Trafalgar and Boone in the Drowned Necropolis by Geonn Cannon My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book continues on from the last one, but the author does a good job of catching readers up. If you like a Victorian era archaeological adventure story, you can do much worse than this. It works well and…

Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir My rating: 4 of 5 stars Well, that was certainly something. Tamsyn Muir seems to have created, with this series, a true experiment in making a genre book more about the journey than the destination. This is the second book in which almost nothing happens for most of the…

Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast by Robin McKinley My rating: 4 of 5 stars My utter enjoyment of this book is inexplicable to me. The subtitle says that it’s a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, but McKinley doesn’t change too much from the original tale. Mostly she makes…

Calamity by Brandon Sanderson My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is a perfect conclusion to the trilogy. Sanderson does a good job extending out everyone’s character growth and the natural progression of the story. I don’t remember if, while reading the earlier books in the trilogy, I made the leap of Calamity as a…

Nightmare Magazine, issue 120 by John Joseph Adams My rating: 4 of 5 stars Once again I bought an issue of Nightmare Magazine to share the stories with my wife. The descriptions on the site seemed interesting and, indeed, they were. The description that got me to buy it was for the short story Concerning…

Let’s Talk About Hard Things by Anna Sale My rating: 4 of 5 stars A well-written and well-narrated book that’s just on this side of a self-help book. There is some advice, but it’s really mostly a series of vignettes that illustrate some points the author wants to make as well as showing that there…

Nightmare Magazine 49: October 2016. People of Colo(u)r Destroy Horror! Special Issue by Silvia Moreno-Garcia My rating: 4 of 5 stars I got this to read together with my wife who lives horror I ended up really enjoying most of the stories. Wish you were here – the history of a revolution and civil war…

The Man Who Could Be King: A Novel by John Ripin Miller My rating: 4 of 5 stars I got this book for free as part of the Kindle First Reads program I like to geek out on many things and one of those is history. Thanks to books like 1776 I already knew that…

Hogfather by Terry Pratchett My rating: 1 of 5 stars This is my second time reading this book. Rating went from 2 stars to 1 star. I didn’t like this book all that much when I first read it and I liked it even less this time around. I don’t like The Auditors as Death’s…

Annihilation Aria by Michael R. Underwood My rating: 3 of 5 stars I don’t know if it’s from reading this book right after Becky Chambers Wayfarers series, but this book did not pull me in the way the other series did. It was fine, but I just finished it more out of obligation to finish…

The Breaking Light by Heather Hansen My rating: 1 of 5 stars I got this book as part of Amazon’s Kindle First Reads where Prime members get a free ebook from a selection of ebooks each month I didn’t like this book for 2 reasons: 1. It’s derivative in all the ways that don’t work…

The Boys, Volume 3: Good For The Soul by Garth Ennis My rating: 2 of 5 stars Things are a little less profane and a little more of the story gets revealed. Maybe Ennis felt he had to be edgy in the first 2 volumes just to shock an audience into interest? That said, there’s…

The Boys, Volume 2: Get Some by Garth Ennis My rating: 1 of 5 stars This continues the feeling that Ennis is simply trying to be as profane as possible just because. The first story revolves around a super hero (kind of like a Batman crossed with Iron Man) who suddenly is unable to keep…

Jumanji by Chris Van Allsburg My rating: 3 of 5 stars Interestingly enough, I heard an audiobook of this picture book. It was on sale recently at libro.fm and I was curious about how a picture book became one of the first live action/adventure movies I saw as a kid. This book basically reads as…

Phenomenons: Every Human Creature by Michael Jan Friedman My rating: 4 of 5 stars What if you took Wild Cards and started off from a more modern place than the 1980s. What would you have? Well, for one thing, less gay slurs and stereotypes. For another, starting with a less sleazy, more modern NYC. I…