Review: I Have No Secrets by Penny Joelson

Author: Penny Joelson
Genre:  YA Contemporary thriller
Pages: 323
Source: College library
Rating: ★★★★☆

I Have No Secrets is the story of Jemma, a fourteen-year-old girl with cerebral palsy so severe she can't move voluntarily at all and thus can't communicate. She thinks fine and is intelligent, but is completely locked in and can't communicate her wishes in any way, not even through eye movements or blinking. Because Jemma can't communicate with the world, people tell her their secrets. One day, a family friend (Dan) tells her he's the name who murdered the neighbour. She desperately wants to tell someone - especially because Dan is dating Jemma's beloved carer, Sarah, and has repeatedly threatened to put Jemma out of her misery. But what can she do?

_______________________________________________

Jemma

This book is really all about representation, and it was so interesting. Jemma lives with her longterm foster parents, her foster brother Finn, who's autistic and around ten years old, and her foster sister Olivia, who's a similar age to Finn and has very troubled behaviour and has been in five foster homes before this one. So clearly her parents are up for a challenge. 

It was so eye-opening to think about what life is like for Jemma, and I really appreciated that the book was in first-person and let me into her head so I could get that perspective (which I hope is accurate). It was so hard to get my head around the idea of just not being able to communicate at all - I kept thinking 'ok but she can do this thing right?' but no. So for example, she loves her longtime carer Sarah, but Sarah has no way at all of knowing that, of knowing that Jemma thinks anything about her at all. Her emotions don't even show on her face. 

When Jemma was ten, she was able to communicate by blinking her eyes, but then she got an eye infection and stopped being able to control them voluntarily. She said she was sort of glad; it was stressful and tiring trying to respond to people's questions by blinking, and they'd keep repeating the question or assume she didn't understand. But now that she's been told about the murder, she has something she really wants to say.

It's also frustrating in other ways; Finn, her autistic little brother, hides in a cupboard when he gets upset and her parents freak out thinking he's wandered off and been killed on the road, calling the police, etc. - when the whole time he's in a cupboard and she can see him with the way her wheelchair is facing, but she can't tell anyone that she sees him because she can't communicate. She manages to make a sort of bleurgh noise with loads of effort, but then her parents just think 'oh look now Jemma's upset too because Finn is lost'. It applies to smaller things too - she wasn't given ketchup for years because once while she was able to blink she said 'no' to some. Her parents always have to make decisions for her even though she has her own preferences; they just have to guess what she would want. It's weird seeing a character with literally zero agency (at least for part of the book).

At one point she has a temporary new carer who comes well-reviewed - but then comes and reads Jemma The Little Mermaid and then puts on The Wheels on the Bus for her. It's horrendous for her, a fourteen-year-old, and the carer is totally oblivious, until Olivia thankfully comes in and laughs and says something like 'you're enjoying it, but is SHE?'. The carer just assumed she should treat Jemma like a toddler even though she's 14, because she's disabled.

Reading from Jemma's perspective really made me think about the importance of being able to communicate, and about how much more important it is to be able to communicate in some way than it is how that communication is done. A lot of parents get very upset if their child doesn't speak; but this really drove home that it is so much worse to not be able to communicate at all, and if someone communicates through AAC or writing, we should respect that and not insist they communicate just like we're used to.

It was also really strange to think about how helpless Jemma is. Even if she learned how to communicate in some way, she would still be completely, 100% paralyzed. It's so strange to think that there's just no way for her to protect herself. At a couple of points she feels someone behind her wheelchair and just has to wait there terrified to see whether it's something innocent or someone there to kill her - she can't even look around to check, and she certainly can't defend herself. It's weird thinking how dependent her existence is on a civilized society and on well-off, patient parents. 

Re: the title - the idea is that Jemma has no secrets because she can't do anything on her own. She can't have snuck out, she can't have showered on her own, she can't have done anything without someone knowing about it. Her only secrets are other people's; the things they tell her because they think their secrets must be safe with her because she can never tell. 

The book is written in Jemma's voice, and has a noticeable lack of commas and complex sentences, which I guess makes sense as people didn't really bother to give her much of an education.

_________________________________________________________________________

Family Dynamics

I really liked this part. The plot has a strange structure - while the overarching goal is to solve the murder and to somehow communicate that Dan did it, there's a lot of time where nothing happens and we just see family scenes through Jemma's eyes. 

1) Finn. I loved Finn; I think it's the first time I've seen autistic representation in a novel, and it warmed my heart so much and is still doing so now. He was a bit of a stereotype but he was adorable nonetheless, and I guess stereotypes exist for a reason. He's nonverbal, constantly lines things up, rocks and/or hides curled up in cupboards when upset or scared, and flapped his arms, among other things. His family got him a box of matchsticks for his birthday, which was so adorable because it was exactly what he wanted - more things to line up. His foster parents were so kind, and Jemma kept saying 'Dad gets Finn.' which was just lovely. It made me so happy when it described an autistic trait, like the arm flapping he was doing when he went to the park; I find that sort of thing so cute.

