Natasha Pulley

3.5***

Subtitle: Eight Ghostly Tales for Long Winter Nights

The stories (and their authors) in this collection are:
A Study in Black and White by [author:Bridget Collins|14717647]
Thwaite’s Tenant by [author:Imogen Hermes Gowar|16834390]
The Eel Singers by [author:Natasha Pulley|8446650]
Lily Wilt by [author:Jess Kidd|15044123]
The Chillingham Chair by [author:Laura Purcell|22701274]
The Hanging of the Greens by [author:Andrew Michael Hurley|3439810]
Confinement by [author:Kiran Millwood Hargrave|5868487]
Monster by [author:Elizabeth Macneal|17715039]

I enjoy short stories. I marvel at how much a talented author can cram into them. No wasted words. No over-the-top exposition. No cast of thousands. In this case they are, as the title hints, “haunting” tales featuring ghosts, monsters, witches, evil spirits and spooky locations. I particularly liked A Study in Black and White, The Chillingham Chair and Confinement.

All are set during winter months, with several being set around Christmas. But there is no holiday cheer here. They are Spooky with a capital ‘S’!… (mer)

This is a Natasha Pulley novel so if you're a Natasha Pulley fan you know what to expect. A strange mystery, a lonely man and an older maybe evil/maybe amazing love interest. At least one of them is going to be autistic. You will not be disappointed in any of that here. Where it differs from the rest of her books up until now is that instead of being sort of historical fiction, it is several hundred years in the future sci-fi, and takes place almost entirely on Mars, where the main character, January, has fled as a refugee from a dying Earth.

I will say that one thing that affected my opinion of this book is how incredibly depressing and infuriating it was to have such a bleak future for our planet. A lot of really bad things are going on right now but I do hope we will be able to pull together before we doom ourselves and our planet. I was so angry while reading this fictional book about a fictional future with fictional politicians who had clearly made the selfish choice and now the planet is all fire and flooding and war and famine and aaaaaaargh spending a ton of money on a Mars colony when they could have spent that money finding alternates to fossil fuels etc- it's fine. This is a fictional book and this is not a real future.

I really enjoyed reading about the Martian culture. It was founded primarily by China so has a language based on Mandarin with a lot of Chinese cultural components but with many other cultures mixed in as well. The Martian colony has genetically modified its people so that everyone is androgynous in appearance, extra suited to the cold atmosphere and huge elevation shifts on a lower gravity planet. They have also over seven generations become an average of six feet tall, but more slender than their Earth ancestors. The refugees from Earth by contrast are much shorter but also much, much stronger, used to three times the gravitational pull. This is where the central conflict arises and where the love interest makes me want to shake them until their teeth rattle when they say things like, but this is like the draft and people don't oppose the draft, they know its a necessity and argh yeah they do oppose the draft you numbskull, people literally go to jail for refusing to go off and kill for their government all the time. If I shook them until their teeth rattled though I'd probably kill them by accident since I'm Earthstrong and they are a sad weak Martian person. This was supposed to be a paragraph of things I *liked* about the book, I think I got off topic. I do really like that there is discussion and acknowledgment that physical strength is not the only type of power, and that issues can be really complicated and still have options that are simply wrong, and also have solutions that are not perfect but cause the least harm.

I liked the second half of the book much better than the first, when we are past the infuriating politicians and horrible views of the dying Earth. There is a lot of good character interactions and a strange little mystery with a heartbreaking ending and mammoths. Seriously, there are woolly mammoths in this book and that might be my favorite part.

This is a super ramble-y review. In conclusion, if you are a Natasha Pulley fan, definitely pick this one up. If you haven't read her before however, I might not start here. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC in exchange for an honest and hopefully at least somewhat coherent review.… (mer)

Uno stile di scrittura pessimo e spesso ostico.

I riferimenti al periodo storico sono stati dimenticati.

I dialoghi sono incomprensibili: non è chiaro il passaggio tra un interlocutore e l’altro.

Da metà libro in poi la storia diventa eterea (ossia scompare nella confusione).



“Ad ogni modo,” ripetè lei, “l’etere potrebbe spiegare l’operato dei medium, l’esistenza dei fantasmi, più in generale gli effetti fisici del pensiero al di fuori della scatola cranica. Se potessimo studiare l’etere, saremmo a buon punto per capire cosa succede alla coscienza umana dopo la morte.”

(pagina 149)… (mer)