C.A. Gray's Blog, page 44
November 20, 2020
Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
Today’s podcast review comes from this blog review of Ender’s Game.
The post Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card appeared first on C.A. Gray.
November 16, 2020
Review of Next Year In Havana
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I was surprised by how engaging this was.
The story went back and forth in time, following first Marisol, the granddaughter of a wealthy Cuban refugee who fled from Cuba right after Batista was ousted and Castro took over, and her grandmother Elisa in real time as that was happening. It wasn’t a frame story, though, as each protagonist had her own plot line and character arc, though the two mirrored each other closely.
Elisa, the debutante daughter of a sugar plantation owner, falls in love with a revolutionary fighting to oust Batista. At this point I rather expected that the story would be pro-communist (or at least pro-socialist) propaganda, but it was far more complex than that, and I thought it did justice to the real history very well. Neither Batista’s nor Castro’s regime was blameless, but Pablo, her lover, did not realize what he was ushering in in Bastista’s stead. Meanwhile, Marisol returns to modern day Cuba after Castro’s death, when Cuba is just about to open up to Americans, ostensibly as a travel writer, but also to scatter her grandmother’s ashes. What she finds there is her heritage, secrets her grandmother kept from her all her life, and a romance with her own revolutionary, Luis–ironically on the opposite side from the one Pablo fought to empower, though the two had very similar ideals.
The tension between Marisol and Luis was a bit annoying and redundant, honestly, but I loved the parallel aspects of the two women’s stories, and the political atmospheres in which they unfolded. Particularly because it was told without an obvious agenda. The story did a good job of showing the complexities of both sides.
My rating: ****
Political content: present but complex; no overt propaganda
Sexual content: present, but just in two back-to-back scenes you could skip, and fairly tastefully done
Language: I think there was some but I didn’t register much of it
Violence: present given the subject matter, but not gratuitous
The post Review of Next Year In Havana appeared first on C.A. Gray.
November 13, 2020
Review of Ender’s Game
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I listened to the full cast version on audio, and I could hardly put it down. The characterization was just incredible… and while it bothered me that Ender was 6 when the story began and only 11 when it ended, it didn’t bother me as much as it did the first time I read it. He’s described as being a genius at the outset, though I think he’s more than that. Genius just refers to intelligence. Ender has the knowledge of an adult, and the wisdom and maturity of a saint, which doesn’t really have anything to do with intelligence per se. But I knew this going in, and accepted it as the primary area in which I’d have to suspend my disbelief.
The story is set in far futuristic outer space, post-war with an alien race. The fleet is recruiting brilliant young children like Ender to train them young. There’s a cap on reproduction of two children per couple, but because Ender’s older brother and sister are so exceptional, his parents get special dispensation to have a third. They hope he will become the savior the fleet has been waiting for, supposedly to fight against the second coming alien invasion. The story takes place almost entirely in school simulations, and it’s an interesting combination of school kid antics and high level tactical decisions, though with theoretically low risk. It’s what Harry Potter would have been if he were a military prodigy rather than a wizard.
Of course in the end, Ender finds out that the stakes are much higher than even he ever realized. The twist at the end requires a fairly substantial suspension of disbelief as well. But the story and characters were so compelling that I almost didn’t mind.
My rating: ****1/2
Language: none
Violence: none (it’s a military story so there kind of is some but it’s minor)
Sexual content: none
Political content: none
The post Review of Ender’s Game appeared first on C.A. Gray.
Animal Farm by George Orwell
This week’s podcast review comes from this blog review of Animal Farm.
The post Animal Farm by George Orwell appeared first on C.A. Gray.
November 6, 2020
Stuck by Chris Grabenstein
This week’s podcast review comes from this blog post of “Stuck”.
The post Stuck by Chris Grabenstein appeared first on C.A. Gray.
November 2, 2020
Review of Animal Farm
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I last read this in high school, but then got it as a freebie on Audible. I was at first rather confused, as it seemed like a cautionary fable against socialism, and yet both the good and the bad characters appeared to be socialist. When I read commentary afterwards, this made sense: Orwell apparently was a socialist, but an idealistic one, like Lenin and Marx. In a perfect world, if humans were totally selfless, socialism might work great. Everyone would be looking out not for their own best interests, but those of everyone else. So in the beginning, the venerable pig Old Major rallies all the animals to revolt against their farmer Jones, so that they can keep the fruits of their own labor and govern themselves. The animals do revolt, and win, and for a brief period of time, there’s utopia. The pigs are the at first benevolent ruling class, natural rulers because they are so much cleverer than the other animals. They boil down “Animalism” to seven basic rules, which eventually get shortened into “four legs good, two legs bad.”