[I didn't really like how Jemma thought about him sometimes - she kept saying she didn't think he understood what was going on around him, but how would she know that? He could just be like her and be unable (or unwilling) to communicate his understanding. I got a bit of a 'hold out hope for Jemma because her condition is physical so her mind is intact, but not for Finn because his condition is neurological' vibe from that, which wasn't great, but I could be reading it wrong, and Jemma does also say she feels a kinship with him.]

2) Olivia. Olivia is a new addition of noise into a house that previously held two non-verbal children, and she is very noisy. She constantly has tantrums and yells, and clearly has behavioural issues and gets in trouble in school for being violent and angry after people tease her for being in care. There are some really poignant moments; she doesn't understand why her foster parents are asking what she wants for her birthday because that's months away and she doesn't think she'll still be there then. She's never had a stable home. Unfortunately, that makes her do desperate things that, in her child logic, she thinks will help her stay. She's clearly so traumatised and it's such a sad situation when you have to weigh up the interests of a traumatised child who's become violent as a result against the safety of the people around them. As someone who grew up in an abusive home, I have seen the way abuse and trauma can cause children to become violent themselves, and the range of different reactions kids have to trauma. [Technically we don't know why Olivia is in care in the first place, so it might not be what I'm presuming it is.]

3) The foster parents (Mum and Dad) are very sweet and really impressive for holding it all together, although we do only see Jemma's perspective so they may not be doing so when out of earshot. But either way they are good to their kids and work hard to help them out and accept them.

4) Jemma's twin sister Josie. This is a bit of a spoiler but I don't think it should affect your enjoyment of the book. Jemma turns out to have a twin sister Josie, and they were adopted separately when it became clear how disabled Jemma was. They have a reunion but it's certainly not a fairytale one, and it's hard for Josie to deal with Jemma - how similar they look but how disabled she is. It's not pleasant, but it is quite nice to see that it's not sugarcoated. That's a big strength of this book; things aren't super sugarcoated, but they also aren't all doom and gloom either. Jemma explicitly thinks about how she is happy to be alive, but isn't made out to be a 'saintly cripple' either. 

_________________________________________________________________________

In summary: An OK plot, but the real star of the show is the disability and trauma representation here - cerebral palsy, autism, and foster care. I consider myself a bit of a disability advocate and it still made me think; when I got off the train after finishing the book [which I read the last 220 pages of in a day of barely stopping], I passed a man in a wheelchair who was making the blegugehreureru sort of nosies Jemma makes when she's trying really hard to express something, and I realised that he might be trying to express something specific rather than sort of just moaning as I'd assumed before. I still didn't know what to do or if he wanted help, but I think it's a step towards understanding.

Such a unique book!

Review: Implanted by Lauren Teffeau

Author: Lauren Teffeau
Genre: Futuristic YA
Pages: 400
Source: Netgalley eARC (Advanced Readers Copy)
Rating: ★★★★☆

Implanted is YA cyberpunk with a very interesting premise. Emery lives in a dome city called New Worth, built on the remains of Fort Worth after climate change made the outside world uninhabitable. The city is built hierarchically, with three vertically-stacked districts: the Terrestrial District, the Understory, and the Canopy. The rich and powerful live in the Canopy and get to see the light; the poor, in the Terrestrial District, live in perpetual twilight. Nearly everyone has an implant, or computer in their head, that lets them communicate with others silently, get directions, find out how near people are, etc. 

The really interesting thing, though, is the idea of hemocryption. Emery is kidnapped and made work as a courier transporting top-secret information through the city in her blood, encoded in her blood cells. She was chosen because she's one of the rare few who can withstand hemocryption without their body rejecting the information-loaded cells. Hemocryption introduces some very original mechanics to the story, like how Aventine (the courier company) has the encoded cells set to release a toxin after a certain amount of time that builds up in the courier's blood until it induces the 'curdle', incapacitating them if they don't deliver the information (i.e. complete the drop) as promised, and so the couriers need to get their blood filtered and deliver the data as soon as possible ('scrubbing'). 

Art!

I drew some stuff from Implanted because the more I wrote of this review the more attached I grew to the book. At the top is the domed city where the book is set, and at the bottom are the main characters, Emery, Rik, Brita, Tahir and Kat.

What I Liked

1. The idea of hemocryption - what an interesting mechanic! And it was cool how it introduced physical constraints to a world where transferring information would normally just be done digitally, which would be pretty boring to read about. People who really want to keep their secrets safe go for hemocryption so the information can't be hacked while it travels digitally.

2. The wholesome relationships between characters - while this book is a thriller, it still has loads of really wholesome relationships that made me feel all warm and fuzzy. Here are some cute Emery and Rik quotes:

'My world narrows, until there's only room for me and Rik and each step we take. >>Tell me what it's like outside.>> In case I don't get another chance to ask. In case I don't get fully scrubbed in time.' 

'>> Haven't thrown up yet.>> 

<<That's my girl.<<' 

Her relationships with her handler and her friend Brita are super adorable as well. I guess I'm used to seeing everyone be completely treacherous in thrillers, so it was really nice to see this - that even when the world is dangerous, some people can stick by your side.

