★★★☆☆ Somehow fails to hit the spot

Illuminations

T Kingfisher

Illuminations begins on a typical T. Kingfisher note -- with an eleven-year-old sitting in her room, bored stiff. Rosa belongs to a family of artists, and she herself likes to draw. She is particularly fond of drawing fanged radishes. (Like how do you do that? Where does one put the fangs on a radish?) If you've read a lot of Kingfisher, "fanged radishes" will feel like a very Kingfisher note.

But Rosa has a problem. The art made by her family, the Mandolinis, is magical. Their drawings and paintings have magical properties, like repelling rats or repelling fire. These magical pictures are called Illuminations. Rosa's radishes, however, have no magical properties that anyone can identify. (It turns out that winged radishes ward off sickness, but Rosa just doesn't want to draw winged radishes.) Everyone in the Mandolini family can feel that there is SOMETHING about Rosa's fanged radishes -- they are magic-adjacent, if not quite magical.

At this point, you can probably figure out what the story is going to be. It's going to be a sort of parable celebrating individual artistic expression, and Rosa and her fanged radishes will become some sort of heroes. And it's gonna be one of those books in which an artist (albeit a writer, not a painter) tells her audience how wonderful art is and how wonderful it is to be an artist.

You know, Kingfisher (AKA Ursula Vernon) is one of my favorite authors. She has an off-kilter creativity that really appeals to me, and a great sense of humor. But (you knew there was gonna be a "But") this one just missed for me. It felt like an orgy of self-congratulation that, in the latter half of the book, became tedious.

Amazon reviews

Goodreads review

Comments

★★★☆☆ Be wary. Be clever. Be good.

One Dark Window Rachel Gillig I finished One Dark Window with a feeling of dissatisfaction, that I'm having a hard time explaining. When I updated my progress at 57%, I remarked "Too much smolder, too little actual fire." By that I meant that it seemed as if Rachel Gillig spent all her time telling us how to feel, and too little describing actual events. Now, objectively, that is false. One Dark Window is full of event -- there are battles and magic spells and romance. Yet, somehow, I can't shake the impression. If you asked me to summarize the plot of One Dark Window , I would find it difficult. Even though I just finished it last night, I have a hard time remembering the events of the story, or arranging them into any semblance of order -- salient/nonsalient, this happened because of that... The Acknowledgements provide a small hint of the nature of the problem. Gillig writes, "To John, my husband who brags about me, holds and feed...

★★★☆☆ Mostly interesting for the juggling lore

Lord Valentine's Castle Robert Silverberg I remember that I was a grad student in biochemistry when I read Robert Silverberg 's Lord Valentine's Castle . I was a grad student from 1976 - 1983, so I must have read it not long after it came out in 1979. I read it because I am and always have been a science fiction fan, and Silverberg has a BIG reputation -- I had read praise of him from many of my favorite authors. So I got this novel and read it. I never read another book by Silverberg , which probably tells you everything you need to know about my opinion. What's the book about? Well, the publisher's blurb begins thus Valentine, a wanderer who knows nothing except his name, finds himself on the fringes of a great city, and joins a troupe of jugglers and acrobats; gradually, he remembers that he is the Coronal Valentine, executive ruler of the vast world of Majipoor, and all its peoples, human and otherwise... This plot summary reminds me of the following qu...

★★★★☆ Which Thursday?

One of Our Thursdays Is Missing Jasper Fforde This installment of Jasper Fforde 's Thursday Next series features a new main character. Actually, she's not quite new -- we met her in First Among Sequels . She is Thursday Next - 5, the fictional Thursday Next in an unsuccessful fifth Thursday Next book promoted because Thursday, the Real World Thursday, was unhappy with her own portrayal in the series. This introductory scene from First Among Sequels will give you a pretty good idea of her personality But I did bring you some breakfast.’ ‘Well, in that case . . .’ I looked into the bag she handed me and frowned.‘Wait a minute – that doesn’t look like a bacon sandwich.’ ‘It isn’t. It’s a crispy lentil cake made with soya milk and bean curd. It cleanses the bowels. Bacon definitely will give you a heart attack.’ ‘How thoughtful of you,’ I remarked sarcastically. ‘The body is a temple, right?’ ‘Right. And I didn’t get you coffee because it r...

★★★★☆ Cliché, manipulative, but still surprisingly entertaining

Silent Scream Angela Marson I have noticed that many Goodreads reviewers are subtractors. What I mean by that is that they appear to evaluate books (or at least review them) by listing all the faults they can find, and then giving a low rating to those works that have lots of faults. In the alternative, adder, strategy, one looks for the good things in a book and gives a high score to a book that has lots of good stuff. I myself am mostly an adder (although I make no claim to absolute strategic purity). I mention this because Angela Marsons 's Silent Scream has serious faults. I'm going to mention a couple of them, but I nevertheless give it a four-star rating. First, you should know (this is not a fault, but just something you should know going in), that Silent Scream is emotionally heavy. It concerns institutionalized children (mostly girls) who are abused in almost every awful way you can imagine. What's more, protagonist Kim Stone is herself a survivor ...

