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one_womanarmy's reviews
222 reviews
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Jane’s refusal to marry Rochester after learning about Bertha is where the story shines. Rochester tempts Eyre to run away with him to France, where no one knows or cares that he is married, but she refuses. She faces the betrayal with shocking strength. She rejects economic and social culture and knows that she can fend for herself, financially and emotionally. She remains in my eyes a heroine we all need - true to her heart, but ruled by her wisdom and morals. Unfailingly kind in the face of tyranny and injustice, and moved to better herself and others at all turns.
4.0
Jane Eyre is my favorite Victorian / classic novel, and a third re-read only confirmed that sentiment. Bronte outlines a rich, funny coming of age story about a young girl traveling from an abusive and lonely childhood to womanhood working as governess for the ward of the brooding Mr.Rochester. Through the ups and downs of life, Jane finds a way to create light and happiness even in the darkest times, and importantly, finds strength and truth in her own conscience and intelligence despite the societal pressures around her to bow, bend, submit and break.
Jane is one of my all time favorite book characters. Jane is a lovable, strong, independent and intelligent woman. Life has dealt Jane a bad hand. She lived with her abusive aunt and cousins until she was ten and then went to a very strict and harsh boarding school. Her life is narrow, but her spirit aims high and true at all costs - her mind and morals rule her in spite of her admittance at many turns to a timid and infirm physical countenance.
Although the novel was written over 150 years ago, Charlotte Bronte’s writing style is incredibly easy to follow. When I first read this book at 14 or 15, I thought of it as just a love story set in the backdrop of Victorian England. But I reread it during the lockdown last year and found so many themes I had missed the last time.
Jane is one of my all time favorite book characters. Jane is a lovable, strong, independent and intelligent woman. Life has dealt Jane a bad hand. She lived with her abusive aunt and cousins until she was ten and then went to a very strict and harsh boarding school. Her life is narrow, but her spirit aims high and true at all costs - her mind and morals rule her in spite of her admittance at many turns to a timid and infirm physical countenance.
Although the novel was written over 150 years ago, Charlotte Bronte’s writing style is incredibly easy to follow. When I first read this book at 14 or 15, I thought of it as just a love story set in the backdrop of Victorian England. But I reread it during the lockdown last year and found so many themes I had missed the last time.
Rereading the book last year I realized that it is not the “romantic novel” it is marketed to be. Edward Rochester would fall into the community of men who belittle their female workers, remind them of their inferiority, and then praise their wit. In one scene, he dresses up as a fortune teller to know how “she truly feels about him.”
Jane Eyre had to literally shout this masterpiece to remind Rochester that she’s her equal:
“Do you think I am an automaton? — a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you — and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal — as we are!”
Jane’s refusal to marry Rochester after learning about Bertha is where the story shines. Rochester tempts Eyre to run away with him to France, where no one knows or cares that he is married, but she refuses. She faces the betrayal with shocking strength. She rejects economic and social culture and knows that she can fend for herself, financially and emotionally. She remains in my eyes a heroine we all need - true to her heart, but ruled by her wisdom and morals. Unfailingly kind in the face of tyranny and injustice, and moved to better herself and others at all turns.
The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley
dark
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
In The Stars Are Legion, Kameron Hurley brings us a queer, all-female space opera in the style of Ancillary Justice and David Cronenburg's body horror to create a world that blends violent war and birth through the use of giant sentient world-ships and a multigenerational lense on forgetting, hoping, and pursuing a better family life. It is the story of two enemy lovers, Zan and Jayd – the story’s two narrators – and their attempt to rebirth a world-ship, the Mokshi, that is capable of leaving their dying, deep-space Legion of world-ships at the Outer Rim of the galaxy.
Biopunk to its core, Legion spins the reader through a hands-on dark and barbaric narrative that takes the reader through the core of a world and the core of the main character's memory and soul, exploring what it means to understand ourselves, our families, and the world around us, and forgive and accept the mistakes we make, the triumphs we share, and the parts that we cannot understand or change.
