justabean_reads's reviews
1276 reviews

(Disclaimer, et cetera.)

You know what I'm rooting for in this series? The hotel reservation system to work right! We're zero for three on a guest arriving and getting what she expects. I have high hopes for the next book, though, as the MC there is meant to be the hotel detective, so there should be other guests, at least.
Anyway! This was another super sweet one, and I was surprised how much I liked the Christmas theme of it all, as I'm allergic to the "one character hates Christmas and learns to love it" trope, which was admittedly not a major theme here anyway.

This time, the future of the lodge is in danger! And the antagonist is the heroine's fated mate, but doesn't believe in fated mates (or Christmas), oh no! It's not quite enemies to lovers, as they aren't sparky and antagonistic, but I liked how they worked through opposing view points, and did not and up in some kind of terrible You've Got Mail non-solution.

I also really liked the heroine, her sister, and their silly-but-heart-warming Christmas/Hanukkah traditions. Probably my favourite of the series so far. 

This is meant to be an oral history of Gamergate, which doesn't interview anyone who participated in harassment, or any of the three primary targets. It also doesn't spend a hell of a lot of time on Gamergate itself, which felt odd to me. I guess maybe it's coming from the point of view that we all saw it, and there's not much to say past, "Well, that was horrible." However, it doesn't really live up to what I was expecting from this book.

Instead, it was about the culture inside the industry, and to a lesser extent fandom, how outside perception affects that, and how much all of that's been built in from the word go. Wolinsky did a great job of putting voices next to each other that added context or pushback without having to interject himself, and this also highlighted how much conflict there is within the community. I really appreciated that he didn't set up some halcyon past Internet age where everyone was nice, though he did talk about how social media has accelerated bullying. It's overall a good look at video game culture, and the conversations in the industry, even if those tend to be somewhat circular, and it's unclear if anything's getting better. Without feeling pinned to the moment of Gamergate happening, or discussing what happened in detail, it ended up feeling unmoored.

(I also want to put out there that the reason that gaming is different culturally than movies, TV, books, sports and their fandoms is in no small part set up cost, time and skill levels required. Like my shitty old laptop won't play any of the good games. Yes, I know Baba Is You and that poker thing everyone is into are also good games, but you know what I mean. And I don't want to spend either the time or the money to get into Dragon Age, or anything more complicated than Zen Koi, or Civilisation IV with the difficulty settings turned off. And it felt weird to me that so many people in the book were genuinely baffled about why games got treated differently than Marvel movies, or whatever.)

At some point, it felt like it was both a little too inside baseball, and not inside baseball enough? 

This one had a lot more go to it than the first in the series, being about twice the length, and having subplots and such. I really enjoyed our grumpy badger mechanic heroine, who just wants a spa weekend to be a fluffy badger princess and get a break from the sexism at work. Esker often writes about women who are too much, and the ways they manage cultural pressures to conform. She's great at the nuances around how that can hurt or shape a life.

I'm also enjoying the trend in this series of not telling us what the other love interest shifts into, and leaving it up to a guess. So far I've been two for two.

The romance was sweet, too, fairly straight forward, but also had a couple reasonable communication problems. I like miscommunication as a trope when it's believable for the characters to be talking past each other, especially if they're both not great at people.

Enjoyed this more than the first one, and you can read it on its own. 

I meant to read this series when it started under the Zoe Chant collective, but then forgot about it, and am finally circling back now that the later books are coming out. (Disclaimer about the author being a friend.)

This was cute! It's not as conflict-driven as a lot of Esker's books other books (which tend to have more shoot outs and fights involving one or more dragon), more a novella setting up the premise for the rest of the books. I liked the hedgehog main character and her mom, and the setting was a lot of fun. The romance felt a little cursory, but I don't think it was meant to be a big huge thing. If you're looking for a super light romance that's mostly holiday fluff (that holiday being Valentine's Day), this is a nice one.

On to the rest of the series! 

I've run out of vermette novels, so I got this as an e-book from the library, and read it on my computer (actually an enjoyable reading experience just in my browser's take on the Overdrive reader. Was expecting that to be a lot more painful!). It's a four-part graphic novel about a Metis teenager who keeps flashing back into her family history, witnessing key events in Metis history.

I guess it functions on two levels, the first being a lesson in Metis history. I again am reminded that I need to just read The Northwest Is Our Mother, because even though there's notes and timelines at the end of each volume, and we get a few scenes with her history teacher explaining events, I couldn't quite keep track of who everyone was. I think vermette did a good job of distributing the information dumps, there's just a lot of names and dates in play. I'm not sure I'd share this as a first  introduction to the history, but I know people use it as a teaching resource.

