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 a less whimsical, less rhyme-y version of The Cat in the Hat. The kids are left alone (oh, the freedom of kids in kid-lit) and they find Jumanji at the park. The parents leave them with the admonition of “not one thing out of place” because they’re coming back with more adults for an adult party. The game has the same effects in the book as it has in the movie.

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 Kickstarted (at the level to get a Tuckerization) because I was a big fan of Mary Fan’s writing. As I mention below, during the Red Sky in Mourning review, my only real criticism of this shared world anthology is that the stories seem too short. Maybe it’s something about the way these authors write compared to the Wild Cards authors, but I feel like I’m just getting into the grooves of the stories in this anthology before they’re over. They’re currently working on a second anthology and I’m hoping things can expand a bit the second time out. I also think it would be neat to have them maybe have tighter intertwined stories like Wilds Cards 2 and 3. Or maybe a full-length story like later Wild Cards volumes. If you’re a fan of superhero comics, but wouldn’t mind experiencing it as prose, this is a good anthology for you.

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

We have reached the end of the Wayfarers series. As has been the case throughout the series, this is less about a specific plot than it is about getting to spend time with the characters that inhabit Chambers’ Wayfarers universe. As soon as I heard the prologue (for I was listening to the audiobook version) I had a strong suspicion this was going to be a Closed Circle plot. This suspicion was strengthened when it was revealed that we’d have a bunch of different aliens that, if it WAS a Closed Circle plot, would be stuck depending on each other and having to work past each others’ differences.

Set My Heart to Five by Simon Stephenson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is my favorite book of 2022 so far. I don’t remember what it was about the write-up on the Big Idea section of Scalzi’s blog that caused me to add this book to my TBR pile, but I’m glad I did.

As the description of the book says, our main character is a bot who suddenly finds himself experiencing emotions. What made the book an almost non-stop read for me was the voice in which the story is told. It’s as if Jared is telling us, conversationally, the story of what happened to him. To imagine the tone of this narration, imagine if Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation and the alien from Resident Alien were combined and then wrote their descriptions of humanity and all the weird things we do as we navigate the world. One example:

Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Chambers continues to make each book in this “series” a standalone that’s tangentially related to the other books. The second book continued with a couple characters from the first book, but otherwise did not interact with them at all. This book is related to the others in that one of the protagonists we follow is the sister of the first book’s captain. It doesn’t appear to have any connections to the second book unless I missed it.

All the Paths of Shadow by Frank Tuttle

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I got this book as part of a StoryBundle bundle, so I didn’t specifically buy this book because I wanted to read it. It turned out to be a nice book in a steampunk-lite second world. (Steampunk-lite in that there are dirigibles. And it’s a Victorian setting. But deep into the book you find out that most of the stuff that would traditionally be explained to run on steam are actually running on mundane magic spells)

As Yet Unsent by Tamsyn Muir

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A bit bummed this wasn’t included in the audiobook of Harrow the Ninth. That said, it was easy to find on Tor.com.

As you find out near the last third or so of Harrow the Ninth, some of the survivors of the first book have been busy with a project of their own. This short story is a bit of a bridge that helps us see how they got there. There are still a lot of unanswered questions (perhaps until Nona comes out this Sept), but it does fill in a bit of the info. More interesting to me is the character study aspect of the story.

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is both a follow-on to the previous one that picks up right where it left off and can be enjoyed as a standalone book. That’s quite a magic trick that Becky Chambers plays there, but it works very well. Essentially, the end of the first book necessitates the characters in this book leaving all the other characters alone and not really interacting with them. It’s also a very different kind of story. While The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is basically Firefly, with our crew going from planet to planet having vaguely linked adventures, this book all takes place in one place.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If, like me, Firefly’s untimely demise has left a hole in your SFF heart ever since you discovered it (it was DVDs for me back when Netflix was about DVDs), then this book is probably perfect for you. The big difference is that the crew of the Wayfarer is not escaping the law, they’re more like contractors for hire. In this case they’ll help create a wormhole for you so that you can get from point a to point b in hours instead of years or millenia. The captain wants to go for big government contracts so he hires Rosemary, our new-to-space character so that the reader has someone that’s learning along with them.

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Whenever I heard about this series, there are two things I heard about it:

1. “Studio Ghibli really screwed up their adapdation”
2. “Harry Potter is a huge ripoff of this book and I don’t believe that JK Rowling had never heard of it when she wrote Harry Potter.”

I can’t speak to the first one. But the second one is WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY overblown. At least, based off of this first book in the series they are almost nothing alike. I saw MUCH, MUCH greater similarities between Battle Royale and The Hunger Games. For starters, the first Harry Potter book is a children’s book (or at most a Middle Grade book) written in a very British kid’s book sort of plot. And as a whole it’s more of a children’s boarding school genre than fantasy or magic for large portions of various books (except the last one or two). By contrast, UKLG was tasked to write what we would now call a YA book. There is no focus on the school except as a setting for our young protagonist to act like a young man and be pressured by his rival into doing something stupid. We then spend the rest of the book with Ged (our protagonist) as a young man - they may have said his age at one point, but basically 17-19 years old or thereabouts. It has nothing in common with HP other than the fact that the main character attends a wizarding school.