Unlike most sci-fi that I have read, the world of The Stars are Legion is almost entirely organic. The world-ships, of which there are primarily three in the story, are gigantic floating, tentacled living worlds with a seemingly unknown number of levels from the bottom, where people are recycled by terrifying monsters, all the way to the top, where the elite and powerful live and conspire. The entire world-ship is organic, made of some kind of fleshy substance that can be cut through to form new passageways, and eaten, if entirely necessary. It is alive with tubes like umbilici, and growths, and blood, and on the outside, a blackening cancerous rot, evidence that the worlds are dying and will continue to do so.
The intertwining first-person narratives of Zan and Jayd make for an extremely compelling and entertaining story, and Hurley’s use of present tense adds an extra level of suspense to the tale’s unfolding of a variety of interwoven plot types: quest, revelation, voyage-and-return, etcetera, all of which are thrilling by turns.
One of the main reasons I loved this book is how Hurley doesn’t separate war and childbirth as two distinct stories that can never meet. Before The Stars Are Legion I’d never really read a science fiction story that included childbirth other than as a form of tragic death for mothers, or procreation as a central narrative for the "arc of humanity." Birth as ritual is cited often. Birth as factual rite of life is not.
Birth is an integral part of the world, not in a clichéd version of the miracle of life, but as one of the many parts of human experience and a necessity for the world-ships survival. All the characters have different feelings about birth and children, some going through with pregnancy for the good of the world-ship despite their disinterest in it, some terminating their pregnancies for a variety of reasons, others wishing for human children and crying when the world-ship takes the creatures they’ve birthed from them.
I also loved, quite simply, that this book was all women. Violent women. Flawed women. Selfish women. Ugly women. Women who birth, women who grieve, women who sacrifice with courage.
I often struggle when listening to a book to retain all of the characters' arcs and storylines, and feel this was true for my experience with Legion. With an eye to reading a physical copy in the future, I can strongly recommend this book as a unique queer feminist sci-fi body horror. Deduction of overall points for dragging out the plot line at time with a bit too much voyaging through unknown lands.
Biopunk to its core, Legion spins the reader through a hands-on dark and barbaric narrative that takes the reader through the core of a world and the core of the main character's memory and soul, exploring what it means to understand ourselves, our families, and the world around us, and forgive and accept the mistakes we make, the triumphs we share, and the parts that we cannot understand or change.
Unlike most sci-fi that I have read, the world of The Stars are Legion is almost entirely organic. The world-ships, of which there are primarily three in the story, are gigantic floating, tentacled living worlds with a seemingly unknown number of levels from the bottom, where people are recycled by terrifying monsters, all the way to the top, where the elite and powerful live and conspire. The entire world-ship is organic, made of some kind of fleshy substance that can be cut through to form new passageways, and eaten, if entirely necessary. It is alive with tubes like umbilici, and growths, and blood, and on the outside, a blackening cancerous rot, evidence that the worlds are dying and will continue to do so.
The intertwining first-person narratives of Zan and Jayd make for an extremely compelling and entertaining story, and Hurley’s use of present tense adds an extra level of suspense to the tale’s unfolding of a variety of interwoven plot types: quest, revelation, voyage-and-return, etcetera, all of which are thrilling by turns.
One of the main reasons I loved this book is how Hurley doesn’t separate war and childbirth as two distinct stories that can never meet. Before The Stars Are Legion I’d never really read a science fiction story that included childbirth other than as a form of tragic death for mothers, or procreation as a central narrative for the "arc of humanity." Birth as ritual is cited often. Birth as factual rite of life is not.
Birth is an integral part of the world, not in a clichéd version of the miracle of life, but as one of the many parts of human experience and a necessity for the world-ships survival. All the characters have different feelings about birth and children, some going through with pregnancy for the good of the world-ship despite their disinterest in it, some terminating their pregnancies for a variety of reasons, others wishing for human children and crying when the world-ship takes the creatures they’ve birthed from them.
