finding your squad
There were a couple of TV series that I’d missed a few episodes of when they were airing, and I’d planned to catch up on Netflix. But neither of them are on Netflix any more! Grump.
The moral of this story is: Don’t assume that something on Netflix today is going to be on Netflix in six months time. (Or tomorrow! I was rewatching season one of Jane the Virgin slowly, a scene here and an episode there, and one day it was there and the next they only had the second season onwards...)
Tracey Garvis Graves, The Girl He Used to Know: Annika and Jonathan were a couple in college. Nearly ten years later, they bump into each other in a Chicago supermarket and wonder if they can rebuild the relationship they once had.
It was almost immediately obvious to me that Annika is on the autism spectrum, and I found that really interesting. The book switches between their senior year of college (1991-2) and their present (2001), which means that there’s a lot of emphasis is on Annika’s growth as a person -- she’s not just defined by what she was capable of as a student, and her current-day achievements are more clearly triumphs.
This story is thoughtful, hopeful, realistic and romantic.
It is less successful when it comes to dealing with the aftermath of tragedy. Graves rushes over those bits, and if she wasn’t going to slow down, I thought she should inflict less serious problems upon her characters, because they already have enough challenges to make for an interesting story. But that’s a small complaint.For years, I’d ordered my hamburgers plain and never entertained the possibility of eating them any other way until Janice gave me one with ketchup, and I realised how much better it tasted. “You’re like the ketchup in my life,” I’d told Jonathan one night on the phone, and he’d laughed.
“I don’t know what that means, but if it makes you happy, I’m honoured to be your condiment.” That was another thing I really liked about him. He never made me feel stupid about the weird things that came out of my mouth.
Eithne Shortall, Love in Row 27: This caught my eye because of the author’s name -- like the singer Enya -- and I’m glad it did, because it was fun.
An airline attendant takes advantage of manual check-ins to try her hand at match-making. The story alternates between Cora on the ground, and the experiences in the air of the passengers Cora assigns to row 27, and of Cora’s friend Nancy, a flight attendant who reports back on what happens.
This is a romance-focused story, and I enjoyed the variety of passengers seated in row 27 -- and the varying outcomes. But the bits about Cora’s mother are the emotional heart of Cora’s story, and I liked Cora’s friendships, especially the way Cora’s falling out with a friend is handled -- and resolved. I also liked how Cora and her colleagues have differing attitudes towards working for an airline: for Cora, her job is temporary, while she recovers from a bad relationship, deals with her mother’s declining health and works out what to do next with her life. But Nancy is working hard for a promotion, and Joan doesn’t want to be promoted beyond the check-in desk.
My only complaint: this book ended and I wanted just a bit more.Cora feared telling her mother new information in case it pushed out the older, more important memories. Logically, she knew it didn’t really work this way -- the doctors had explained the difference between short- and long-term memory -- but still she wanted to pull a woolly hat down over her mother’s head to stop the dying brain cells from escaping through her ears.
She took directionless, part-time work, thinking a career would just present itself to her. But it didn’t. So she went to Berlin. Leaving England felt like a valid alternative to having a career path. When relatives asked Sheila what her wayward daughter was doing, she could say “Cora’s in Germany”, and there would rarely be any follow-up questions. Being in a different geographical location qualified as doing something.
Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, Aurora Rising: Tyler Jones misses the draft because he’s off rescuing a cryogenically-frozen girl and he doesn’t end up with the squad he hoped for. As the tagline says: They’re not the heroes we wanted. Just the ones we could find. Nobody panic.
This is fast-paced and entertaining and involves a lot of things I like -- like teamwork and Lord of the Rings references! But with a squad of seven POV characters to get to know in fewer pages than The Fellowship of the Ring, I don’t feel strongly invested in anyone. At least, not yet.
But this is just the start of the story and there’s a lot of potential. “The only places I fit are the places inside my head,” she continues. “It is as you said, sir. I do not understand people.” She looks around the bridge. “But I believe of all the places I have not fit, I fit here a little better.”
Scar smiles. “Who wants to be normal when you can be interesting instead?”
(Two of the things I loved about the Illuminae trilogy was its unique epistolary format and the self-contained nature of each book. I’m a tiny bit disappointed that Kaufman and Kristoff didn’t make more use of the epistolary format with this next series. Oh well.)
Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses: I was expecting this to be a “Beauty and the Beast” retelling. It’s actually more of a retelling of “East of the Sun, West of the Moon” with bits of “Tam Lin” thrown in -- but even though that should be exactly my sort of story, it wasn’t quite.
There were times when I found Feyre’s reactions and choices annoying and short-sighted. It’s not that I need or expect protagonists to be aware of all the things that I -- a genre-savvy reader and an outside observer -- am aware of, I just need to understand their perspective and their choices. Something about Feyre’s narration and her characterisation, wasn’t always convincing. I wavered back and forth between feeling frustration and feeling captivated.
It was darker than I wanted, and the ending wasn’t wholly satisfying -- because it is setting the story up for sequels. Which I won’t be reading, even though A Court of Mist and Fury is a really great title. Originally @ Dreamwidth.
