porge_grewe's reviews
164 reviews

A beautiful book about family, belonging, change, and Orcadian identity and heritage. It also very much benefits from the medium - a verse novel written in the Orcadian dialect with English translation. Having not grown up hearing Orcadian, I didn't find it the easiest read, but the text built up my familiarity with its terms and cadence, creating something really spellbinding. The ending felt incomplete, but for the story and the themes of the book, anything more complete would have felt wrong - A really special book. 

A difficult and beautiful account of a shameful period of history, told from the point of view of those caught up in it - This is a brilliant story, reminiscent of Vonnegut and F Scott Fitzgerald, bringing together duty to self, family, country, and beyond, hope, delusion, sympathy, charity, and desperation in the period just after the Second World War - Strongly recommended.

An excellent set of short stories, though not quite as polished and consistent as the previous collection, Terminal Boredom. In many ways it feels like a forerunner to Sayaka Murata's Earthlings - Even down to one of the short stories feeling like a prequel to it - But there's a punk irreverence to it all which stops the horror being too horrifying, and it goes in much more for the weird. A lot of the other reviews reference punk, which is apt because she talks about music a lot in the stories, especially the third story in the collection and my personal favourite "Hey! It's a Love Psychedelic!", which manages to do something which literature often stumbles over, and which must have been a nightmare for the translator - An effective and playful time travel story.

A masterpiece by the master of the surreal and the intensely human. Equally entertaining and moving, Vonnegut covers themes as diverse as the grubbiness of war, sex, mid-twentieth century American life, death (so it goes), and four-dimensional perspectives on time, all brought together into a compelling narrative based around the central question: how do you write about your experience of a massacre? 

I can't think of a better review than: magical.

This is an interesting one to review - The prose is bold and clear, the stories are grim vignettes which each leave you with an indelible image or impression, even if they don't necessarily have a satisfying ending, and the setting of the stories is fascinatingly grim - It all has a sense of extreme poverty and gothic despair, like the intersection of George Orwell and Edward Gorey.

I would find it hard to recommend to anyone I know, however, as this thing is *dark* - Take heed of the content warnings! It also leans very hard on my least-favourite gothic trope of dwelling on how ugly everyone is as a reflection of their character - I understand its function for setting the scene and putting us in the mind of the narrator, but it still feels unnecessary.

Content warnings: <sp> domestic violence, infanticide, rape, murder, unwanted pregnancy, child sexual abuse, definitely more that I'm forgetting </sp>

Fascinating, heartbreaking, thoughtful, hopeful - Strongly recommended if you have any interest in museums, communities, and our duty to the dead and the living.

What a mixed bag!

Yumi and the Nightmare Painter bears the odd accolade of being the best and worst of the Secret Projects released thus far. Of the two previously released projects, it has more in common with Tress, being a Cosmere book, with everything that brings with it, but it feels much more ambitious. 

Too ambitious, as it turns out. The plot dissolves into a mess by the last quarter of the book, to the extent that Hoid, our narrator once more, has to take time out of the story to turn to the reader and explain how the world this story takes place in works so that we can understand the late-stage twists and their solutions - I still didn't, Hoid. While Tress and Frugal Wizard had their own issues, their plotting was clear and understandable throughout, whereas Yumi collapses under the weight of concepts Sanderson fills it with.

Which is a shame, because as I mentioned earlier this was also the best of the Secret Projects so far! Yumi and Painter have a legitimately great dynamic, and once we're through the establishing bits and before we get to the messy finale stuff, the middle half of the book is Sanderson doing what he does best - Solid, charming character work. The worlds were uninspiring - Sanderson is always at his worst when he is recreating real-world cultures, mainly because the portrayals never feel terribly thoughtful, these worlds in particularly seemingly being informed by an amalgam of fairly tired anime tropes - But I would take a lot more of Yumi, Painter, and their supporting casts interacting.

It feels unfair to say when all these secret projects were passion projects put together by Sanderson alone during lockdown, but this would have been a much better book with some judicious editing. 

Also, though I rarely agree with Hoid, he is right - The ending *would* have been better if it had gone the other way.