3(2b?). The romance is lovely. I don't usually care for romance in books, but this was so not insta-love. It was getting to know each other over a long time, growing to trust each other, trouble, hurting each other (but for important reasons, not just being angsty) and proving that they could depend on each other. I don't want to say too much because spoilers, but it was such a wholesome, gradual, compelling friendship-blossoming-into-romance and so I loved reading about it rather than mildly resenting it like I do with a lot of book romances. Also, it ran parallel to the plot rather than taking it over, which was good. 

Oh, and no love triangle.

[Seriously, the relationships are so good!]

4. Representation! There were at least two gay couples very casually mentioned (like, 'her wife' or something) and it was cute. Also, Rik is a scientist like me! There was also what seemed like a lot of racial diversity going by the Hispanic-sounding surnames but I imagine that's quite common in Texas. 

5. I was impressed by the approach Teffeau took when showing the technology. In a book whose first draft I wrote years ago, I had some similar things (for example, a main character was training to be a 'data curator', and so is Emery, which is probably because like me the author figured that'd be one of the main jobs remaining in an advanced technological society, and people communicate using implants except for some holdouts) so I felt a little scooped, but I have to give it to her - she did figure out how to make it work, how to make the technology powerful yet restrictive enough that it didn't swamp the plot. 

For example, you could only use your implant to synch chat with people who accepted your request, and if you wanted to be really really close to someone you could 'calibrate' with them, which seems to let people feel things through you and feel your emotions. Like having your partner in your head at all times to comfort you - way more intimacy than we can get now. 

6. The action was really exciting and entertaining. One of the features is a bunch of protests as unrest spreads through the city, and just reading about the chaos and commotion was a lot of fun. It'd make a good movie I think, especially with the structure of the city.

'Rik pales at the agitated crowds, and Charon and Denita exchange a panicked look. But for the first time today, I relax. As a courier, navigating the inevitable New Worth crowds is my bread and butter. 

Time to go to work.'

7. Emery's backstory was great and I loved how much agency she took. And the role her handler later played in helping her deal with it [can't say much more because of spoilers!]. 

"What good's the word of a Canopy brat?"

I try not to react to the dislike radiating off her frame. "I lived down here until I was eighteen." 

"Bet you couldn't wait to escape."

"No, I couldn't. The only things we have to sustain ourselves are the implants and thoughts of Emergence. Don't judge me for taking one of the few avenues available to me, and I won't judge you for refusing it."' 

8. Some cool writing:

The writing style is an odd mix between utilitarian spec-fic style and the pretty prose of literary fiction, which felt strange at times, but mostly worked and gave us the story without too much interference but with some nice sentences like this one.

''Anticipation twines through me.'

What I Didn't Like

1. For a thriller, the plot was a little unclear. We're pulled through the book by our concern for Emery's safety and her friends mainly, but there are definitely other, larger things unfolding throughout society and intertwined with her story. While those things were interesting to read about (class struggles mainly), the connection between them didn't seem particularly tight and so I wasn't really clear about what they wanted or what would count as 'success' on the large scale. Similarly, there was a hint of government corruption, but it never really became clear how much there was. 

I did feel quite nostalgic while reading it - it's the exact sort of genre I was into a few years ago, and it's a really good example of that genre. But I think now I would prefer a more expansive view of what happens to the world rather than just to the character, so I'd have preferred a bit more information on what was actually going on in the rest of the world.

2. The ending wrapped up very, very quickly and tidily. I'm very glad it's not a series (I love a good standalone), but I feel like Teffeau could have written a bit more to explain what happened and not have it end so suddenly.

3. I didn't get quite as into it as I have into my favourite books ever, like Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn and Way of Kings - so, for example, with Sanderson, I was completely crushed and couldn't read on for a while after a main character died, but with this I think I'd be OK - still sad, but able to keep things in proportion. Which is perhaps better(!)

That said, the book still got to me to an extreme degree - one night after reading it I woke up from a nightmare in which I'd been in the world of Implanted and had a huge amount of trouble convincing myself it wasn't real and I was just in my house in the present day. So it can definitely sneak into your dreams!

Overall

This was a really fun read. There were definitely some things that left me a little confused, but the reading experience in general was pure fun and the characters were lovely and well-rounded. The more I think about the characters the more I love them, actually. I recommend it if you're into science fiction or futuristic YA. 

In short: Entertaining cyberpunk with new ideas and heartwarming character relationships. 4 stars.

★★★★☆

This book was provided to me for free in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to Netgalley for the eARC, and to Angry Robot Books for having me auto-approved to download and review your stuff!

Review: We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

It actually pulls off a photo cover. (Source: Goodreads)

★★★☆☆


Author: E. Lockhart
Genre: Literary Fiction/YA Contemporary (? - it's a weird book)
Pages: 225 (paperback)
Source: Local library












We Were Liars is a strange book. It's very ~literary~, i.e. nothing happens for a very long time and you don't relate to the characters, but the writing is beautiful - sometimes pretentiously so. The narrator is unreliable and describes emotions like this, which is actually kinda cool: 

'Then he pulled out a handgun and shot me in the chest. I was standing on the lawn and I fell. The bullet hole opened wide and my heart rolled out of my rib cage and down into a flower bed. Blood gushed rhythmically from my open wound,
then from my eyes,
my ears,
my mouth.It tasted like salt and failure. The bright red shame of being unloved soaked the grass in front of our house, the bricks of the path, the steps of the porch. My heart spasmed among the peonies like a trout.'

