bluejayreads's reviews
753 reviews
A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe, by Alex White
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
This is the first novel I’ve read in print format in at least two years. I have read a few physical books and ebooks in that time, but they were all nonfiction or short story collections. Every novel has been an audiobook until this one. And as someone who used to keep a stack of books literally as talk as my waist next to my favorite childhood reading chair and spend hours reading up to seven physical books per week, it’s an absolutely bizarre experience to discover that hard copies in my hand just aren’t as immersive as audiobooks. So I’ll admit that I struggled a lot with this book, largely because of the format.
But that wasn’t the only reason A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe and I had a rough beginning. I’m a lover of speculative fiction, but I’ve always leaned more towards the fantasy side. I have found some really good scifi, especially recently, but cool scifi stuff isn’t enough to keep me interested – I need plot and characters and other stuff to get immersed in. And this book starts off really slow. The “finding a legendary ship” thing is a catalyst for part of the beginning, but it doesn’t really kick in until the middle. I was going to say that the beginning is setup, but it really isn’t. The beginning has stuff happening, just without much of a real focus.
This story has two protagonist: Boots (the washed-up treasure hunter) and Nylah (the hotshot racer). Boots is angry and rude and mean, but I didn’t mind her all that much. She’s not someone I would like to spend time with in real life, but she was fine as a character. Nylah, though, started the book as the kind of cocky, punchable asshole that I really, really hate in real life and in books. She got some character growth earlier on that helped, and she was incredibly powerful, so by the end I didn’t mind her, but the beginning was difficult. There’s also a host of other characters, including a spaceship crew who definitely get enough page time and development to be called secondary protagonists, but who I don’t really have much to say about. They’re all good, don’t get me wrong – I don’t think there’s a single weak or badly-done character in this book – but there’s nothing to say about them that could add to this review.
The world was an interesting fusion of scifi and magic. It’s your classic spacefaring, mutli-planet, fancy tech, faster-than-light spaceship travel kind of intergalactic science fiction world, but also a world where almost everyone has some type of magic and magic can be used to fuse with, alter, power, and enhance technology as well as just doing straight magic stuff. And the fusion was great. It was cool seeing cybersecurity as a psychic battle between people with tech magic and an evolving AI defense system. It made for some badass fight scenes. And really, it gave my fantasy-loving side something to really enjoy in this otherwise fairly ordinary scifi world and made the whole thing that much better.
Now, you might get this far and think, So this is a pretty solidly okay book, right? And you’d be wrong. This is a really, really good book. And the reason is because somewhere in the middle, the whole “hunting the legendary missing ship” thing finally kicks in. And I loved it. When it starts, the reasons for wanting to find the ship are small – Boots is trying to save her own skin, the rest of the crew wants a payday, and Nylah didn’t even want to be involved but got dragged along for the ride. But as they journey across the universe, exploring massive and unsettling abandoned places (my favorite) and getting chased by an unbelievably powerful assassin, they begin to put together a deadly conspiracy with its roots in a genocidal war decades earlier and its culmination fast approaching. It was thrilling, engaging, and brilliant, plenty of scenes with the absurdly powerful protagonist trope that I adore … I loved it deeply and read it in two sittings. Whatever else my criticisms of the book, once the plot got rolling it really got rolling.
