shanaqui's reviews
1148 reviews

Much the same as with his book on penguins, there's some cute art and some fun facts, but it's not very substantial. 

Much the same as with his book on penguins, there's some cute art and some fun facts, but it's not very substantial. 

Much the same as with his book on penguins, there's some cute art and some fun facts, but it's not very substantial.

I think the major reason to pick up Matt Sewell's Penguins and Other Sea Birds is really for the art: though it does contain facts about each bird, each bird only gets a short paragraph. There is some neat info included, like the fact that certain birds (male crested auklets, if you're curious) smell uncannily like tangerines -- but it's mostly just titbits.

The art is cute, though sometimes I think he does choose to emphasise odd features of the animals, probably to give the images more character. So it's not a great resource for recognising the birds that you might be likely to be able to spot for yourself in the wild.

Laurie Gilmore's The Pumpkin Spice Café just... isn't very good? The characters feel flat, even though they're given quirks and identifying features: the way they see each other doesn't match up at all with how they're thinking and feeling and describing themselves, but not in a way that feels like "whoa, yeah, this person has self-esteem issues". Jeanie acts neurotic and terrified of everything (and her internal monologue tells us that she is), and Logan reads "perky and cute". It feels like two paper cutouts being pressed together, "Now kiss!"

The insta-love doesn't help.

It mostly feels like someone wanting to write a small town romance and then making really, really sure that we know we're in a small, quirky town. It's small! And quirky! Don't you know that it's small and quirky? Look at how small and quirky it is!

There are several sex scenes, which I completely skimmed because they didn't really advance characterisation much, and I did not believe at all in the chemistry between them, because I kept being told how much chemistry there was.

Some reviews are saying it's a Hallmark movie in book form, and yeah, I see that. 

A while back, I was a volunteer for the RNIB (that's the Royal National Institute for the Blind, in the UK), which means I have a bit more awareness of the accessibility options for the blind in the UK (and in general). Even so, I was trained by a sighted person, and all the volunteers I knew were fully sighted. Maud Rowell's Blind Spot makes me wonder what, in consequence, we missed.

If you're curious about accessibility for blind people (not just in the UK, but also in Japan), about experiencing art and museums as a blind person, being a visual artist while blind, and lost blind role models, this is definitely one for you. 

It's short, like all books in the Inklings series, and thus it can't possibly be exhaustive -- but it's a window into that world, nonetheless.

Borrowed from Kindle Unlimited; it's the story of Shiva and Parvati, illustrated like a graphic novel. I can't judge faithfulness since I really only knew the bare bones of the story beforehand, but it was an interesting way to experience it.

I picked up Carolyn Wells' Murder in the Bookshop because 1) bookshop, 2) classic mystery, and 3) female author name from whom I hadn't read anything yet. It's American rather than British, which is part of why I hadn't come across the author before. This volume also contained a short story, "The Shakespeare Title-Page Mystery".

As far as the setup goes it's fairly typical, with various hallmarks of the genre: a controlling husband, a younger wife who has developed a relationship with someone who works for her husband, the murder of said husband, a private detective, and of course, suspicion of the wife and the employee. In addition we have the stolen book, and various legit-sounding details around rare books and the rare book trade.

It falls down on inconsistency, though. One moment Fleming Stone says it'd be dangerous for the young wife and her lover to seem close, and the next (without any debate or comment) he's talking to the police about it quite casually. "I'm not going to show this to her," he says, only a couple of pages before he promptly does so. It just feels like a bunch of steps are being missed out -- things there might be reasons for, but which you need to hear the reasons for before they make sense.

In addition, the ending is very, very rushed, and suddenly you no longer see any of the moving parts. It's also one of those mysteries that keeps key info from the reader, which is a pet peeve for some.

It's a shame, really, but I don't think I'd read anything by this author again -- it was too unsatisfying.

It was really interesting, early in the pandemic, how people turned to disaster movies and books about the very same concept. Personally, I found myself rereading Mira Grant's Feed, which features a zombie apocalypse due to a virus that infects literally everyone, and led to severe restrictions on the number of people who can gather, fear of other people, etc, etc. Katie Goh's The End tries to examine why that might be, and comment on a few examples.

Like all the Inklings series, it's pretty short, so it's hardly exhaustive. A chunk of it is focused on COVID specifically, which makes sense giving the timing of the book. I think it makes a good case for why disaster fiction interests and engages us, and I enjoyed the reading process. 

Now Go is basically an essay about Studio Ghibli's portrayal of grief and what that means to the author. It isn't really just about grief in Studio Ghibli movies, and sometimes the link feels a bit tenuous. I can understand feeling a very strong personal connection to movies, and seeing things in them which reflect on one's own grief and loss, but it ends up not being an inquiry into grief in Studio Ghibli, but very much the author's grief and Studio Ghibli. The actual analysis of the movies as texts is fairly surface-level.

I also wasn't super convinced that the author understood that, for example, Howl's Moving Castle is based on a book by Diana Wynne Jones, and not something that Miyazaki came up with in his own head alone. He didn't engage at all with the anti-war themes of this adaptation of Howl's Moving Castle, which are very much Miyazaki's thing, developed out of very small elements of the plot of the novel. It would have fit nicely with his themes, but... nope.