Book #312 of 2021: My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson An electrifying debut, made up of the title novella and five unrelated short stories. Each entry is set somewhere in my adopted home of Virginia, and finds a black protagonist struggling with our country’s legacy and contemporary expressions of racism. In the main event, a …
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Book #311 of 2021: Kiki Kallira Breaks a Kingdom by Sangu Mandanna Another title in the popular recent mini-genre of Percy Jackson-inspired #ownvoices fantasy stories involving a middle-grade protagonist coming face-to-face with certain mythological beings drawn from the writer’s cultural heritage. In this novel, the Hindu gods and demons are joined by a fun Inkheart …
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Book #310 of 2021: Rage by Bob Woodward This title from summer 2020 is a reasonable follow-up to author Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House of two years earlier, but I don’t find that the reporter has gained any new levels of insight into the 45th US president, despite his greater access. Drawing …
Book #309 of 2021: The Dark Design by Philip José Farmer (Riverworld #3) The longest, slowest, and most inscrutable Riverworld novel yet. Another decade has passed in this strange afterlife, although technology, politics, and culture don’t seem to have changed much in the meantime. The biggest recent development is that people are no longer resurrected …
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Book #308 of 2021: Cinderella Is Dead by Kalynn Bayron I believe this is the first fairy tale retelling I’ve seen that incorporates the classic version of the text as official propaganda of a fascistically sexist (and homophobic) police state, so that’s an interesting premise to start from. Girls in this kingdom are taught the …
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Book #307 of 2021: The Suspicion by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #24) If I’m being honest, this adventure is fairly inessential and a bit cartoonish, especially in its abrupt ending of Visser Three and his troops agreeing to just walk away from the ‘Andalite bandits’ in an exhausted temporary truce. But I kind of love …
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Book #306 of 2021: Black Girl Unlimited by Echo Brown This autobiographical novel — or fictionalized memoir, if you prefer — tackles some very heavy topics in the childhood and teenage years of its author / protagonist Echo Brown, a dark-skinned African-American who faces racism, colorism, domestic abuse, rape, and more, not to mention the …
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Book #305 of 2021: The Overlook by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #13) I admire author Michael Connelly’s commitment to regularly including crooked members of law enforcement among his villains, but I think this particular story actually works better earlier on, when LAPD detective Harry Bosch is just clashing with FBI bureaucracy (no pun intended) over …
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Book #304 of 2021: One, Two, Buckle My Shoe by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #23) There’s an ingenious if improbable solution to this 1940 mystery (also published as The Patriotic Murders and An Overdose of Death), in which a dentist and his patient are each found dead hours after an appointment — the former of …
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Book #303 of 2021: Opal by Maggie Stiefvater I’ve heard author Maggie Stiefvater refer to this Raven Cycle sequel as a novella, but at 38 pages, it’s probably scraping the lower limit of what could fairly be given that designation. It’s really more of a quick interlude in the lives of her heroes Ronan Lynch …
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