justabean_reads's reviews
1276 reviews

Best book so far! Worrals and Frecks decide to build a pop-up aerodrome and refuelling station in the Cévennes so that the RAF can ferry Spitfires to Malta. (This was written in 1943, so the forward notes that it takes place before the Nazis occupied all of France. There is no note telling starry-eyed young women that joining the W.A.A.F. will lead to none of this.) They are given the blessings of the Biggles crossover character who runs Definitely Not the SOE, and sent on their way. Shenanigans immediately ensue.

I'm always uneasy about asking for German PoV in WWII stuff, but I fully want the mission reports of all the random people who run into Worrals and have no idea what the hell just hit them. One of the highlights of the book: periodically the same character comes by to bring them more aviation fuel, and they catch him up on how it's going, while he mutters "What the fuck?" over and over again under his breath. There's also several fun French Resistance characters (organisation not quite called that, since this came out in 1943), who mostly want to push people down ravines where their bodies will never be found.

If I have a quibble, it's that there are next to no female characters aside from our heroines. Especially in a book about the French Resistance, it feels like there's room for a lot more, but almost all of the active and incidental characters are male. In previous books at least we got an old lady and a barmaid who were part of the resistance, but nothing here except a landlady towards the end and a variety of unnamed shepherdesses.

This book starts with a longish note about how Worrals is specially qualified due to speaking fluent German and French, and also has worked really hard and proved to be trustworthy (all the stealing shit and lying to her CO apparently not counting), and therefore is getting picked for special duties, rather than any of this being a normal occupation for a W.A.A.F.. Johns was asked to write these to induce young women to sign up, I suspect someone was getting letters from girls who'd found out they didn't get to fly planes, and there were next to no spy shenanigans, and were mad that this wasn't what was on the brochure.

Anyway, by this point, Worrals' CO has more or less thrown up hands, and the women are working for Definitely Not the SOE full time. Their latest mission involves establishing an air courier service to run secret messages to England from the creepiest castle in the Loire Valley. The plot then gets a bit Scooby Doo with Nazis, as there are perfectly normal explanations for all the ghost-like things happening in the castle, and the answer is always "spies." I did find the early parts of this one a little slow, as the women mostly seemed to be reacting to stuff happening to them or being helped out by mysterious forces, and our chaos goddess wasn't in effect as much, but it picked up later. Good setting if one wanted to do actual monsters or hauntings, though.

We do get some lovely moments of presumed dead in the middle, and there was only one bed! Also, it sets up a bunch of characters used in the next book, so I wouldn't skip it. 

Worrals, in the course of not doing her job, begins to suspect one of the other pilots is a spy, and gets up to all sorts of shit trying prove it. As with the pervious novel, she does exactly one ferry flight, before spending the rest of the book involved in spy shenanigans in France. No, her CO does not know she's gone to France. However, the pure chaos the woman leaves in her wake draws the attention of Definitely Not the SOE, and we're off to the races. I really enjoy how the books hit a balance of the characters being quietly competent at all times, while still showing their feelings and natural distress at accidental spy shenanigans in France. There's a lot of snappy dialogue that mostly comes across as humour to cover distress, and that they're eighteen, and the weight of a world war hasn't yet sunk in.

Oh, this book decides to make the flirting between Worrals and a male pilot an open romance, but it takes up so little page time I'm just pretending it's not a thing. 

Was doing this as part of a group read for banned book week, because the Utah school board banned the whole series (More on why in a minute). Also, it's such a Romantasy touchstone, with so many imitators by now, that I wanted to see what the deal was.

It was a lot of fun! The romance tropes weren't exactly my thing (too heterosexual, for one), but I can feel ten thousand teen girls perking their ears up. The plot is kind of mashes up Beauty and the Beast for the first half, with Tamlin for the second half, plus or minus a bunch of other fairytales kicked into the mix.

Our grubby stabby heroine ends up living with this scary fairy lord for reasons. He wants her to wear pretty dresses in his pretty castle, and she wants to stab him in the face and go back to her family. I kept thinking of the commentary on Fifty Shades of Grey (I don't remember whose, sorry) about how part of the fantasy was about being made to get things you actually wanted. Because women aren't supposed to be the kind of bitch who wants pretty dresses and fancy castles, for Lo! she is too mindful, too demure (sorrysorrysorry, I know that meme burned out like a month ago, but it was all I could think of while reading the first half). Thus: Oh no! I must wear pretty dresses! And everyone will tell me how great I look! But it's not something I wanted, this just happened to me.

Once the Tamlin plotline kicks in, we get a darker and more explicitly sexualised version of the trope that had my eyebrows in my hairline and thousands of teen girls figuring out several kinks. I suspect the later half of the book is what got the series banned, much more so than the fade to black sex scenes. However, maybe the Utah school board just didn't like all the fairy magic and shit, and banning it is pointless one way or another.

Most of the book was pretty straight up, but I did end up liking how the storyline with the heroine's family worked out, as they seemed to be entirely useless, selfish and bad when we first met them, but turned out to have a lot more going on later in. Another interesting twist (which seems to have become something of a thing with romantasy heroines) is that instead of being incredibly bookish like Disney's Belle, the heroine is largely illiterate. Which absolutely bites her in the ass later on.

I don't think I'll read the rest of the series, but I enjoyed this one. 

These are seriously so fun! Our heroine and her BFF are fresh young faces in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (which didn't have female pilots, but the book came out before the author knew that) who just want to do their bit for king and country. This involves doing their actual jobs as described exactly one (1) time, before haring off for spy-hunting adventures for the rest of the book. No, their commanding officer did not agree to any of this. He thought they were spending a weekend in London.

