ergative's reviews
925 reviews

 Oh, dear, oh dear. This was such a charming conceit--the solicitors' office cat meddles in everyone's business to improve their lives for the better. But beyond the conceit, there was nothing in this book that I enjoyed reading. The prose was plodding and repetitive. THe dialogue was contrived and characterless. The characters themselves were stock figures, rather than people. One of the lawyers adopts a refugee family because he's lonely and has a big house. For the rest of the book, they are referred to as 'his refugee family', because that is their role: they are refugees. They never even get names--unlike everyone's pet, who is given a name. To be sure, in a book about a cat, it makes sense that all the pets are named. I just rather wish that people were afforded the same respect. 

Worst of all, the stock roles assigned to each personality-less individual were tainted by many, many unthinking, outdated gender stereotypes. 

When some children have difficulty with literacy at school, the little girl is only interested in shopping and fashion, and her mother wants her to be a model. The little boy is interested in math and science. 

The headmaster's wife herself works full time at the local secondary school as a teacher, but what she teaches is 'home economics', and she's still responsible for cooking dinner every night, which is inedible (hahaha!), and no one eats it, and as a result her children are fat and have pimples from relying on chips. Hahahaha the female partner is responsible for cooking, no one tells her that she needn't do this domestic labour, so for over a decade she's been taking on extra responsibilities she didn't need to undertake, and getting blamed for the health of her children. Because womens be cooking, right? 

The lawyers themselves are all men, except for one token woman, whose life difficulty that the cat solves invovles a reluctance to get married and have children. Because womens need to make babies, right? 

One lawyer's life difficulty involves an overbearing wife who needs to be divorced. Another lawyer's life difficulty involves an overbearing mother whose influence must be cast off. Because womens are just a ball and chain of shackles, right? 

The secretaries are both women. Of course. 

Very, very disappointing.
 

 The best elements of Dear Committee Members and The Shakespeare Requirement combined. Schumacher is a genius in how she allows us to laugh at the student writing, while still granting them their own distinct touches of insight, thoughtfulness, and personality. She does nothing to the students that she hadn't already to faculty and administration in the previous books.
 

 Perfectly adequate for an audiobook to listen to while cooking. Definitely I can see why I liked these so much when I was 12. Now that I'm older, they're a little more obvious, but there's some cute culture clash.
 

 http://www.nerds-feather.com/2023/10/review-age-of-ash-kithamar-1-and-blade.html 

 This was as good as I expected it to be. I gobbled it down over about two days. 

 I enjoyed reading this, but the ending didn't quite work for me. On the one hand, from a literary perspective, it worked really well. All of these plot threads incidentaly intersect with each other, and then go off in their own directions. I have images of birds or trains or traffic flying in from all directions, getting caught briefly in some vortex or whirlpool, and then continuing off on their own distinct trajectories, possibly offset from the original path because of the whirling influence of the other birds/trains/cars. The book is just the vortex whirlpool when the paths cross, but the rest of the characters lives happen too. The 'where aer they next' had a real feel of verisimilitude to it. I absolutely believe that, in the real world, those epilogue vignettes would have happened as described. But I don't read books for verisimilitude. Tell me a fairy story! Wrap up the plot threads in a satisfying way. 

 Eh. Sure was a lot of fat-shaming and misogyny in this one. Ahh, the 80s 

I think this is the best of the four. The plot is certainly more coherent than The Mirador, with hints and ideas that are dropped early on coming back in to show why they're important towards the end; and I enjoyed learning about the new batch of politics and magical philosophy that came with the new setting. 

 This felt a little bit less focused than the previous two books, and I was never entirely clear, given how it began, whether I was supposed to look for a connection between the mystery of the extra tomb in the crypt and the modern-day court political shenanigans. I see now that I think the former was perhaps some symbolic representation of the toxicity of court politics (??), but it took so long to get resolved that it felt as if instead there was gong to be some grand connection between them, which never materialized. 

Still, the character work is superb. The way Felix is such a PROFOUND asshole is a really bold choice. It was a very good narrative decision to bind him to Mildmay in the previous book with the obligation d'ame, because otherwise it would absolutely beggar belief why Mildmay puts up with him. This way there's a perfectly reasonable motivation for that.