Book #142 of 2022: The Answer by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #53) (A quick note from your reviewer here. If you’ve read my past few Animorphs reviews, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been giving away more and more of the plot each time. These final volumes are just so jam-packed with major developments that it’s …
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Book #141 of 2022: Fairy Tale by Stephen King This new portal fantasy from Stephen King is fine, but its tale of an ordinary kid finding his way into a magical world is not exactly breaking fresh ground for the author of such works as The Waste Lands or The Talisman. There’s also an awful …
Book #140 of 2022: Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty I don’t love this book, but it’s significantly better once you realize it’s been falsely marketed as a collection of short stories when it’s actually a disjointed composite novel. Each entry ends somewhat abruptly, but they are not telling unrelated plots with distinct …
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Book #139 of 2022: What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher This creepy little novella is a retelling of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher by way of Mexican Gothic or The Girl with All the Gifts — which is to say, it posits that a rare breed of mushroom colony at the …
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Book #138 of 2022: Star Wars: The Princess and the Scoundrel by Beth Revis This Star Wars novel — not to be confused with Alexandra Bracken’s 2015 junior novelization of A New Hope, entitled The Princess, The Scoundrel, and the Farm Boy — is slow on plot but rich in characterization, and covering a period …
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Book #137 of 2022: Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly (Ballard and Bosch #1) Detective Renée Ballard has only appeared in one Michael Connelly book before this, but there’s still a frisson of crossover thrill when she encounters the author’s more established hero Harry Bosch early in this volume. After cautiously feeling one another out …
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Book #136 of 2022: The Sacrifice by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #52) The last story with Ax as its sole narrator is also the strongest one yet. The plot is deceptively simple: together with the rest of their small resistance force, the Animorphs propose, debate, and ultimately carry out a bombing assault on the local …
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Movie #14 of 2022: Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) Another Marvel feature that’s solidly entertaining in the moment but pretty disposable in the long-term franchise view. Leaning heavily on the space-rocker tone set by director Taika Waititi’s earlier Thor: Ragnarok, this sequel slides into the status of second-best Thor movie more or less by default. …
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Book #135 of 2022: The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia This loose retelling of the 1896 classic The Island of Doctor Moreau relocates its action to Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, a setting that #ownvoices author Silvia Moreno-Garcia paints as vividly as she has in previous releases like Mexican Gothic, now against the backdrop of …
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TV #43 of 2022: What We Do in the Shadows, season 4 Probably the strongest run of this supernatural comedy yet, with clear arcs for just about every major character except the Guide. Colin Robinson has been replaced by a rapidly-growing junior version of himself — a concept allowing fresh new jokes for his different …
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