'Silence is a protective coating over pain.' This was her family's approach to dealing with problems, i.e. to just not talk about it; she loves Gat, her cousin's Indian friend, because he believes wounds should be looked after and talked about.

While the writing was for the most part very nice, it did annoy me how the narrator kept describing people like 'She is sugar, curiosity and rain' and 'He was contemplation and enthusiasm, ambition and strong coffee'. What does that even mean? 

At the moment I'm looking through Goodreads Quotes to find excerpts (don't go there if you don't want spoilers) and oh boy there are definitely things I did not get the meaning of when I read them before knowing the twist. Like 'Be normal, now. Right now. Because you are. Because you can be.' and 'This island is ours. Here, in some way, we are young forever.' and 'Just think before you complain about stuff other people would love to have.' 

I agree with Publishers Weekly's comment: 'it will prompt some to return immediately to page one to figure out how they missed it.'

I can't say much because really the whole point of this book is in the twist ending, so I'll just say that it's about a girl from a very rich and privately troubled family struggling over the inheritance returning to their private island to try and figure out, despite her amnesia, what really happened two summers ago. 

It can be a bit of a chore to read for the first, well, 70% of it, but if you're going to put in the effort to start it, make sure you get to the end because that's when all the payoff is. It ramps up a lot towards the end.

I give it 3/5 stars; 3 stars for the beautiful writing, the twist and the fact that it did manage to make me cry in the end even though I didn't think I was particularly attached to the characters, and 2 knocked off because it's definitely a trudge for the first part and doesn't have much in the way of plot or character development until you realise she has amnesia about that summer and then it gets a bit suspenseful as you wonder what actually happened.

Review: Mistborn Book 1: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson

I've just finished Mistborn, which I read as a break before the third book in another Brandon Sanderson series, The Stormlight Archives. In short, his books are among my favourites ever. Pretty good for a book genre I thought I didn't like!

Pretttyyy cover

*I have yet to review either of the Stormlight Archives books I've read because they're so good and so long

Mistborn takes place in the 'Final Empire', a land where ash constantly falls from the sky and coats the barren landscapes, and the night is filled with mysterious mists and mistwraiths. There's the supreme Lord Ruler, a God who's been in control for a thousand years; the nobles, who live decadent lives in Keeps; and the skaa, a slave labourer class whose lives are seen as worthless. Life is extremely cruel for the skaa - they work on plantations and in factories for nobles, are killed frequently for the slightest transgression, and noblemen often take young female skaa they own (or rent from the Lord Ruler) to have sex with them, and kill the girls afterwards so they can't bear half-breed children. Only people who've lost two or more limbs are 'allowed' to beg, and the police will kick them every so often to make sure they really are helpless. 

There have been many attempted revolutions over the last thousand years of the Lord Ruler's empire, but they've barely ever even got off the ground. But now some Allomancers are on the case. 


Worldbuilding: 

There isn't a huge amount of physical worldbuilding, although we do learn that there are no flowers in this empire, and plants are all brown rather than green. The cultural worldbuilding is interesting and largely revolves around the power relationships between the skaa, the nobles and the Lord Ruler.

The magic system is the real star of the show, and is called Allomancy. Allomancy is magic of metals; Allomancers can swallow certain metals and 'burn' them for particular results - one each for strengthening senses, calming others' emotions, strengthening your physical abilities, rousing others' emotions, pulling and pushing metals from a distance, and more. The pulling and pushing of metals is really cool and I suspect would look awesome visually; Allomancers use it to basically fly around and it's cool because it's physicsy, talking about how it has to be just action and reaction, not whatever random direction you want to fly. For example, an Allomancer will drop a coin onto the ground and push against it, sending themself flying into the air because they're effectively pushing against the ground - but if the coin is in the air instead, that push will instead accelerate the coin away from the person because the person is heavier than the coin. Super cool how systematic it is, and it makes fight scenes super cool. There's also another type of magic in the book but I'll keep hush on that one. 

In what I've come to see as a Sanderson trademark, our introduction to Allomancy was mainly through the process of Vin learning how to do it, similarly to how we learned about the magic in The Stormlight Archives through [spoiler] discovering their powers and gradually learning more. I preferred how we learned more about the magic in this book, how it was more systematic. 

Characters:

I looooove themmmm. So much. I got ridiculously, painfully attached to the characters in this book - at one point about halfway through they were in trouble and I had to go for lunch, and I had to get my boyfriend to promise me the characters got through it okay to get over my anxiety about it and eat. And then near the end something really really sad happened and made me not really want to finish the book :( 

Enough about how sad their suffering made me - the characters were awesome, especially the main characters (the side characters could be a bit one-dimensional but were still pretty fun to see). Kelsier is a super charismatic though cocky team leader and is honestly a joy to be around. So daring, but impulsive. An archetype really, but still, I loved him. Vin is probably the main viewpoint character although they're joint main characters; she starts out as a street urchin, half-breed child of a prostitute and a noble, nearly killed by her mother and beaten by her brother, travelling with thieving crews and struggling for survival with absolutely no one to trust. I definitely related to her beginnings and so it was so so sweet seeing her get to be part of a crew. Kelsier creates a crew with the goal of taking down the Final Empire, and despite how dangerous the work is, it was wonderful seeing her going from a backstabbing petty thieving crew, to this one where people actually trusted each other. Lovely spots of wholesomeness between the fights.

