Books and comics read in August 2016

[usuallyhats]

Dusty Answer - Rosamond Lehmann
Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur: BFF
The Assassin's Curse - Cassandra Rose Clarke
Wildthorn - Jane Eagland
Signal to Noise - Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Child of Flame - Kate Elliott*
Mockingbird: I Can Explain
Reflections: On the Magic of Writing - Diana Wynne Jones
Tell the Wind and Fire - Sarah Rees Brennan
Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K Jerome
To Say Nothing of the Dog - Connie Willis
Hemlock and After - Angus Wilson
The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: Squirrel You Know It's True
Sex Criminals: Three The Hard Way

*with a certain amount of skimming; it's book four of seven, over 800 pages long, and there are some storylines I just do not care about any more. /o\

Wildthorn
This was a YA f/f historical romance in which one party is sent to a mental asylum, and therefore invited comparisons to Fingersmith, which sadly made it seem not particularly good, when actually it was mostly perfectly fine. I did find it pretty unsubtle in its feminism, but this might be because I am a cranky old woman who has read lots of similar things already; someone with a fresher eye might like it more. It did also fall into the ableist trope of "I, a neurotypical person, do not belong in this horrible place, but eh all these neuroatypical people probably do I guess" a bit, and the end rang a bit classist to me. ...er, I did enjoy this more than I'm implying here! I liked the heroine a lot, and the romance was very sweet.

Signal to Noise
I really liked the milieu of this book, but I found the characters a bit too unlikeable for my taste, and I very much wanted more magic and far less romance.

Didn't finish: The Long War - Terry Pratchett and Steven Baxter
I didn't actively dislike this, it was just quite slow and a bit boring, and slightly microaggressiony, and eventually I just asked myself "self, would we be happier if we stopped reading this book?", and we decided that we would, and so we did.

Short stories I enjoyed this month:
Flying Magic (Stephanie Burgis): Delightful short story set in the Kat, Incorrigible universe, in which Kat has to deal with her own children. <3
Fire Watch (Connie Willis): wonderful and also heartbreaking.
Superior (Jessica Lack): v. enjoyable m/m romance, with superheroes.

Comments

[persiflage-1.livejournal.com]

I confess I haven't managed to get past the first of the Long Earth books by TP & SB. I liked the premise of the first one, but it was too slow. (I guess I'm too used to the faster pace of Pterry's novels.)

[usuallyhats]

Yeah, it's a great premise! I liked the first one, but I read a lot of it on a late night coach home, so I think I was just in the mood for something pretty leisurely.

[persiflage-1.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, that probably helped!

[livii.livejournal.com]

Signal to Noise was such a promising idea, but it was so badly written. Like, even the grammar was bad. And the story didn't hang together. Bah.

[usuallyhats]

Yes, it was such a shame! I really wanted to love it, but the more I read it, the more it annoyed me.