shanaqui's reviews
1148 reviews

Amy Jeffs' Saints is intended to bring some of the excitement and attention we have for retellings of folklore to hagiographies (stories telling the lives of saints). She's chosen a small sampling of all the possible stories and retold them, following each with some commentary on its context, meaning, etc. Most of them were unfamiliar to me (I've only studied a few Vitae, those which mention King Arthur), so the commentary was much-needed.

Jeffs' style in retelling the stories is rather personal, informal, sympathetic; she gets into the heads of the characters and has us inhabit them for a few moments, which I rather liked, though it's not usually how saints' stories get told. That's because she really is recounting them as folklore, as stories, rather than with belief -- which, for some readers, might not be acceptable, I'm sure.

I would personally have liked a bit more of the commentary, since I have a reasonable feel for what hagiographies are like, but I enjoyed it. The paper cut illustrations add something as well, I think, though I'm not the most visual person.

That was a heck of a conclusion to that arc. Wow.

T. Kingfisher's What Feasts At Night is a follow-up to her retelling of 'The Fall of the House of Usher', this one as far as I can tell an original story (though based on folklore, it's not as strongly tied to a specific story). It was nice to see more of Alex Easton, and to explore ka's experience as a soldier, along with the fallout of the events of What Moves The Dead (unsurprisingly, Easton is not even slightly a fan of fungi).

The book actually takes us to Gallacia, to the hunting lodge that Easton briefly mentioned in the previous book, in order for Miss Potter (also returning, hurrah!) to stay there and do some exploration for fungi. But when ka arrives, there's a curious heavy atmosphere, the man he used to pay to keep the place up is gone, and the villagers don't want to explain what happened.

I found it interesting that Easton points out at one stage that the events in What Moves The Dead are in fact all natural, not supernatural: freaky as heck, but it's driven by fungi, growing and surviving. In What Feasts at Night, the threat is definitely supernatural. Which probably explains why I found it rather less unsettling than What Moves The Dead: infection and contagion frighten me for legitimate reasons, while ghosts and spirits and "other families" are more solidly in the realm of fiction. I'm not immune to getting creeped out at random, of course, but this book just didn't play on my fears as well. I just enjoyed Alex's character, the world-building of the Ruritanian romance stuff, and the typically witty narration of a T. Kingfisher book.

In a way, I enjoyed it more than the first book, and certainly read it faster. I don't think that makes it better -- I think What Moves The Dead is quite possibly the better book.

I know most about Mike Pitts as an archaeologist who worked at Stonehenge, so I thought he could bring some archaeology and objectivity to the story of the discovery of Richard III's burial. And he has a go at it, though sometimes he's still a bit too sensational and breathless, even as he reports Phillippa Langley's naivety with a sort of fondness at it. If he wanted to steer clear of that, there could've been less focus on Langley's intuitions (which, while apparently accurate in this case, are hardly a basis for good archaeology -- and it's easy to big them up in hindsight).

Still, he does discuss the relevant history, both the period and a little about the site, and talks about the process of getting funds and permissions for the dig, along with some of the details of the excavation and the order of finds, etc.

I'd say this book probably doesn't add anything much new if you were interested in the excavation at the time, or got interested and read about it since, but it's not bad if you don't know what was going, if maybe a little dry in places because it is an archaeologist's perspective more than a showman's.

It's pretty well-established by this point that I love a book that does a deep-dive on a highly specific subject, so obviously I was very tempted by Annie Gray's The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker, a history of the high street. It starts with a chapter about shopping prior to the 1650s, and then discusses some broad eras from there, with the conceit that we're going shopping with a certain level of means and a certain shopping list.

I wasn't always in love with that conceit, I must admit; I wanted less about how "probably you're quite tired by now and could do with a pick-me-up", and more just facts. I get other people find that dry and boring, but I find the imaginative flourishes often just act like padding, and obscure the information that you're reading for. I wonder if another format might've worked better, like chapters themed around types of shops (drapers, for instance) or a type of shopping (confectionary, menswear, etc) in order to really highlight how that changes over time.

Regardless, I did find this really fascinating, and it was interesting to reflect on my own experiences of high streets. Cardiff's is definitely still alive, for instance, and apparently got the top spot in a consumer survey very recently: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy445y8nkvo But where I grew up in Wakefield feels a bit more lacklustre, in part because of the semi-recent Trinity Shopping Centre built a few streets away, obviously designed to draw the life of the town there.

Annie Gray has a surprising optimism about the future of the high street. Certainly I've found myself both using my local high street more since I started reading this (grabbing stuff from Boots and Superdrug rather than online, for instance, and heading to a local bike shop instead of Halfords when I needed bike accessories), and frustrated by the shops that have closed and gone away (I'd have patronised an M&S in person if they hadn't moved to a spot outside of town). As someone returning to cycling, the local high street is somehow a lot more tempting now, especially with the library now sited much closer to it. 

Didn't leave much of an impression on me.

It's hard to know how to rate or talk about Janet E. Morris' A Man and His God. As I understand it, it's part of a larger world, and though it's listed as being only 39 pages, I'd swear it was at least twice that. Maybe it was printed with the tiniest font imaginable.

Anyway, it has a semi-mythic register, and follows Tempus, a warrior who is currently on the outs with his god. It seems from the narrative that he's cursed because he slept with his sister, and his sister is cursed because she manipulated him into it. Tempus' feelings and intentions are often unclear, and I think that isn't helped by the fact that this is actually cut out from a larger narrative.

The story is full of a general contempt for life and specifically for people different than oneself and for women. There is a kiss between Tempus and another man, Abarsis, as he dies, and there's the Sacred Band who are all paired warriors, but... I can't say that it felt particularly queer-positive in any way. There's lots of violence, gratuitous levels of it, and torture.

Maybe it all fits together better if you read the whole original collection rather than these cut-out-and-revised fragments. That said, this part was published alone both in the past and now, so it should stand alone.

I think there's an angle from which I can see that this is cleverly done, but the general contempt for everything that oozed off Tempus didn't endear him to me, and it isn't clear to me what level this is coming from: the character, the setting, the narrative, or the author. It's not my thing either way, but one could admire it more if one was sure that the author doesn't think they're portraying a true hero.

Nathan Ballingrud's Crypt of the Moon Spider was very much a random choice for me, because I've been interested for a while in reading more short fiction, and the library happened to have this on their Halloween-themed table. Before I go on, I want to emphasise that you probably shouldn't read the rest of this review if you're arachnophobic, and this book probably isn't for you. (Fiction and reality are two different things, of course, but if the thought of spiders makes you squirm, I'm pretty sure this one isn't a place you want to go.)

It definitely brings the unsettling vibes, as Veronica Brinkley arrives on the moon to be treated for depression and is swiftly experimented on and abused, with the doctor using spider silk from long-dead Moon Spiders to replace parts of her brain he's cut out.

Obviously that's ick on various levels, and it doesn't get any better when spiders start hatching inside people's skulls -- particularly Veronica's, as something special has been implanted in her brain.

For me this one was a step too far out of my comfort zone in a direction that I'm not really interested in going. I'm not unduly arachnophobic (not compared to e.g. my germophobia), but spiders moving through my brain is definitely not an image I want to sit with. I think if I were rating objectively (not that I really believe there's such a thing), I'd have to give it some higher marks for how well it manages some very unsettling images. But I rate based on enjoyment, and this one was solidly not for me.

There's apparently to be a sequel, and I'm not sure where that would go -- but I won't be following!

The full might of Fairy Tail, wow.

It's a heck of a set of battles, for sure. And Cana is Gildarts' daughter?!