Book #19 of 2024: By the Pricking of My Thumbs by Agatha Christie (Tommy and Tuppence #4) The year is 1968, and Tommy and Tuppence Beresford are no longer the “young adventurers” that they were originally dubbed in their 1922 debut. While not quite old enough to land in Ms. Marple‘s cohort — Tommy even …
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TV #5 of 2024: Star Trek: Prodigy, season 1 This animated program gets better as its first year goes on, but I remain confused about who exactly the target audience is supposed to be. On the one hand: the tone is fairly YA, the majority of the main characters are young teens (or the alien …
Book #18 of 2024: The Eternal Return of Clara Hart by Louise Finch This isn’t my first time-loop story — or even the first YA book I’ve read where a teenager keeps reliving the same party where a classmate gets killed, and in the process gradually realizes that their clique of popular friends are actually …
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TV #4 of 2024: Seinfeld, season 4 I’ve been fairly lukewarm on this sitcom up till now, so I’m happy to find that this 1992-1993 season is much more my speed. The previous year gets the ball rolling with a little bit of light continuity from week to week, but this run leans fully into …
Book #17 of 2024: The Tower at the Edge of the World by Victoria Goddard This 2014 story was one of the first titles published in author Victoria Goddard’s massive Nine Worlds fantasy setting, and is also one of its earliest to take place chronologically. It’s relatively short at 62 pages in paperback — it …
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Book #16 of 2024: Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia E. Butler This collection of short stories (originally published in 1995, then revised in 2005 with two additional entries) was the last work of author Octavia E. Butler’s fiction that I hadn’t yet read, so it’s been a bittersweet experience for me this week to …
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Book #15 of 2024: Book of Signs by John Peel (Diadem #2) This sequel retains the juvenile feel befitting its middle-grade audience, but it’s enough of an improvement over the previous volume that I’ll bump my rating up from three stars to four. The story is more straightforward, with a minimum degree of recap for …
Book #14 of 2024: What the Dead Know: Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator by Barbara Butcher A morbidly fascinating look at an unusual job, but a bit too bogged down in unrelated asides on author Barbara Butcher’s personal life, especially near the end. (A little bit of memoir in such …
Book #13 of 2024: The Woman in Me by Britney Spears Three-and-a-half stars, rounded up. The personal story that Britney Spears has to tell is a moving one, centering the pain she felt over decades of mistreatment in the music industry and the public eye. Between releasing a succession of chart-topping hits, she was emotionally …
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Book #12 of 2024: Through the Groves by Anne Hull In this memoir, author Anne Hull paints an evocative picture of her childhood in central Florida — one I found poignantly familiar to my own, despite growing up three decades later and about 100 miles east of her. The orange groves already giving way to …
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