Movie #5 of 2020: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) This is the first Star Wars release in my lifetime that I didn’t see in theaters, partly due to new parent challenges and partly because of the mixed-to-negative reviews it seemed to be getting everywhere. Now that it’s out on Disney+ and I can …
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Book #97 of 2020: Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing by Maryla Szymiczkowa (Profesorowa Szczupaczyńska #1) The idea of a nineteenth-century Polish Miss Marple has potential, but I haven’t found the characters or plot in this series debut to be especially interesting. The amateur detective in particular seems motivated to look into the case largely out of …
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TV #12 of 2020: Shameless, season 1 I like most of this large Chicago family, and I especially enjoy the hardscrabble depiction of their poor financial straits, which is pretty rare for TV. The Gallaghers’ lives are precarious in any number of ways, and seeing them cleverly hustle both in and outside of the law …
Book #96 of 2020: My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix This 80s horror pastiche doesn’t win me over as early or as completely as author Grady Hendrix’s later effort The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires — set in the same town but otherwise unrelated — but it’s effective at balancing its various …
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Book #95 of 2020: Severance by Ling Ma This 2018 novel offers an intriguing fresh take on plague fiction, in which victims are reduced to mindlessly repeating their most familiar mechanical actions until they eventually waste away. It’s almost like a zombie scenario, except that the shambling mobs are just a sad curiosity rather than …
Book #94 of 2020: Heart of Iron by Ashley Poston (Heart of Iron #1) In theory, this should be a neat space opera retelling of the quasi-historical Anastasia story, in which a young royal escapes the uprising that kills her family and is brought up in secret not knowing her true identity. Unfortunately, the execution …
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Book #93 of 2020: The Midnight Lie by Marie Rutkoski (The Midnight Lie #1) This fantasy novel takes a little while to grow on me, but once the narrative clarifies into the story of a sheltered heroine learning to ask for what she wants — including the love of an alluring new female acquaintance — …
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Book #92 of 2020: These Ghosts Are Family by Maisy Card This novel hops around a lot from character to character, gradually filling in the web of family relations surrounding a Jamaican immigrant who faked his death to start a new life in America. The resulting narrative is so nebulous — eventually even encompassing enslaved …
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Book #91 of 2020: Spellhacker by M. K. England I like this novel’s conceit of magic as a tightly-controlled natural resource that criminals are hired to siphon off from the government pipeline, and I definitely appreciate author M. K. England’s commitment to representing diversity of race and gender in this setting. Among other inclusive elements, …
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Book #90 of 2020: Conrad’s Fate by Diana Wynne Jones (Chrestomanci #5) This fifth Chrestomanci volume — in both publication and author’s suggested reading order; actually the second chronologically — has a great set-up, but it throws out too many intriguing complications that aren’t given the development they’d need to land with any proper impact. …
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