Plot: 

A lot happens, and the first book has an awfully lofty goal. They want to overthrow this supreme emperor, who's seen as a literal god, and free the skaa. It's definitely the sort of thing you'd think would take a whole trilogy but nope, that's the goal of just the first book. At the same time, it's kinda weird because they say near the start that the plan is to overthrow the Final Empire a year from now so you're sort of waiting for that one thing to happen the whole time. But yeah, it does feel a bit rushed and like some things aren't given the time they deserved or are left a bit confusing, especially the ending.

Overall:

I absolutely loved it, though watch out if you get very invested in characters because the aforementioned incident is crushing. Nevertheless, a brilliant book with a fascinating magic system and characters I loved spending time with. There's so much more to the book that I haven't mentioned, since it has various subplots and lots of surprises (from Kelsier: 'There's always another secret'), but I think you'll just have to read it for yourself.

Source: I got my copy from the college library; you can also buy it, and if you're doing that I recommend Book Depository for free worldwide shipping.

Holiday to Waterford

Leon and I were planning to have a few days holiday in Dad's caravan. When that offer fell through, we booked a spontaneous 2-day holiday down in Waterford in the Woodlands Hotel & Leisure Centre. 

(All photos taken by Leon.)

Sunday

Up earlyish for the 9.50 DART to Connolly, walk to BusAras, get the 11.30 bus to Waterford, which takes 2 hours. I read about 200 pages of Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson and got very into it. Man I love Brandon Sanderson's books. 

We arrived in Waterford at 2 pm and go shopping for suncream and a swimsuit for me, since the main reason we wanted a hotel is to go swimming and use the jacuzzi (we realised later that when we feel like a holiday we should go to a local swimming pool to try get that out of our system first as it turns out hotels don't have a monopoly on swimming pools!). It was super hot and sunny - it literally felt like getting out of the plane in Germany. 

We got the 5 pm regional bus to the hotel after a bit of stress trying to figure out where the bus stopped out of the various unmarked bus stops. The buses were funny - on one of the short journeys the bus driver didn't charge at all, while another one was 2 euro. 

Got to the hotel, checked in, dropped off our stuff and ordered a takeaway because we couldn't cook in the hotel. The takeaway was apparently a traditional chipper but unfortunately was terrible; the chips had no salt in them and the garlic bread was neither garlicy nor the kind of bread we were expecting. It was sort of like unflavoured naan bread? Hopefully that's not just what they count as garlic bread in Waterford because if so they are missing out. 

Finally we headed down to the pool and enjoyed that and the jacuzzi for about an hour. It was lovely; it had been too long since we'd last been swimming, and we'd missed it. I love the feeling of weightlessness in the water. The deep end was significantly too deep for me to stand up in, but eventually I figured out that if I relaxed I could just float in a standing position and still have my head above water, which was cool. I love floating in general. Swimming is cool too, especially backwards.

Monday

Monday was the day we had intended to go out and see Waterford City but alas we ended up spending most of the day in our hotel room. Thankfully, we're both people who like that sort of style, of getting to relax on holiday. We had a nice pastry-based breakfast with stuff from the nearby Lidl, then I read Mistborn a bunch, until finally we went out for lunch to a nice cafe called Oskars where I got soup, bread and chips and Leon got nachos. It was a nice time but man eating out on holiday is so expensive! 

I spent a lot of the lunch being really anxious about Mistborn because the characters were in a major pickle and I get really really empathetic towards characters, until I got Leon to slightly spol it for me so I didn't have to be as worried about the characters anymore. 

Leon took a bunch of cute photos so here are some:

We then went down to the pool and swam and again it was great. We're now thinking of going to Trinity's pool to swim twice a week after work. Something I love about swimming is that it kinda requires concentration; a major reason I never exercise is that I get really bored with nothing occupying my mind, but with swimming you have to concentrate or you could, y'know, drown. Or get water unpleasantly in your mouth and nose. So hopefully that can be a remedy for my sedentary lifestyle.

We had another takeaway for dinner (ironic after talking about living healthy but I don't know what else to do on holiday but eat out or order in), this one pizza from Apache. Thankfully that one was solid.

Tuesday

Tuesday was our leaving day, but since we didn't go anywhere Monday, we decided to also do some tourism. We got the bus in to the city (apparently Waterford is indeed a city) and bought passes to the Medieval Museum and the Bishop's palace. 

The Medieval Museum was pricey but pretty cool. We first explored the wine cellar (and with all the steps and rickety footing I thought about how bad it must be to be unable to walk trying to get around inside):

We then got the lift up and watched a show about Waterford's medieval history, which was mostly about their long war with New Ross and their efforts to prove to the British king how loyal they had been to him through history so that they'd get better trade rights. They had a Great Charter Roll made to flatter the king and also secure exclusive trading rights in Waterford Harbour, and Waterford was known as the city that never betrayed the Crown (there was a snappier name that I've forgotten). 