The second level is as an actual story, which works pretty well despite it being an educational book. I did find the character a little flat to start out with, but I think that was intentional, as Echo was in a new school, had some family issues, and was isolating herself from dealing with the world. I liked how she started to come out of her shell and joined the Indigenous student group, and made connections with her family. I initially thought Echo's action's could've been more integrated with the past, making her more a participant than a witness, but I ended up liking how vermette handled it, and explained why Echo was touching particular moments. It concludes really neatly.

The art's gorgeous. Especially big splash pages in the historical bits, just lovely stuff. 

I would like to point out that if you prominently place a cat on the cover of a book, I expect there to be a significant cat character in said book, and there was not. No cats, at all, in fact.

That aside, I really enjoyed this. A young woman finds out her boyfriend is marrying another woman, and she's been the bit on the side this whole time, then dumps him, quits her job, and ends up moving in with her uncle, who runs a used bookshop in a neighbourhood in Tokyo dedicated to booksellers. There she starts to come out of her shell, and falls in love with reading. Much of this is a love letter to twentieth-century Japanese literature, which is a topic I know absolutely nothing about. However, you don't really need to know the books she's talking about (though I think you'd get more out of it if you did, and the translator has a note at the end about which ones can be found in English). Mostly it's just a gentle look at family relationships and friendships, and learning to be your own person. (There's a low-key m/f romance plot towards the end, and sadly she doesn't end up with the bookish female grad student hangs out with a lot).

There's a second book in the series, which I'll probably check out at some point. Really sweet and relaxing, and made me curious about Japanese novels. Though perhaps not curious enough to dive into that rabbithole. I'm also interested in how much context the translator added, because it felt like he explained things a Japanese-speaking reader would probably know, like when the Meiji Restoration was. However, the translator's note at the end doesn't mention that. 

So this is based on The Medium Is the Message by Canadian media theory legend Marshall McLuhan, like really based on. The books are the same shape (which shape is physically hard to read, for the record. We have improved book formatting since the 1960s), has the same chapter titles, the same mix of text and graphics. Joynt is clearly very invested in this bit.

I overall liked the content, though it's difficult at times, dealing heavily with child sexual abuse. I liked all the ways Joynt talked about different mediums and different ways to tell a story, both his own and his great uncle Marshall McLuhan's. There's a lot of media criticism in here, especially about the ways storytelling has been used to enforce conformity, or elide marginalised people and perspectives.

However, The book is so closely tied to The Medium Is the Message, which I never did read and I haven't thought about in twenty years, that I often felt like I was missing half the conversation. I'm not sure who this book is for? But good for Joynt for just going for it, and Arsenal Pulp Press for being game for this odd, odd project. I'm happy it exists, even if I'm not sure I entirely understood it. 

This was a bookclub pick that I probably wouldn't have read otherwise, but I did end up liking well enough. It didn't knock my socks off, certainly, but it was a nice book about small-town life in Nova Scotia during WWI. Our heroine is the only girl in a family of many many boys, who apprentices with the local midwife, a Cajun faith healer with Acadian roots and absolutely the most fun character in the book. There's a lot of great daily life details, and church and sewing circle political battles. When the book is focusing on the small town of a century past aspect, its strongest, and some of the language is very beautiful. It's the author's home town, and you can see how much she wants us to love the place as much as she does.

Sadly, it doesn't quite work on a couple other aspects. The author cites A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 in her notes, but seems to have missed a lot of the point of that book: midwives were mostly ordinary women with a trade they practised on top of their regular lives as part of a community. This is the full magical moon woo take on the topic. It was written in 2006, and reminded me of The Red Tent in its bull-headed insistence on reclaiming women of the past as magical and beautiful and perfect, and nuance and reality can take a hike.

Our Heroine never has a single opinion that would be out of place today. She's from WWI-era rural Nova Scotia, and while I can see her training leading to her being down with abortions and birth control, I feel like not even blinking when running into: lesbians, sex workers, suffragists, Black people, free-love communes, etc, was a bit too much of a stretch for me. The antagonist is the local doctor, who wants to start an obstetrics hospital to serve the region, and is wrong about everything. I will grant that 1915 was maybe not the best period in the history of ob/gyn research, twilight sleep being the hot new thing, and certainly male medical professions of the period (or any period) weren't known for listening to women. However, I am of the opinion that modern, science based medicine is a net positive, and having the dichotomy be: Women doing home birth always good v. medicine and hospitals always bad was... a bit much.

