Reviews and Comments

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I didn't connect with this at all. An easy read, it's a family drama spanning two generations with characters apparently cursed by illness, sour marriages and car accidents. It felt aimless for much of the book, and the characters were all detached and mostly uninteresting. The writing felt very lifeless. Looking at other reviews this is all a matter of taste, but yeah this wasn't for me.

I am utterly elated having just finished this book! It's so good. I immediately connected with and cared about the main character, Jade, and I was so impatient to find out what happens... and what really happened. Essential reading for anyone who loves slashers.

Written like a good action movie. You're given pretty clear instructions on how to feel about each character (heroes, villains), the plot is tight and exciting, and the monsters are extremely badass. It's quite fun reading books this gory.

This is probably the scariest book I've read so far in my current journey into horror fiction. I'd good and I'm sure I'll be back for some more G. Hendrix at some point.

I was stuck in airport hell for several hours and was about to finish my other book, so I bought this cheap edition to keep me going. It worked a treat! This is a short, easily digestable mystery involving bodies - and orchids - appearing at the premises of a Milan fashion house. It has the right balance of giving enough information to form a theory, then our hero detective letting rip with the solution right at the end. I'd read another one of these for sure next time I want something light and entertaining.

It took me a few weeks to read Authority whereas I got through Annihilation very quickly. In retrospect I would've enjoyed this more if I read it quicker and got more immersed in it as a result. I did enjoy Annihilation more, for the most part. Much of Authority involved spending time with the unlikeable Control with a growing sense of things not being quite right. It's interesting, weirdly bureaucratic and the ending is excellent. Definitely going to read Acceptance now.

This is probably my preferred flavour of sci-fi - concise and straight to the point, with an interesting concept at the core. It feels premature to review it while I'm still reading the trilogy (currently half way through Authority).

While I found this 3-part book engaging, and I don't mind writing that is exploratory in nature, in the end I did wonder what the point was. There was potentially interesting stuff about power imbalances and alternative histories/futures, but never really followed through with.

I also got the vibe that the author is channelling some self-loathing of her own in the way that she gives characters no hope and/or makes fun of them.

Fairyland is good, and despite being [checks watch] 27 years old it doesn't really feel dated. Things I particularly liked were the pacing of the story - action unfolds and then the story skips forward years at a time to when the action unfolds again in a different setting. I also liked the characterisation, it was well done and kept me interested. I would probably have liked it even more if I was a bigger sci-fi fan.

Set in gold rush era New Zealand, it reminded me more than a little of the series Deadwood despite being on the other side of the world. It's brilliantly written and is very deliberate and interesting in form - structured according to astrology and the chapters flipping upside down as the book progresses. The mystery was original and unpredictable, but kinda low key.

Aliens visit earth and leave again, as if they were just stopping for a picnic along the way to somewhere more interesting. The people living near the visited sites (Zones) find all sorts of mysterious and often dangerous things left behind that shatter our concepts of physics and the possibilities of life. Scientists are no better off than anyone else tring to understand them. And that's the crux of it - when humans are so insignificant, so far away from understanding reality, there is really very little separating us. I've typed and deleted a few more things but felt like it cheapened the book's themes because ultimately I think they are affective rather than ideological. So I'll just keep them to myself.

This was a Christmas gift chosen for me on the basis of it being an Australian gothic ghost story. Really though, it's a love story. A supernatural one and also a queer one. I bawled my way through a good part of it because I cared about the main characters and because the plot happenings were the kind of things that hit me right in the feels. It's a beautiful book.