In 2001 I was an administrative assistant for the managers that oversaw the book buyers at Borders Books (may it rest in peace). One of the buyers thought I would like Kushiel’s Dart and recommended it. Once in my hands I couldn’t put it down, reading so fast that on subsequent readings I discovered whole paragraphs that had previously been skipped. It was completely different from any fantasy I had read before and quickly became one of my most recommended books to anyone who I thought […]
Not exactly a sequel
Daniel O’Malley’s first novel, The Rook, is easily one of my favorite and satisfying books I have read, so I made sure to add Stiletto to my must-read list. I read a few early reviews, so I wasn’t surprised by the fact that Stiletto isn’t a direct sequel to The Rook. In The Rook, we meet Rook Thomas right after she lost her memory and gained her powers. We get to know Thomas as she gets to understand herself. O’Malley crafted a near perfect fantasy thriller with The Rook, […]
A Woman Will Always Sacrifice Herself
I decided I would find a more obscure banned/challenged book for the bingo game and came across Daughter of the Forest, which was challenged in a Missouri high school in 2015 for the rape scene that happens about a third of the way into the book. Since the rest of the story is filled with violent warfare, torture, imprisonment, and an attempted witch burning, I found it ironic that the most unwholesome plot point to the challengers was the rape and subsequent PTSD our main character […]
A Heavyweight Collection
I began reading comic books in the early nineties. There was no local comic shop in my tiny town, but I was able to use a mail-order service, and a few weeks later a package would arrive at home with my new issues, catalog, and if I was lucky a free promotional comic. One such time, I received a copy of Bone #1 (8th printing), and I was transported into the adventures of the Bone cousins. All those years ago I was able to read […]
Is it a letdown if you expect it to be bad?
These were never going to be high quality books. I’ve read and reviewed the first two and I know this and yet somehow this finale bummed me out with its not-good-ness. It wasn’t that I had high hopes, it’s that I had low expectations and it still fell short. I finished Hero at the Fall less than a week ago and I’ve already forgotten what happened except that it all mostly worked out in the end (go figure. Very few books in this age range get […]
The author is inadvertently his own villain
This is another one that’s just kind of … there. The author fancies himself a standup comedian and the book was self-published, which should really tell you all you need to know. It’s not offensively bad (for the most part, there are some HILARIOUS stereotypes about women, let me tell you) it’s just blah. It’s a book that is meant to combine magic and technology and it just kind of flops there and looks dead. Here’s an anecdote that pretty well describes the book and […]
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