Andrea Phillips: The Daring Adventures of Captain Lucy Smokeheart (so far)
I wouldn’t normally write about a novel that’s half-complete, but I just tore through the available chapters of this serial novel-in-progress like a bag of movie popcorn, and this seems like a great...
View ArticleTim Leong: Super Graphic – A Visual Guide to the Comic Book Universe
Imagine, if you well, a Venn diagram, with circles for people who: * like mainstream comic books * like indie/alternative comic books * are interested in information design * like infographics/”chart...
View ArticleApology; Ann Aguirre: Wanderlust
There’s been mess of foamy-mouthedness around the Science Fiction Writers of America association over the past couple weeks. I won’t link to the petition that jump-started it, but it basically asserts...
View ArticleGilbert Sorrentino: Lunar Follies
One of the interesting things about Gilbert Sorrentino’s Lunar Follies is how little I can say about it, despite its formal structure, without departing for the subjective. It consists of 53 brief...
View ArticleMark Z Danielweski: House of Leaves
House of Leaves, is more or less, a purported transcription by a guy named Johnny Truant of a manuscript he finds in a dead man’s apartment. He gradually becomes convinced the work of transcribing it...
View ArticleRainbow Rowell: Fangirl
Fangirl has a soundbite to make it easy to describe: it’s the YA novel about the girl who writes fanfic. Like most soundbites this is terribly and unfairly reductive; it’s about a whole lot of other...
View ArticleThe Girl Who Would Be King
The Girl Who Would be King uses alternating first-person narration to tell the stories of two young women who discover that they have unusual abilities, their struggles to understand and adapt to them,...
View ArticleE. Nesbit: Five Children and It
I learned about E. Nesbit and Five Children and It from Delia Sherman’s The Freedom Maze, which predisposed me to wonder if the reason I didn’t know Nesbit’s name while I did know the names Baum,...
View ArticleJohn Green: The Fault in Our Stars
I read The Fault in Our Stars with no clear idea of what it was about, because several people whose judgment I trusted said I really ought to. If I had known what it was about, I doubt I would’ve read...
View ArticleNaomi Mitchison: Travel Light
“Travel light” is an exhortation protagonist Halla hears at one point in this singular slim book; it’s a tactic that enables her to travel farther and faster than she otherwise might, not being unduly...
View ArticleHolly Messinger: The Curse of Jacob Tracy
Reminds me almost equally of TV’s Deadwood and Angel – impressively researched post-Civil War setting with a complex supernatural ecosystem in a series of nearly self-contained novellas that gradually...
View ArticleSara Benincasa: DC Trip
liked this better after I stopped worrying about the geographical inaccuracies and just went with the full-on zany. the framing device didn’t work for me, and some of the backstory digressions seemed a...
View ArticleJonathan Howard: Carter & Lovecraft
Entertaining collision of hardboiled PI and Lovecraft ’s Mythos, with a dash of a metaphysics/ metatextualism. Already impatient for sequel.
View ArticleJennifer Weiner: The Guy Not Taken
I liked this short story collection much better than “Good in Bed.”
View ArticleSteven Erikson: Willful Child
I thought this started out very strong, but even though its episodic, aimless nature is explicitly part of the point, I was ready for it to be over well before it was.
View ArticleLeigh Jenkins: Catherine the Inquisitor
Interesting, if not always compelling, alternate Tudor history tale. sometimes felt like Jenkins was more ingested in showing off research than telling a story, but I still had some problems...
View ArticleAlyssa Cole: A Princess in Theory
When Naledi gets exaggeratedly polite emails about being a long-lost royal bride of an African nation she very reasonably assumes they’re a phishing/identity theft attempt, but it’s all true, and “A...
View ArticleCourtney Milan: After the Wedding
I very much appreciate how Courtney Milan inverts and subverts familiar romance tropes, and “After the Wedding” is no exception: it literally starts with a wedding, in which the principals are forced...
View ArticleCatherynne M Valente: Space Opera
I loved this book so much it’s hard for me to write coherently about it. The language: dense, rich, vivid musical. The premise: yes, Eurovision in space, played for laughs, but not JUST for laughs,...
View ArticleEliza Madison: Eight Naughty Nights
I really enjoyed the many “Star Wars: references and a guest appearance from my favorite feature of Milwaukee airport. Also thought the family drama and not-always-graceful coping with grief provided a...
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