Book #137 of 2025: Firestorm by John Peel (2099 #6) After a couple weaker entries that passed without much action, the final volume of this middle-grade sci-fi series thankfully delivers with a bang. Everyone is scrambling to defeat the villain Devon’s terrorist threat to end all life on Earth (via a crashing ship full of …
Tag Archives: John Peel
Book Review: Meltdown by John Peel
Book #109 of 2025: Meltdown by John Peel (2099 #5) After a promising start, this middle-grade sci-fi series has stalled out in a major way, and I can only hope that the sixth and final volume manages to tap into that original sense of imaginative fun that propelled the earlier books. Just like in the …
Book Review: Revolution by John Peel
Book #88 of 2025: Revolution by John Peel (2099 #4) This middle-grade sci-fi series stalls out a bit here, though I’m hoping the final two volumes are able to recapture the original momentum and fun. (It’s been a quarter-century since my last read, so none of this is particularly clear in my memory.) The subplot …
Book Review: Traitor by John Peel
Book #72 of 2025: Traitor by John Peel (2099 #3) Another quick but propulsive adventure, bringing us to the halfway point of this middle-grade sci-fi series from 1999-2000. Our main hero Tristan begins this installment in police custody (thanks to innocently sharing identical DNA to his terrorist clone twin), and after dodging an attack from …
Book Review: Betrayal by John Peel
Book #36 of 2025: Betrayal by John Peel (2099 #2) A propulsive sequel that picks up right where the first installment of this middle-grade sci-fi series left off, with a doomsday computer virus ravaging all of New York City. It’s actually impressive how well author John Peel, writing in the 1990s and imagining a century …
Book Review: Doctor Who: Timewyrm: Genesys by John Peel
Book #31 of 2025: Doctor Who: Timewyrm: Genesys by John Peel (Virgin New Adventures #1) When Classic Doctor Who was canceled after its 26th season in 1989 — not that it was called Classic at the time — there was no expectation that the series would ever pick back up again on-screen. Virgin Publishing, running …
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Book Review: Doomsday by John Peel
Book #18 of 2025: Doomsday by John Peel (2099 #1) A neat teen sci-fi thriller that I can just vaguely remember reading in my youth. Since the series was written in 1999 and set a century later, I thought it would be entertaining to revisit now that we’re a quarter of the way there, to …
Book Review: Book of Games by John Peel
Book #76 of 2024: Book of Games by John Peel (Diadem #12) This novel is one of two that author John Peel self-published (in a single bound volume) to close out his long-running Diadem fantasy saga, but I really wish he hadn’t bothered. It’s an embarrassingly poor effort, riddled with typos, repetitive wording, and rather …
Book Review: Book of Time by John Peel
Book #70 of 2024: Book of Time by John Peel (Diadem #11) The middle-grade / YA Diadem line was released in waves under a succession of publishers: first Scholastic for the original six novels from 1997 to 1998, then Llewellyn (who gave the saga a temporary new subtitle of “Worlds of Magic”) for the next …
Book Review: Book of Doom by John Peel
Book #64 of 2024: Book of Doom by John Peel (Diadem: Worlds of Magic #10) This is the last of the second wave of author John Peel’s Diadem novels, the four published from 2005 to 2006 under Llewellyn (following the original six volumes put out by Scholastic from 1997 to 1998). It also functions as …
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