Book #33 of 2021: The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia #7) What a depressing and offensive conclusion to a generally solid children’s fantasy heptalogy. Author C. S. Lewis has always had his share of mid-twentieth-century hangups, but they are seldom so blatantly awful as here, where traditional feminine interests like …
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Book #32 of 2021: The Orchard by David Hopen This novel’s all-Jewish cast helps disguise the familiarity of its tropes, but it’s ultimately a pretty conventional coming-of-age plot, one part Mean Girls (sheltered new kid falls in with the school’s popular crowd of bad influences) and one part The Secret History (scholarly discussion group chases …
Book #31 of 2021: Wishtree by Katherine Applegate This is a weird little middle-grade story narrated by a talking tree, detailing its efforts to find a friend for a local girl and encourage the rest of the neighborhood to stand up against the recent xenophobia targeting her family (probably Islamophobia in particular, although that’s not …
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TV #11 of 2021: Dawson’s Creek, season 1 I think I was too young when this show first aired to watch it then or hold any nostalgic attachment now, and I’m old enough at this point that I still don’t have an easy identification with the teenage protagonists. Both in the age of the cast …
Book #30 of 2021: When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo (The Singing Hills Cycle #2) Not quite as powerfully moving as the previous novella, but still well above much of the fantasy genre. In this story, returning protagonist Cleric Chih is waylaid on their travels by a pack of hungry tigresses, …
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Book #29 of 2021: The Courts of Chaos by Roger Zelazny (The Chronicles of Amber #5) These Amber sequels have never really lived up to the promise of their series debut, and since this fifth book brings the initial story arc to a close, I think it’s a good moment to cut my losses and …
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Book #28 of 2021: Unfinished Portrait by Mary Westmacott This pseudonymous Agatha Christie novel is reportedly quite autobiographical, but I’ve personally found it to be a fairly aimless bildungsroman, tracing its protagonist’s life from childhood to early marriage without much of an overarching plot. It’s also full of the writer’s less endearing quirks, like people …
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TV #10 of 2021: I Am Not Okay With This, season 1 Another 2020 Netflix original that was unfortunately cancelled after just one season due to COVID-19 impacts on studio production. As with Teenage Bounty Hunters, there are plenty of dangling threads here suggesting that the writers were instead expecting the show to be renewed, …
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Book #27 of 2021: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black A dark and violent YA tale, predicated on the idea that although a vampire’s first bite infects the victim with an all-consuming thirst for blood, they don’t turn fully undead until they finally give in and feed on another human in turn. There’s …
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TV #9 of 2021: Star Wars: The Clone Wars, season 6 Production on this penultimate batch of episodes was cut short by Disney’s 2012 acquisition of Lucasfilm, with the truncated season eventually being released straight to Netflix in 2014. So it wasn’t created to be an intentional ending for the series, and it doesn’t read …
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