nocto's reviews
1270 reviews

The Bezzle by Cory Doctorow

informative mysterious fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

The followup to Red Team Blues goes back in time and starts at the time of the dot com boom (and the subsequent crash). And, my God, this makes me feel old! I’ve got used to books set in the 1970s and 1980s having nudged into the historical or period fiction categories nowadays but I am not ready for the early twenty-first century to be plundered like this. The good news is that Cory was there too, and I think I was reading his blog at the latest soon after that, so it’s thankfully all good from a detail perspective.

There’s a lot about pyramid schemes here and then the tale has a friend of Marty’s end up in jail and proceeds to go deep down the rabbit hole of how corporate prison systems work, or more accurately, don’t work. I learnt more about Catalina Island in California which I otherwise only know from it being one of the location names that got repurposed as MacOS names.

If I have an issue with the book it’s that there were true stories in here and fictional ones, and it wasn’t entirely clear which were which - a nod to those which were true at the end of the book would have been nice to have. I knew one of the stories was sadly true, but had to fact check another. Part of the point here is that these are all things that could have happened, or are very similar to things that did happen, this is the dystopia we are living in, and not calling out explicitly those that were literally true seemed an oversight.

The Locked Room by Elly Griffiths

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

The main point of this write up should be that I raced through the book in less than a day and enjoyed it. I'm also pleased Elly Griffiths didn't decide to break with setting her books in real world time and skip past 2020 as if nothing happened. There are some series that are just set in generic contemporary times whose authors can get away with that but this series of books have always had actual dates in them and the characters have proper birth dates and age appropriately. All of which is stuff that I appreciate.

So I'm pleased to be back in 2020 (kind of? very much in a "fictional reliving only!" sense) where we're seeing the first wave of Covid and lockdowns through Ruth's eyes. I had issues with how much the characters disregarded the restrictions that were in place in the UK at the time though. Most of it had purpose in the plot, and the criminal bits seem completely reasonable. There was just a bit too much "exceptional" stuff going on for my liking, and I thought some of it was out of character.

By way of other nitpicking I thought using the "Locked Room" in the title and not really having much of a Christie-esque locked room mystery was a bit of a missed opportunity. But I've said before that I don't come to these mysteries for the plots as much as to be back with a familiar cast of characters. I don't watch soap operas but I enjoy long running book series and the personal developments in this one were interesting although they threw up some strange coincidences that I'd like to have seen resolved as well.

So basically I could sit here all day and pull holes in the book, but I really enjoyed reading it. It ends, as this series often do, on a bit of a cliffhanger and I'll no doubt get on with the reading the next in the series soon even though I know my opinion is very likely to be much the same as it is for this one.

Educated by Tara Westover

dark informative reflective

4.0

I'm not generally a big fan of biographies of any sort. They tend to be tales of how luck worked in your favour (see celebrity autobiographies) or how luck worked against you (see misery memoirs), though I haven't really got enough experience of either of those sub-genres to make either of those claims. There's something I find a little bit creepy  reading about someone's not fictional life and wondering how much of it is actually fiction. And with that background I'm not really sure why I picked this book up to read other than I'd seen it recommended in several different places and, anyway, I like trying things that are a bit out of my comfort zone. And I realised that there is something interesting in reading about other people's lives; that's what history books are after all, so first of all I realised that if this story had been written by someone a little more removed from the events within it then I'd have been happier with it, and that's obviously my problem and not the author's. But when I looked at it that way I realised that if I'd read a second hand account of this story then I'd have wished it was a first person account. So, yes, my brain's a confusing place. But so is everyone's.

The author of this story is the youngest daughter in a very religious family in Idaho who grew up, through the 1990s, with parents who were preparing the end of the world. The family rejected authority and their youngest children's births didn't even get registered. Injuries resulting from car crashes and major health and safety at work failures went untreated as they didn't agree with modern medicine. Although some of her older siblings had some school education the author only remembers receiving a very basic education at home. And that's ostensibly the main thrust of the story. How she went from pretty much no education apart from learning to read religious texts to gain a place at university and ultimately excelled in academia but what a battle it was. But though it's the title that's not really the main bit of the story. Intertwined throughout the story about education are her memories of abuse, physical and mental, from members of her family, and her struggles to reconcile these.