The moral of this story is: Don’t assume that something on Netflix today is going to be on Netflix in six months time. (Or tomorrow! I was rewatching season one of Jane the Virgin slowly, a scene here and an episode there, and one day it was there and the next they only had the second season onwards...)
Tracey Garvis Graves, The Girl He Used to Know: Annika and Jonathan were a couple in college. Nearly ten years later, they bump into each other in a Chicago supermarket and wonder if they can rebuild the relationship they once had.
It was almost immediately obvious to me that Annika is on the autism spectrum, and I found that really interesting. The book switches between their senior year of college (1991-2) and their present (2001), which means that there’s a lot of emphasis is on Annika’s growth as a person -- she’s not just defined by what she was capable of as a student, and her current-day achievements are more clearly triumphs.
This story is thoughtful, hopeful, realistic and romantic.
It is less successful when it comes to dealing with the aftermath of tragedy. Graves rushes over those bits, and if she wasn’t going to slow down, I thought she should inflict less serious problems upon her characters, because they already have enough challenges to make for an interesting story. But that’s a small complaint.For years, I’d ordered my hamburgers plain and never entertained the possibility of eating them any other way until Janice gave me one with ketchup, and I realised how much better it tasted. “You’re like the ketchup in my life,” I’d told Jonathan one night on the phone, and he’d laughed.
“I don’t know what that means, but if it makes you happy, I’m honoured to be your condiment.” That was another thing I really liked about him. He never made me feel stupid about the weird things that came out of my mouth.
Eithne Shortall, Love in Row 27: This caught my eye because of the author’s name -- like the singer Enya -- and I’m glad it did, because it was fun.
An airline attendant takes advantage of manual check-ins to try her hand at match-making. The story alternates between Cora on the ground, and the experiences in the air of the passengers Cora assigns to row 27, and of Cora’s friend Nancy, a flight attendant who reports back on what happens.
This is a romance-focused story, and I enjoyed the variety of passengers seated in row 27 -- and the varying outcomes. But the bits about Cora’s mother are the emotional heart of Cora’s story, and I liked Cora’s friendships, especially the way Cora’s falling out with a friend is handled -- and resolved. I also liked how Cora and her colleagues have differing attitudes towards working for an airline: for Cora, her job is temporary, while she recovers from a bad relationship, deals with her mother’s declining health and works out what to do next with her life. But Nancy is working hard for a promotion, and Joan doesn’t want to be promoted beyond the check-in desk.
My only complaint: this book ended and I wanted just a bit more.Cora feared telling her mother new information in case it pushed out the older, more important memories. Logically, she knew it didn’t really work this way -- the doctors had explained the difference between short- and long-term memory -- but still she wanted to pull a woolly hat down over her mother’s head to stop the dying brain cells from escaping through her ears.
She took directionless, part-time work, thinking a career would just present itself to her. But it didn’t. So she went to Berlin. Leaving England felt like a valid alternative to having a career path. When relatives asked Sheila what her wayward daughter was doing, she could say “Cora’s in Germany”, and there would rarely be any follow-up questions. Being in a different geographical location qualified as doing something.
Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, Aurora Rising: Tyler Jones misses the draft because he’s off rescuing a cryogenically-frozen girl and he doesn’t end up with the squad he hoped for. As the tagline says: They’re not the heroes we wanted. Just the ones we could find. Nobody panic.
This is fast-paced and entertaining and involves a lot of things I like -- like teamwork and Lord of the Rings references! But with a squad of seven POV characters to get to know in fewer pages than The Fellowship of the Ring, I don’t feel strongly invested in anyone. At least, not yet.
But this is just the start of the story and there’s a lot of potential. “The only places I fit are the places inside my head,” she continues. “It is as you said, sir. I do not understand people.” She looks around the bridge. “But I believe of all the places I have not fit, I fit here a little better.”
Scar smiles. “Who wants to be normal when you can be interesting instead?”
(Two of the things I loved about the Illuminae trilogy was its unique epistolary format and the self-contained nature of each book. I’m a tiny bit disappointed that Kaufman and Kristoff didn’t make more use of the epistolary format with this next series. Oh well.)
Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses: I was expecting this to be a “Beauty and the Beast” retelling. It’s actually more of a retelling of “East of the Sun, West of the Moon” with bits of “Tam Lin” thrown in -- but even though that should be exactly my sort of story, it wasn’t quite.
There were times when I found Feyre’s reactions and choices annoying and short-sighted. It’s not that I need or expect protagonists to be aware of all the things that I -- a genre-savvy reader and an outside observer -- am aware of, I just need to understand their perspective and their choices. Something about Feyre’s narration and her characterisation, wasn’t always convincing. I wavered back and forth between feeling frustration and feeling captivated.
It was darker than I wanted, and the ending wasn’t wholly satisfying -- because it is setting the story up for sequels. Which I won’t be reading, even though A Court of Mist and Fury is a really great title. Originally @ Dreamwidth.