Category: NetGalley

Daniel Polansky, March’s End (2023)

On By Ola GIn books, NetGalley, Ola, reviews19 Comments

Author: Daniel Polansky

Title: March’s End

Format: e-book

Pages: ???

Series: –

What review would be better to start the month of March with than a review of March’s End? Polansky’s new book offers his trademark blend of gritty realism and fantastic flights of fancy. It’s casually cruel, in love with the melody of its own language, melancholy and tender at times, but mostly, and always – beautifully, clinically detached.

Polansky is sharp. All sharp edges, short witty remarks, quick, astute observations. I do wonder if he fences; those books of his that I have read certainly remind me of fencing – finding the opponent’s weak spot and lunging, without hesitation or remorse. There is certain urgency in his writing, a particular blend of ruthlessness and vulnerability that demands to be read. I enjoy it; it is rather unique in our times of effusive wordy diarrhoea, of sickly sweetness and hand-holding, back-patting cosiness and hidden feelings of authorial superiority. Yup, Polanski is none of those things, thank goodness. His unique second-person-perspective narrative in The Seventh Perfection made that book one of my favourites of 2020, but March’s End is closer in theme and mood to the novella The Builders. 

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Ashley Ward, The Social Lives of Animals (2022)

On By Ola GIn books, NetGalley, non-fiction, Ola, reviews26 Comments

Ashley Ward, The Social Lives of Animals (2022)

Author: Ashley Ward

Title: The Social Lives of Animals

Format: e-book

Pages: 384

Series: –

The first book of 2023, yay!

Ward’s The Social Lives of Animals delivers exactly what it promises – a highly interesting, sometimes humorous, sometimes dead serious account on the social aspects of animal lives. It’s a very good popular science book, full of fun facts and anecdotes made more engrossing by the fact that many of them were witnessed first-hand by the author. As Ward is a professor of biology, there is a certain hierarchy detectable in the storytelling, a slow journey through the animal kingdom following the growing social complexity of behaviour: from the invertebrate toward vertebrates, and among these, from fish to mammals. The natural science lens is visible in other aspects of the book, as well – Ward judiciously spices his account with more scientific terms, taking care to explain what each means and why it is important. It is a highly entertaining, educational book and while maybe a tad less jaw-dropping and more anecdotal than I expected, it’s still a great resource for those interested in animal ethology. Ward is a great storyteller and possesses a wealth of data he itches to share with everybody. His enthusiasm is palpable, as is his knowledge. There’s humour, horror, sadness and joy, and loads of fun facts about a host of animals as varied as krill, termites, humpback whales, cockroaches, gorillas and vampire bats. I, for once, will never look at tits (erm, the birds) the same way.

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K. Eason, Nightwatch Over Windscar (2022)

On By Ola GIn books, fiction, NetGalley, Ola, reviews39 Comments

Author: K. Eason

Title: Nightwatch Over Windscar

Format: e-book

Pages: 480

Series: The Weep #2

Hello everyone! I’m nearing the end of my course, and with the programming bootcamp safely behind me I decided to go back to some of my blogging and reviewing duties. I’m hoping to be fully back on WP within a week or two, and to have some collaborative summary of the year prepared with Piotrek before the end of said year ;).

Alas, I wish I had a better book to mark my blogging comeback. You’ll have to endure this withering onslaught just like I endured the book in question – bravely and with resolve. One thing that needs to be said upfront is that the name of the series should by rights be changed to The Bitter Weep. That’s how I felt throughout the reading experience, and while the tears had dried somewhat by now, the bitterness remained.

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Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species (2022)

On By Ola GIn reviews, Ola, books, non-fiction, NetGalley19 Comments

Author: Lucy Cooke

Title: Bitch: On the Female of the Species

Edition: e-book

Pages: 416

Series: –

Disclaimer: this review is a one-off till the end of December, I’m sad to say. It’s going to be shorter, too, which you may find a relief 😉 Iwon’t be able to visit your blogs either, unfortunately, so please be patient. I’ll be back in full, just not yet!

Al right, on to the review. Let’s not beat about the bush: I initially chose this book on the strength of its title. And it’s a cool title, no question about it. That hyena doesn’t hurt, either ;). Lucy Cooke tackles a topic that has been avoided for years, decades and centuries. Most representatives of the biological sciences, on the account of being human and as such subjective and subject to the strictures of their cultures, tended to treat the females of other species as they treated their own: negligible and, in general, uninteresting. Weaker, drab, passive and condemned to live their lives as a background for the virile males, females were perceived as a secondary sex: important, sure, but never truly in power. Cooke, with the help of many contemporary scientists, proves these assumptions wrong.

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Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau (2022)

On By Ola GIn books, fiction, NetGalley, Ola, reviews16 Comments

Author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Title: The Daughter of Doctor Moreau

Format: e-book

Pages: 306

Series: –

I’ll be brief, and frank. Yes, ouch.

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau is not a long book, and yet reading through it felt like eternity. I have been reading the first half of the book for over a week; every time I picked it up I felt that I was forcing myself to do it. Nothing was happening, and the reveals were totally unsurprising for a book that is to a large extent a retelling of The Island of Doctor Moreau. The second half picked up the pace, and offered some entertainment, but never on par with my previous encounters with Moreno-Garcia’s books. In short, this is not a bad book, and yet it’s far from good, too. It’s mediocre, and I’m actually sad to say it, because all Moreno-Garcia’s novels that I have read before were pretty enjoyable – and quite remarkable, too. I had so much fun with the fungal creepiness of Mexican Gothic, and with the darker realistic vibes of Velvet Was the Night, and even the early fantastic unevenness of Certain Dark Things was entertaining. 

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