Alas, though, people (and in this case animals) are not perfect, and are not inherently selfless. So in the story, two pigs rise to power above all others: Napoleon (a type of Stalin), and Snowball (a type of Trotsky/Lenin). Napoleon eventually ousts Snowball, slowly turning the animals against him by subtly adding to the rules of Animalism that they all had previously accepted, and even changing history, making the animals question their own memories. Through repeated indoctrination and propaganda, most of the good-hearted animals come to believe Napoleon’s version of the world, despite their nagging doubts and evidence to the contrary.
Ultimately, the pigs break every one of the tenets of Animalism, walking on two legs after all, and becoming so human that it is impossible to tell the difference between them and the actual humans. The farm ends up worse off under Napoleon than it ever was under Jones.
Some aspects of the allegory can really only be understood in light of the Bolshevik revolution, and it’s not otherwise a perfect fable for other examples of the rise of socialism throughout history. But the very simple rendering of how propaganda can influence the the masses is especially chilling at the moment.
My rating: ****
Language: none
Violence: minor
Sexual content: none
Political content: heavy but historical (though you can draw conclusions to the present day, clearly this was not the author’s intent)
The post Review of Animal Farm appeared first on C.A. Gray.
October 30, 2020
Goldheart by Kenley Davidson
Today’s podcast review comes from this blog review of Goldheart.
The post Goldheart by Kenley Davidson appeared first on C.A. Gray.
October 28, 2020
Review of Stuck
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This was a fun audible original! A very short middle-grade read about an 11-year old boy named Jackson who doesn’t want to grow up, and who makes a wish (but more importantly he later realizes, whose grandfather makes a wish for him) that he would always stay 11. He gets the wish, but (in “It’s a Wonderful Life” fashion), this of course turns out to be a curse, as he repeats 5th grade… for 10 years. Everyone else around him isn’t stuck though, so he has to watch the world move on without him. The explanation for all of this involved astral planes and what-not, but it’s pretty much like waving magic wands.
I actually got more engaged in the story as it went on–each time Jackson thought he’d figured out the key to break the curse and end the cycle, I felt so disheartened for him (more than he seemed to be himself). How he finally did break the curse was (spoiler alert kind of, though you can probably guess it) about learning to put others before himself. This was a little cheesy and didn’t totally fit with the rest of the story, since it wasn’t like Jackson was an especially self-centered kid to begin with. But man, I was glad for him when he got off the merry-go-round!
My rating: ****
Language: none
Violence: none
Sexual content: none
Political content: none
The post Review of Stuck appeared first on C.A. Gray.
October 23, 2020
Romanov by Nadine Brandes
Today’s podcast review comes from this blog review of Romanov.
The post Romanov by Nadine Brandes appeared first on C.A. Gray.
October 20, 2020
Review of Goldheart
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These are the best fairy tale retellings I think I’ve ever read. They are not cheesy (it itself a feat!), well written, and are so loosely based on the original tale that I never quite know what’s about to happen, even though I do know the story upon which it’s based.
For “Goldheart,” that’s especially true, as the retelling is *extremely* loose. The main character is Elaine, a peripheral character in the first book in the series, “Traitor’s Masque,” a loose retelling of Cinderella. Elaine is a very meek, non-confrontational painter who finds herself in a sudden and dire need of cash. So she accepts the strangest commission she’s ever had: to paint the wife of an absurdly successful financial investor, who lies on her deathbed. But she is not to paint her as she is; she must paint her as she was, in the investor’s memory. Only he’s so unapproachable that she does not have access to his memories either. He, presumably, is the Rumplestiltskin character, while she is given the impossible task (spinning straw into gold) and locking her away until she completes it. If she does not do so, she will lose everything, but if she does, he will cancel all her debts, as it turns out, he holds the notes for them. The only “gold” in the story is that Elaine manages, with help, to procure a golden dress that Serena, his wife, wore in her heyday. She paints the portrait wearing the dress.
Meanwhile, the investor (Torbert Melling) has a grown albino son named Blaise whom he’s locked away in his attic for shame. Blaise is fabulously wealthy but of course, terribly sad and neglected. Blaise has a friend named Will, who, for reasons of his own, has also become Blaise’s servant of sorts. These two become love interests for Elaine, kind of, though very early on, only one of them emerges as a real contender.
It’s an entertaining story from start to finish. I’m glad I remembered this series, as I will definitely be reading on!
My rating: ****
Language: none
Sexual content: none
Violence: none
Political content: none
The post Review of Goldheart appeared first on C.A. Gray.