I also loved, quite simply, that this book was all women. Violent women. Flawed women. Selfish women. Ugly women. Women who birth, women who grieve, women who sacrifice with courage.
I often struggle when listening to a book to retain all of the characters' arcs and storylines, and feel this was true for my experience with Legion. With an eye to reading a physical copy in the future, I can strongly recommend this book as a unique queer feminist sci-fi body horror. Deduction of overall points for dragging out the plot line at time with a bit too much voyaging through unknown lands.
Neuromancer by William Gibson
Did not finish book. Stopped at 44%.
Did not finish book. Stopped at 44%.
This book had its time and place, if that time and place was being a horrible misogynist and completely out of touch with the ways in which technology and culture, but remains still, and too, misogynist to digest in this our era of women being actual people.
True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart by Thích Nhất Hạnh
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
4.5
My fourth read. Thich Nhat Hanh, the renowned Zen monk, offers timeless insight into the nature of real love. With simplicity, warmth, and directness, he explores the four key aspects of love as described in the Buddhist tradition: lovingkindness, compassion, joy, and freedom—explaining how to experience them in our day-to-day lives.
True Love also emphasizes that in order to love in a real way, we must first learn how to be fully present in our lives, and he offers simple techniques from the Buddhist tradition that anyone can use to establish the conditions of love.
I am biased in my review. Thich Nhat Hanh has always, to me, been a great teacher in Buddhist Dharma as well as one of the great teachers of all time in regards to learning how to be more compassionate and how to love oneself.
True Love also emphasizes that in order to love in a real way, we must first learn how to be fully present in our lives, and he offers simple techniques from the Buddhist tradition that anyone can use to establish the conditions of love.
I am biased in my review. Thich Nhat Hanh has always, to me, been a great teacher in Buddhist Dharma as well as one of the great teachers of all time in regards to learning how to be more compassionate and how to love oneself.
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
adventurous
dark
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Some stories cannot be told in just one lifetime. Harry August is a born again, born again, born again fellow - travelling always back to hai beginning no matter how often or in what manner he dies. North takes the classic time travel trope to dark and unique dimensions in First Fifteen Lives by exacting from Harry religious fervor, dreams of quantum world domination, poverty, wealth, academic fame, at least five marriages, 114 birthday parties, and most difficult, a range of quite graphic tortures by the CIA and close companions alike.
Unique, captivating, and filled with equal measures charm and oddity, I found this an excellently written book, compelling by the page and endearing as a first person travel. That said, this novel needs several serious physical and psychological trigger warnings.
Harry commits suicide repeatedly. As a child. As an adult. Harry is institutionalized and abandoned as an insane child, captured, and confined in long periods as an adult. The detailed, drawn out, and graphic torture scenes were so vivid and so accurately narrated in imparting their emotional trauma that I had nightmares many evenings. Harry's extreme, bitter loneliness as he relives life again and again was also a very keenly felt kind of emotional distress as a reader, North's analogy for the human condition turned up to painful high flame.
A stunning achievement, but not for the faint of heart.
Unique, captivating, and filled with equal measures charm and oddity, I found this an excellently written book, compelling by the page and endearing as a first person travel. That said, this novel needs several serious physical and psychological trigger warnings.
Harry commits suicide repeatedly. As a child. As an adult. Harry is institutionalized and abandoned as an insane child, captured, and confined in long periods as an adult. The detailed, drawn out, and graphic torture scenes were so vivid and so accurately narrated in imparting their emotional trauma that I had nightmares many evenings. Harry's extreme, bitter loneliness as he relives life again and again was also a very keenly felt kind of emotional distress as a reader, North's analogy for the human condition turned up to painful high flame.
A stunning achievement, but not for the faint of heart.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicide, Torture, and Toxic friendship
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
challenging
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
James Baldwin's 1956 novel of queer love, shame, the mirage of American exceptionalism and the damning silence of masculinity is hopeful in spite of it's tragic arc and ending.