Is A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe perfect? Definitely not. And there’s some things that I just didn’t like about it (e.g. Nylah at the beginning) that other readers may not find irritating or may even like. But the details are great, the world is pretty neat, and once the plot gets going it’s absolutely fantastic. On the whole it’s a very good book. But I don’t intend to read the rest of the series. Part of that is because everything seems to imply that the rest of the series is focused on dealing with the rest of the people involved in the big conspiracy, and that just sounds less interesting to me. And part of it is because this book wrapped up really well. There’s definitely room for a sequel, but it doesn’t feel like it requires one. It was a good, satisfying adventure, and I feel no need to read on.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Violence, Blood, and Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Grief, Genocide, Gore, and Murder
Minor: War and Sexual content
Betrayal, romantic partner death (in past), scifi guns
Elatsoe, by Darcie Little Badger
3.75
I very nearly DNF'd this one, because the main murder mystery plot just didn't vibe with me. Ellie's magic with ghosts means that her murdered cousin straight-up told her who killed him, and the mystery part was actually about finding why and how in a manner that law enforcement would accept. And I just didn't find it that interesting. However, then I realized that I did find everything else in this story interesting. The world of monsters and magic - fae magic, Indigenous magic, vampires, all sorts of stuff - along with the modern world was well-crafted and fascinating. I loved how it was the modern world just a little askew because, you know, magic. I loved learning about the Ellie's Lipan Apache traditions and magic, I loved having a protagonist who was explicitly aro/ace without it being a big deal, I even really enjoyed Ellie's relationship with her best friend Jay. And the murder mystery part did end up having a solid climax (although I'll be honest, I saw the big twist from a mile away). On the whole, I'm glad I finished reading it, because even though parts of it didn't do it for me personally, there's a lot to love in this book.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Grief and Death
Moderate: Murder and Racism
Minor: Car accident, Body horror, and Animal death
In Mercy, Rain, by Seanan McGuire
4.0
Jack seems to get an inordinate amount of time in the Wayward Children series, but I really don't mind because she and her world of the Moors are great. This story is very short and incredibly atmospheric, and really reminds me of the early books in the series (which, since it's meant to be set just after book two, makes perfect sense). It feels like a single scene of how Jack met her girlfriend Alexis that Seanan just couldn't make fit in Down Among the Sticks and Bones but that she liked and thought was important, so she added some context and rich descriptions to the beginning and called it a short story. And personally, I think it worked very well. The Moors are fascinating anyway, and this reveals some details (or just reminded me of details that I forgot) and provides some more characterization for Jack's mad-scientist mentor. It's a fast, dark, and wonderful read and I enjoyed it very much.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death, Child death, Mental illness, and Body horror
Romantic partner death (mentions), emotional neglect
Juice Like Wounds, by Seanan McGuire
4.0
In my review of In an Absent Dream, I complained that the book was too short because one of Lundy's friends straight-up died and you only find that out in dialogue after the fact. I guess Seanan McGuire heard my complaints, because this is the story of the great quest that lead to that death. As anticipated, it was wrenchingly sad, although I think it would have had even more impact if I'd read it directly after In an Absent Dream. It was also very lyrical and heavy on the feelings of being a child - specifically the invincibility and belief that nothing truly bad is going to happen to you - but significantly less atmospheric than I expected. Which is a disappointment, because I love the goblin market that Lundy goes to and I wanted to spend more time there. But this is a short story, not a full book, and for what it is it really works. Fantastical and heartwrenching, as every Wayward Children story tends to be.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death and Child death
Moderate: Injury/Injury detail and Blood
Minor: Body horror
Skeleton Song, by Seanan McGuire
4.0
Christopher has been in several of the Wayward Children books so far, mainly the ones set at Eleanor West's actual school, but he's never been a major character. I mentioned in my review of Come Tumbling Down that I wouldn't mind if he got his own book. But he got his own short story and honestly that's good enough. His adventure in Mariposa, the world of music and dancing skeletons, is very straightforward and follows the pattern of the other stories set in the magical worlds - though it was light on how and why he came through the door in the first place and focused more on what he found there and how he fell back out. Every wayward child's world is a place that connects to their struggle in our world, but Christopher having an illness heavily implied to be terminal and walking through a door into a world where death is not only not to be feared, but is a beginning of something better beyond the bounds of flesh, is the most obvious one so far. This is like a shortened and condensed version of a full Wayward Children book and I think it could have easily been made longer, but it also works as a short story. And if you're missing your Wayward Children fix, it's definitely worth reading.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death
Minor: Body horror and Terminal illness
Zeus Is Dead: A Monstrously Inconvenient Adventure, by Michael G. Munz
Did not finish book. Stopped at 23%.
Did not finish book. Stopped at 23%.
Picture this: You’re on page 105. You’re nearly a quarter of the way through this book. At this point, you’re pretty sure you know what the plot is. You’re not really sure which option is going to be the actual antagonist, and you’ve only recently gotten a feeling that you’ve found the protagonist – although you hope not, because this suspected protagonist has a severe case of Unlikeable. That’s my experience with this book. Is it wildly creative, full of fun and entertaining ideas, and downright zany at times? Absolutely. Is it populated by a solid and likeable (or at the very least, interesting) cast of characters? Not so much.
