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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Book #11 of 2024: Derring-Do for Beginners by Victoria Goddard (The Red Company #1) In the backstory to The Hands of the Emperor and the rest of author Victoria Goddard’s sprawling Nine Worlds fantasy saga, the Red Company was a roving band of friends whose infamous exploits have long since passed into legend. This prequel …
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Book #10 of 2024: Beholder by Ryan La Sala At first glance, it seems like this fantasy horror novel should have too much going on its plot to be remotely effective: an orphaned teen protagonist with the magical ability to see backwards in time through mirrors and other reflective surfaces, a Lovecraftian entity lurking inside …
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