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Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro's 2005 dystopian novel, explores themes of adolescent friendships, love and loss. In the novel he accomplishes the goal of all great science fiction: isolating and amplifying realities present in our own world. Never Let Me Go meditates on the fears surrounding growing up and finding one's place in an unknown world. Kathy H. narrates her childhood and adolescence as an orphan in Hailsham, a British boarding school. Ishiguro's stunning prose move the reader easily through Kathy's reminiscences on her friendships, centering on those between Kathy, Ruth (charismatic and controlling) and Tommy (angry yet sensitive). The novel's fast pace both is unexpected and welcome; the reader is quickly swept along with the mystery of who these children are and what their fate will be. The second part is set in The Cottages, where the students live before becoming carers (no spoilers as to what the will be after that!). The final part brings the characters together once more to reflect on their previous lives at Hailsham and on their futures. Never Let Me Go's greatest strength is its chronicle of the friendships between Kathy, Ruth and Tommy. Ishiguro perfectly describes young friendships, jealousies, and the discovery of what the world truly is and our place within it. By showing us, through Kathy's eyes, an unknown and frightening world, the reader is returned to discover the mysteries of their own childhood again. The love triangle, however, was less compelling than the friendships. The "true love" is treated more like a reveal than it should have been, given the style of narration.
Ishiguro's meditations on adolescent love, friendship and loss are tragic and poignant, but he is not a science fiction writer (nor does he try to be). While the revelations about his dystopia universe are well-paced and ultimately fairly fulfilling (horrific and appalling as well), at its core this novel is a coming-of-age. The protagonists, never seeming to fully transition into adulthood, are shockingly resigned to their ultimate fate (some even eager to transition into the final stage of their existence). Ultimately, Never Let Me Go is a beautifully written young adult mystery, and a page-turner at that. I would recommend it to anyone interested in Gothic literature, science fiction lite, and/or literary fiction.
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The Fifth Season is a fast-paced and complex fantasy / sci-fi blend that looks hard at the realities of systemic oppression. Jemisin's strong narrative voice carries seamlessly through three different character perspectives, each carrying the reader through aspects of an earth-shattering world. In The Stillness seismic disasters occur with regularity and a new apocalypse is never more than a few generations removed. Humanity struggles against Father Earth, who is literally trying to kill them. The stills, or normal people, live in walled communities, while orogenes, or those with the ability to quell or bring on seismic events, are a feared and oppressed minority. The novel follows three orogenes: Essun, a comm school teacher whose life is destroyed when her husband learns her secret; Syenite, an academically-trained, angry young orogene woman sent on a mission and expected to breed with another orogene; and Damaya, an orogene child learning her place in the world under the tutelage of her frightening Guardian. The quick-paced narrative is laced with reveals about the world and the characters; as the protagonists learn of their world, so do the readers. For readers unfamiliar with the genre, this often means suspending disbelief and trusting the narrative. The Fifth Season accomplishes what the best science fiction or fantasy aim to do: it creates a completely engrossing and original world that critiques the power structures in our own. The narrative itself is entirely unique (don't want to give spoilers!), and though the characters face bitter trials and hard truths, a better future seems ahead those who are wiling to fight for it.
A well-crafted novel filled with anger at oppressive realities, and the hope that they can be changed. Excellent reading for anyone interested in real thought-provoking fantasy / sci-fi or just a great read. Floating Dragon is a well-written but ultimately disappointing horror novel filled with a motley disaster of genre tropes. While certain sequences provide genuine goosebumps, they're lost among dozens of gore-ridden snapshots and a mess of unnecessary perspectives. The narrative, like the menacing cloud of chemical dust that hovers above its fictional town, seems to float about endlessly and, ultimately, without purpose. Twin catastrophes beset 1980s Hampstead, Connecticut: noxious gas leaked from a chemical plant, and a resurgence of an insidious decades-dormant evil. Our four protagonists, connected through their heritage and psychic abilities, seek a way to combat the reawakened evil known as the Dragon. Floating Dragon has its strong points: Straub's prose and narrative voice are compelling, and certain of his protagonists- the aging novelist and the teen boy in particular- are genuinely sympathetic. Some of the novel's passages, such as an aging middle class woman's excursion to purchase hospital-themed romance novels, are genuinely compelling- if entirely unnecessary to the plot. Perhaps compensating for its weak plot, Floating Dragon will hit all your horror genre bingo squares: evil mirrors, poison gas, psychic children, macabre hallucinations, man-eating houses, car-eating fire bats, vindictive ghosts (that might be another hallucination), the spirit of Ichabod Crane, and several somewhat offensive portrayals of domestic abuse. Scene after scene of unconnected horrors, told from an absurd number of perspectives, quickly become tiresome. Underneath them all is an unfortunately straightforward tale of New England descendants combating an ancestral nemesis to save their town once and for all. The final, very lengthy battle scene fits the narrative perfectly: it's cliched, overlong, and a bit silly.
