Book #128 of 2021: Rolling in the Deep by Mira Grant (Rolling in the Deep #1) A short but effective creature feature, following a deep-sea expedition looking to capture or manufacture footage of mermaids for a schlocky TV production. The last thing they expect is to find the real animals who inspired the myths, nor …
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Book #129 of 2019: Kingdom of Needle and Bone by Mira Grant Although this novella has an important message about vaccination and herd immunity, the characters and the plot feel pretty abbreviated. That’s partly an artifact of length, but author Mira Grant — who also publishes under the name Seanan McGuire — has been able …
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Book #80 of 2019: A People’s Future of the United States edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams I expected to really love this anthology, based on its foreword and stated goal of bringing a Howard Zinn recentering of marginalized perspectives to the world of tomorrow. The authors and characters include women, LGBTQ people, …
Book #53 of 2019: In an Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children #4) I’ve generally enjoyed this series of novellas about children longing to escape back to other realms, but this latest installment doesn’t quite carry the same magic for me. I feel as though author Seanan McGuire never really makes the case for …
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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 #151 of 2018: Star Wars: Canto Bight by Saladin Ahmed, Rae Carson, Mira Grant, and John Jackson Miller Four loosely connected Star Wars novellas, all set in the decadent casino city from The Last Jedi. They’re generally solid but unremarkable little sci-fi action tales, entertaining but adding little to our understanding of Canto Bight …
Book #123 of 2018: Blackout by Mira Grant (Newsflesh #3) I’ve enjoyed Mira Grant’s bloggers-fighting-zombies trilogy far more than I ever expected to, but the plot in this final volume is pretty slow and coincidence-heavy compared to what’s come before. One character spends the entire first half of the book quarantined in a CDC hospital, …
Book #153 of 2017: Deadline by Mira Grant (Newsflesh #2) Mira Grant’s bloggers-fighting-zombies novel Feed was a surprising amount of fun, but this sequel surpasses it in just about every dimension. Partly that’s because the team has matured, so they seem less like teens on Xanga and more like real investigative journalists, and partly it’s …
Book #124 of 2017: Feed by Mira Grant (Newsflesh #1) Once you set aside this book’s ludicrous premise – not the zombie uprising, but the idea that independent teen bloggers represent a trusted news source – it ends up being a lot of fun. The story is set several decades after the undead outbreak, and …
Book #39 of 2017: Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children #1) Seanan McGuire isn’t the first author to wonder what happens to the children who have visited a fantasy world after their return, but she brings a rare warmth to this story of a boarding school built to shelter such travelers. McGuire’s …
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