Reviews and Comments

This is the third book written by the Brontë sisters I've read, and so far I've definitely enjoyed it the most. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall felt a little too moralistic to me, with Wuthering Heights I couldn't understand the characters' motivation. Jane however? I get Jane. Abused and neglected in childhood, desperate for love, yet still too proud to accept crumbs... I get Jane Eyre.

It's just a shame how much the two other most interesting female characters in the book - which would be Bertha and Adele - are treated. Bertha is little more than a plot device, when her story carries so much potential. Charlotte Bronte wouldn't have even had to make her sympathetic to satisfy me, just show a little bit more of her perspective. But, you know, I'm a person who has lived in the world for a couple of years, so I knew about the woman in the attic, and I was prepared for her. It was Adele who really broke my heart. She's what? Supposed to be nine years old? And Rochester and Jane both judge her so harshly for being basically a young girl who likes dresses and presents and people giving her attention. It's sad, she was adopted by a man who may or may not be her father and he... kinda hates her, because he projects her mother's rejection of him on her childlike shallowness.

I'm planning on reading Wide Sargasso Sea, the famous prequel from Bertha's perspective, but I also heard that Angela Carter was apparently planning a novel about Adele that she didn't get to finish before her death. What a shame! I would have loved to read that.

(Also, the woman on the painting they chose for the cover of this version is much too pretty. I always pictured her as a very slight, mousy girl, with ears that stuck out a bit.)

So. I didn't like this book very much, but this is a bit of an annoying review to write. The reasons why I don't like this book are not really something I can fault the author, as they're pretty much to be expected for a book written in this time period.

Shortly put, like many older examples of children's lit, I find Little Women to be overly didactic and twee, with the added difficulty of disagreeing with some of the moral lessons it tries to teach.

I can see the value it must have had in its time, as well as to some readers, in portraying girls with interesting inner lives and conflicts, who did not always entirely fit the gender norms. It was, in that sense, an interesting bit of insight in the time period. But as an adult modern reader I couldn't really connect with it.

"The Towers of February: An (as of yet) anonymous diary with punctuation and footnotes added by Tonke Dragt"

As the very long subtitle shows, the conceit of this book is that it's actually a diary found by the author ( a la the works of Tolkien).

The author of this diary (with the first page dated to the 30th of February...) woke up on a beach with no clue who he is, where he is, or how he got there. His only clue is the mysterious, indecipherable writing on the last 24 pages of a notebook he found on his person.

It seems I simply can't pick up a Discworld book without finishing it within three days or less.

The Tiffany books were my introduction to Discworld, and they, and the witches in general, are really still my favorites. I don't think I've ever experienced that elusive sense of being represented in fiction as strongly as when I read about Tiffany Aching mispronouncing words because she'd only ever saw them written down. More than that, I admire her (and Mistress Weatherwax). She's responsible and practical and decisive, all virtues that, in my opinion, don't get enough attention in fiction. Probably because authors don't naturally tend to be the practical sort.

I'm continually amazed by how well Pratchett writes women, even the clique-y, bizarre internal politics of tween girl friendships ring true. (If you weren't a Petulia or Anagramma, you've met them.)
Warm, insightful, incredibly funny... It's a Pratchett-book, what more do you need?

A confusing mix when it comes to tone, this story reads mostly as a pulpy space opera, except for those moments where it launches into complicated discussions of linguistics and grammar.

Rydra Wong is a poet with such a great knack for learning languages that it borders on telepathy (body language is a language too, after all), and she uses her talent to decode the messages of the Invaders who, as the name suggests, are at war with her society.

I'm not a linguist, but I believe that the scientific theories on which the premise of this book is based have been debunked , which didn't help my suspension of disbelief. Personally, I was much more interested in another idea Delany introduced: discorporate people. Basically, in the future we prove that ghosts do exist, we just haven't yet developed the technology needed to perceive them. Without technological intervention we simply forget our interactions with the discorporate as soon as they happen, leaving us with nothing but the lingering feeling of being haunted. His vision of a future in which the dead are integrated into society is fascinating, and I would have preferred a book that focused on that idea.

