive devices it is hard to say how much of the copulation is as we would understand it. As she grows older we see her negotiate this new world and her own place in it, she has more physical relationships but also carries around a purse full of her 40 other lovers, fictional creations. She gets married and they try to get pregnant, all whilst having separate love relationships.

Part of the translation issue, and this is very cultural, is to what degree Amane is unusual. She occasionally mentions feeling out of place, and has female friends who find her excitement in physical sex, weird. There is also the degree to which this scenario leads out of the current Japanese relationship crisis, where working women do not find their male counterparts attractive. There is certainly a homophobic aspect to Japanese society that is embedded here, as marriages are not meant to be the form of procreation, the lack of same sex marriages seems anachronistic (it is discussed as the possible end of any kind of family whatsoever). The final third of the book finds Amane and her husband moving to the experimental city of Chiba, where pregnancy is decided by a computer, which inseminates all those eligible at the same time - men and women alike (one of the experiments is a male womb). Once parents in Chiba give birth they give up their children to the society birthing centre, and the city is full of children who call everyone "mother" and are fundamentally co-parented by the city. This is a big step, has shades of Brave New World about it and is seen to be equitable and the future. Amane likes the solitary aspect of it, but has other issues about her physical urges which suddenly shifts the last twenty pages or so into an actual horror story.

Vanishing World is a fascinating work, even with its somewhat unsettling coda. It feels very Japanese, its talk of romantic relationships with fictional character seems to push Ginny Tapley Takemori into some tricky areas in translation, it feels like this is an idea that is already concurrent in Japanese society. The scenario presented seems very speculative to my eyes, but possibly not so much in modern Japan, where ideas about the point of family and relationships may be at a different stage. I'm not sure the final lurch into horror does it any favours, though it certainly gives it a more sensationalist denouement (there is a "ban this sick filth" aspect to it). Robust and thought-provoking. ]]> Review7544421225 Mon, 05 May 2025 03:51:15 -0700 /review/show/7544421225 Peter gave 3 stars to Sancta Femina (Paperback) by Kathryn Combs
A lot is going on in Sancta Femina, which smashes up a post-apocalyptic humanity tale, with future war, the discovery of faster-than-light travel, the cost of longevity treatments and religious terrorism all as distinct plot points around a lead character with auspicious genetics. I wonder if this has gone through a lot of iterations, because it feels like the religious stuff is supposed to be more important than it ends up being, the religion of the post-apocalyptic sect is unclear, and while it takes on bits of Christianity, it isn't a direct line from Catholicism. In many ways, this aspect of the plot seems taken from a bunch of seventies religious horrors where science meets religion for nefarious reasons, and this has the flaws of those (how can you prove what has happened, would people really care).

Nevertheless, the packed nature of Sancta Femina means there's something for everyone here. It is at its best at the start, when our protagonist Hella Nazari wakes up in an escape pod and has to trek across an alien world to safety. She's an engaging lead and the alone time sets her backstory and the world building up well. Once she reaches the near-deserted base, she reconnects with her brother who is in the thrall of the religious terrorist who has, in the twenty years she's been in cryosleep, been responsible for a nuclear attack on Earth. He is also responsible for her birth, which does beg the question why she was left for twenty years. There are a few connective plot issues like this in the book, which you have to roll with as the plot moves on, but does make it less satisfying.

Sancta Femina is a solid bit of sci-fi adventuring which never quite hits the highs its complex set-up wants it to. It never gets better than its initial base escape segment, and its final section feels rushed (though I was happy that it had a definite denouement). An enjoyable if messy read, it never quite justifies its central plot reveal. ]]> Review7533994067 Thu, 01 May 2025 08:22:21 -0700 /review/show/7533994067 Peter gave 3 stars to Ice Born (Midnight War) by Adam Fernandez
Ice Born is a standalone book in a space war series, which probably accounts for some of the jankiness I felt about it. It tells the story of the coming of age of Sergeant Arabella Smith, who I assume is an important character in the Midnight War series. The actions of the grown-up Smith bookend this tale, but mainly concern how she went from a slightly coddled colonial background to end up in the Republican Army. A solidly built story that takes parental weakness, and innate smarts from the young Arabella that turns her from a naive, slightly spoiled brat, to briefly an independent teenage smuggler. All of which works but since I didn't know who she would become when she joined the forces at the end of the book, I felt like I was hanging. So whilst it is perfectly true to say it is a standalone story, you still need a bit more context about the character to really care about the minutiae of her teenage survival years. ]]> Review7143356290 Wed, 30 Apr 2025 09:24:26 -0700 /review/show/7143356290 Peter gave 4 stars to Death in the Dressing Room (A Fethering Mystery, 22) by Simon Brett
I assumed that this would be a Charles Parris mystery, since it is set in a regional theatre. I have a long history with Charles Parris, and haven't read any of the Fethering mysteries, which it surprises me that there are more that the Parris ones. So whilst I don't know the character dynamics between the two key sleuths here, it is absolute simplicity to pick up. I read this whilst travelling on the Brighton to Littlehampton line, where Fethering is nominally (the regional theatre feels like Worthing to me). Beyond that Brett is still in his comfort zone as the play the murder takes place within is a touring update and adaptation of a partially beloved 90's sitcom - and he knows actors, TV and their world so well that it is a perfect backdrop. (The same can be said in Mrs Pargetter's Patio where its delve into competitive reality shows felt very real).

