Book #177 of 2019: The Sorcerer’s House by Gene Wolfe There’s some neat slipstream weirdness to this fantasy novel, and its epistolary format hints at interesting nuances of narrator reliability, but I just couldn’t get past the obnoxious treatment of all the female characters. Every woman in this story is either a perky flibbertigibbet, a …
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Book #176 of 2019: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale #2) With this novel, author Margaret Atwood returns to the setting of her 1985 classic The Handmaid’s Tale a decade and a half later on (and ignoring how its recent TV adaptation has imagined what happens after the end of that first book). …
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Book #175 of 2019: The Institute by Stephen King Stephen King’s latest novel finds a secret government program kidnapping children with latent psychic abilities, running unethical experiments upon them, and harnessing their powers for nefarious purposes. That’s a variation on a plot device the writer has utilized several times before, but it’s given its most …
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Book #174 of 2019: Star Wars: A Crash of Fate by Zoraida Córdova This Young Adult licensed novel is one of three 2019 books exploring the Galaxy’s Edge setting that has been developed as a new theme park area in Disneyland and Disney’s Hollywood Studios. Its main purpose is to showcase the locations, characters, and …
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Book #173 of 2019: The Need by Helen Phillips This short novel starts out as a creepy thriller about an unseen household intruder, but it grows into something far weirder and more complex as it goes along. As such it’s probably one of those stories that’s best entered into without much advance knowledge of the …
Book #172 of 2019: Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty A neat sci-fi murder mystery, sort of like Altered Carbon with less misogyny and more disciplined storytelling. In this setting, cloning is commonplace, and people are supposed to wake up in a new body with their recent memories intact if anything happens to a previous version. …
Book #171 of 2019: Redwall by Brian Jacques (Redwall #1) This is a fine if straightforward adventure story, and definitely one that grows on me as it goes along. The brave woodland creatures in its cast represent a fun change from most children’s fantasy literature, and the bucolic setting lends the tale a certain timeless …
Book #170 of 2019: Resistance by Jennifer A. Nielsen On the surface, this novel about teenage Jewish resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied Poland is a welcome piece of YA historical fiction, educating all ages about a lesser-known aspect of World War II. The characters are invented, but they are inspired by Jennifer A. Nielsen’s extensive research …
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TV #34 of 2019: Veronica Mars, season 2 Let’s start at the ending. This season is so much more serialized than the first, with major storylines unfolding over multiple episodes and a lighter focus on the cases of the week — and although a few of those sub-plots peter out before the end, they mostly …
Book #169 of 2019: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan (Percy Jackson and the Olympians #1) This middle-grade fantasy debut is a fun ride with an engaging young character voice at its center. The plot can be a bit episodic, and the worldbuilding doesn’t go much deeper than bringing traditional Greek myths into the modern …
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