Book #12 of 2018: Origin by Dan Brown (Robert Langdon #5) I’m not going to belabor the usual Dan Brown tropes, because if you’ve read this far into his Robert Langdon series, you know what to expect. Someone gets murdered just before sharing a big secret, Langdon races around an old city trying to solve …
Author Archives: Joe Kessler
Book Review: Forest of a Thousand Lanterns by Julie C. Dao
Book #11 of 2018: Forest of a Thousand Lanterns by Julie C. Dao (Rise of the Empress #1) I have some minor quibbles about character motivations, but overall this is an impressive debut novel that retells the beginning of the classic Snow White fairy tale without ever feeling unoriginal. Partly this is due to the …
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Book Review: Ruin and Rising by Leigh Bardugo
Book #10 of 2018: Ruin and Rising by Leigh Bardugo (Grisha #3) This final novel in Leigh Bardugo’s Grisha trilogy is the first one that I feel really approaches the quality of her later Six of Crows series. (Or to put that more charitably, the five Bardugo books that I’ve now read get steadily better …
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Movie Review: Airplane! (1980)
Movie #1 of 2018: Airplane! (1980) It’s been quite a while since I last watched this movie, and my wife picked the DVD off the shelf tonight because she had never seen it at all. It holds up pretty well, although the pacing is noticeably slow from a modern perspective. (Obviously this is a movie …
TV Review: Class, season 1
TV #4 of 2018: Class, season 1 This show has its weaknesses, and almost all of them are unfortunately on display in that headscratcher of a finale. (Among other things, writer Patrick Ness never seems to understand how deeply uninteresting the Shadowkin are compared to some of the other things his characters have to deal …
Book Review: The Widow’s House by Carol Goodman
Book #9 of 2018: The Widow’s House by Carol Goodman I really liked this modern gothic suspense novel, in part because it reminded me of so many other books I’ve enjoyed. It’s the story of a troubled woman returning to her hometown (think Sharp Objects or The Roanoke Girls) to become the caretaker of a …
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Book Review: Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman
Book #8 of 2018: Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman (Seraphina #2) I adored Rachel Hartman’s earlier novel Seraphina, and this sequel coasts by on a lot of borrowed good will from that. Unfortunately, Hartman has jettisoned the parts of Seraphina that I found most engaging (namely the cultural differences between humans and dragons, her heroine’s …
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TV Review: Black Mirror, season 4
TV #3 of 2018: Black Mirror, season 4 I loved the opening and closing episodes of this latest anthology, and the rest were pretty great as well. (Only Metalhead didn’t really do much for me, but it was impressive enough on a technical level.) I feel like this show gets mischaracterized a lot – it’s …
Book Review: Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake by Frank W. Abagnale with Stan Redding
Book #7 of 2018: Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake by Frank W. Abagnale with Stan Redding All things considered, I think the 2002 movie adaptation tells Frank Abagnale’s story better than Abagnale (with co-writer Stan Redding) does himself. Even setting aside the issue of whether the criminal prodigy …
TV Review: Marvel’s Runaways, season 1
TV #2 of 2018: Marvel’s Runaways, season 1 I had high hopes for this one throughout the first few episodes, but it definitely ended up as one of those Marvel projects with better acting than writing. I understand it deviates a lot from the source material too, which is even more frustrating – I hate …
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 