One of Baldwin’s most famous novels, Giovanni’s Room is an exquisitely written tale that I loved as soon as I started reading it, and that I have thought about ever since finishing it. An achingly beautiful read, we meet David, an American who has escaped to Paris to find himself. Soon after his arrival in Paris he meets Giovanni – and, despite being betrothed to his fiancé, Hella – a relationship begins to form between the two men.
From the start, the reader and narrator share a mutual understanding of the story’s distressing and inalterable conclusion, making it even more difficult for both to trek through the memory of misadventure. Baldwin’s language is lyrical and haunting; his imagery agonizing, and while Giovanni’s Room is by no means an easy book to read, it’s undoubtedly an important one.
I can’t remember the last time I was this blown away by a book. The evocative Parisian setting, the gothic-like nature of the tale, the desire; the shame and the sexuality; the all-consuming love and lust.
The audiobook was fantastically narrated. The reader voices David's first person take with forceful, emotive shame and longing, moving me to tears on more than one occasion.
One of Baldwin’s most famous novels, Giovanni’s Room is an exquisitely written tale that I loved as soon as I started reading it, and that I have thought about ever since finishing it. An achingly beautiful read, we meet David, an American who has escaped to Paris to find himself. Soon after his arrival in Paris he meets Giovanni – and, despite being betrothed to his fiancé, Hella – a relationship begins to form between the two men.
From the start, the reader and narrator share a mutual understanding of the story’s distressing and inalterable conclusion, making it even more difficult for both to trek through the memory of misadventure. Baldwin’s language is lyrical and haunting; his imagery agonizing, and while Giovanni’s Room is by no means an easy book to read, it’s undoubtedly an important one.
I can’t remember the last time I was this blown away by a book. The evocative Parisian setting, the gothic-like nature of the tale, the desire; the shame and the sexuality; the all-consuming love and lust.
The audiobook was fantastically narrated. The reader voices David's first person take with forceful, emotive shame and longing, moving me to tears on more than one occasion.
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
challenging
dark
informative
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
The Three Body Problem is one of the most enjoyable and successful hard science fictional books ever written. Cixin Liu - China’s most popular sci-fi author - immerses the reader in a quintessentially Chinese story; not only is Three Body set in a different part of the world from most sci-fi you’ll encounter, but it also feels remarkably different in writing style and plot development.
Hard science fiction paradise ensues alongside a complex timeline, historical fiction, and the development of cults, scientific progress, and intergenerational trauma. Liu injects the plot with heavy doses of realistic quantum entanglement, information theory, nanotechnology, and particle physics. New, fantastical ideas abound, such as a lengthy but plot stabilizing description of Trisolaris - the epiponimous planetary name of our interstellar neighbors - creating a single proton subatomic particle called a “sophon,” which changes dimensionality as a way of storing information.
This is brilliantly combined with questions of human morality the division or uniting of a species, and what should be considered "advancement" by intelligent society (fascinatingly contrasted by one scene towards the end of the book where those stensibly trying to save humanity also reaorrt to cutting hundreds of innocent people into tiny chunks with nanowire). The ramifications of broad changes in sociological conditions as having bearing on these ropics, especially in relation to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, is interwoven alongside science to bring history, philosophy, sociology, and its impact on human science and the development of morals and mores.
The story itself is told from multiple points of view across several decades. Such drastic shifts in perspective and time frame could be disorienting in less capable hands, but Cixin Liu adeptly handles these transitions, using them as an effective way to build the greater narrative.
On to limitations. I’m not the first reader to note this, but the lead characters are flat. Very, very flat. Instead of driving the plot, the central character Wang reacts to it. I never felt that the decisions he makes in the novel were guided by his belief system. He’s kind of like the cart on an on-rail amusement park ride. The ride sure is thrilling, but you’re unlikely to remember much about the cart.