It was a bit cringe how they constantly prostrated themselves before the British crown - quite the embarrassment to the nationalist movement, though I'm not sure how strong that was in the Middle Ages. 

Does he really need a sword on his belt too?

That floor had a lot of really cool artefacts, mostly focusing on Waterford's relationship to the Crown but with some cool models of the city that Leon loved. Also a place with crayons where you could do rubbings, so I did a quick one of those.

We then went down to the first floor, which focused on religion in medieval Waterford, and watched a show about the golden vestments and how they were protected through the years as power changed hands between Protestants and Catholics. The vestments were super important because they're embroidered with gold and overall very fancy. We also saw a lot of not-very-good statues but I suppose you can't be too harsh on people working in the Middle Ages. 

Overall, the museum was very good. As an aside -- the giftshop had cards for gay couples!

We then went to the Bishop's palace which unfortunately was a let down; for some reason I'd been expecting a church, but it was really just a house with some nice furniture and the first Waterford crystal item (a decanter). Might have been better if we'd done the audio tour though, and they did have this very cool sculpture made entirely of shells, that we sadly couldn't get a great picture of.

By this point we were hungry and went looking for food but couldn't find much walking down a main street that would serve a decent lunch but wasn't super expensive. Eventually we went to the Book Centre, a lovely big bookshop I'd seen recommended online, and ate there before spending an hour browsing through the books. I got very excited when I saw Cait Drews' book A Thousand Perfect Notes on the shelf face-out, and even as a Book of the Month! I know her!

 I also bought Leon the Brandon Sanderson book Steelheart. The book shop was awesome - both of us really enjoyed it.

After that, it was into the bus for the 4 hour journey home. The journey and evening weren't great because I came down with something very unpleasant and resembling heat exhaustion, but it was gone by morning thankfully. Damn Waterford heat. 

It was a good holiday - plenty of time to relax with Leon but also a nice bit of tourism. Big advantage of this over family holidays - get to decide what to do together as equals, and if you want to rest together you can do just that :) 

Review: Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett

3 stars.

This is the 3rd book in the Discworld series. I've read a few others that I enjoyed, including Going Postal and Mort, but unfortunately this one was pretty underwhelming.

It centres on Eskarina, or Esk, an 8-year-old girl, and Granny Weatherwax, the village witch. A dying wizard wants to pass on his powerful wizard's staff before he dies, so he comes to the village of Bad Ass to give it to the 8th son of an 8th son - only that son turns out to be a daughter, Esk, and now suddenly there's a female wizard. Granny tries to bring her up as a witch but the wizardness keeps coming through and causing havoc, and eventually they decide they need to take her to Unseen University, to which women are not allowed to be admitted. So now there's a witch-wizard hybrid and she's determined to get in.

Good: 

It's a nice concept - why are witches always shown as women and wizards always shown as men? Why can't that change?

And as usual, Terry Pratchett is very funny moment-to-moment and very unafraid of breaking the fourth wall (at one point he says something like the kind of lighting that would make Steven Spielberg reach for his copyright lawyers). 

Other funny bits (a very non-exhaustive list; he has some kind of funny or self-aware bit basically every few lines):

• Someone asks Esk 'Why are you here?' and she says something like 'I don't know, Granny won't tell me. Something to do with men and women I think.'
• 'It must be quite interesting, reading books,' said Esk. 'Sort of. Can't you read, Esk?' The astonishment in his voice stung her. 'I expect so,' she said defiantly. 'I've never tried.'
• 'She was opposed to books on strict moral grounds, since she had heard that many of them were written by dead people and therefore it stood to reason reading them would be as bad as necromancy.'
• 'The lodgings were on the top floor next to the well-guarded premises of a respectable dealer in stolen property because, as Granny had heard, good fences make good neighbours.'

And many, many more funn(ier) bits besides. It's also very amenable to reading aloud because it's largely dialogue.

Granny is a funny character; when she's training Esk to be a witch, she likes to teach her 'practical magic', so she learns about herbs but also about washing the dishes. And the idea of 'Borrowing', that witches can 'borrow' the mind of animals so for example Granny will read through an owl's eyes when it's dark, or borrow the mind of a different bird to travel far, was cool. It was interesting to read about the principles of witching, about how you don't try to manhandle the animals etc but you just want to gently sway their wills, and that's also how you convince people. Esk had issues with that because she naturally had powerful magic and didn't always have the patience to do it patiently in the witching way.

Bad: 

Unfortunately, the book was very underwhelming because there doesn't seem to be any overarching plot, or stakes, or tension. Towards the end of the book she wants to go to Unseen University and tries to convince them to let her in and they don't. Then something weird happens with shadows from another universe and she has to go save a wizard and so they make her one - but the rules aren't made clear at all and so I've no idea what counts as success, and things are very hand-wavey. Maybe I've just been spoiled by Brandon Sanderson's 'hard magic' but things just felt awfully wishy-washy and there was no structure to the story so I wasn't very attached to it or gripped by it, and I didn't even feel that close to the characters, possibly because of the two main characters one is an 8-year-old girl and the other is an old witch. I hear other Discworld books are better though, and apparently Pratchett was just finding his feet. 