Floating Dragon is a hodgepodge of horror that Straub's strong prose fails to make palatable. Fans of Stephan King's classics (Floating Dragon has often been compared to IT) may find the patience to locate the genuine horror amongst the fire-bats. Do Androids Dream is a short, fun sci-fi thriller that poses a series thought-provoking questions. Unfortunately, though Dick's dystopian world clearly mimics aspects of 1960s America, he fails to land any real critiques or conclusions. In a post-WWIII world, humankind has colonized Mars and rogue androids, physically indistinguishable from human beings, are hunted and unmasked via empathy test. Bounty Hunter Rick Deckard aims to seek out and 'retire' (kill) six of the latest-model androids, Nexus-6s, who recently escaped Mars. With the money from these bounties Deckard hopes to buy a valuable real animal- a rarity on this dystopian earth- to replace his embarrassing electric sheep. Meanwhile, across the city 'chicken-head' John Isidore, a man whose mental function was impaired by the war's radioactive dust, seeks to assist several of the Nexus-6s whom Deckard hunts. Dick peppers Do Androids Dream with interesting and playful concepts such as mood-organs, 'kipple,' and the duel between religion (Mercerism) and a 24-hour-a-day talkshow. Between fast-paced fight scenes and plot twists, Dick manages to mediate on middle-class American obsessions with status, the usefulness of religion, and reality verses illusion. Unfortunately, the ending of Do Androids Dream is about as unsatisfying as Deckard's electric sheep. The final fight scene makes an incomprehensible use of Mercerism, and Deckard's later existential crisis concludes nothing meaningful about the world or his part in it. Is killing androids wrong? Do the reveals about Mercerism matter? Does empathy improve humans' lives? Do androids dream of electric sheep? We never find out.
Ultimately, Do Androids Dream is worth the read for the questions it poses. It's a little thriller with big ideas, and an excellent start for those interested in the sci-fi genre. Security, by first-time author Gina Wohlsdorf, is a fun, pithy romantic thriller constructed as a slasher. Wohlsdorf creates strong tension, both dramatic and sexual, through her excellent prose. However, Security also proves why slashers tend to work better as films than novels: after a time, even the best written descriptions of gore build tedium rather than tension. Using a provocative narrative voice and inventive page-layouts, Wohlsdorf intersperses bloody violence with a burgeoning love story. As the Manderely Resort's manager (and our protagonist) Tessa prepares for the hotel's opening night, two killers stalk the hotel staff, murdering with ruthless effectiveness. The narrator, the head of security, watches the mayhem via a number of hidden cameras. The plot picks up when Tessa, who is as efficient at hotel management as the killers are at gutting her staff, is thrown off course by the sudden appearance of her former foster brother Brian. The romantic tension between these two (they clearly love each other, so why did Brian abandon her to ride motorcycles in a circus?!) is the strongest aspect of the novel. The climax (figuratively) of this love story, as melodramatic as a Dostoevskian parlor scene, fully satisfies given the build-up. The excellent sex scene that follows reaches its own climax (literally) during a bloodbath elsewhere in the hotel. Security's biggest flaw is how repetitious the murder scenes begin to feel, given their multitude. The killers are emotionless, the victims themselves generally gutted before they're ever fleshed out with enough depth to become sympathetic. The cut-scenes between romance and murder, narrated through camera lenses, feel more cinematic than literary. Ultimately, however, Security's final fight scene fully satisfies. Readers interested in atypical romantic thrillers will find something unique and fulfilling in this bloody book.
The Terror by Dan Simmons could have been literary terror at its finest, with the right editor. As it stands, it's an historical horror novel about men trying to survive in a place they probably should never have gone to begin with. At 700 pages, the narrative skids unevenly through excellent suspense sequences, blood-chilling horror, and overlong, entirely unnecessary historical descriptions of boats and ice. So very, very much ice. The Terror is story of the 1845 Franklin Expedition's tragic and mysterious attempt to locate the Northwest Passage. Simmons invents details one might imagine as close to the historical reality: the two ships and their crews get trapped in ice for two consecutive winters in the subzero, sunless Arctic Circle. Starving to death slowly, terrorized by a supernatural ice monster (or something), the two ship captains eventually make the ill-fated (but necessary) decision to take the men on a trek across the barren landscape in search of rescue. The men fight for survival while hauling heavy gear and enormous boats across the turgid pack-ice, falling prey to starvation, frostbite, poisoned food, scurvy, attacks from the ice monster (still not sure if this was a metaphor), murder, and other spine-tingling horrors. By the time mutiny and cannibalism finally appear the reader is just about ready for them. The main problem with The Terror is its pacing. While certain sections (not enough) provide edge-of-your-seat suspense, many others languish, as slow moving as the ship's luckless crew. The reader slogs through pages upon pages of details about 18th century ship interiors, the characteristics of different sorts of ice, and repeated explanations of the effects of slow starvation and scurvy. Cut 200-300 pages from this novel and it could have been superb (though die-hard fans of Moby Dick may disagree). Another weakness of The Terror lies in its ending. For some reason, while Simmons has managed to imagine every detail of an ice Carnevale, three constructions of a peg-leg, and the taste of bear meat verses canned carrots, he shies away from constructing the end of the ice-wrecked crew's many-month journey. The reader is left just as in the dark by the novel as s/he is by the historical record. The one ending that is made clear, that of a lone protagonist, is overlong, rather random, and generally silly compared to the book's first 600 pages. Fans of literary horror may enjoy this book, or those interested in historical adventure fiction. Though there is a supernatural element, it is very small compared to other Simmons novels.
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MJ WilsonWriter, Reviewer, Book Lover ArchivesCategories |