Category Archives: Lilypad Reviews

An umbrella parent for all the lilypad reviews.

The Quiche of Death by M.C. Beaton (1992) – BR00215 (2022) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
October 29 2022

Plot or Premise

Agatha Raisin retires from an active public relations life in London and settles down in a small town, expecting a relatively quiet existence.

What I Liked

The general premise is interesting, with a pie she enters in a contest ending up somehow killing someone. There are lots of characters running around, and once things settle down, it has the basis for a good universe to visit.

What I Didn’t Like

I struggled with three aspects of the story. First and foremost, Agatha herself is not particularly likable. She’s spent her career generally being oblivious to others, but now that she has moved to a small town, her intent is to get to know the locals and ingratiate herself. Except as she does, she basically does so rather offensively by trying to fake her way into winning a baking contest and condescendingly considering local efforts to organize anything as obviously underwhelming. Second, the whole murder is rather obvious to the reader, but even within the investigation, some elements are assumed away while ridiculous other parts are painstakingly investigated with no real avenue to pursue. And some of the information that people learn, with a weird out of place point-of-view shift at convenient moments, is held back. Finally, some of the characters are simple clichés, rather than fully formed. Supposedly that makes them “funny”, I just found them annoying.

I do have another complaint, but it doesn’t affect the rating. If it did, zero would be in the cards. The story is quite old at this point, and I was reading the first one from 1992. In the copy I bought, they included a short story as an extra, in honour of the 25-year anniversary of the book’s debut. Except there is no warning whatsoever about the story and what you’re about to read, and how it fits into the timeline other than it is present day. And yet, with no sense of spoiler, there are references to two characters and all that has gone on with them over the last 25 years. It’s not quite as bad as, say, reading the short story and it saying, “Oh, remember the case you had where the butler did it?”, it doesn’t give away murder mystery reveals, but rather it reveals the nature and extent of the relationship Agatha has had with two main characters in the series. I won’t even talk about it here, as they would be major reveals, and I confess I was quite dismayed to learn it from the shortstory. I am intending to read the whole series, but I’d rather not have known in advance.

The Bottom Line

Good start for a series, okay book on its own

The Lost World by Michael Crichton (1995) – BR00214 (2022) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
October 27 2022

Plot or Premise

Six years after Jurassic Park turned into a human slaughter by rampaging dinosaurs during a storm, the chaos theorist Ian Malcolm is back to join a rich academic in visiting Site B, a nearby island that was the production facility for the original Park’s dinosaurs.

What I Liked

The story is a bit of a retread of the original, with a bit of added mystery of what happened at the site that is now long dormant. There is a bit new in the ways that the dinosaurs interact and less about “how” they were created from the first book.

What I Didn’t Like

I have three significant problems with the text. First and foremost, Ian Malcolm supposedly died during the first book, and I can overlook his resurrection for this book, except after having experienced severe trauma from being near dinosaurs, he voluntarily goes back into the dinosaur world with no obvious sense of fear or even foreboding. He’s almost as naïve as the original Hammond from book 1. Secondly, the book reads almost like a documentary on the feeding habits of a group of cows. There is virtually NO menace for the first 60% of the book. Ian knows better, the rest may not, but mostly it is just a bunch of aggressive dinosaurs walking past the humans with nary a sniff. Lastly, there is a giant “mystery” of how certain animals ended up in a specific nest area. They couldn’t have got there on their own and other dinosaurs couldn’t have lured or moved them there. But in the end, the blasé explanation of how the dinosaurs died doesn’t answer how they ended up where they did. Nor any other history of the island. It’s still well-written, but there are some gaping plot holes that make no sense at all.

The Bottom Line

Good writing but about as exciting as watching cows eat grass

Artemis by Andy Weir (2018) – BR00213 (2022) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
October 26 2022

Plot or Premise

A young woman on a lunar base works to save money and build some capital.

