Book #231 of 2017:
The Field Guide by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black (The Spiderwick Chronicles #1)
This was cute, but very short and way below my preferred reading level. I felt like I hardly got a chance to know the characters before the book came to a rather sudden end. I could see myself reading the rest of the Spiderwick books someday as bedtime stories for my future kids, but I don’t feel particularly compelled to seek them out on my own.
★★★☆☆
Book #230 of 2017:
We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
The biggest flaw in this novel about a teenager returning to her family’s vacation home two years after an accident there that she can’t remember is that there’s basically no plot to it. Author E. Lockhart paints a lovely idyllic picture of Cady, her cousins, and the friend who always summers with them, but there’s no real story here beyond Cady struggling to recall an incident no one will talk to her about. (The second biggest flaw is the eventual resolution to that mystery, which frankly seems unearned and a little gimmicky.) Lockhart nails the endless feeling of a teenage school break, but she doesn’t scaffold that with enough of a story to really make us care about these characters.
★★★☆☆
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TV #44 of 2017:
Marvel’s Inhumans, season 1
Oh, my god. This show was so awful that it retroactively makes Iron Fist look pretty decent by comparison. We’re never given any reason to care about the characters or their situation, the villains have no clear motivation at all, and the plot basically spins its wheels for the entire season (which is only eight episodes long, thankfully). What an absolute misfire on every level imaginable. I can’t believe Marvel canceled Agent Carter only to greenlight this garbage, or that they still trust Scott Buck now after his back-to-back trainwrecks.
★☆☆☆☆
TV #43 of 2017:
The Handmaid’s Tale, season 1
Very powerful and difficult-to-watch television. To be honest, I wasn’t really blown away when I read the book this show was based on – it’s definitely a solid dystopian nightmare, but I didn’t find it especially gripping or haunting. This adaptation was all of that and more, though. Visually arresting, filled with intensely personal performances, and impossible to look away from. The writers and designers also really emphasized how this society got the way it is (whereas I felt like the book largely took the 1984 approach of just presenting everything as the new status quo) and the parallels to our own world are terrifying.
★★★★☆
Book #229 of 2017:
The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
This book is partly a true-crime story about a child molester and murderer, and partly the author’s attempt to work through the sexual abuse that they themself experienced at the hands of their grandfather growing up. Because of the subject matter it’s a deeply personal account, but it does sometimes feel as though the writer is grasping at fairly tenuous connections between the case they’re researching and their own life history. You can tell that Alex Marzano-Lesnevich has poured every scrap of their heart into writing this book, but in the end they struggle to present any sort of real conclusion.
[Review written in November 2017. Updated August 2021 to correct the author’s name and pronouns.]
★★★☆☆
Book #228 of 2017:
A Million Worlds with You by Claudia Gray (Firebird #3)
The Firebird trilogy has gotten steadily better as it’s gone along, and this third novel brings it all home nicely. As befits a series finale, the stakes are higher than ever in this book, and the parallel universe-hopping that’s always been a great showcase for author Claudia Gray’s creativity feels less like idle sightseeing now that the villains are actively seeking to destroy whole universes (and/or kill off the versions of our heroine Marguerite who live there, which forever shuts her out of traveling back to those worlds). Some of this gets a little hokey, since the bad guys don’t exactly have motivations that seem to justify wiping out entire universes, but mostly it’s an adrenaline-fueled race to the finish line. The romance angle even takes a back seat to the heroics for once, which may not be to every reader’s tastes but came as a relief to me. If you made it through the clunky early chapters of the first book in this series, you should definitely read on to see how it all concludes.
This book: ★★★★☆
Overall series: ★★★★☆
Book ranking: 3 > 2 > 1
Book #227 of 2017:
The History of Bees by Maja Lunde
Taken individually, I suppose I like the three different strands that make up this novel, although the stories set in 2098 China and 1852 England are far more compelling than the one set in 2007 America. (Respectively: a woman trying to track down her sick son in a dystopian bureaucracy, a man struggling with depression while inventing an artificial beehive, and a farmer upset that his son doesn’t want to follow in his footsteps.) But even though these three stories are loosely tied together by the end, it never really feels like they have much to do with one another. All involve bees and all involve parents, but I didn’t really track any major insights resonating from one storyline to the next and the eventual plot connections are fairly superficial. Again, I like the stories just fine on their own, but I think I would feel more warmly towards this effort if I had encountered them as three separate novellas rather than as alternating chapters in a single novel.
★★★☆☆
Book #226 of 2017:
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley (Flavia de Luce #1)
The precocious eleven-year-old detective in this story alternates between cute and grating, but even at her worst it’s a shock to see her kidnapped and physically assaulted in the story’s climax. It’s overall an interesting murder mystery with a distinctive voice telling the story, but if that’s how the child is going to be treated, I think I’m one-and-done with this series.
★★☆☆☆
Book #225 of 2017:
The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin (The Broken Earth #1)
Great fantasy worldbuilding and effortless diversity of race, gender identity, and sexuality, but it bothered me a little that the three different storylines felt so isolated from one another (even after I developed a suspicion about how they were connected and well before a late reveal confirmed it). Still, this apocalyptic setting where earthquake wizards are kept in glorified slavery has a lot going for it, and I’m hopeful that the sequels will be even better now that the overall shape of the narrative has been made clear.
★★★★☆
Movie #18 of 2017:
Little Evil (2017)
The last fifteen minutes or so redeem this movie somewhat, when things take a Good Omens sort of turn and start emphasizing the antichrist child’s free will. But for most of the runtime, it’s a pretty lackluster effort. I think the idea is supposed to be that Adam Scott’s character clearly has a devil kid for a stepson but he’s the only one who seems to notice anything weird? But the comedy in that isn’t particularly on point and the parts that are played straight don’t feel distinct enough. It seems like this movie wants to both exist in and critique/puncture a particular film genre, which can be a terrific mode of storytelling — see Disney’s Enchanted, or for a more horror-relevant piece, Joss Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods — but this one never really goes all in on either front. It’s not horrendously bad, but it’s all a bit muddled.
★★☆☆☆
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