TV #6 of 2018: Marvel’s Luke Cage, season 1 This show starts off so strongly, following in Daredevil’s footsteps of presenting a superhero spin on urban crime dramas like The Wire. But the villain of the back half of the series is never very well established, and the season really suffers for it, especially in …
Author Archives: Joe Kessler
Book Review: Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold
Book #19 of 2018: Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold (Vorkosigan Saga #2) I still feel like this is a series I could happily walk away from and not miss, but this Hugo-winning second novel — actually the seventh in publication order — is a definite improvement over the first. (I’m also told that the baby …
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Book Review: Doctor Who: A History of Humankind by Justin Richards
Book #18 of 2018: Doctor Who: A History of Humankind by Justin Richards This is another in the line of licensed Doctor Who children’s books presented as annotated reference materials, but I like it a lot better than the earlier effort How to Be a Time Lord. Partly that’s because it has a better gimmick …
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Book Review: Defy the Stars by Claudia Gray
Book #17 of 2018: Defy the Stars by Claudia Gray (Constellation #1) There’s a bit of a rocky start to this novel, but it’s not long before the story kicks off into a careening sci-fi adventure. It’s got so many things I love about the genre: an exploration of the souls of advanced robots, people …
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Book Review: Morning Star by Pierce Brown
Book #16 of 2018: Morning Star by Pierce Brown (Red Rising #3) When I first read this book in 2016, I wrote the following review: “A thrilling end to a spectacular trilogy. I do think this book was a minor step down from the first two Red Rising volumes, which had more cohesive plot structures …
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Book Review: First Test by Tamora Pierce
Book #15 of 2018: First Test by Tamora Pierce (Protector of the Small #1) This is the start of a new quartet within author Tamora Pierce’s larger Tortall series, and it benefits from the worldbuilding that the earlier books have established without doing much to further things here. Set a decade or so after Pierce’s …
TV Review: Marvel’s The Punisher, season 1
TV #5 of 2018: Marvel’s The Punisher, season 1 I don’t care much for either the beginning or end of this show (which seem to tell us little we didn’t already know about the character), but the middle section is surprisingly solid. I’m also really impressed with Ben Barnes’s acting and accent work — I …
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Book Review: Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History by Katy Tur
Book #14 of 2018: Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History by Katy Tur NBC News correspondent Katy Tur reported on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign right from the start, often finding herself publicly singled out by the candidate with alternating praise and insults in his signature volatile style. Trump broke political …
Book Review: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Book #13 of 2018: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr Historical fiction is not generally my cup of tea, but I appreciate this Pulitzer-winning novel of a blind girl in Nazi-occupied France, especially for its short, staccato scenes that manage to be poignant but never maudlin. I do think the novel goes …
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Book Review: Origin by Dan Brown
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 …
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