Book #246 of 2019: Hope and Other Punchlines by Julie Buxbaum I don’t read much Young Adult literature that isn’t science-fiction or fantasy, but I found this to be a sweet and poignant little story about a pair of teens each haunted by September 11th. Hope was a one-year-old caught in an iconic photograph being …
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Book #245 of 2019: The Pursuit of William Abbey by Claire North Claire North’s latest supernatural thriller imagines a late-Victorian protagonist doomed to speak the truth in people’s hearts while the ghost of a boy he saw killed moves inexorably towards him. The closer the spirit gets, the less William Abbey can resist his compulsion, …
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Book #244 of 2019: The Gentleman’s Guide to Getting Lucky by Mackenzi Lee (Montague Siblings #1.5) This midquel novella takes place soon after the first Montague Siblings book, and I don’t want to give too much away about the ending to that one for anyone who hasn’t read it yet. But it’s another fun outing …
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Book #243 of 2019: Full Throttle by Joe Hill I don’t really know what to do with this latest Joe Hill collection. My average rating over its thirteen short stories is a 3-out-of-5 stars, but the most common score that I’d give to the individual entries would be a 2. Overall, I guess it’s a …
Book #242 of 2019: Children of Virtue and Vengeance by Tomi Adeyemi (Legacy of Orïsha #2) Plotwise, this novel is a big step forward from last year’s Children of Blood and Bone, which had the same interesting Yoruba-inspired mythos but told a fairly standard rendition of the hero’s journey monomyth within that setting. (Destroyed home, …
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Book #241 of 2019: Call Down the Hawk by Maggie Stiefvater (The Dreamer Trilogy #1) Author Maggie Stiefvater’s excellent Raven Cycle left plenty of open ends for potential further exploration, and this first volume in its sequel series capably picks up one of the more compelling ones: the ability of certain characters to bring forth …
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Book #240 of 2019: Disney’s Land: Walt Disney and the Invention of the Amusement Park That Changed the World by Richard Snow This is an informative history of the creation of Disneyland, with a few significant caveats. First is the scope: author Richard Snow mentions that his subject was intended by Walt Disney to be …
Book #239 of 2019: Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon Gentlemen of the Road (working title, per the author’s afterword: Jews with Swords) is an exciting, swashbuckling adventure through 10th-century eastern Europe, and definitely one of the rare novellas that doesn’t feel at all abbreviated. Michael Chabon excels at bringing this historical period to …
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Book #238 of 2019: Gwendy’s Magic Feather by Richard Chizmar (The Button Box #2) The first novella in this series was a collaboration between authors Richard Chizmar and Stephen King, and although the execution was a little uneven, I mostly liked the concept. But I just don’t get this follow-up solo venture from Chizmar, set …
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Movie #13 of 2019: Veronica Mars (2014) I still haven’t seen the new Hulu revival of Veronica Mars, but my rewatch has finally reached this equally-unexpected reunion movie that came out in 2014, seven years after the original show went off the air. I think I’m a little more charitable towards the project than I …
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