REVIEW: The Glass Spare by Lauren DeStefano

Image from Goodreads

The Glass Spare bears all the hallmarks of its era (just past the midpoint of the 2010s YA fantasy): a vague fantastical world, a teen girl protagonist with a magical ability that jump starts the narrative, and a male love interest that becomes part of a generally flat love story. 

I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad book - these tropes wouldn’t be popular if they weren’t the perfect coat hanger for a multitude of tales. The thing is, tropes work when you do something interesting with them. For me, The Glass Spare almost reached that place, but sadly fell short. 

REVIEW: Can War Be Eliminated? by Christopher Coker

Image from Wiley

Can War Be Eliminated? is a slim volume - an essay bound up in book form, really - and that very much dictates the tack it takes to answer its provocative titular question. It is a solid overview of what war is from an evolutionary, cultural, sociological, technological, and political perspective. However, its scope is necessarily limited by its size, which in turn negatively impacts its depth in favour of breadth. 

Nothing radically new was presented and I often found the persuasiveness and cogency of the arguments to have been hindered by their briefness, and in some areas also by their lack of thorough interrogation. For example, I very much appreciated his deconstruction of the “warrior ideal” and the role it has played and continues to play in our personal and cultural construction of what war means to us. However, I found some of the logic used to interpret data on women in the armed forces to be unconvincing, even if the broader argument it fit into made sense. This lack of cogency is likely owed in large part to the broad brush strokes with which he paints most of his examples. Given that my answer to the titular question was “no” before picking up the book, I do wish that there had been deeper interrogation, but I recognise that the text is limited by its length.