Let’s start at the beginning, because this book sure didn’t! Everything in the first seven chapters is setup, with a wide cast of Olympian gods and various mortals introducing the world, the return of the gods, how things changed, and the foundations of the actual plot (I think? I’m about 90% sure resurrecting or not-resurrecting Zeus will be the central conflict here). A character in chapter seven gets re-introduced as “a.k.a. the young woman from chapter four” and even though I think it was supposed to be for comedic purposes, it was actually very helpful because there are so many characters running around that I can’t keep them straight. (So many, in fact, that I couldn’t even always tell how many were on the page – the scene right before I stopped reading was weirdly confusing until the last line revealed that there was a whole fourth character involved that I somehow missed.)
If you read the back cover, it feels like Apollo is going to be the protagonist here. But that’s definitely not true. Judging from the first seven chapters, nobody stands out as protagonist material, but you could make good arguments for Apollo, Hermes, or even that one rebellious college student priest of Hecate. There was a TV producer introduced on page 17 that I thought could be a protagonist, but then she disappears for fifty pages and comes back as a completely different person on page 71 to be set up as the reluctant love interest. (Or they could be two different characters that have the same name. There’s zero connection between the later character and the one from the scene on page 17 besides name and occupation so it’s hard to tell.)
It isn’t until chapter eight that someone shows up who actually has protagonist potential. There’s a Prophecy about him, making all the gods interested for various purposes, which definitely seems like a symptom of being a protagonist. But his introductory scene consists of him being annoying, awkward, and unable to stand up to a rude lady who stole his coffee. And then one scene later he turns into a stalker, putting a very, very creepy and uncomfortable angle on producer-lady’s reluctant love interest role. And he’s not the only person who seems to think producer-lady will come around if they just ignore her “No,” so I really don’t like where that seems to be going. The stalker getting the girl is never a good look, especially if the stalker is supposed to be a hero.
I think what bothers me most about how terrible the characters are is how good everything else is. I love the concept of the Olympian gods descending into the modern world and how much chaos that makes. I love that Zeus had to die to make it happen (and the question of why he demanded no-contact with mortals in the first place). I love the dynamics between the Olympians, the competing factions, the mixed reactions to Zeus’s murder, the mystery of who actually did it and how. I love how modern humans react to the gods, from wholehearted embrace to casual acceptance to ignoring to religious nutjobs going full anti-Olympian militia. There was the potential for some very interesting commentary about modern religious beliefs and behaviors. I love the variety of weird monsters now unleashed on the world. The plot, with various Olympian factions working to ensure Zeus either returns or stays dead, was solid. Even the writing style, though it did have a distinctly amateurish feel, managed to be genuinely humorous at times.
But, the characters. As much fun as the world is, as solid as the plot is and as light and fun as the writing is as a whole, it’s the characters that drive a story. And these characters all suck. They range from bland and forgettable to caricature without substance to “I would punch this person in the face if I met them” unlikeable assholes. (Or stalkers. I still can’t get over that the likely-protagonist-hero is straight-up stalking someone and everybody, including the woman he’s stalking, seems to view it as irritating but nothing more. It really bothers me that nobody in this book seems to notice or care how INCREDIBLY GODDAMN AWFUL AND CREEPY it is.) There was not a single character I could connect to, care about, or even be willing to follow around for the rest of the book. I really do think there’s a lot of potential in this story. It just needs a whole new cast of characters to realize it.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Stalking
Moderate: Kidnapping and Injury/Injury detail
Minor: Blood and Religious bigotry
The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, by Gabor Maté
Did not finish book. Stopped at 25%.
To be fair, Gabor is a doctor and likely doesn’t realize he is making those assumptions. These are underlying assumptions of our society as well – just look at any health, diet, or weight loss claim. Once you know to look for them, you’ll see these assumptions everywhere. So I don’t really blame Gabor for writing from that perspective. It’s great that he’s on board with the growing body of evidence about trauma’s effects on physical health. I think he just didn’t go far enough in the “challenging society’s assumptions about health” aspect.
Did not finish book. Stopped at 25%.
I have read a LOT about trauma and its effects over the past few years (e.g. here, here, here, and here). This is a topic of personal interest for me, as well as one where, at this point, I feel fairly well-versed. From the emphasis on the back cover, I thought this was going to be about the many small and not-so-small traumas we face every day because of how society is set up (the “toxic society” promised in the subtitle) and how those affect our health. I expected something more along the lines of Sedated than anything.
I’m going to refer to author in the singular here because even though the book tries to emphasize that Daniel also had a large hand in the writing of the book, the concepts and ideas are obviously all Gabor’s.
