Book #29 of 2021: The Courts of Chaos by Roger Zelazny (The Chronicles of Amber #5) These Amber sequels have never really lived up to the promise of their series debut, and since this fifth book brings the initial story arc to a close, I think it’s a good moment to cut my losses and …
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Book #28 of 2021: Unfinished Portrait by Mary Westmacott This pseudonymous Agatha Christie novel is reportedly quite autobiographical, but I’ve personally found it to be a fairly aimless bildungsroman, tracing its protagonist’s life from childhood to early marriage without much of an overarching plot. It’s also full of the writer’s less endearing quirks, like people …
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TV #10 of 2021: I Am Not Okay With This, season 1 Another 2020 Netflix original that was unfortunately cancelled after just one season due to COVID-19 impacts on studio production. As with Teenage Bounty Hunters, there are plenty of dangling threads here suggesting that the writers were instead expecting the show to be renewed, …
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Book #27 of 2021: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black A dark and violent YA tale, predicated on the idea that although a vampire’s first bite infects the victim with an all-consuming thirst for blood, they don’t turn fully undead until they finally give in and feed on another human in turn. There’s …
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TV #9 of 2021: Star Wars: The Clone Wars, season 6 Production on this penultimate batch of episodes was cut short by Disney’s 2012 acquisition of Lucasfilm, with the truncated season eventually being released straight to Netflix in 2014. So it wasn’t created to be an intentional ending for the series, and it doesn’t read …
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Book #26 of 2021: Labyrinth Lost by Zoraida Córdova (Brooklyn Brujas #1) A fun #ownvoices fantasy built on indigenous Latinx mythology, rather like Percy Jackson in aiming for the younger side of the YA market. The plot is a classic careful-what-you-wish-for scenario, in which a teenager frightened by her family’s magic tries to lose her …
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TV #8 of 2021: Teenage Bounty Hunters, season 1 I like the characters in this Netflix series, but I feel far more interested in their family drama and high school social lives than in the wacky side gig that makes up the other part of the title. Each of the twin protagonists exhibits meaningful growth …
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Book #25 of 2021: Eternal Life by Dara Horn I love a good story about angsty immortals, but it’s possible I read this one too soon after last year’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, which explores a similar thematic territory far more movingly. In this 2018 novel, the protagonist is a woman who doesn’t …
Book #24 of 2021: Rocannon’s World by Ursula K. Le Guin (Hainish Cycle #1) First published in 1966, Ursula K. Le Guin’s debut novel already shows her promise, spinning a genre-bending tale that sets off her loose Hainish Cycle of related books and gifting future writers with the name and concept of the ansible, a …
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TV #7 of 2021: Kim’s Convenience, season 4 There’s a little plot momentum this year when Jung finally gets together with his long-term love interest, but for the most part, this is the same steady program it’s been all along: reliably funny yet rarely all that exciting, and structurally still far too separated into its …
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