Even while I was still reading I knew that when I finished the book and went to look online I would find 'balancing' points of view from those family members, because of course you would deny the seriousness of these things if anyone accused you of them, no matter that the author has presented her case in a very careful and considerate manner. There are pseudonyms used in the book but since the author has used her real name and is talking about her family that pseudonymity can be no more than a polite veneer. The book goes on perhaps longer than it should have done because she's trying to walk a balance beam explaining the details and the maybes and the perhapses and it makes sense to me that she struggled with her mental health whilst trying to come to terms with her family's actions. 

Would I have been happier as a reader if the story had been fictionalised even if everything didn't get neatly wrapped up at the end? Probably, but that would have made it a different story. And my conclusion is that the heart of this story is a conundrum about how memory matters. We all have stories of things we've experienced where other people's memories of those same events don't match up with ours. I don't doubt that abusers don't think they are abusive, but I don't think that matters to their victims who have to live with their own memories. The book was well written, opened my eyes to a world I know little about and gave me a lot of think about.

Swimming Lessons by Claire Fuller

emotional reflective

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I really enjoyed Bitter Orange by the same author but found The Memory of Animals to be interesting but slightly too loopy really so I wasn't quite sure what to expect this time. Happily I really liked it, not as good as Bitter Orange but still a very good read. It's a book that's made by the characters as much as the plot. Though there is quite a lot of plot. Half of the book is a series of letters that Ingrid writes to her absent husband in the early 1990s before she goes missing leaving her two daughters behind. And the other half of the book is Ingrid's now grown up daughter Flora dealing with her aging father.

Ingrid's half of the story starts when she meets Gil, a much older man who is her tutor on a creative writing course and the letters narrate in  detail the ups and down of the relationship between the two of them. I often felt that the letters didn't really feel like letters, though whether the recipient was ever meant to read them is an open question in the book. There was a purpose to them being letters though and the story would perhaps not have worked quite the same if those sections had simply been narrated by the author. 

The balance between the two halves of the story is pretty good, I couldn't pick which half I liked better and flipping back and forth between Flora and Ingrid never got tiring. It didn't feel like two separate stories that happened to go together as books like this sometimes do, the plot flowed through the two halves as we found out more about Ingrid, and the reader always knows more than Flora does. A good read all around.

The Lantern's Dance by Laurie R. King

adventurous mysterious relaxing

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

I had this on my list of new release books to watch out for this year but didn't actually realise it was due for release so early in the year and the first I knew of it being released was when it popped up on the new additions shelf at the library. Result!

It was pretty slow in the beginning and after a handful of chapters I was idly wondering if my enthusiasm was misplaced. But then it all started to come to life. One thread of the story has Mary Russell, nursing a badly sprained ankle in a rural France, translating a coded journal she has found. The other thread has Holmes running off elsewhere in France looking for his missing son - the son King created for him and Irene Adler previously in this series. I love it when the two threads start to throw up clues that the reader can see and put together before either of the detectives can. 

There's many, if not all, the classic hallmarks of a Holmes story here, and all the ones that make a good Russell plot as well. I like how the Holmes universe has been extended and this was the first one for a while that made me want to go back and read Conan Doyle again as well.

Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt

emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

This was fabulous. Told from the first person point of view of the mother of a heroin addict daughter who pretty much kidnaps her baby granddaughter, it's a tale of very mundane details that somehow adds up to a lot more. We gradually see more about Ruth's past as she cares for the baby and we watch the baby, Lily, grow up. There's not a great deal of the daughter, Eleanor, in the book but her absence is felt by everyone. 

I was disappointed by the lack of realism of the characters and the relationships in the last [Susie Boyt book](/books/only-human-by-susie-boyt) I read. Happily, in this book I definitely wasn't. These were great characters. It occurs to me now that we don't see a lot of most of them first hand. For much of the book I feel we only learn about Ruth's set of schoolgirl friends and her teaching colleague Jean from what Ruth tells us but then when they step onto the scene we understand why they are there.

And I wasn't disappointed by the ending of the book, it was really well played, leaving you optimistic and sad at the same time but with a definite sense of closure.

The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

I read this off the back of enjoying the Lady Astronaut series a lot but not fancying the author’s other books that look to be historical romances. This was science fiction and it also turned out to be a murder mystery so right up my street really.

