Movie #19 of 2017:
Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
By far the best Thor movie, and one of the better Marvel Cinematic Universe movies overall. Lots of humor, neat worldbuilding, and actual character growth for Thor and Loki! It could have done better by its female characters, but all in all it was a fun ride and a reminder of why we all fell in love with Marvel movies in the first place.
★★★★☆
Book #234 of 2017:
The Book of Swords edited by Gardner Dozois
This is a collection of short stories in the “sword and sorcery” genre, which as far as I can tell is fantasy on the smaller scale, with no evil overlords threatening the world. (I’d say the stakes are lower than epic fantasy, but if a story is well told, it should still mean everything to its characters.) Not every story in this book has swords, and not every story has sorcery, but they all share a general focus on scrappy adventurers dealing with the problems immediately in front of them. It’s probably not a book I’d reread, but it introduced me to some new authors to watch and featured some new material from old favorites like Garth Nix, Robin Hobb, and Scott Lynch. Some stories are better than others, but it’s an overall solid collection.
★★★☆☆
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Book #233 of 2017:
The Obelisk Gate by N. K. Jemisin (The Broken Earth #2)
As this series goes along, it’s starting to feel like author N. K. Jemisin is more interested in showing off her admittedly awesome and intricate worldbuilding than in telling a story with compelling emotional stakes for her characters. It’s still a good read, but a large portion of the plot is just people figuring out their world’s mysteries, and that’s keeping the series from becoming truly great. (This middle book in the trilogy also suffers in comparison to its predecessor, which took greater stylistic and narrative risks than this more streamlined and conventional sequel.)
★★★☆☆
Book #232 of 2017:
The Realms of the Gods by Tamora Pierce (The Immortals #4)
This is the final book in Tamora Pierce’s Immortals Quartet (within her larger Tortall series), and it sort of resolves the ongoing storyline from the previous books. But most of the novel strands its main characters away from the central conflict for no real reason, giving them some episodic tasks to complete on their way back to the war. The flaws from the previous books are also on full display here: both Daine’s overpowered magic abilities that render all of her obstacles trivial and her really gross romance with a magic tutor who’s twice her age.
(It was already uncomfortable to read about these characters’ sexual tension in the earlier books when their feelings were largely subtext, but Pierce makes the indefensible choice here to uncritically present the attraction of a man in his thirties towards his sixteen-year-old student as a romantic love story. Thankfully they only ever make out, but they do so heatedly, on multiple occasions, none of which are at all necessary for the plot.) Tortall is always a fun place to visit, but this story as a whole was a big misfire.
This book: ★★☆☆☆
Overall series: ★★☆☆☆
Book ranking: 3 > 1 > 2 > 4
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.
★★★☆☆
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
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