Book #242 of 2019: Children of Virtue and Vengeance by Tomi Adeyemi (Legacy of Orïsha #2) Plotwise, this novel is a big step forward from last year’s Children of Blood and Bone, which had the same interesting Yoruba-inspired mythos but told a fairly standard rendition of the hero’s journey monomyth within that setting. (Destroyed home, …
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Book #241 of 2019: Call Down the Hawk by Maggie Stiefvater (The Dreamer Trilogy #1) Author Maggie Stiefvater’s excellent Raven Cycle left plenty of open ends for potential further exploration, and this first volume in its sequel series capably picks up one of the more compelling ones: the ability of certain characters to bring forth …
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Book #240 of 2019: Disney’s Land: Walt Disney and the Invention of the Amusement Park That Changed the World by Richard Snow This is an informative history of the creation of Disneyland, with a few significant caveats. First is the scope: author Richard Snow mentions that his subject was intended by Walt Disney to be …
Book #239 of 2019: Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon Gentlemen of the Road (working title, per the author’s afterword: Jews with Swords) is an exciting, swashbuckling adventure through 10th-century eastern Europe, and definitely one of the rare novellas that doesn’t feel at all abbreviated. Michael Chabon excels at bringing this historical period to …
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Book #238 of 2019: Gwendy’s Magic Feather by Richard Chizmar (The Button Box #2) The first novella in this series was a collaboration between authors Richard Chizmar and Stephen King, and although the execution was a little uneven, I mostly liked the concept. But I just don’t get this follow-up solo venture from Chizmar, set …
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Movie #13 of 2019: Veronica Mars (2014) I still haven’t seen the new Hulu revival of Veronica Mars, but my rewatch has finally reached this equally-unexpected reunion movie that came out in 2014, seven years after the original show went off the air. I think I’m a little more charitable towards the project than I …
Book #237 of 2019: Star Wars: Resistance Reborn by Rebecca Roanhorse Although I’ll need to see the upcoming movie The Rise of Skywalker to be certain, it sure doesn’t feel like anything in this official prequel novel is particularly essential as setup. Its biggest contribution to smoothing the leap from The Last Jedi is probably …
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Book #236 of 2019: The Man Who Tried to Get Away by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Man Who #3) In 1990, author Reed Stephens published this final book in an odd little mystery trilogy that seemed to care more about putting its detective characters through suffering and atonement than having them actually solve crimes. A …
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Book #235 of 2019: The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino This 1957 Italian novel presents the whimsical tale of an eighteenth-century nobleman who climbs a tree as an obstinate child avoiding his dinner and then proceeds to spend the rest of his life up there. Roaming the countryside from branch to branch, he …
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Book #234 of 2019: This is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel This is a lovely family drama with some important transgender representation, but I can’t help feeling that it would be a more powerful and honest story if it actually centered the character in question. Instead, most of the narrative is rooted in …
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