Book #130 of 2020: Click Here to Start by Denis Markell I like how this middle-grade adventure novel manages to educate readers about America’s Japanese internment camps while maintaining its lightweight tone, but the characters make a few too many lucky guesses that happen to pan out, especially for a treasure hunt that’s supposed to …
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TV #20 of 2020: The Good Wife, season 2 This legal drama’s sophomore outing is even more fun and confident than its initial run, deftly mixing interesting weekly court cases with some enjoyable political intrigue (both in law firm maneuvering and the actual district attorney’s race). We do spend a little too much time on …
Book #129 of 2020: The Winner’s Curse by Marie Rutkoski (The Winner’s Trilogy #1) I picked up this book on the strength of author Marie Rutkoski’s later novel The Midnight Lie, which features a different cast in a different area of the same fantasy setting (sort of like the relationship between the Grisha trilogy and …
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Book #128 of 2020: Darius the Great Is Not Okay by Adib Khorram (Darius The Great #1) A charming YA novel about an American teenager traveling to his family’s home in Iran for the first time, rich in #ownvoices details drawn from debut author Adib Khorram’s mixed-race Persian heritage and struggles with mental health. (In …
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Book #127 of 2020: The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings #1) As a foundational text of the fantasy genre that’s inspired countless homages and knock-offs — and as a product of the mid-twentieth century — you might expect The Lord of the Rings to seem generic …
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Book #126 of 2020: The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale This 2017 tract has a provocative title, but it provides ample data supporting its revolutionary stance. Although not every reader will agree with sociologist Alex S. Vitale’s ultimate conclusion that police systems should be abolished entirely, anyone involved in a discussion of potential …
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Book #125 of 2020: Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks I enjoy the middle of this historical fiction piece, but it’s a little slow to start and goes somewhat off the rails by the end. Still, the core of the plot — about the true case of a 17th-century British village whose residents chose to …
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Book #124 of 2020: Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson The twists in this mystery thriller make it hard to discuss without spoilers, but they don’t always land satisfyingly for me as a reader. There are also some pacing issues about when certain revelations come to light, and a few instances of characters not asking …
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Book #123 of 2020: Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein Author Alexander Weinstein has a real talent for thinking up interestingly disturbing sci-fi premises based on new and emerging technologies, like the parents in the title story who have to delete their digital offspring after a malware infection or the couple from “Openness” …
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Book #122 of 2020: Clique Bait by Ann Valett This high school revenge novel is lightweight but fun, playing out vaguely along the lines of Mean Girls (or Hannah Capin’s recent Foul is Fair, minus that book’s heavy-handed Shakespearean conceit). A teenage nobody infiltrates the popular kids with ulterior motives to take them down, gets …
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