TV #2 of 2019: Orange Is the New Black, season 6 Moving the action over to the long-mentioned Maximum Security branch is a reasonable way for this prison show to keep itself fresh (and cut loose some of the huge cast it’s assembled over the years), but the writers have made some odd choices about …
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Book #11 of 2019: An Excess Male by Maggie Shen King There’s a solid dystopian premise for this story of a near-future China where genetic engineering and a cultural preference for sons has given rise to marriages of multiple men sharing the same wife, but all four of the viewpoint characters — a 40-year-old bachelor, …
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Book #10 of 2019: Fortunately, the Milk by Neil Gaiman This is a goofy little shaggy-dog story, made up of the series of outlandish excuses a father offers to his children for why he was late picking up some milk from the store. (And I do mean “little” — at an audiobook length of just …
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Book #9 of 2019: An Ocean of Minutes by Thea Lim A bittersweet sci-fi take on the immigrant / refugee experience, this debut novel from author Thea Lim imagines a world in which people can enter into indentured servitude and time-travel to when their services are needed, generally to pay off a loved one’s medical …
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Book #8 of 2019: A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Thorns and Roses #1) I’m pretty underwhelmed by this retelling of Beauty and the Beast by way of Twilight, which somehow captures some of the worst impulses of both those narratives. There’s no real build-up to the heroine’s …
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Book #7 of 2019: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon This book is hard to summarize without giving away meaningful plot events, but I definitely enjoy the way that its story unfolds. It’s something of a Great American Novel, one of those attempts to distill the experience of a particular place …
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TV #1 of 2019: Friday Night Lights, season 2 After a remarkably grounded debut season — one that I called “practically flawless” in my review — the follow-up for this high school football series tips way over from drama into melodrama. I can only imagine that network interference is to blame for the sudden tonal …
Book #6 of 2019: Stranger Things: Worlds Turned Upside Down by Gina McIntyre It turns out that the ‘behind-the-scenes’ information promised herein is all pretty surface-level, and the tone is sometimes distractingly twee, as when the characters are described like they’re from a Dungeons & Dragons campaign and not a TV show. (“Joyce Byers. Abilities: …
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Book #5 of 2019: A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza This #ownvoices novel is a beautiful portrait of a Muslim Indian-American family, and a great example of how a skilled writer can situate intense drama in the quiet relationships of a household without resorting to any larger-than-life action or melodrama. The struggles of …
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Book #4 of 2019: Archenemies by Marissa Meyer (Renegades #2) I like this superhero spy sequel much more than its predecessor, but I’m still struggling with some of the basic concepts of this series. Nova’s hatred of the Renegades — which continues to be a bizarre name for an official government peacekeeping force — has …
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