A great conclusion to the Earthsea series. One of the best sort: the kind that immediately makes you want to start right back at the beginning. It ties up all the existing threads and questions about its world so beautifully, that reading the series again with the knowledge of how it ends doesn't spoil the story, but is its own kind of pleasure.

Turns out my dad read this book back in the day, and really enjoyed it! He’s normally not a big reader, so it’s always fun when we get to bond a little over books.

This novel centers on two doomed relationships. That of the main narrator, George, and his friend and love interest Sara, and that of George’s friend, Jonas, and a young psychiatric nurse named Marie.

The problem between George and Sara seems to be that she can’t let go of her attachment to the older man who, essentially, abused her when she was a shy, vulnerable teenager. When he, now a famous pianist, comes to perform in Amsterdam, she can’t bring herself to stay away, and even though she knows he treated her badly, she’s unable to let go of their past and open herself up to genuine, healthy love. Despite that she’s never described as conventionally attractive, yes, the narration even calls her straight-up ugly, she’s actively desired by our main character, as well as other men, which I honestly found rather refreshing.

Jonas is chronically ill and unable to work, so, despite a mutual desire for connection, he feels he has to break off his budding courtship with Marie as he believes he can’t offer her a real future. I was about halfway through, when I started to wonder where the gay themes were supposed to hide, as this all felt very heterosexual to me. Ah, me of little faith. It turns out that the illness in his teenage years that Jonas never really recovered from, was immediately preceded by a sudden attraction (yes, crush even) to a male classmate. (In classic gay-novel-yearning, he’s described as looking like a Greek statue). With my very rudimentary literary analysis skills, I wonder if Jonas’ physical illness (of unclear cause) is meant to parallel Sara’s emotional issues, as his too, could be caused by an inability to let go of a past love.

I’ve read that Sara is actually based on a woman Anna Blaman knew and was in love with, which makes me wonder if Jonas is also partly an autobiographical character. Like him, she was also sickly throughout her life (and she died fairly young, she was only 55 years old).

I enjoyed the prose. It was very old-fashioned Dutch, but also rich and at times, beautiful.

I missed Dracula Daily last year, but I thought, why not join and see if there's still some hype this year?

"Woman and friend"

Short novel published in 1941, despite what Bookwyrm says. Written by another feminist and LGBTQ Dutch author. Anna Blaman was a lesbian who so openly and non-judgmentally wrote about gay characters and same-sex desires in her books that her fellow authors accused her of crimes against literature in a mock-trial. It did not stop her.

I'm a bit apprehensive about this one. I loved the first three books or so as a child, then I grew up before my local library had a chance to acquire the rest of the series, and now I'm trying to make up for it. This is the first book that expands the setting from the English countryside, and I'm just not sure about it. I feel like that's the setting in which these stories work best, but I'll give it a chance. And while I kind of like Grimalkin as a character, I'm also not really enthusiastic about this introduction of "assassin witches". It feels like Delaney is taking this series from a fantasy series fairly grounded in English folklore, to, I don't know, a shounen anime. Not that I think he has watched a lot of those, but it starts to approach about that amount of realism and the same proportions of eerie spookiness to kick-ass fight scenes.

I generally really like Delaney's approach to witches as villains in these books, he managed to strike a great balance between making them genuinely frightening but also sympathetic. Drawing on a lot of older witch lore (if they're malevolent, they make pacts with the devil, are seductresses and grind baby bones for potions), he's aware enough of the misogynist ideas that were the foundation for many of these superstitions to address those too. You will not find many children's books, that clearly primarily target boys, that make realizing your mentor's sexism is ill-founded an ongoing point of character development. And yet, since when is wielding a knife what makes a witch so frightening? It's a very, ugh, dare I say, male way of approaching this. (I just realized that maybe it's relevant too that Grimalkin, the more sympathetic evil witch fights in a "typically male" way (pointy things) versus the other witches who use more feminine coded methods (seduction, manipulation))

Am I giving too much thought to a children's book? Yes. Will I stop? Never.

At least Mam and Alice are back, and they're always great. Plus, Grimalkin does genuinely promise to be a fun character, though not, in my opinion, because of her vast array of knives.