Brett is such a dab hand at this stuff I was a little surprised that the pacing seemed off to me, but actually it all works to bulk out his suspects and give his regular cast some proper character beats. I've probably read too many modern cosy mysteries recently which whizz through a lot of this stuff. The work is put in though for a nicely twisty denouement. Along with the joy of trying to match up the archetypes of his characters with known real actors and writers, and a proper British denouement, its great to read someone who knows how to do this stuff so well. ]]> Review7531169023 Wed, 30 Apr 2025 08:46:34 -0700 /review/show/7531169023 Peter gave 5 stars to When the Moon Hits Your Eye (Hardcover) by John Scalzi
The third of John Scalzi's "whimsical what-if silliness" books, a loose grouping of books that start with a vaguely preposterous sci-fi starting point, and then commits to taking that idea seriously. The Kaiju Preservation Society posited an alternate universe inhabited by kaiju which occasionally made incursions into our world, which needed protecting to stop that happening. Starter Villain took the idea of James Bond villains seriously and flung our protagonist into the midst of it. When The Moon Hits Your Eye is the most preposterous, and not strictly a modern sci-fi jumping off point at all, namely what if one day the moon turned into cheese.

Unlike Kaiju and Villain, When The Moon Hits Your Eye does not have a proper central protagonist. It's a collage of vignettes of people invested in the moon and how it turning into cheese affects them. So there are astronauts whose moon mission is cancelled, there are politicians trying to disseminate information. Some rich people want to be the first to taste moon cheese, and there is a very, very thinly veiled Elon Musk analogue who hijacks his own public/private partnership rocket to be the first man on the cheese-moon. This is all peppered with some stab at a scientific breakdown of what the moon turning into cheese would mean (it changes size and position to maintain mass and still have tidal effects - but also pure cheese is not made to be put under such gravitational stress so it's slowly starts to break up).

This is a lot of fun, and there isn't really a dud amongst the vignettes (even a quite tangential sex scandal has a bit of heft as a story, as does the cheesemonger romance). Scalzi is having fun and there is never a point where you think he has gotten bored of the inherent silliness of the premise, or indeed its arbitrary occurrence leading to a equally arbitrary conclusion feels acceptable under the circumstances. Lots of fun. ]]> Review7530892954 Wed, 30 Apr 2025 06:37:19 -0700 /review/show/7530892954 Peter gave 4 stars to The Book That Held Her Heart (The Library Trilogy, #3) by Mark Lawrence
The good thing about The Book That Held Her Heart is that it sticks the landing, it successfully closes the trilogy in a satisfying was with regards to the characters, even if it leaves its central philosophical issue still up to the reader. We ended The Book That Changed The World with our reunited lovers and their friends and family being scattered via the Library mechanism after being attacked by the King (who was a pretty minor baddie in book 1). Again in classic trilogy fashion we open with another new set of eyes, a new character who comes across some of those time and space-displaced characters. Unusually though for this fantasy trilogy, where these characters end up is on Earth, in pre- World War Two Nazi Germany. This is a big leap for Lawrence, he had previously suggested that the Library contained all the books in all of the worlds, but there was no suggestion or portal fiction initially. And the insertion into a Jewish-run bookshop both dulls the fantastic, and lightly cheapens the point that had already been made about book-burning societies. Again Lawrence has to do some convenient worldbuilding on the sly, these parties being made of three races, only one of which are human, the magic of the library lingers briefly over anyone using it to travel to make them seem like locals.

