Review: Deathless

Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It seems a fashionable trend to re-tell Slavic fairy tales. Deathless is not a first book I read exploting them, though judging by the publication date, it was written sometime in the beginning of this literary fashion. And I must admit it's not the worst version.

From the first page I had a feeling that the author really did her homework, having a Russian husband probably helped a lot. The number of transliterated Russian words is rather questionable. I myself had a good laugh at them, but I'm not sure a person unfamiliar with the language can appreciate them much; they certainly add something to the tale, but only if you can trace the meaning behind them. The meaning is more or less explained along the way, but then the reader is left with the necessity to remember which word is which, so that level of the story is the first in line to be skipped.

The translations of Russian poetry are rather liberal, changing words for the story's sake, and at the same time still ugly. I don't know if there are better translations out there, but the author could at least try to keep the rhyme. Or, if nothing else, the rhythm.

As I said, I had thought that the author did a very good job in studying the culture. Right up to the page 63. On which Pushkin is called Aleksey. It somehow broke the spell. After that the transliterated Russian words became annoying; tradional elements of fairy tales, like three-fold repetitions, looked foreign; stereotypes seemed to pile up out of control (of course Russian fairies, and all Russians for that matter, drink vodka as water and nothing else, right?)

The poet's name is not the only overlooked mistake in the text. There were some gender-changing kings of water and strange-looking birds, but most of them were easy to forgive.

And then comes the Siege of Leningrad... There is probably a way to turn that pain and that fear into a story, a fairy tale to pass on. But that book is not that way.

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Review: What Remains

What Remains by Garrett Leigh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

That was the first book by this author I read and probably the last. The last because I liked it so much I don't want to learn all her books are the same :) It was a very refreshing experience. Most of the authors in the genre I read are from the US, so the language and perspective here are new to me. Besides, the author really did her homework and the characters that came from different places do sound differently.

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Review: Biscuit Goes to School

Biscuit Goes to School by Alyssa Satin Capucilli
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Ehm. This book's rating is 4.17? I know a lot of much better books with ratings not nearly that good. Anyway, the story bored both me and my kid. The pictures are sweet, but the text that goes along is disappointing at best. I'm pretty sure that vocabulary of a book marked 'shared reading' can go beyond ten words.

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Review: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I wasn't sure how many stars to give this book, three or four, but after reading about the author and his account of creating the story, settled on joining 130,000 people on GR.

The idea to wind a story around a collection of vintage pictures is interesting and fresh. And at first I really liked the book, like the first third, before anything 'supernatural' started to happen. After that point, (view spoiler)[after our hero goes to 1940 and finds the peculiar children living there (hide spoiler)], I had a distinct impression that it was written by another person. The first part is light, but gripping, while after that the writing abruptly becomes sloppy and boring. The world-building is limping; the author goes to great length explaining how this peculiar world works, but there are so, so many details that don't fit, it's amazing.

The author also didn't bother to do his homework. I can't be sure, as a non-native English speaker, but there are several slips, when supposedly European kids from the WW I time use words, such as skivvies, marked as Americanisms in dictionaries. The stunning display of flashlight fish the kids see also doesn't quite make sense. It struck me as odd, so I went to Wikipedia of course and looked up species that are called 'flashlight fish'. Naturally, most of them are deep-water fish that don't live in the Atlantic. There are two that can be found in the Atlantic, but one of them is deep-water dweller and the other is 'epipelagic to mesopelagic', which translates to 90-820 meters, that besides comes to 'shallower depths during daylight' (the scene happens at night). A bit deep for snorkeling, isn't it? Also, the author presumably thinks that human eyes consist of whites and pupils, nothing else.

The thing that bothers me most is the unique peculiar gift of the main character to see something that appeared in the universe a hundred years ago. Did those 'special' peculiars passed as 'normals' before that? How many other peculiars live with a gift not yet called upon?

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Review: The Rabbit Who Wants to Fall Asleep

The Rabbit Who Wants to Fall Asleep by Carl-Johan Forssén Ehrlin
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Scrolling down the book's page on Goodreads I found that first several reviews start with a word 'creepy', and I totally agree! This 'new way of getting children to sleep' consists of reading incredibly boring stories with repetitive phrases meant to hypnotize the kid. The foreword says that if it didn't work the first time, just read it again. Great, just read an incredibly boring story several times and, bingo, the kid is asleep!

In my world, the bed time is the time for imagination, for interesting stories, for some time together, for reflecting on the day, and many other things, but definetely not for... that. I don't know a good word to describe what this book is supposed to do. There is no meaningful story in it, to think about and to compare with, no interesting pictures, nothing at all. If you say 'sleep, sleep, sleep...' long enough, it would have the same effect.

Sometimes, very rarely, I need my kid to go to sleep faster, but even then I wouldn't read this. I'd choose some authobiography or other non-fiction, boring for the kid, but interesting for me. Works every time. By the way, this 'new way of getting children to sleep' doesn't work. I honestly tried!

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Review: Vampire Knight, Vol. 2

Vampire Knight, Vol. 2 by Matsuri Hino
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

It seems that the drawing is even worse than in the first volume. Besides, nothing actually happened in this volume, which is frustrating. Hence, one star.

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Review: Понедельник начинается в субботу

Понедельник начинается в субботу by Arkady Strugatsky
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is one of my all-times favorites that I read and re-read (I can remember at least ten occasions). This particular session was special, because my husband was reading it aloud. And as soon as we reached the end, we started again. And then read again, selected parts.

The mix of surrealism and straightforward realism, irony and self-irony, fondness and disillusionment is amazing and breathtaking. This book shows the atmosphere among Soviet Union -> Russian scientists so accurately, as if it's a mirror. And it makes me feel both nostalgic and apprehensive, because it of course shows both good and bad sides, and also that they are the same. The things we love are pretty horrible, if we think about them long enough, but in most cases they are what they are. It's just the paradigm, the universe we live in. And the mirror to look in.

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