Book #244 of 2020: Red Hood by Elana K. Arnold A dark and gory feminist tale, perfect for the chilly weather and dimmer evenings we’re getting now at the tail end of the year. It’s a loose retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, where the girl in the woods is a teenager going home to …
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Book Review: Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko
Book #243 of 2020: Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko (Raybearer #1) A lovely piece of #ownvoices YA fantasy, with an all-black cast and imaginative worldbuilding loosely inspired by West African mythology. Debut author Jordan Ifueko is clearly breaking from the eurocentric genre norm here, but she also seems to have ventured further afield from the Orisha …
Book Review: Night Watch by Terry Pratchett
Book #242 of 2020: Night Watch by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #29) This wasn’t my first Discworld title, but for a long time, it was the only one I had read in the subseries about the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. It’s the volume I’ve reread the most as well, so I can attest that it works just …
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TV Review: The Office, season 4
TV #42 of 2020: The Office, season 4 This is a deceptively light season of the classic workplace sitcom, with few of the plot shake-ups that have marked previous years. But there is still the structure of Ryan’s time at corporate bookending this particular run, and some new romantic developments offer intriguing forward momentum that …
Book Review: Our Time Is Now by Stacey Abrams
Book #241 of 2020: Our Time Is Now by Stacey Abrams Author Stacey Abrams witnessed unprecedented levels of voter suppression in her 2018 campaign for Georgia governor (in which her opponent was the state official doing most of the suppressing), and even the slight fraction that she presents here should be infuriating to anyone who …
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TV Review: The Good Wife, season 7
TV #41 of 2020: The Good Wife, season 7 The penultimate run of this legal drama petered out by the end, but this final year is somehow another big step down. On a scene-by-scene basis The Good Wife continues to bear a surface resemblance to the show it used to be, but the characterizations and …
Book Review: The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal
Book #240 of 2020: The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal (Lady Astronaut #2) This alternative history sequel furthers the accelerated timeline for space travel after the natural disaster of the original novel, with most of its new plot concerning a 1960s first voyage to Mars. That’s fun to see play out via Apollo-level technology, …
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Book Review: The Last Coyote by Michael Connelly
Book #239 of 2020: The Last Coyote by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #4) I know it was only a matter of time before Detective Harry Bosch would get around to the cold case of his mother’s murder, but most of the investigation here plays out too straightforwardly to keep my full interest. The lack of …
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Book Review: American Hippo by Sarah Gailey
Book #238 of 2020: American Hippo by Sarah Gailey This volume collects two novellas that were previously published independently — but which I hadn’t read before — along with a pair of new short stories in the same setting. Together they present an alternate history of a nineteenth-century America populated by hippopotami, occupying roughly the …
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Book Review: The Tyrant Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson
Book #237 of 2020: The Tyrant Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson (The Masquerade #3) On balance I think this latest Baru Cormorant sequel is probably an improvement over the previous volume, but it’s still nowhere near as electrifying as the original novel. The more fantastical additions like self-aware cancers continue to not quite work for …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 