Visual Disorders I: Aphantasia

This post is inspired by a cool Twitter thread I saw about how our eyes trick us during the saccades that occur when we move our eyes from place to place e.g. when reading, which you can find here. It's called saccadic masking or chronostasis, and it's an interesting example of how what our eyes detect and what we actually experience visually are quite different. 

I then saw another thread (which I can't currently find) that mentioned akinetopsia (not being able to see movement) and simultanagnosia (only being able to see one thing at a time) and so here I am looking at unusual eye disorders that are down to the counterintuitive ways our brains process vision.

I'll be doing two posts on this: Part 1 is just about Aphantasia, which I have, and Part 2 will be about other interesting visual/cortical disorders.

Aphantasia

Aphantasia is the lack of a 'mind's eye' or the inability to voluntarily visualise. I have it, and it means I can't picture anything in my head, from a simple red triangle to someone's face.  I was interested to read that it's defined as inability to voluntarily visualise - that's mostly true for me as I can't voluntarily visualise, but I also rarely visualise even involuntarily i.e. in my dreams.

 It's incredibly understudied but that's starting to change. The revival in interest in it appears to have come from a man who went to his doctor saying he had lost his ability to visualise after a minor surgical procedure and then was profiled in the New York Times, leading a lot of people to say how could someone not visualise but also some people to say wait, I've never been able to do that! It's odd that scientists (apart from someone in the 1800s) never actually discovered congenital aphantasia until someone lost the ability.

It's a really fascinating subject because everyone assumes other people are just the same as them since it's such a private experience. I always thought counting sheep was just metaphorical and that you weren't supposed to actually picture them, or that when you were told to visualise during meditation (argh) it was also just a metaphor or something. It did make meditation very frustrating - we'd go on school retreats and they'd lead us down memory lane with 'Imagine you're walking up to a door. What colour is the door? You walk in and see photos on the wall. What's happening in the photos?' I guess people must have been actually seeing things in their heads while they narrated this but I was seeing absolutely nothing and having to just lie there and make up answers like 'OK I guess the door can be red' even though I couldn't actually see the door at all. 

For a great long explanation of this, I recommend this post by a man with aphantasia. 

There's a really interesting link to blindsight [ability of cortically blind people to respond to/locate objects they can't consciously see] there in my experience - I can't visualise (most of the time - I tend to get one involuntary image in my head right before I go to sleep some nights, and I occasionally dream in pictures) but I could still reasonably accurately tell you how many windows (etc.) were in X room of my house. It's sort of like a coordinate system in my head, where I could imagine walking into that room and having a sense for how far away or near the windows were to me in each position without ever actually seeing anything.

The way I 'see' things is interesting albeit difficult to explain. Say I'm trying to picture a graph of y = x^2, which is a parabola opening upwards centred on the y-axis. I can't see it in my head in any normal sense of the word 'see' - there is no colour, no form, no anything visual. However, I have recently enough picked up a skill with which I can imagine that I am a point on the line and so I can trace out the line in my head purely through imagining motion, but there'll be no visual image, just the sensation of movement. That doesn't scale well; I could draw out a triangle or a rectangle, but it will only exist in the place where I currently am in the motion so there's no actual trace left of it so there'll never be a full shape. I can sort of imagine moving as a different shape, so instead of being a point I could be a square and by moving that could create the sense of a cube. But there still won't be anything you'd actually associate with a picture, no boundaries/colour/lines. And that approach only really works with simple geometric shapes because I can't exactly imagine myself as a travelling point to picture someone's face; the whole face needs to exist at once, whereas the y = x^2 curve can just exist as an infinite series of points.

Scientists asked that guy who'd lost his ability to say which letters of the alphabet had low-hanging tails e.g. j, g, and were suprised to find out he could do it even though he couldn't visualise. I can do it too - I would run through the alphabet in my head (without seeing anything visually) and either do it just by knowing it because I've already classified them while learning to read, or imagine I'm a point moving along the letters. 

It feels like there's just no screen there. The information must be there because I can recognise people (usually - I'm not brilliant at it) without having to run through a checklist, but there's no 'screen' in my head for me to assemble that information visually. When I try to remember what someone close to me looks like, all I have is words I've specifically thought of while looking at them so 'brown hair' 'tall' and my emotional response to that. If I want to think 'is X person pretty?' I have to think back to the last time I saw them and remember what my response was then - I can't just picture them and judge how I feel now about how they look.

However, the screen must exist because I do get a flash of mental vision some nights before I go to sleep and because sometimes some things in my dreams are visual. 

Super interesting stuff and I hope they do more research on it soon. I feel like it should maybe be classed as a disability; it certainly made organic chemistry very difficult as that's all pictures and I can't remember pictures at all. I remember in primary school we had to look at a picture for X seconds and then had Y seconds to write down as many things as we could remember from the picture and maybe where they were; I think now people must have done that by snapshotting the picture in their heads and holding it in memory to look at it, but I had to just name the things and memorise the list of names, so 'socks, slide, tree, cat, blanket'. It's also very annoying that basically all the words we use for imagining (including that word itself) are based on vision, e.g. 'visualise the future', 'picture this'. I can still imagine, just in words, concepts and feelings (sometimes sounds) rather than images. 

