cattytrona's reviews
241 reviews

really enjoyable. at the start it feels like it's just going to be a silly novelty gag story, but pretty quickly opens up into something smart and meaningful. what feels like generic fantasy choices actually become very compelling worldbuilding, and the gimmick food stuff turns out to be so thematically important and well integrated. by the end the manga's got proper some grimdark elements (the kind that are themselves becoming typical fantasy traits (no shade)): there's blood, there's necromancy, there's horrible decisions, but - and perhaps most impressive of all - it actually never stops being funny. the art style's lush, too. just consistently awesome to look at.

i like how it's got some of the restoration element of lotr, which again, are a fantasy trope, but they're flipped almost exactly on their heads. yeah, broad strokes the king is back, the land's returned. but in lotr everything is back in its rightful place except the people who died. in this, no one's dead, but everything's tangled. the king is new, the land is essentially new to everyone alive, and things have been learnt so that people don't just divide up into their separate enclaves.

comedy fantasy unbeaten when it comes to disrupting tropes and providing a really mature, reflexive response to a rather messy genre.

liked better on a reread, not because it opened up in any particular way (tbh it’s been too long since i first read it for this to be anything but a refresher) but because i knew what to expect, as a practical reading experience. knew i would have to sit thru so much johnny stuff, and therefore had much more patience for it. was aware the navidson bits i was curious about were just bits, and could temper my expectations. had a better sense of pacing, and could take my time on the slow sections bc i knew i would speed up. it was much easier this time because i wasn’t hoping it would be something it isn’t.
my feelings haven’t massively changed about the components of the book. the navidson record is by far my favourite part. i like films, i like mock academic writing, i love a scary house. i like the spooky story around a document’s creation and discovery, which is where zampano comes in. i care most about the navidsons, feel they’re most real: unclear how intentional this is, but if it is i do respect that. johnny is fine but somewhat something to put up with, for the ultimate twin joys of frame narratives and truth/fiction/authorship tangles. his yapping is a pain. the appendixes are fairly bad, firstly because they so move away from the navidson record (which is the good), and secondly because the letters rely on a lot of not-quite-there JT investment, and the poetry is so bad, and it finally feels like the self indulgence of the whole endeavour comes crashing in. not a totally bad thing but the film stuff is so much crisper.
it’s mad to me that all the discussion online about this book feels like it dissolves into ‘true author theory!!!’ stuff ‘the film is real’ ‘a woman wrote everything’. we know who wrote it and that it’s fiction. i know it does a little bit of meta manoeuvring but ultimately only one guy’s name is on the front cover. for me, the actual joy of house of leaves is that all these fake things can exist as real simultaneously and we don’t have to choose one to explain it all, because many stories can and have to coexist, otherwise there would be no point in libraries. the intrareferences go up and down across the texts because they are all within the covers of this experience. you don’t have to life of pi it, you dont have to choose. you don’t have to choose in life of pi either. it’s fun, to draw attention to how stories make themselves real despite the presence of logic and contradiction.
had thoughts, not original ones, but interesting to me, about the house/manuscripts as books, and bodies, but again, the appendixes slam a big wall between the house and me, the reader who's just reached the end, which make it hard to trace such thoughts to their conclusion. oh! i did like when JT tried to retrace the literary locations – and they didn’t exist! classic. curious if anyone else has retraced his roadtrip, and if they reflected on how they were doing the same thing as him, animated to action by something unseen, unfindable, a story.

after finishing dragonflight, i was like ‘oh i get it. i see why this series is 26-odd books long. at this slow pace, it would take 26 books to properly unfold a life and planet and plot, but i’m excited to spend the necessary time tracing lessa’s journey in the dragon society of pern’. and then i started dragonquest and it was about different protagonists and different concerns and i was like. oh. ok. i don’t understand this series.
because, see, there’s a thing the first couple of books in the series do where the set up is agonisingly slow, and then plot and excitement and discovery kicks in, and it is a satisfying and full narrative, but because it comes so late in the gamed, it also feels like the whole book's set-up and then cliffhanger for future development. (which is coming together at this point of the series, it’s just world development more than character). i though dragonsong struck a better balance with this. i thought dragonsinger struck a much worse one: it’s all set up. it takes place over one week and the high points are playing in a quartet and a market. there’s a big dragon on the front cover, which is completely false advertising. it also barely delivers on the content of the first book: i thought her brother would matter? and despite all that set-up, apparently this is the last menolly-focused book. this seems mad given how it ends, which is why i started w that anecdote about how i don't understand the structure of the books:series? all in all, an insane use of 250 pages.
i had a lovely time with it, though. menolly is a sweetie, i was glad to see her succeed. the whole thing is pure fantastic wish-fulfilment, and that’s nice. cozy fantasy does nothing for me as a label, but i guess this sort of fits? obsessed with the fact harpers hall is pure wizard school, but for music. like it’s not roke, but it’s not not roke. and for me (stupid about it) but also for the story and for menolly, it’s nice to see music as magic, something fantastical and transformative, whilst also very clearly a skill.
to conclude. i continue to be surprised and unsettled by the irregular rhythms of these series, 4 books in, but i do also think mccaffrey knows what shes doing, and that i will see menolly again and that’ll be good, and everything will crescendo at some point, with all my old friends there, and it will be satisfying, because i know so many of them. i was right that the story would unfold slowly, across books, but i forgot it could also unfold across people and places, and not to any of their detriments. 