(The author of A Sweet Sting of Salt owes Ami McKay money, because that book is just this book plus lesbian selkies.)

And for all the period detail and love of place, it did feel like McKay was including historical events because she had to, rather than examining the impact they might have had at the time. We get both the Halifax Explosion and the Influenza pandemic, which were all-consuming horrors of the era, and the characters just sail through them, and then never really look back or seem impacted by that time everyone died. She does a bit better with WWI, and how having most of the young men gone changes the town, and worrying about the safety of friends and brothers, but on the whole I wanted more depth.

I've heard the author's other books are more or less the same idea, so probably won't look into any of her other novels, though her memoir looks interesting.

Should reread the Martha Ballard book. (I just learned, and am appalled to know, that there's a mystery novel with Martha Ballard as the main character where she uses her medical knowledge to solve crime, and this is a bestseller in the US, and probably the main way most people have encountered her. *wanders off to cry*) 

This was on the USian National Book Award's shortlist, and people were aflutter that a spec-fic book had made it there (they were also excited about Orbital, which is neither SF nor speculative fiction, so you never can tell). I'm trying to read more in translation, and hadn't done anything from Arabic this year, so picked it up from the library. It was... fine?

It's set in a post-revolutionary world in conversation with 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, from the point of view of a newly-minted book censor, who's charged with banning any book that doesn't fit through the narrowest of government restrictions. He lives in a beige and restricted world, and the exposure to actual literature is deeply shocking, and then enthralling, and then causes reality to bend, or maybe that's just his mind breaking. The more he reads, the less clear it is if what's happening on page is actually happening, which is of course the point.

The author is a Kuwaiti bookseller, who has to deal with this kind of censorship on the daily, and meant this book as a way to look at the opposition. Given that, I would've liked the censor (who is never named) to take a little longer to fall head over heels in love with reading. It felt like it was too easy, and too immediate a change in him, where I would've liked to see more struggle. However, he's also several generations into regime brainwashing, so it would make some kind of sense how unprepared he is to encounter colour. I did like how each time he reads a new book  (Zorba the Greek, Alice in Wonderland, 1984 itself) he starts seeing the world through new language, and new terms. It does a great job of underlining how censorship is meant to restrict thoughts more than anything. (Good interview with the author and translators.)

There's a secondary plot about the censor's imaginative young daughter, and the struggle to suppress her expressiveness in order to save her (and himself) from re-education, while increasingly realising the cost. The struggle to not destroy her in the act of protecting her is one of the strongest lines in the book.

I'm not sure why it didn't hit me harder than it did, but for some reason, the whole thing felt more analytical than real in a way that didn't completely land for me. 

More Hugo reading. I think I picked this because it was advertised in Locus, and the cover was really pretty. Thus the selection bias that rules our lives.

I will say for a book called The Wings Upon Her Back, with a picture of a cybernetic wing on the cover, I did expect the heroine to be able to fly for more than the first two pages of the novel. She was not. There were flashbacks, running parallel timelines of how she got into and out of this mess, but the flashbacks ended before she got wings. No flying.

That aside, I enjoyed this! The mess she was in was getting sucked into an authoritarian regime by following a charismatic leader, and then slowly understanding that every single thing she'd done in the last twenty years was bad actually, and trying to work out what to do next. Also, there were gods, which may or may not have been aliens, and a wonderfully creative mix of technology and/or magic dumped onto what had been a pre-industrial society, and maybe Star Trek was right about that being bad.

It sure is a time to be reading about fascism, and how spiritual abuse can be used as a cudgel to keep people in line, and how far a vulnerable young person will go to prove her devotion to the monster she's in love with.

So it's pretty dark. We meet the underground movement fighting to bring back some semblance of justice, who are also a hot mess, we see torture and destruction and things that can never find atonement. There are some very cool set-piece battles. I liked how the narration was pinned to one character, but was a shade on the side of omniscient, knowing what she was feeling even when she wouldn't admit to it, and how that gave a bit more room to explore a character who started out so locked into her worldview that she was unable to see reality when it punches her in the nose. (The writing style reminded me a bit of Genevieve Valentine.)

It does also mean spending more than half the novel inside the brain of someone who was ride or die for an authoritarian government, and that was a lot of brainspace to spend with a footsoldier of fascism, especially right now. I think the care and nuance with which Mills deals with her character was very worthwhile, and I'm a huge sucker for characters trying to pry themselves out of their previous worldview, and try to do what they can to make up for past sins, even if redemption isn't possible.

Overall really enjoyed this, if enjoyed is the word, and will keep an eye on what Mills does next. Could've used more actual flying.