We all know this story. We’ve seen it acted out with Muppets, or Mickey Mouse, or monstrosities that reside in the Uncanny Valley of Doom. We had the story read to us when we were children, and grow up to read it to our own brood. It’s been adapted numerous times for every medium. It is as ubiquitous as Shakespeare, and as indelibly tied to the Christmas season, ironically, as Capitalism itself. Which makes it almost impossible to review. It’s impossible to look at this […]
A Modern Pagan Folk Story
A recent article in The Atlantic argues that British children’s stories are better than American ones, because the British often tap into fantasy and paganism in a way that really captures a child’s imagination. The heroes of these stories are not setting out to learn a moral, but are “trickster[s] who triumph through wit and skill.” Well in the case, Good Omens is the story of that British child growing up and viewing religion and fantasy with common sense and a deep understanding of humanity. And that child […]
Let’s Do The Time Warp
Who among us has not thought about what we would tell our younger self if we could go back in time? If we’re honest, we acknowledge that our younger self, after getting over disbelief and the resulting freak out, would not listen to a damned thing we had to say. That’s the challenge for Cal Leandros in Nevermore, the tenth installment in Rob Thurman’s urban fantasy series, and it goes about as well as you might expect.
A Liar walks into a Castle and finds a Monty Python Sketch
I really enjoyed this book – until the end. It has a very whimsical nature and what reads like (in my mind, at least) a very dry, British humor. The audiobook of this should be a gas. I love the way that DeWitt has written the dialogue between the characters. It has a very cinematic flow that made it a joy to read, all arched eyebrows and nuanced looks. While not a capital-F Fantasy, this is still sort of in that realm, but shoulders into […]
Just another paint-by-numbers Nora Roberts
Oh boy. I did not finish this book. I hate not finishing books – for a reference point, I even completed Fifty Shades of Grey, as much as I wanted to hurl it into the commode and flush it. I started reading when I was two and a half, and I ran through all the “age-appropriate” books in my house and in the local library of my small Indian hometown by the time I was 10. So through my tweens and teens, I read the […]
A saddening letdown with a few bright spots
I didn’t know anything about this series but when I saw it on the shelf I got very excited. Unfortunately, the graphic novel did not live up to any of my expectations. Slapdash and far too cutesy for my liking, I was hoping for grand mythmaking on the level of Gaiman’s Sandman series but it just wasn’t up to the task. There IS a good story in here but the writers and artists just couldn’t pull it together.