Just a delightful 1940s girls-own adventure, which hits a believable balance of women being just as capable pilots as men, and having as much nerve as anyone, with also having to deal with sexism, societal restrictions, and not getting trained for combat. Worrals has something of an advantage because no one sees her coming, and also she's incredibly competent because she can think on her feet, and if she gets in too deep her bestie will probably bail her out. They're very much just gals being pals. I really do need to read Women's Barracks.

If I had one complaint, and I realise this was written for a girls' magazine in the 1940s, but the English people generally seemed to not notice the Nazi spies living among them and basically drawing giant arrows pointing towards aerodromes. Like to a comical extent. If the local vicar is unwell, he will be drowned in the soup poured over him by helpful church ladies! You will not be able to run a criminal enterprise out of the vicarage! Anyway.

A+. Plan to read ten more of them. 

About growing up in the 1980s and 1990s when there's an active serial killer in your neighbourhood, and no one seems to know what to do with that, and also that might not be the biggest problem. I haven't read any interviews with Hernandez to see how much autofiction is in here, but it does feel like it has a grain of lived experience in it. The serial killer was real (though not named in the book), and the rape culture of the time, well... I did this with a book club with a bunch of women who're Hernandez' age or a little older, and "The fucking '80s!" was the reigning sentiment.

The storyline alternates between a film editor in present day working on a tacky true crime show about serial killers, and her childhood and teen years living through it. She is a hot mess making bad choices in both timelines. I thought the flashback sections were a little stronger, though I did like the plotline with her son in present day, and how it's not like we've grown out of rape culture.

What really stuck with me though, was this line: "They were everywhere. All of them. These men lurking and leering. Touching and rubbing. All of them. But supposedly, there was just one guy." So much of the book is about how while obviously the Scarborough Stalker was terrible, at least the adults seemed to understand that. No one understood about date rape, or the paedophile next door who was such a nice guy, or statutory rape. In all the focus on "stranger danger" and "rape whistles," none of the adults notice/care about the danger every single young woman is in from friends/family/neighbours. And if something bad does happen to her, even the actual serial killer, it was somehow her fault anyway.

This book was a lot, but I thought it handled heavy topics around rape culture, generational trauma and homophobia sensitively and empathetically. As with The Story of Us, Hernandez didn't quite land the plane in a way that worked for me, but I can understand the choices she made. 

Read this for "Shortie September" for the Reading Across Canada challenge, not realising when I got it from the library that it was a script for a play Hernandez did about fifteen years ago. Interesting to read back to back with Behind You as they cover some of the same themes around sex and rape culture in Catholic high schools, though this feels very much like a journeyman effort done when the author was still very close to the experiences it depicts. I think this is meant to be educational theatre, or a discussion starter aimed at The Youth, and I'm very curious how that worked out. As a book, I'd rather see the play. 

(I somehow picked this up for 2024 Hugo reading, despite it not being genre fiction and not being published in 2024? I guess maybe the Canadian edition came out this year?)

Anyway, it was fine. Certainly a page turner, as I ripped through to find out the answers to the mystery in the set up. In the end, I'm not sure that it came together, or that the pay off to the mysteries made a lot of sense, though I did like a lot of parts of the whole.

The story follows a woman in her late twenties, who has been at loose ends for some time, trying to figure out why her sister committed suicide. Also, every single person in the family is terrible at communicating, so she travels all over the world to find out information her mother could've explained in about a minute and a half. I do know people who are that bad at talking to each other, but it still felt like the revelations happened at the speed of plot, not in a way that made organic sense for the characters. Which was the part I found really frustrating: we have the structure of the seven skins, each section of the book tying in with a discovery and a myth. However, like a "Five Times" fic where the author only really had three and a half ideas, it felt like a lot of padding here and there to make the numbers happen. And I'd have liked the book more if there'd been about a hundred pages less of it.

There was a lot of really beautiful imagery, and I loved the friendships and relationships between the female characters. The idea of reclaiming selkie stories from a more feminist angle should've worked better than it did, but ended up feeling tacked on, and as though tying in the stories made the author reach a little too far. 

Diane's back! Now divorced, turning fifty, and looking for a new run at life, she gets a new job, and starts eyeing up a new boyfriend. I really like how neither the job nor the boyfriend "fix" any of her issues, but the books continue on in an effort to figure herself out. She's working out her relationships with her kids, her mild drinking problem, and her sledgehammer, and by the end the story feels neither over, nor incomplete. Like the first book, this one sends her on a voyage, leaves her in a good place, and I could totally see this as the end, or read twelve more of them. Very fun series, and I'm going to go find out what else Lavoie has written. 

I had to read a Canadian woman in translation for a reading challenge, and these were on sale. Given that basis of selection, I'm surprised how much I ended up loving these. Diane's husband leaves her just short of their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and Diane has to re-evaluate her life and how she fits into the world—a bottle of rosé and a sledgehammer at her side. This got talked up as a commentary on gender politics, which I guess it roughly is, but mostly it's a comedy. Diane's an absolute delight to spend multiple books with, and even though straight lady gets divorced books aren't traditionally my genre, I loved this one. It's also very sweet in places, and all around a fun read.

I'm direly curious about the translation, which was out of Quebec French. I should find a copy in the original as I'd love to know about some of the choices made. Not that I think the translation is bad, just that I know some of the vernacular used doesn't literally translate to French, and I love comparing that kind of thing.