Book #36 of 2019: Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children #3) I always worry that these novellas about children who miss their adopted fantasylands are going to get formulaic and stale, but somehow author Seanan McGuire keeps coming up with new variations that I find endlessly enchanting. I’m not sure if this …
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Book #35 of 2019: Hey Ladies! by Michelle Markowitz and Caroline Moss This novel has a razor-thin plot and some truly ridiculous millennial caricatures, but it’s kept me laughing almost despite myself. I also really like the cleverness of the epistolary format, which tells the story entirely as an ongoing email thread (with occasional text …
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Book #34 of 2019: All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai The idea that our version of 2016 is a dystopia caused by an errant time-traveler is a great premise, but I find the execution here to be severely underbaked. This is a curiously apolitical book — it could easily have been set anytime in …
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Book #33 of 2019: Rebel of the Sands by Alwyn Hamilton (Rebel of the Sands #1) Theoretically, this should be a wildly fresh Young Adult fantasy novel, with a setting that blends Middle-Eastern mythology with a gunslinging western. In practice, however, it leans far more towards the latter influence than the former, and the worldbuilding …
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Book #31 of 2019: The Black Echo by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #1) I don’t read (or watch) a lot of police procedurals, but having enjoyed the TV adaptation of this book series, I figured I should check out some of the original source material. And I’m glad that I finally did, because this first …
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Book #32 of 2019: The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present by David Treuer As the title suggests, this is a book that’s very much in conversation with Dee Brown’s classic Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which I regret to say I haven’t yet read. Like that earlier volume, …
Book #30 of 2019: Kingdom of the Blazing Phoenix by Julie C. Dao (Rise of the Empress #2) The first book in this East Asian-inspired fantasy duology remains a fascinating look at a complex antiheroine, but author Julie C. Dao makes the disappointing choice for its sequel to reduce that character to a more conventional …
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Book #29 of 2019: The Hollow of Fear by Sherry Thomas (Lady Sherlock #3) With this third novel playing out along similar lines to its shaky predecessors, I think I’ve reached the end of my patience with the Lady Sherlock series. There are some strong character elements that I like in its genderbent version of …
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TV #7 of 2019: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, season 4 This series has always been an interesting blend of over-the-top 30 Rock absurdism and heightened-yet-thoughtful portrayal of abuse and recovery, but this final season struggles with that balance and regularly comes across as glibber than I remember the show being in the past. It’s a bit …
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Book #28 of 2019: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik This pastoral winter fantasy novel initially seems like it will be a straightforward retelling of the Rumpelstiltskin myth, and I was already drawn in by the idea of setting that story in a medieval Slavic kingdom with a Jewish heroine. As it develops, however, author Naomi …
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