storyorc's reviews
640 reviews

The stakes seem high but it quickly became apparent that the narrative would excuse away any problems that would actually let them BE high. What's left is fluff and minor squabbles. Not bad, but not much drama. 

There's nothing really orcish beyond a few tusk mentions either. The orcs may as well be humans from a few hundred years in the future, politically. This is cozy. We don't have to worry about feudalism ethics. But it's not exciting.

Finally, Elketh is irredeemably immature and brings nothing to the table. I was hoping Ruga would take her pretty little face in hand and tell her so at the end. She deserves better.

It's just all very ok.

As convincingly 19th-century writing as it is an true account of English magic, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell will delight the lovers of whimsy, historical fiction, and anyone who chafes against the portrayal of fairies as hot boys with abs and a hidden heart of gold. These fair folk will ruin your life and only sometimes do you the dignity of noticing.

Magic never loses its mystique and danger, even as we follow Strange's growth in his abilities, even without invoking fairies and forgotten kings. Clarke lays down general principles as well as the exact methods and ingredients for many an individual spell but refrains from any explanation of how the former lead to the latter so that we, like amateur magicians, never fully understands its innerworkings. This hard-to-the-characters, soft-to-the reader pair perfectly with the impression of scholarship created by endless footnotes and academia to preserve a sense of magic's vastness no matter how many spectacles our heroes and villains pull off.

I use the term 'heroes' loosely. Though Strange makes a superior first impression to Norrell, both titular magicians are selfish in the way that only wealthy men could be in that era. They cause near as much strife as they solve, which is only compounded by the Georgian manners. It often makes for an aggravating reading experience but the self-sabotage grows so organically from their personalities that it couldn't really be any other way. The welcome counterbalance to this is that, while the characters exhibit period-typical misogyny, classism, and racism, the novel does not. Clarke never breaks character to openly denounce it but her narrative spends more time in the point of view of servants and wives than a true 19th-century account of historical events would, and they are often the only ones with the most common sense. Childermass, especially, is perhaps the single most effective actor in the story and Norrell's sequences would be insufferable without him. It can be no accident that while society overlooks them,

the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair and John Uskglass himself seek out Stephen Black, Emma Pole, Arabella Strange, and John Childermass, not Jonathan Strange or Norrell - nor that those four get the most desirable endings

.

The only downside of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell being such a faithful representation of Victorian (Georgian, technically? Depending on whether we go by style or setting) literature is that it shares the same drawbacks. I often wanted to grab characters by the scruff and shake until they stopped beating around the bush and being so hung up on propriety. The commitment to detail could also get exhausting. On the whole, however, the frustrations are part of the experience and very much worth it for the delightful, surprising ways Clarke ties off all her plot threads in the end.

What a fool I was, to believe that the three Dune books would worldbuild us organically to Leto's infamous transformation. Thematically, it's inevitable, but I miss the relatively-grounded ecology laid down in the first book. Still, if you've made it past Messiah, you're probably good with reading for the political philosophy first and all else second. Children is as nutritious as Messiah in that regard, following the Golden Path ideology through to one terrible, fascinating conclusion.

Characters taking a backseat to the philosophy doesn't meant they're bad either - Jessica remains uncomfortably relatable; Alia, the kind of train-wreck you can't look away from, and the twins' bond has its touching moments. You feel for their sacrificed childhood.

Paul

is the only member of the cast whose plight is tragic enough to full break me out of trying-to-absorb-a-lecture mode though. Poor guy. 

The same could be said for the plot, or at least, I think so. Sometimes, it was a thrill to get a peek behind the curtain at the vast web of political schemes interacting with the pressure of their society's momentum. Sometimes, I gave up trying to understand what everyone was doing and why.

As for the star of the show, the politics philosophy, you can look forward to include: whether the ends justify the means when those ends involve atrocities, Bene Gesserit teachings on how to keep a large populace in line, whether the symbolism and mystique of a culture helps or hinders its ability to survive, corruption, societal stagnation, and the importance of taking a wide-angle approach to important decisions. Herbert also continues to explore the price of precognition, fate, and the value of uncertainty.

Definitely a book to make you think about who's steering the ship and just how much they control the waves. I only rate it slightly lower than the previous two because I preferred the characters in those.

Really not a fan of the ending line being about how Leto was always stronger than Ghanima though. Nothing in the text suggested that and I would have thought the state of Leto at the end of the book renders the question of which twin is stronger moot. Wish I could understand why Herbert found that sentiment important enough to end on.

I wanted that secrets box sooooooo bad

A brilliant, yet closed-off female scientist with a philosophical interest in life and the borders between lifeforms travelling into the Weird unknown in search of cosmic truths? As someone whose favourite book is Annihilation, my hopes were high.

In Ascension contains a tragic look at parental abuse and dementia, and the complicated sister bond that arises from it. It contains cool ideas for space exploration like living ships you can eat off and that recycle your corpse after death which are "somewhere between cities and gods". It contains fun facts about the Netherlands' flood control systems and the time President Bush retroactively made new astronauts by lowering America's height limit. It imagines how manned space exploration might look in its near-future setting. The prose includes great phrases like "our only closeness was in the residue of violence", "the horror... at eating something... capable of drawing a route towards the nearest star" (talking about algae, not humans, sorry), and describing a drug that can recreate religious bliss as "revelation on tap".

It also contains twice as many words as I would have liked. MacInnes employs a conversational writing style so (interesting!) ideas are often restated as we get them. For example:

Sometimes it adds depth, sometimes it just adds reading time. I also struggled to understand what was physically happening in a few places - sometimes because of terms I should have looked up, but also sometimes because I didn't understand the (futuristic?) tools MacInnes invented, or the significance of an event in the mission. His decision to have some events I would have considered key - like the moment of take-off - happen off-page was also baffling. Finally, the memoir style of narrative made for too much 'telling' for my pacing tastes. The reliance on reported speech and paragraphs of Leigh's speculation to portray her crewmates' personalities in particular hampered me in getting invested in them; they were always most vibrant when we were hearing from them directly in a scene.

My favourite aspect of the novel was the extended exploration of the border - or lack thereof - between us and the oceanic soup we crawled out of. At a young age, Leigh

almost drowns,

only to find "fraternity" underwater, "pressed against a teeming immensity"; as a graduate, she insists the ocean "already contains everything... of every body, of every living thing - it's still there". Without getting into spoilers, the space portion of the book makes interesting observations of how that might scale from the ocean to the universe, and takes every opportunity to talk about organisms that operate en mass, beyond any one single identity. It's a beautiful counterweight to Leigh's perpetual struggle to connect to others and compelling food for thought. If the quote "you could describe us as both people, and as mobile assemblages of ocean" piques your interest, you should give this book a try.

Larkin was a little too gen z for my nerves but the story delivers on everything you'd expect from the cover except the full werewolf form.