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 …
Author Archives: Joe Kessler
Book Review: My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix
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 Review: Severance by Ling Ma
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 Review: Heart of Iron by Ashley Poston
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 Review: The Midnight Lie by Marie Rutkoski
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 Review: These Ghosts Are Family by Maisy Card
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 Review: Spellhacker by M. K. England
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 Review: Conrad’s Fate by Diana Wynne Jones
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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TV Review: Brooklyn Nine-Nine, season 7
TV #11 of 2020: Brooklyn Nine-Nine, season 7 Another solid run of this police workplace comedy (sitcop?), reliably delivering jokes but not really knocking it out of the park anymore. Brooklyn Nine-Nine has an unfortunate tendency to shy away from follow-through on any big narrative moves, and sure enough, this batch of episodes swiftly reverts …
Book Review: The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
Book #89 of 2020: The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson I admire the ambition of this novel to build up an alternate world history across six centuries — in which the Black Death kills off almost all of Europe, and China and a Muslim empire become the dominant geopolitical powers instead …
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