Someone said recently 'but you must be able to visualise, you read all the time!' [this was after I brought it up and was in response to an English student who'd said they couldn't do it either], which was funny but also fascinating because clearly our reading experiences are very different. I definitely miss out on some parts of books because I basically just skim the descriptive bits since I can't visualise them. So I hate books that constantly visually describe the surroundings and will only read it in case there's information there that I might need, so if it describes a uniform in great detail and mentions they've a knife in one pocket, I'll only remember the knife because that might be relevant later. And I draw and paint (though not brilliantly), either by looking up and down at the thing I want to draw a lot, or if I'm drawing from memory (because I can't looking at it in my head) I either use a geometric shape or draw a little bit, see if that's recognisable as the shape I want to draw, and if so keep going in that way. 

It's definitely an interesting thing to find out about, and a great opportunity to think about how other people think. 

Review: June 2018

Hey all! Started some new things in June. 

LAIDLAW SCHOLARSHIP: The first Leadership Weekend for the Trinity Laidlaw Scholars took place near the start of June. We learned about mission, styles of leadership, public speaking, reflection, networking and more. Here's the post about the Leadership Weekend, and here's me, Luke and Mollie outside the Pav afterwards:



Also, the Laidlaw Scholars organised a couple of meetups and went to the Eat Yard and to the Science Gallery for the opening night of their LIFE ON THE EDGES exhibition, so that was cool. I also got to see Shane Bergin at Science Gallery which was great.



RESEARCH JOB: I've been working in Prof. Aoife McLysaght's lab in Trinity doing computational genetics (bioinformatics) research! It's super cool and they're great there. I've done two weeks so far.

EXAM RESULTS: Exam results were a big focus of this month (of my sleepless nights anyway!) and I got them on the 15th of June and am delighted to say I got 86% overall, a first in all 11 modules, a first in all 11 exams, and 100% in my Multivariable Calculus exam. Here's the results post. I had been sooo worried but I did it !!!

CODE: I've been doing a lot of R, mostly for my job but also practising using ggplot2 to make cool data visualisations so I was ready for the job when I started.

I'm proud of this one even though it's fairly simple because I did it from memory (except the color-coding bit which I had to check my previous code for the syntax of but y'know still progress) pic.twitter.com/i1qkBhbGAK

— Elle Loughran (@frizzyroselle) June 4, 2018

I mapped the populations of California's cities in R/ggplot2! Followed this tutorial for Texas https://t.co/EeND2VIAbq and then modified it for California :) pic.twitter.com/w9Om32P9nd

— Elle Loughran (@frizzyroselle) June 4, 2018

I also did the whole Python course on Rosalind in two days! I'm glad I chose Rosalind over Codecademy as it was quicker but more challenging and made sure I actually learned how to manipulate files (read in, write to, etc) rather than just playing within the sandbox like Codecademy does, so it suited me as someone who already knew how to code a bit. I had tried to learn Python on Codecademy before but it frustrated me because it forced me to go through all the exercises like 'what is a variable' and 'basic arithmetic' again when I already knew those from other languages.

Just finished the 6 @ProjectRosalind Python Village lessons & problems! From installing Python to doing arithmetic, working with strings, lists and dictionaries, doing loops & conditions and reading from and writing to files in two days :D

— Elle Loughran (@frizzyroselle) June 7, 2018

PAINTING: I've taken up painting! I went to the local art shop and got some watercolours because y'know what I'm an adult and I can do that. I was a bit eek about the price (18 euro) but I think it's quite good value because it has like 10 pans of watercolour paint, several tubes of paint, three watercolour pencils and a normal pencil, a rubber, a parer, some paper and a mixing palette.

I've been really enjoying it, it's super relaxing and aesthetically pleasing and I'm not even particularly good at art. I've been doing this style where I do a set of similar items around a theme and it's fun.

Characters from Stormlight Archives.

UKULELE: I picked up my ukulele from my family when I visited them and to my horror discovered a string had snapped off. This month I went up to Everest Music & Piano Shop in Bray and they were lovely - they gave me a new string for 2 euro and put it on for free ... and actually gave me the whole thing for free in the end as it happens but anyway they were lovely. 

I've been using my ol' trick of transposing the chords of songs until they're some variant of  C G Am F Em Dm and learning a bunch of songs including Hey There Delilah by the Plain White Ts, Let Her Go by Passenger, Photograph by Ed Sheeran and How Far I'll Go from Moana.



READING: In June I completed Words of Radiance (#2 in the Stormlight Archives series) by Brandon Sanderson (review not up yet because what a book, 5 stars), Lost in Math by Sabine Hossfelder (review/recap here), Junk DNA by Nessa Carey (review/recap here), Inferior by Angela D. Saini (review/recap here), and Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou (review/recap here). 

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HEATWAVE: Help. It shouldn't be in the high 20s in Ireland. Admittedly it's a lot cooler over here because we're by the sea and it's windy so I tend to actually be kinda cold during the day inside (because I'm wearing a light dress for the weather that's in it) but way too hot at night. Odd.

DATE: Leon and I went on a nice date to Mooch, which was lovely albeit too expensive.