Movie #9 of 2019: Avengers: Endgame (2019) These tentpole Marvel movies are tricky to review individually, because each one is so intertwined with both the past and the future of the franchise. Case in point: everyone knew that this latest Avengers flick would find some way of walking back the unfathomable calamity of the previous …
Author Archives: Joe Kessler
Book Review: City of Dragons by Robin Hobb
Book #180 of 2019: City of Dragons by Robin Hobb (The Rain Wild Chronicles #3) Fantasy author Robin Hobb can effortlessly spin out a tale, but this quartet remains one of the weakest elements within her larger Realm of the Elderlings saga. Although this third volume is at least more action-packed than those before (and …
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Book Review: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein
Book #179 of 2019: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein An interesting pop psychology book, putting forward the argument that training in multiple skill domains yields more breakthrough successes than narrowly focusing on proficiency in a single field. From musicians who play several instruments to students who declare a late …
Book Review: Alice Payne Arrives by Kate Heartfield
Book #178 of 2019: Alice Payne Arrives by Kate Heartfield (Alice Payne #1) Although this novella about rival factions of time-travelers isn’t as mind-bending or as inventive with the concept as the similarly-focused This Is How You Lose the Time War, it’s still a lot of fun and offers some great character moments throughout. Alice …
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Book Review: The Sorcerer’s House by Gene Wolfe
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 Review: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
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 Review: The Institute by Stephen King
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 Review: Star Wars: A Crash of Fate by Zoraida Córdova
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 Review: The Need by Helen Phillips
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 Review: Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty
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. …
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