Overall, ven a single one of the ideas in here would have sufficed for a book of its own, but to put them all together into a single cohesive epic tale is absolutely jaw-dropping. Liu reaches for the stars - figuratively and stylistically - and finds tremulous, imperfect brilliance among them.
Hard science fiction paradise ensues alongside a complex timeline, historical fiction, and the development of cults, scientific progress, and intergenerational trauma. Liu injects the plot with heavy doses of realistic quantum entanglement, information theory, nanotechnology, and particle physics. New, fantastical ideas abound, such as a lengthy but plot stabilizing description of Trisolaris - the epiponimous planetary name of our interstellar neighbors - creating a single proton subatomic particle called a “sophon,” which changes dimensionality as a way of storing information.
This is brilliantly combined with questions of human morality the division or uniting of a species, and what should be considered "advancement" by intelligent society (fascinatingly contrasted by one scene towards the end of the book where those stensibly trying to save humanity also reaorrt to cutting hundreds of innocent people into tiny chunks with nanowire). The ramifications of broad changes in sociological conditions as having bearing on these ropics, especially in relation to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, is interwoven alongside science to bring history, philosophy, sociology, and its impact on human science and the development of morals and mores.
The story itself is told from multiple points of view across several decades. Such drastic shifts in perspective and time frame could be disorienting in less capable hands, but Cixin Liu adeptly handles these transitions, using them as an effective way to build the greater narrative.
On to limitations. I’m not the first reader to note this, but the lead characters are flat. Very, very flat. Instead of driving the plot, the central character Wang reacts to it. I never felt that the decisions he makes in the novel were guided by his belief system. He’s kind of like the cart on an on-rail amusement park ride. The ride sure is thrilling, but you’re unlikely to remember much about the cart.
Overall, ven a single one of the ideas in here would have sufficed for a book of its own, but to put them all together into a single cohesive epic tale is absolutely jaw-dropping. Liu reaches for the stars - figuratively and stylistically - and finds tremulous, imperfect brilliance among them.
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
adventurous
emotional
funny
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Review to come! This was my fourth read - this time on audiobook.
Expect Me Tomorrow by Christopher Priest
challenging
emotional
informative
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
1.5
After finishing the final pages of Christopher Priest's pandemic-birthed novel, I was left with the same question that puzzled me in the first ten, fifty, and hundred pages of the book - what genre is it? Science fiction? Time travel? Historical fiction? A book about injustice? A clever climate denial scheme?
Expect Me Tomorrow is told across two narrative strands, featuring two sets of identical twins. Adolf and Adler Beck survive a glaciologist father; Adler pursues a career in climate science and Adolf becomes a roaming opera singer and bon vivant. Their lives become entangled with their relatives, another set of twins in 2050 living through accelerating climate intensity in the British Isles. When Chad Ramsey is fired from his police investigation job he retains a mysterious DNA connectivity technology that allows him to access his ancestors for brief moments of their real lives, back in time, and attempt to clear Adolf's name from a supposedly false conviction in the 1870's.
Across this already confusing landscape of twins, time travel, and crime are conflicting climate change theories. Adler Beck believes in the Gulf Stream collapse theory which posits the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet combined with the end of a natural solar cycle will result in an Ice Age incrusting Earth in uninhabitable cold. His modern counterpart's story is told not through science, but lived experience, narrating his days of struggling to find food amid heat waves and sand storms, the encroaching deaths of millions of refugees and the collapse of his town into the sea, the collapse of waste, sanitation, and policing, and the deterioration of his own home and livelihood in real-time.
As Chad (modern) connects to Adler (past) we are wound casually through an increasingly "sure" picture that Adler was correct - climate change will be reversed by the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. Similarly, the past relevatives' names are cleared, dead fathers found, and our modern climate refugees able to move to Norway and take a job with UN at the last moment.... all is well, all ends tidy, and climate change averted, all in one book! If only a single tantalizing ecological event - or in the case of Chad, a phone call from a wealthy benefactor - could so neatly wrap up the anthropological nightmare we have steadily created for ourselves.