★★★★☆ Making heroes of Rednecks and Hillbillies

Demon Copperhead Barbara Kingsolver You already know that Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver is a retelling of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens . Indeed, it is so faithful a retelling that, if the publisher had not already spilled the beans, I would feel compelled to mark this review a spoiler because of mentioning David Copperfield . If you have read David Copperfield at all recently, then you will recognize the characters and the major plot points as you read Demon Copperhead . (I last read David Copperfield when I was a kid in the late 1960s, so I was blessedly free from this detailed anticipation as I read Demon Copperhead . I did, however, check out the Wikipedia plot summary of David Copperfield on finishing Demon Copperhead , so I'm up to speed on both plot outlines.) And this, I say, is absolutely fine! If you're going to steal, by all means, steal from the best! I am co...

★★☆☆☆ Nudge nudge wink wink

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman Laurence Sterne I was a high-school student when I tried to read Laurence Sterne 's Tristram Shandy . This was a mistake. If you read a lot of old books, you come to know of other, even older books that are mentioned by the authors of the less old ones. I don't know how many Tristram Shandy -reading gentlemen I encountered in 19th century English literature. (Always gentlemen -- although I rather suspect 19th century ladies read Tristram Shandy , few 19th-century authors would dare to feature a Tristram Shandy -reading female.) One can easily imagine Mr Bennett chuckling at Tristram Shandy , although if he did, Jane Austen doesn't tell us so. So, I tried to read it. It's supposed to be funny. It was frustrating. High-school me kept hoping something would happen, but nothing ever does. In fact, that is kind of the point. Sterne is masterful at filling pages with text and yet so...

★★☆☆☆ Misery, Canadian style

The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories Margaret Atwood (Editor), Robert Weaver (Editor) I read The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories , (eds Margaret Atwood , Robert Weaver ) because it is the textbook for a community college course I've registered for this winter called "Writing Short Stories". This is one of the worst short story collections I have ever read in my life. I noticed early on that it appeared to be the same story over and over again. A man and a woman are trapped in a desperately unhappy marriage. Maybe something happens, or maybe not. It is evident that for Atwood and Weaver plot is entirely optional. Some of the stories had one, and some did not. There were rare exceptions to the desperately unhappy marriage storyline, in which the characters were miserable for other reasons. You know that feeling of relief as you approach the end of a really bad book? I had that feeling 45 times in rapid succession as I worked my ...

★★★☆☆ What is it like to be an octopus?

Children of Ruin Adrian Tchaikovsky There is a famous essay called What is it like to be a Bat? / Wie ist es, eine Fledermaus zu sein? by philosopher Thomas Nagel . (Although I am not a philosopher, I am a neuroscientist, and as a neuroscientist it is almost impossible to avoid knowing a little of the nonsense philosophers think about how minds work.) Nagel attempts to make an argument about consciousness. He argues that the consciousness of a bat is an experience a human cannot possibly have or understand, because echolocation is so unhuman. I have a little fantasy about Adrian Tchaikovsky 's Children of Time series . I imagine he read Nagel 's effusion and said to himself, "Utter nonsense! I'm gonna show that I can imagine not only what it's like to be a bat, but even what it's like to be a spider or an octopus!" ( Nagel in fact raises the question of invertebrate experience in his essay, only to make the point that it is an even h...

★★★★☆ Matrimonial predators

The Brides of High Hill Nghi Vo We catch up with Chih, who is accompanying the Pham family -- Mr and Mrs Pham and their daughter Pham Nhung to the castle of Lord Guo. The Phams are a family of merchants down on their luck, and Nhung has been proposed in marriage to Lord Guo. She and Chih met cute, and she asked them to accompany her to Lord Guo's castle for the marriage negotiation. Chih appears to have a mini-crush on Nhung, which she appears to encourage. Chih desperately misses their neixin Almost Brilliant, who is mysteriously absent. Nhung is naturally worried about being married. Chih, who knows many stories, true and fictional, about husbands and wives, would like to reassure her, but cannot honestly do so. Stuff happens. You will recognize the story pretty quickly. It's Bluebeard. You probably already figured that out -- the plural "Brides" in the title kind of gives it away. In this one Chih faces serious personal danger, more immediate than in any other S...

★★★★☆ Murderbot is not all there

System Collapse Martha Wells In my review of Rogue Protocol I described Murderbot as "the adorably cuddly ball of barbed-wire that she naturally is". But Murderbot's bristling exterior has been breached. In Network Effect Murderbot encountered alien remnant contamination, which did something -- she's not quite sure what -- to her. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I had told Mensah. “I think you might know,” she had said. “You just don’t want to talk about it.” She is definitely not 100%, and she knows it. In fact, her knowing it is something like 80% of the problem -- Murderbot is suffering from that oh-so-familiar-to-humans problem, a failure of self-confidence. She needs help, and her relationships, always an uncomfortable subject for Murderbot, with "her" humans and with ART are essential. Short bookkeeping note here: although Network Effect is nominally book 5 and Fugitive Telemetry book 6 in The Murderbot Diaries , the chron...

Search This Blog