Book #166 of 2024: Voyage of the Damned by Frances White I’ve heard this book described as a fantasy-genre version of an Agatha Christie story like And Then There Were None, but I think The Hunger Games might be an even more apt comparison for the steadily-rising body count. While the identity of the murderer(s) …
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Book #165 of 2024: Grief in the Fourth Dimension by Jennifer Yu Two recently deceased teenagers, who attended the same high school but didn’t really know one another there, now find themselves sharing a room together in the afterlife. The space is an empty void they can populate by wishing for furnishings, but the main …
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Book #164 of 2024: Doctor Who: Rogue by Kate Herron and Briony Redman Probably the best of the recent Fifteenth Doctor novelizations, as is fitting for being the only one written by the author(s) of the original episode in question. Kate Herron and Briony Redman tell just as thrilling a queer love story for the …
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Book #163 of 2024: In the Shadow of the Fall by Tobi Ogundiran (Guardian of the Gods #1) An exhilarating new fantasy series debut that pits a novitiate orisha priestess against body-snatching heretics like Doro from Octavia E. Butler’s Wild Seed seeking to destroy her order. I wish the plot structure deviated more from the …
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Book #162 of 2024: After the Forest by Kell Woods I like the idea of following up with Hansel and Gretel (sorry, “Hans” and “Greta”) as young adults, haunted by the trauma of what they experienced as children, but this fantasy novel spends a bit too long getting to the point, which then winds up …
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TV #45 of 2024: ReBoot ReWind, season 1 In honor of its 30th anniversary, this new eight-part documentary series is a neat look back at the 90s TV show ReBoot, which was the first cartoon to be made with entirely CGI graphics. Drawing on newly-restored footage and interviews with over 50 members of the old …
Book #161 of 2024: Out of Time by Chris Archer (Mindwarp #9) A fun penultimate adventure for this middle-grade sci-fi series, and by this point, I’m positive that I never read this far into these books back in the 90s, so I’m excited to see how everything resolves. The six teenage heroes start this volume …
Book #160 of 2024: The Wolf and the Woodsman by Ava Reid I might have liked this novel better if I hadn’t first heard about it on a list of #ownvoices Jewish-inspired fantasy works, which definitely set me up for disappointed expectations. Debut author Ava Reid does draw on some folkloric elements from her religious …
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TV #44 of 2024: The Umbrella Academy, season 2 Categorically an improvement over the debut year of this comic book adaptation, which I rated at a frustrating 2-out-of-5 stars for all its elements that never really came together or lived up to their potential. The change for the better is felt immediately in the season …
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Book #159 of 2024: Dragon by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #8) This 1998 title is a bit of an odd installment in the Vlad Taltos fantasy series. It’s not the first volume to take place earlier in the protagonist’s career, back when he was a low-level boss for the Jhereg criminal organization, but it’s unusual …
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