Reviews and Comments

I felt like there was much joy in how Keiko had found her place in life, and fulfillment through doing a good job at the convenience store. Nicely critical of the way the people around her -- her so-called friends -- can't accept the choices she's made that make her happy and keep trying to push her into something else. The only sour note for me was Shiraha; I get why he's in the story, but every page with him on it was so unpleasant (perhaps I'd become weirdly protective of Keiko?) that I enjoyed the last third of the book much less than the preceding two-thirds.

DNF'ing, which I should have done long before. The first few stories were at least an interesting take on vampirism, that's different from your usual blood-drinking count, though with the slight oddity that each story was followed by several paragraphs of the author explaining why they wrote it. In the ebook this wasn't even particularly set off from the story, which led to some confusion until I realized what was going on.

Things went downhill with Harlan Ellison's story, which was distinctly meh, and followed by pages of self-indulgent self-hagiography. I thought the name sounded familiar so I looked him up online and... yeah. It's not great when the 'Controversies' section of your Wikipedia page has ten sub-sections.

Not sure whether my lack of enthusiasm for the following stories is fair, or just tainted by Ellison's, but I'm done.

I'm a bit torn as to how to review this. It was all going so well until the last fifty pages or so. Well, two of the main characters are suicidal for much of the book, and there's some pretty awful bullying going on, but it's still, somehow, enjoyable. All of a sudden things are neatly tied up by an intervention that comes out of nowhere, and then we're off into QM and Schrödinger's cat, and Everett's many-worlds interpretation, and I'm just wondering where the novel went to...

Felt like several rather disjoint narratives -- a pretty short history of the tar sands, a discussion of how wildfires are changing, a lengthy account of the Fort McMurray fire, followed by a lengthy history of climate change and the way fossil fuel companies have concealed the facts so they can keep making profits. The first and last are, unfortunately, nothing new. The discussion of how wildfires are changing was a real eye-opener (I've since looked up 'fire tornadoes' on YT and, yikes!) but the description of the fire in Alberta, while perhaps interesting as an illustration of how things are changing so fast that it's hard for people to comprehend, ultimately felt a bit like a thriller, but written about real peoples' lives. A bit mind-boggling, I will say, that Fort McMurray had a population of around 90,000!

OK. Weirdest thing I've read in a long time. Not really sure how/why I finished it, especially as the first third-or-so, in which Natsuki is eleven, is a distinctly uncomfortable read. The CWs I've listed aren't even all the topics I'd probably mention, but I've forgotten some and others... I'm not even sure how I'd describe them. When you strip out all of the dialled-up-to-eleven weirdness, what you're left with is a novel that might have interesting things to say about how people (particularly Japanese women) deal with societal norms, expectations, and pressure, and about how the construction of a fantasy world can make sense as a way of dealing with childhood trauma. For me, though, it all felt a bit too heavy-handed -- the constant invocation of 'the Factory' felt a bit much after a while. Note: I haven't given a star rating because I just don't know how to rate it.