Book #202 of 2019: Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia Another entry in the burgeoning genre of #ownvoices fantasy books that draw upon the traditional folklore of their authors’ cultural heritage. In this case, that’s Mayan mythology, which I knew little about beforehand. I’d call the result a win for representation, but somewhat …
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Book #201 of 2019: Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo (Alex Stern #1) This mature urban fantasy is a major departure for author Leigh Bardugo, both in genre and in tone. Although its college-age characters aren’t significantly older than her YA Grishaverse bunch, the traumas they face are so much darker than anything encountered in that …
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Book #200 of 2019: The Long Blink: The True Story of Trauma, Forgiveness, and One Man’s Fight for Safer Roads by Brian Kuebler This is a true story about my cousin Ed Slattery, whose wife was killed and two boys gravely injured when a drowsy semi truck driver crashed into their car in 2010. Ed …
Book #199 of 2019: The World That We Knew by Alice Hoffman There are some lovely individual moments in this novel about characters in 1940s Europe evading and resisting the Nazis, but I’m ultimately dissatisfied by the overall shape of the narrative and by how little author Alice Hoffman has developed the various elements of …
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TV #36 of 2019: Better Call Saul, season 1 This is my first time rewatching this program from the beginning, on the heels of my first time going back through its parent show. And overall, I really think I prefer this one. Breaking Bad is an amazing piece of television storytelling on any number of …
Book #198 of 2019: The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman (The Book of Dust #2) I hate to foreground the matter in my review, but I think every prospective reader of this much-anticipated His Dark Materials sequel should know that it’s a book in which returning heroine Lyra Silvertongue gets sexually assaulted by a group …
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Book #197 of 2019: His Hideous Heart: 13 of Edgar Allan Poe’s Most Unsettling Tales Reimagined edited by Dahlia Adler I’m rounding up my rating for this collection a little bit on the strength of the original Edgar Allan Poe stories (many of which I’d never read before) that have been included along with their …
Book #196 of 2019: A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II by Sonia Purnell The true story of how an American woman with a prosthetic leg overcame discrimination against her nationality, her gender, and her disability to become a British intelligence agent in Vichy …
Movie #10 of 2019: El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019) It’s an undeniable thrill to see Jesse Pinkman again (along with some other old friends), and both star Aaron Paul and writer/director Vince Gilligan seem to have grown even more adept at depicting the wayward figure’s stoic anguish in the six years since Breaking …
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Book #195 of 2019: The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow This is a lovely fantasy debut about portals to other worlds, the power of stories, and the tension between stable stagnation and unpredictable change. The prose is lyrically beautiful in the Laini Taylor fashion, and the plotline of a mixed-race girl …
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