TV #52 of 2022: Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, season 1 Despite carrying the novelist’s name prominently appended to the title, this is one of those curious adaptations that alters or completely jettisons nearly all of its source material, for better or for worse. The difference is immediately apparent, since in the original book …
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Book #167 of 2022: A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin (Earthsea #1) Author Ursula K. Le Guin’s first Earthsea novel — following two short stories in the setting she’d already published elsewhere — recounts the early life of its titular character, whom we are repeatedly told will someday be the most powerful …
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Book #166 of 2022: A Pocket Full of Rye by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #7) Another standard and somewhat forgettable / interchangeable Agatha Christie mystery, taking its title from the old nursery rhyme about the four and twenty blackbirds. As usual with this author, those lines of doggerel are soon linked with a series of …
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Book #165 of 2022: Aviva vs. the Dybbuk by Mari Lowe A dybbuk is a ghoulish spirit from Jewish folklore, traditionally said to be haunting a person or place due to unfinished business at the creature’s time of death. In this middle-grade novel, there’s such an entity lurking around the mikvah (a ritual bath site) …
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Book #164 of 2022: Greywaren by Maggie Stiefvater (The Dreamer Trilogy #3) I’ve been steadily losing patience with this Raven Cycle spinoff from the start of the second volume on, and unfortunately, nothing in this final novel (which appears to close out the entire franchise, at least for now) does anything to reverse that trend. …
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TV #51 of 2022: Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi, season 1 I don’t quite see the point of this latest Star Wars anthology series — and I’m not sure that Disney does either, given their decision to drop the entire first season in the middle of the ongoing Andor release schedule. Theoretically I think …
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Book #163 of 2022: Amari and the Great Game by B. B. Alston (Supernatural Investigations #2) It remains hard to avoid Harry Potter comparisons in discussing this middle-grade fantasy series, but this second volume is just as engaging as the first and continues to put an original spin on some common genre tropes shared between …
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Book #162 of 2022: Road of Bones by Christopher Golden [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.] The atmosphere of this horror novel draws a reader in immediately, well before any hint of the supernatural appears. Set in the far north of Siberia, one of the coldest places on earth that’s nevertheless inhabited, it …
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Book #161 of 2022: A Mirror Mended by Alix E. Harrow (Fractured Fables #2) I enjoyed A Spindle Splintered for its fresh take on fairy tales (by means of a terminally-ill young queer woman from our world discovering she’s an iteration of the Sleeping Beauty trope and then traveling throughout the multiverse rescuing some of …
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Book #160 of 2022: Fair Warning by Michael Connelly (Jack McEvoy #3) This 2020 novel is the third title to center on reporter Jack McEvoy, an otherwise peripheral figure in author Michael Connelly’s broad Harry Bosch / Mickey Haller franchise. He’s always an interesting change of pace from those more frequent protagonists, and I pictured …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more