What I Liked

The story seems incredibly realistic by focusing less on the tech details and mostly on the day-to-day life of Jasmine aka Jazz. She has a very basic life, scrambling to make ends meet as a porter / courier around the station and trying every day to find any angle to get ahead just a little bit, regardless of the small corners she has to cut. She doesn’t want to be rich, she just needs to pay off a large debt and have a bit left over to improve her daily life a smidge. When a big opportunity comes along, perhaps her one and only chance to get out from under, she has to make a decision if she’s willing to sacrifice her scruples and become a full criminal. And then after deciding yes, how far her commitment to others remains.

What I Didn’t Like

Jazz is good at rationalizing cutting corners, and she makes the leap incrementally to becoming a full criminal, but some aspects of the switch don’t quite fit. Put simply without spoilers, I was reminded of the adage that if you sleep with dogs, you get up with fleas … once she commits, she gets her hands a bit dirtier in other areas. Realistic that if she was in for a penny, she was in for a pound, but the big reveal near the end of the nature of the debt doesn’t really justify everything she did to get there.

The Bottom Line

Fast-paced story with portrayal of regular lunar life

Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton (1990) – BR00212 (2022) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
October 25 2022

Plot or Premise

A rich industrialist with a vision creates a safari park on a secluded island for tourists, where the main attraction will be dinosaurs brought back to life through advanced DNA sequencing.

What I Liked

It’s a bit hard to read the book without comparing it to the successful movie franchise that was built on the book. But the imagination to not only conceive of a dinosaur park for tourists and to conceive of a realistic way to make the science sound feasible even in 1990 (pulling dinosaur DNA from a long-dead mosquito trapped in amber) was simply fabulous to see.

Not surprisingly, the book is different from the movie (or more accurately, the movie diverges from the book), but a lot of the core elements are the same. An underappreciated computer nerd, a worried security chief, the storm that turns the island into a death trap, etc.

What I Didn’t Like

Overall, I didn’t feel any sense of wonder in the book. In the movie, for example, you could see the sense of “OMG these are dinosaurs” and the characters are wowed out of their socks. In the book, it is more like, “Cool, but let’s talk about using night-vision goggles to see them, that’s really interesting.” I didn’t feel the wonder of any of them.

In addition, some parts were a bit odd — Grant is a loner bachelor but loves children (hates them in the movie, a better choice); Grant and the kids drift on the river with nothing much happening and tend to get back way too safely; the kids have Wesley-Crusher-syndrome and are able to get the computers working again; Hammond is almost a buffoon more than a visionary; and the ending is more about strange relations with Costa Rica, and a “final solution” than getting away from the raptors. Overall, I saw lots of edits that were done to the story from the book in order to put it on screen, and most of what they cut were good edits. I didn’t feel like the book was so much “more” than the movie, perhaps even a bit less.

The Bottom Line

Great book but some of the movie edits made the story better

Heads You Win by Jeffrey Archer (2018) – BR00211 (2022) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
October 23 2022

Plot or Premise

The year is 1968, the location is Russia. Alexander’s father defies the state and the KGB kill him. He and his mother must escape, and they have to choose between a ship going to the UK or one going to America.

What I Liked

The plot uses the same plot structure as Sliding Doors, the movie with Gwyneth Paltrow (this is sometimes called the “A/B” plot device). If you know the movie, you know there is always a scene at the start where the main character has to make a choice (A or B). In Sliding Doors, Gwyneth tries to board a subway — and the story divides into two parallel tales, one based on whether she makes the train and one where she doesn’t. In a recent TV show, Ordinary Joe, there were three storylines.

For this book, a coin toss is used to decide Alex and his mother’s fate. The stories are told in parallel, bopping back and forth between them over time. In one timeline, Alexander becomes “Alex” in New York, a street trader and military guy vs. “Sasha” in London who is the academic. Both get involved in bigger issues, etc.

What I Didn’t Like

A recurring problem with the fast pace of Archer’s books is that it often reads almost like a fairy-tale life — event A springboards him into event B which springboards him into events C, D, E, F, and then next thing you know, he’s deputy only to God himself. It does read unrealistically at times, as every character goes on to something big in politics (like President or PM, etc.). In addition, the twist at the end as they wrap stuff up leaves one of the storylines very disappointing, all things being equal.

The Bottom Line

Great story, cute twist ending, but one storyline doesn’t pay off.