Book Review: Out of Orange by Cleary Wolters

Book #49 of 2018:

Out of Orange by Cleary Wolters

The Netflix prison dramedy Orange Is the New Black began as an adaptation of a true-life memoir, with the character Alex Vause based on a figure from author Piper Kerman’s past. Out of Orange is that woman’s own account of her time as a smuggler-turned-prisoner, but it’s unfortunately nowhere near as compelling as the first book or the show. Blame the editors for some awkward, repetitive, and disjointed language, but the story itself is also quite slow and often focused on mundane details like the minutia of flight plans or a revolving door of the author’s lovers and pet cats. And since it’s largely missing the advocacy for criminal justice reform that helps make the original Kerman memoir so effective, there’s really not much here to recommend at all.

★☆☆☆☆

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Book Review: Calling on Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede

Book #48 of 2018:

Calling on Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede (Enchanted Forest Chronicles #3)

I’ve liked the first two books in this children’s fantasy series, but this third one is a misfire for me. Its issues might not trouble a younger reader, but the humor is way more slapstick than before, and the new character of Killer the enchanted rabbit takes up far too much space being far too annoying (his catchphrase, repeated ad nauseum: “I’m HUNGRY”). The plot is thin and ends on a cliffhanger, so I just hope the fourth and final book is nothing like this one.

★★☆☆☆

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Movie Review: Ocean’s Eleven (2001)

Movie #3 of 2018:

Ocean’s Eleven (2001)

We had some bad family news yesterday, and when I got home I needed a comfort watch. Enter this movie, which is near and dear to my heart despite its flaws (like Don Cheadle’s atrocious attempt at a cockney accent or Julia Roberts being literally the only woman with lines in such a massive cast). It’s a classic and a franchise-launcher for a reason, and it’s really just an all-around fun heist movie. I really like all the vague references to the previous history these characters share, suggesting that there are early adventures we’ve still never seen. That’s an unusual writing choice, but as with most of the rest of the movie, it somehow just works.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb

Book #47 of 2018:

Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb (Liveship Traders #1)

As always, I have mixed feelings about this book and its sequels. On the one hand, you couldn’t ask for better atmosphere in a fantasy yarn of pirates, sea serpents, and talking figureheads, and the rich worldbuilding wonderfully fleshes out an area on the edges of the map from author Robin Hobb’s earlier Farseer trilogy. The characters too are largely an interesting bunch, and by bouncing around among a large cast, Hobb is able to weave a more complicated narrative than the Farseer books could offer.

On the other hand, this first novel’s plot is incredibly slow, and one of its major threads doesn’t even connect with anything until the very end. Other threads, like that of the serpents themselves, effectively go nowhere for this entire book, and although they’ll be important later on in the trilogy, their inclusion here feels rather aimless. Ship of Magic is far from the only fantasy story to suffer these flaws, but they hobble what should be a fun swashbuckling adventure.

[Trigger warning for a budding romance between a 13-year-old girl and a 20-year-old man, and for a sexual encounter between two adult characters who are both high, drunk, and concussed at the time. There’s also a rape that I can recall later on in the trilogy, so readers wanting to avoid that may wish to give all three books a miss.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Book #46 of 2018:

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

This is a stunningly beautiful story that blossoms from a small family drama into a whirlwind of class and racial politics in a wealthy Cleveland suburb. The narrative darts here and there, fleshing out different characters’ perspectives and backstories so that even the most odious figures in the town are at least understandable as flawed human beings. Everything ties together a little too neatly in the end for my tastes — and the less said about the bespoke artsy photographs that speak to each recipient’s soul, the better — but I love these characters and all the ways that author Celeste Ng has found to explore different facets of motherhood through them. Adoption, surrogacy, and simple mentorship can form powerful bonds between young girls and their mother figures, and in Ng’s hands they can be as devastating as the literal fires that give this novel its title.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: How to Stop Time by Matt Haig

Book #45 of 2018:

How to Stop Time by Matt Haig

There’s a lot of potential to this novel about a man aging at 1/15 the usual rate, but it’s sunk by certain elements that feel barely sketched in. Most glaring is the secret society of people with the narrator’s condition, of whom we only ever meet one or two and never even glimpse their supposed enemy. And of course, it doesn’t help that other authors like Anne Rice and Claire North have already written such poignant and gripping stories of functional immortals surviving the centuries to which this book must inevitably be compared. It almost rises to that level at times when our hero grapples with the nature of outliving everything familiar, but on the whole the project unfortunately just doesn’t hang together.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Star Wars: Leia, Princess of Alderaan by Claudia Gray

Book #44 of 2018:

Star Wars: Leia, Princess of Alderaan by Claudia Gray

This prequel novel depicts sixteen-year-old Princess Leia coming of age alongside the fledgling rebellion against the corrupt empire that rules her world. Like author Claudia Gray’s earlier novel Lost Stars, it’s a great character-driven drama that asks some smart questions about reform and revolution while also delivering the daring space thrills that you would expect from this series.

As part of Disney’s new canon of Star Wars novels, there are some fun tie-ins to the recent movies, like Leia’s friendship with a young Amilyn Holdo or a quick visit to the salt planet Crait. I also really appreciate the tense scenes that Gray has written between Princess Leia and Grand Moff Tarkin, which add nice depth to their meeting in the first Star Wars movie three years after these events. It’s not quite an essential read, but Star Wars fans will find a lot to love here.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins

Book #43 of 2018:

The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins

This is a pretty weird book, and I’m still not entirely convinced it’s my kind of weird. But it definitely comes close at times, and by about the halfway point of the novel, I found I simply couldn’t put it down. I think it reminds me most of American Gods — in both its slipstream presentation of everyday Americana and its intricate supernatural plots within plots — but whereas Neil Gaiman’s classic story blends myths inherited from across the world’s religions, author Scott Hawkins has offered up his own surreal arcana of talking lions, kidnapped children, blackmailed presidents, and lines of divine succession. All of that in an ancient library that might just be in the subdivision a block over from your house.

It’s bizarre and it’s bloody — trigger warning for implied rape as well as some pretty graphic violence against both animals and humans — but I have a feeling it’s really going to stick with me.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Mysterious Mr. Quin by Agatha Christie

Book #42 of 2018:

The Mysterious Mr. Quin by Agatha Christie

This obscure Agatha Christie title is a bit of a head-scratcher. The short stories in the collection have the general structure of detective fiction, but in lieu of her usual sort of investigator, Christie has penned a borderline-supernatural figure who immediately knows the answer to every mystery and asks leading questions until the other characters deduce it as well. That’s a pretty tiresome conceit, and one that doesn’t really lend itself to any real dramatic stakes — especially since no one seems to care about actually bringing any of the perpetrators they uncover to justice. I commend the author for experimenting with genre, but the results here are rather lackluster.

★★☆☆☆

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TV Review: The Mindy Project, season 4

TV #12 of 2018:

The Mindy Project, season 4

I’ve been pretty critical of this show in the past, but I thought season 3 was at least a little step up from its early clumsiness, and I had hopes that the move from Fox to Hulu for season 4 would boost the program creatively even more. Unfortunately, I saw little sign of that, just more of the revolving cast door and inconsistent character logic that has always plagued this show. The romance arc this season also feels like a weak retread of stories we’ve seen the show do before, and I really struggle to get invested in any of these characters.

★★☆☆☆

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