oz617's reviews
467 reviews

There are some points where I’d love Blish to take full advantage of the form, and tell us more of what the characters were thinking about the events. That aside, this was a good set of episodes, and I didn’t feel like they lost any of the magic when being adapted into short stories.

Very strong anthology. I’ve been rotating the story about the old man’s shoes in my head for days now.

Found this book abandoned on a roadside – hopefully by someone skipping off into the sunset to improve their professional life.

I don’t know how this book manages to make me feel nostalgic for wartime Britain, but it hits the sort of English tone I love.

Well drawn and charming, but I felt by the end that the message of the story was “depression exists”, which… true! If I were a school counsellor, I might hand a copy of this to a sad teenager. It just hits a sad indie millennial girl vibe – nothing inherently wrong with that, but to me it feels lacking of substance.

Loved reading the author’s foreword. The quality of writing has definitely improved over the series, even as Blish slowly runs out of episodes to cover.

Sweet story – though I feel like the Secret Seven books are all the same, this town is rolling in thieves. I always preferred the Famous Five

One of the first books I would recommend to anyone interested in learning about the crimes of the US government. Slahi’s experiences were horrific, and the informal, colloquial way in which he writes only highlights the inhumanity with which he was treated. There’s now an uncensored version released, which I’m very eager to read, as the censoring of the original text seemed clumsy and nonsensical. I wish I could call the torture he suffered surprising, but the only surprising thing is how well Slahi held onto a positive state of mind.

I’m unfamiliar with the politics discussed here, so Half Gods was more educational than I usually expect a short story collection to be. This is the second book of interconnected short stories I’ve read, and I’m growing to love the form. I found it a little difficult to follow, and there were moments where I wished we could spend more time with one location or character than another, which made it a frustrating read at times. Maybe things would be clearer if I’d been able to read it all in one sitting, but there’s so many natural break points with short stories, that becomes hard. Altogether this made the collection rather uneven, but I’m glad to have read it.

Hilarious. Completely hilarious, occasionally emotional, full of references that parents will definitely understand, and which aren’t so dependent on context that children would be confused.