The book is driven by a hopeless need for a Hail Mary save. That we be protected from our own worst mistakes, habits, and oversights by omnipotent forces beyond our control.
This small-minded climate change drivel was further mired by dragging passes of irrelevant technological minutiae and long-winded descriptions that advance no plot or character. The consulted nature of attaching several narrative strands together was not well done - Priest botches the possibility of elegantly showing how past and present, science and superstition, truth and mistruth can be reworked and overlaid with one another. Instead, he spends precious pages in tedious descriptions of scenes that go nowhere, pairing this with affectless dialogue and excruciating long scientific passages which were difficult even for someone with my climate science background to digest.
The passages of Chad existing in a 2050 climate scenario were heart-breaking, and the best portion of the novel. The vivid nature of life's everyday details becomes a struggle the reader embodies. Chad and his wife eat, sleep, fix their house, and work - but in an increasingly difficult world, where the house is suffocatingly warm, infrastructure is collapsing, and small daily necessities like batteries hard to come by.
Overall, not a worthy read, though a valiant effort to weave interesting narrative forces and climate fiction potential together.
Expect Me Tomorrow is told across two narrative strands, featuring two sets of identical twins. Adolf and Adler Beck survive a glaciologist father; Adler pursues a career in climate science and Adolf becomes a roaming opera singer and bon vivant. Their lives become entangled with their relatives, another set of twins in 2050 living through accelerating climate intensity in the British Isles. When Chad Ramsey is fired from his police investigation job he retains a mysterious DNA connectivity technology that allows him to access his ancestors for brief moments of their real lives, back in time, and attempt to clear Adolf's name from a supposedly false conviction in the 1870's.
Across this already confusing landscape of twins, time travel, and crime are conflicting climate change theories. Adler Beck believes in the Gulf Stream collapse theory which posits the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet combined with the end of a natural solar cycle will result in an Ice Age incrusting Earth in uninhabitable cold. His modern counterpart's story is told not through science, but lived experience, narrating his days of struggling to find food amid heat waves and sand storms, the encroaching deaths of millions of refugees and the collapse of his town into the sea, the collapse of waste, sanitation, and policing, and the deterioration of his own home and livelihood in real-time.
As Chad (modern) connects to Adler (past) we are wound casually through an increasingly "sure" picture that Adler was correct - climate change will be reversed by the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. Similarly, the past relevatives' names are cleared, dead fathers found, and our modern climate refugees able to move to Norway and take a job with UN at the last moment.... all is well, all ends tidy, and climate change averted, all in one book! If only a single tantalizing ecological event - or in the case of Chad, a phone call from a wealthy benefactor - could so neatly wrap up the anthropological nightmare we have steadily created for ourselves.
The book is driven by a hopeless need for a Hail Mary save. That we be protected from our own worst mistakes, habits, and oversights by omnipotent forces beyond our control.
This small-minded climate change drivel was further mired by dragging passes of irrelevant technological minutiae and long-winded descriptions that advance no plot or character. The consulted nature of attaching several narrative strands together was not well done - Priest botches the possibility of elegantly showing how past and present, science and superstition, truth and mistruth can be reworked and overlaid with one another. Instead, he spends precious pages in tedious descriptions of scenes that go nowhere, pairing this with affectless dialogue and excruciating long scientific passages which were difficult even for someone with my climate science background to digest.
The passages of Chad existing in a 2050 climate scenario were heart-breaking, and the best portion of the novel. The vivid nature of life's everyday details becomes a struggle the reader embodies. Chad and his wife eat, sleep, fix their house, and work - but in an increasingly difficult world, where the house is suffocatingly warm, infrastructure is collapsing, and small daily necessities like batteries hard to come by.
Overall, not a worthy read, though a valiant effort to weave interesting narrative forces and climate fiction potential together.