Book #15 of 2024: Book of Signs by John Peel (Diadem #2) This sequel retains the juvenile feel befitting its middle-grade audience, but it’s enough of an improvement over the previous volume that I’ll bump my rating up from three stars to four. The story is more straightforward, with a minimum degree of recap for …
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Book Review: What the Dead Know: Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator by Barbara Butcher
Book #14 of 2024: What the Dead Know: Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator by Barbara Butcher A morbidly fascinating look at an unusual job, but a bit too bogged down in unrelated asides on author Barbara Butcher’s personal life, especially near the end. (A little bit of memoir in such …
Book Review: The Woman in Me by Britney Spears
Book #13 of 2024: The Woman in Me by Britney Spears Three-and-a-half stars, rounded up. The personal story that Britney Spears has to tell is a moving one, centering the pain she felt over decades of mistreatment in the music industry and the public eye. Between releasing a succession of chart-topping hits, she was emotionally …
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Book Review: Through the Groves by Anne Hull
Book #12 of 2024: Through the Groves by Anne Hull In this memoir, author Anne Hull paints an evocative picture of her childhood in central Florida — one I found poignantly familiar to my own, despite growing up three decades later and about 100 miles east of her. The orange groves already giving way to …
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Book Review: Derring-Do for Beginners by Victoria Goddard
Book #11 of 2024: Derring-Do for Beginners by Victoria Goddard (The Red Company #1) In the backstory to The Hands of the Emperor and the rest of author Victoria Goddard’s sprawling Nine Worlds fantasy saga, the Red Company was a roving band of friends whose infamous exploits have long since passed into legend. This prequel …
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Book Review: Beholder by Ryan La Sala
Book #10 of 2024: Beholder by Ryan La Sala At first glance, it seems like this fantasy horror novel should have too much going on its plot to be remotely effective: an orphaned teen protagonist with the magical ability to see backwards in time through mirrors and other reflective surfaces, a Lovecraftian entity lurking inside …
Book Review: Book of Names by John Peel
Book #9 of 2024: Book of Names by John Peel (Diadem #1) A solid launch to a fun middle-grade fantasy series about a trio of kids drawn from separate worlds into a magical mystery linking them together. The worst thing about this first title is that it burns through so many of its ideas so …
Book Review: Endless Night by Agatha Christie
Book #8 of 2024: Endless Night by Agatha Christie This is not a mystery novel, although there’s a major death fairly late in the text and a subsequent twist that causes the reader to reevaluate what we’ve heard / understood about the story before that point. It could perhaps be seen as what would happen …
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Book Review: Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View: Return of the Jedi edited by Tom Hoeler
Book #7 of 2024: Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View: Return of the Jedi edited by Tom Hoeler Another batch of 40 stories to celebrate the 40th anniversary of a Star Wars movie, this one centered around the background characters and/or events of Episode VI, Return of the Jedi. Some of these entries …
TV Review: Fargo, season 5
TV #3 of 2024: Fargo, season 5 I like sporadic elements of this season of Fargo. The gas station shoot-out in episode one is a remarkably tense action sequence, and Jon Hamm and Juno Temple are both acting up a storm with those accents. As ever for this anthology series, the midwestern pleasantries masking dark …
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