Book #51 of 2020: Girls with Sharp Sticks by Suzanne Young (Girls with Sharp Sticks #1) Blown away by this series debut, which reads like a wild blend of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Stephen King’s The Institute, with shades of The Handmaid’s Tale and Westworld to boot. Its story of a finishing …
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Book #50 of 2020: Akata Warrior by Nnedi Okorafor (Akata Witch #2) This second novel in the Akata Witch duology has a messier and more episodic plot than its predecessor, but it also feels more like a fully-formed fantasy vision rather than just an #ownvoices West African take on Harry Potter. (Although as with that …
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Book #49 of 2020: Doctor Who: At Childhood’s End by Sophie Aldred with Steve Cole and Mike Tucker As the final companion when the ‘classic’ series of Doctor Who went off the air in 1989, the character of Ace McShane casts a long shadow over the franchise. Her nuanced characterization and complicated relationship with the …
Book #48 of 2020: Witch Week by Diana Wynne Jones (Chrestomanci #3) This has always been my favorite Chrestomanci book, even though it’s a bit of a spin-off, with the multiverse-hopping enchanter only showing up in the last third or so of the text (and not requiring any prior reader knowledge to understand and appreciate …
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Book #47 of 2020: White Kids: Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America by Margaret A. Hagerman There’s an unfortunate disconnect between this 2018 book’s title / framing and its actual content, which discusses author Margaret A. Hagerman’s ethnographic study of thirty affluent white families in one midwestern community from 2011 to 2012. …
Book #46 of 2020: Whiskey When We’re Dry by John Larison I don’t read (or watch) a lot of westerns, but I’ve mostly enjoyed this tale of an orphaned rancher who restyles herself as a man to strike off across the frontier in search of her last surviving kin and ultimately falls in love with …
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Book #45 of 2020: Race to the Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse A delightful middle-grade fantasy novel that incorporates elements of traditional Navajo folklore while avoiding the paint-by-numbers plot that such modernizations often entail. (I hesitate to call the work #ownvoices, since author Rebecca Roanhorse is not Navajo herself and she makes clear in an afterword …
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TV #3 of 2020: Doctor Who, season 12 I’m honestly still not sure how I feel about this season on balance. The Thirteenth Doctor’s debut year was designed to be maximally approachable for new viewers, and although that could sometimes feel a bit tame, I don’t think any of us expected its successor to bolt …
Book #44 of 2020: The Lost Book of Adana Moreau by Michael Zapata Ostensibly, this is a novel about a man whose late grandfather has a package come back as undeliverable after the funeral, and his efforts to track down its intended recipient, the son of the woman who wrote the unpublished manuscript inside. But …
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Book #43 of 2020: The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern This seems like one of those books that is guaranteed to frustrate a lot of readers, in that it obliquely hints at larger designs instead of ever giving us the full picture. The opening premise, after all, is less a novel than a collection of …
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