this is a book with massive temporal and geographical scope, but it doesn't formally ever really reflect that. it's efficient, and fairly brief, and has a limited cast of characters, and is composed of a sequence of  distinct events, between which much intermediary time is skimmed past, so it's hard to ever get a handle on the size of the story. and i wouldn't say the characters are underdeveloped or anything, but given how much in-story time is spent with them, i feel like i don't know them that well. all this is a shame: i'd like the breadth of the story to fill the huge landscapes we're sometimes told it occurs in.
the language is lush and notable: i took a whole bunch of notes. it's really very gorgeous. it perhaps doesn't reach the precision and opulence of, perhaps, tom sawyer or the shipping news, but the fact those are even comparitive is notable. (an odd pair of choices: twain came to mind because of the period, proulx because that's my standard for short, beautiful sentences.)
am ended up very fond of the narrator, and found the sort of revelation he comes to towards the end very tender, moving, surprising. what is it about stage performance in historical fiction, to make it provide such a consistent way of unlocking genders and relationships? this, and tipping the velvet, and even, ish, stage beauty come to mind from my immediate canon. i mean, i know why, but i would like to read more on it, as well as of it.
two brief complaints. 1) i found the battle scenes throughout a little numbing, and there's a lot of them. i understand their place in the book, why they're where it descends into detail and present tense, but i struggled a little. 2) this is a book that deserves a smaller font size: honestly that might have helped me expect less scope. i always hate how big the font is (how big the books are) in recently published novels, but when it’s a historical one too, it just feels wrong.
ultimately, i think this is a really smart, interesting book, slightly let down by packaging which doesn't articulate why, what it's properly about. so, here’s my sense of the heart of it. it's about the cage of being a soldier, and how that clashes and meshes with the silences (?) of queerness, in a country and landscape which is opening up, into freedom and hostility, kindness and bloodshed. as the book considers in its final pages. in that end, it is very twain. huckleberry finn, this time.

sort of impressively grim, but i really failed to engage with it in any meaningful way

good, brutal. le carre is a fantastic writer. the world here is so alien. i like how willing he is to leave the reader unsure, in suspense, how he plays with what it shows you so carefully. the only reason i'm being so conservative with my star rating is that it felt a little brief: the story's short, and i wish it had been, denser, maybe.

most stories i liked, or at least found evocative: driftglass, we in some strange power’s employ…, the star pit & aye and gomorrah stand out as particularly sticking. kept having to remind myself they were from the 60s, and i think how modern they often felt actually limited my appreciation of just what they were doing.
i didn’t love the turn into other genres, when my expectations were set for science fiction: the last story’s fantasy was pushing it, and realism or whatever’s going on that greek story did not do anything for me. but i thought the actual scifi worldbuilding was really good, really fun, and again, felt very unique for the period.

a very charming teen adventure. a horse girl story taken to the max, except also well-written, and the horses are dragons, and i wish all my friends had read this bc i want to talk fire lizards with someone. i loooove in fantasy series (and other books too, bone clocks comes to mind i suppose) where you change perspectives and suddenly see a character you know really well from a different pov and it’s like ‘yeah that scary awe-inspiring dragonrider is my pal from last month’s read :)’ it’s soooo fun. and also means i can retract my complaints about the declawing of lessa in the previous book, because she does read as scary and important here. i like the perspectives here, like all the characters, think mccaffery’s prose is more consistently solid than it was at times before. i had a nice time, and im looking forward to hunting down a copy of dragonsinger so i can read it sooon. altho i read the whole thing (and wrote this) whilst travelling after very little sleep so i hope i remember what happened

skilful and interesting, particularly engaged by how good the voices of the narrators were. but left a little cold, it didnt get under my skin. it’s possible that was a timing issue on my part

i think this is nice, sweet, kind, an easy, pleasant read. but i struggled a lot to want to pick it up. i crawled through it in 15 page increments right before i went to sleep. so even though, if asked, i would say 'yeah, it was good :)', i fear that pace is a pretty damning and more truthful review.