Tesla is on her honeymoon - a cruise ship from Earth to Mars - when her and her newlywed spouse, Shal, come across a dying person outside their cabin, who quickly becomes a dead person and Shal is accused of the murder. It’s a good setup and a lively story. There’s lots of nice futuristic technological bits muddled up with the recognisable banality of cruise ships which stay the same no matter where they are headed. The human elements of a story don’t change no matter the setting, and the authors romance fiction background shows. I mean that in a positive way, the relationships between the characters are interesting and it’ll keep your attention even if you’re not sure about the science fiction aspect of it.

There’s lot of nice stuff here, as well as the cruise ship aspect there’s lots about the nature of celebrity and trauma. The chapters all have related cocktail recipes, which is cute and thematic, though it wasn’t clear to me until the end that they were mostly (maybe entirely) alcohol-free in this version of the future which obliviates the worries I had whilst reading about the characters all day drinking. Not to mention the service dog.

I also felt the murder mystery plot was pretty decent, no strange space shenanigans were hiding the culprit. I think the cruise ship setting led it to have a feel out of the golden age of mysteries whilst very much not being of that era. All in all, I enjoyed it a lot.

The Great Deceiver by Elly Griffiths

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

When I read The Midnight Hour I mentioned that this was one of my favourite new series in the last few years. And it’s still providing plenty of entertainment. It’s maybe getting a tad too cozy between the characters but since the interpersonal relationships are one of the things I like and the series might otherwise fall apart I can see why things are going in the way that they are.

On the whole though it’s an entertaining murder mystery that begins when the assistant to the “Great Deceiver” magician is found dead in a Brighton boarding house. The stories are dealing nicely with the demise of variety theatre since the first episode in the series which was set in 1950, along with other changes in society. We’re in 1966 now and the book is a little heavy handed with foreshadowing things that the reader knows well. Not just characters commenting that England will no doubt be terrible in the World Cup but pondering future advances in forensics as well.

I suspect that if I examine the plot too closely it’ll fall apart so I’ve learnt not to do that with Elly Griffiths’ books. I’m here for the ride and I hope there is more to come.

A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom by John Boyne

medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This was a mind blowing kind of a read. The story itself might be pretty ordinary, in fact the point is that it is just that, though also it’s not. Yes, that makes no sense. But it also makes no sense that the scenery shifts with each chapter and the characters shift with it, and yet that absolutely works. I saw the list of chapters labelled with locations that cover most of the globe and dates that are spread over 2000 years and was expecting some kind of linked short stories. Which it sort of is and also isn’t. Each chapter picks up where the last one left off, but with the details moved in space and time. It’s a really clever conceit and works really well, it’s hard to explain but turned out to be easy to read.

I think it’s interesting though that I found the parts of the story set in places and times I didn’t know well more interesting than those that I already knew about. The central character crosses paths with various famous historical characters and I found those bits felt a bit tired, but I don’t doubt that some of the other bits I enjoyed were also about well-known characters, just not ones that were well-known to me. And since I know far more about recent history than the dark ages a lot of those more tired feeling pieces fell towards the end of the book as time got closer to the present day, which meant that the book seemed better in the beginning and the middle than in the end. Though there were clues spread throughout the story about how the book was going to end, and I think the author pulled the final chapter off pretty well, and left it on a nicely optimistic note.

Definitely a book I’d recommend and there’s only a handful of other books I’ve ever read that have tried to do anything this expansive.

All Souls Lost by Dan Moren

fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

I pulled up the sample of this book on my iPad just on the basis that I've heard the author on various podcasts and was interested to see what he wrote, I wasn't expecting to get sucked in enough to actually read it, I guess I was just being polite! But it worked out ok...

For a long time I've not really been a fan of ghost stories, but I'm realising it's not the ghosts themselves that are the problem, it's the way they are often used where the boundaries of the fiction aren't clear to the reader and they just feel like a cheating device. That didn't feel like the case here, the supernatural and its limitations were pretty clear from the beginning. And the ghost tricks here tend to fail spectacularly creating mad problems rather than being the kind of *deus ex machina* devices that annoy me. It's fun. 

The book is pretty much a tech thriller but set in a universe quite like ours where there just happen to be some other things going on beneath the surface. And some parts of the 'universe quite like ours' was a very thin name-changing veneer on the world we live in, but I'm fine with that.

A fun read, and I'm glad I picked it up and ran with it.