Book #135 of 2020: Star Wars: Queen’s Peril by E. K. Johnston This Star Wars novel has a few neat moments — like handmaiden Sabé’s brief female love interest — but is overall far too disjointed to be effective. It’s a prelude to the first prequel movie followed by a retelling of that film’s events …
Continue reading “Book Review: Star Wars: Queen’s Peril by E. K. Johnston”
Book #134 of 2020: Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller I’m not a big fan of this style of popular nonfiction that blends a history lesson with the writer’s personal journey to learn it, but even considered against others from that genre, this …
Movie #7 of 2020: Coco (2017) This Pixar feature has pretty much everything I’m looking for in an animated film: a lushly-rendered imaginative world, a heartfelt story with endearing characters and unexpected plot developments, plus even some laughs and a memorable song or two. I love how strongly the movie draws on traditional Mexican culture …
Book #133 of 2020: Bounce by Megan Shull This middle-grade body-swap / time loop novel really doesn’t work for me, unfortunately. I don’t necessarily need to know the mechanism behind why our tween heroine keeps waking back up on Christmas morning as a different girl — it can be a Yuletide miracle, or even just …
TV #22 of 2020: Star Trek: The Next Generation, season 5 Another reasonably solid season of late-twentieth-century science-fiction, delivering a handful of great episodes like “Conundrum,” “Cause and Effect,” “The Next Phase, and “The Inner Light” along with the all-time classic “Darmok” (which I’d first heard about in college linguistics classes over a decade ago). …
Continue reading “TV Review: Star Trek: The Next Generation, season 5”
Book #132 of 2020: A Ceiling Made of Eggshells by Gail Carson Levine I expected to enjoy this historical fiction novel more than I did, both for its focus on a family of 15th-century Spanish Jews and on the strength of other titles I’ve loved from author Gail Carson Levine over the years. Unfortunately, the …
Continue reading “Book Review: A Ceiling Made of Eggshells by Gail Carson Levine”
Book #131 of 2020: The Blood of Emmett Till by Timothy B. Tyson An informative account of the famous 1950s lynching case, including a rare interview with the white woman who accused the black fourteen-year-old of whistling at her and new details from a recovered courtroom transcript of the subsequent trial of his murderers. The …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Blood of Emmett Till by Timothy B. Tyson”
TV #21 of 2020: Shameless, season 4 Well, it took a while to get here, but Shameless has finally grown into the sort of show I always wanted and sensed it could be. There are still a few of the characteristic over-the-top developments this season, but for the most part those more outrageous elements are …
Book #130 of 2020: Click Here to Start by Denis Markell I like how this middle-grade adventure novel manages to educate readers about America’s Japanese internment camps while maintaining its lightweight tone, but the characters make a few too many lucky guesses that happen to pan out, especially for a treasure hunt that’s supposed to …
Continue reading “Book Review: Click Here to Start by Denis Markell”
TV #20 of 2020: The Good Wife, season 2 This legal drama’s sophomore outing is even more fun and confident than its initial run, deftly mixing interesting weekly court cases with some enjoyable political intrigue (both in law firm maneuvering and the actual district attorney’s race). We do spend a little too much time on …
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more