The main premise of The Myth of Normal is that modern medicine’s fundamental assumptions about human health are wrong – that the mind and body are not and can never be truly separated, and that trying to treat illness as separate from the person’s life circumstances is short-sighted and misses essential underlying factors that affect a disease’s onset, progression, and treatment. All of which I do agree with. However, for all its emphasis on challenging fundamental assumptions, the book itself refuses to challenge or even acknowledge the fundamental assumptions that drive it:
- There exists a state of perfect health which is possible for humans to achieve;
- Achieving this state is both possible and essential for every human being;
- Therefore, the ultimate goal (or one of the ultimate goals) of every human being should be to work to achieve this state.
To be fair, Gabor is a doctor and likely doesn’t realize he is making those assumptions. These are underlying assumptions of our society as well – just look at any health, diet, or weight loss claim. Once you know to look for them, you’ll see these assumptions everywhere. So I don’t really blame Gabor for writing from that perspective. It’s great that he’s on board with the growing body of evidence about trauma’s effects on physical health. I think he just didn’t go far enough in the “challenging society’s assumptions about health” aspect.
There is a lot of research presented here, so I do give him credit for that. It’s not really anything I didn’t get from The Body Keeps the Score (Gabor even quotes Bessel van der Kolk several times), but if you’re not familiar with the concepts and the research, I think it would be a good introduction. Where I had issues was all the parts that weren’t research. The anecdotes and stories were incredibly sensationalized. It was always someone with a horrible and fatal disease going from being bed-bound to living a pretty much normal life due to healing from horrific childhood sexual abuse. Nobody was healing from schoolyard bullying or their parents’ divorce and as a result seeing improvement in their back pain or having fewer headaches. It was always people with something dramatic and incurable who healed their trauma and therefore fixed their disease.
As someone who is disabled/chronically ill, I’ve heard all of the “one weird trick to heal your incurable disease! Doctors are amazed!” stuff. And if you strip away the scientific trappings, what Gabor is presenting sounds exactly like the “natural cure without drugs!” bullshit you find in weird alternative health circles. Take out the fact that Gabor is a doctor and cut the parts where he cites research and you could replace “trauma healing” with “kale,” “yoga,” “unpronounceable exotic herb,” or whatever else in every single anecdote and it would sound exactly as outlandish. Gabor is pretty much promising that healing your trauma will fix anything and everything wrong with you, up to and including incurable and fatal conditions.
I don’t want to deny the fact that there is research. Unlike most “cures” in this non-medical modes of healing space, the trauma-health connection actually has a lot of promising research around it. Which I think is why I take such issue with the way it’s presented here. Could healing your trauma help your physical health? Absolutely, and there’s research to back that up. Will healing your trauma cure your cancer? I can’t bring myself to believe that, no matter how fancy the credentials of the doctor telling me the story.
This book may have fallen prey to the whims of marketing, ignoring scientific nuance in favor of something that will sell – and sensationalism sells. Or maybe Gabor completely believes in trauma healing as a miracle cure. I don’t know. But regardless, I don’t recommend this one. The concepts and research are good, but you can get the same information in other books (I recommend The Body Keeps the Score and It Didn’t Start With You) with many fewer issues. The effects of trauma on physical health are worth learning about. But not from this book.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Abandonment, Chronic illness, Rape, Domestic abuse, Cancer, Pedophilia, Child abuse, Terminal illness, and Incest
Minor: War
Promises, Promises, by L-J Baker
Did not finish book. Stopped at 25%.
Did not finish book. Stopped at 25%.
I'm not much for comedy at the best of times - most of it just comes off as unfunny at best and cringeworthy at worst. And that's exactly what happened with this book. I very nearly gave up on page 11 because the protagonist insisted on making a fool of herself while both literally and metaphorically shoving away another character trying to help her avoid doing so. But sometimes the inciting incident is a little rough and then it gets better, so I pushed on. And admittedly after that one scene, I no longer felt like cringing out of my skin. But it didn't improve by much. The characters were caricatures with little depth whose main purpose seemed to be subverting tropes. The humor ranged from just not funny to awkward and forced. And the plot was far too straightforward and unexciting to hold my interest on its own. I appreciate that the book was trying to subvert all of the fantasy quest novel tropes - I am absolutely here for trope subversion. But Promises, Promises took the concept of subverting tropes and just kinda forgot to build an actually enjoyable story around it. I will admit, though,, comedies aren't my jam generally. The problem here may be me and not the book. But regardless of where the fault lies, I couldn't find the desire to continue.