But what of Evar and Livira. They ping pong about a bit, becoming various forms of ghosts in the past, yet again witnessing more developments in tyranny and warfare based on books takend from the Library. Livira is still a joy to read as a character, even if she now is a little too knowledgeable, and it is clear that her book (written way back in The Book That Wouldn't Burn) is the big magical MacGuffin. The rules of the universe are so slack though that I am sure a few a broken here to bring us to our eventual conclusion, where our three parties all converge on the bad guy, and then we get the literary equivalent of the whirling lights in the sky of an MCU film.

I'm a little flippant about this series as I do think its large cast and excessive lore do weigh down what is quite a lovely romance at the heart of it. And by virtue of being such a big story with such a deep philosophical underpinning (is knowledge good or bad), that it was never going to wrap itself up neatly, and its ending is a little bittersweet to me. I am also not sure about it dipping its toe in a Nazi Germany, it certainly makes its point of destruction of knowledge and book burning, but I am not sure it is a point that needed to be made that way. Nevertheless, it is a very enjoyable trilogy which, if read together (as I did books 2 and 3) is quite addicting and readable for all of its flaws, and with a very enjoyable character at its heart. They were books that I enjoyed. ]]> Review7143332754 Wed, 30 Apr 2025 06:35:02 -0700 /review/show/7143332754 Peter gave 3 stars to Station Grand (Hardcover) by Craig Hurd-McKenney
A slight sci-fi adventure that turns into a thin childhood abuse allegory, and then just becomes a fantasy for escaping that abuse. There's some lovely impressionistic black and white artwork from Noah Bailey, but they aren't given a lot to cut their teeth on here, the horror parts are mainly amorphous masses and whilst the art can control the perception of reality here the writing doesn't really make the slipping from the initial premise to the actual underlying story in any way subtle. That the piece only has the protagonist and the space station computer as characters, and the initial premise (a very long solo space mission) is already on the edge of torture that losing grasp of reality feels inevitable rather than part of the metaphor. The metaphor works, but the story needed a bit more depth, or further development.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC for this title. ]]> Review7528328272 Tue, 29 Apr 2025 06:39:55 -0700 /review/show/7528328272 Peter gave 5 stars to One Level Down (Paperback) by Mary G. Thompson
What's interesting about One Level Down, is that sometimes, even with a great idea, it really just has to be a novella. Here we are introduced to a simulated world, copied from a planet with which many colonists had a bad experience. Their attempts to tame the alien world floundered with microbes and disease and so the remaining homesteaders bought a simulation of the world as an ideal and all went to sleep into it. And they lived and grew, all except our lead character Ella, who has been trapped in the body of a five-year-old for fifty-eight years. Her father runs the colony and simulation, and in their grief and urgency to retreat to its safety, allow him a few additional privileges which he has, over time, abused. So, people who disagree have disappeared, and Ella is forced to remain five, and for her own safety, to pretend to him that she is still five. But an opportunity arises when the company that runs the simulation sends a technician for some maintenance, can Ella convince him to help her?

It's possible that this could be told as a mystery, that we don't know the nature of Ella's problem, but Thompson rightly sees that as a waste of a vibrant protagonist's voice. And once we are in Ella's head, there really is no other way to tell the story. Not least as none of the above actually contains the big idea at the heart of One Level Down which was both cleverly handled and surprised me with its overall consistency. But also once revealed, there isn't far to go, so I was genuinely surprised again that Thompson found a third place to go for a very satisfying ending. It is a novella; it is mainly an exhibition of ingenuity and plot mechanics, though Thompson gives Ella enough depth for the reader to root for her. One of the best sci-fi novellas I have read in a while. ]]> Review7528097960 Tue, 29 Apr 2025 04:28:31 -0700 /review/show/7528097960 Peter gave 4 stars to Doña Perfecta (Paperback) by Benito Pérez Galdós
A solid classic satire wherin a young educated man comes to a small, proud village to meet and court his cousin (1850's!), and is accused of atheism, new modern thinking and general discourtesy by his prim and proper aunt Dona Perfecta. Just as her name is ironic, the book goes to great lengths to see how her hypocrisy and prejudice slowly spin out of control. It's a pity, therefore that the ending didn't follow through to some kind of ironic triumph - but then I guess that's why this is literature. ]]>