The 2025 Library Mouse Literary Awards

Behold, it is I, Horus Sam the Library Mouse, with the final post of the year of 2025. Continuing the tradition begun in 2024, I present to you the second annual Library Mouse Literary Awards!

Some new awards have been added. Some old awards will not be returning, mostly because I haven't read anything that merited them. Some returning awards have been renamed. But without further ado, I present:

The Library Mouse Literary Award for Absolute Hilarity

Winner: What If? by Randall Munroe

This award is for books that are absolutely hilarious. What If? fits that bill perfectly.

The Library Mouse Literary Award for Having a Really Great Cover

Winner: Winter's Maiden by Morgan L. Busse

Runners-up: Among Trees by FJRD Interactive, Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett

This award is given to books (or, in Among Trees' case, videogames) with covers I really like. This isn't judging a book by its cover, because I'm judging the covers on their own merits.

The Library Mouse Literary Award for Graphic Violence

Winner: All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

This award is given to the most graphically violent book I've read this year. All Quiet on the Western Front may be an important book, but it's not a pleasant book.

The Library Mouse Literary Award for Spookiness

Winner: Lockwood & Co. series by Jonathan Stroud (Book 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Runner-up: Apocalypse Taco by Nathan Hale

This award is given out for spookiness. I read more spooky things this year than I did last year.

The Library Mouse Literary Award for Best Portal Fantasy

Winner: The Chronicles of Narnia series by C. S. Lewis (Book 2, 4, 5, 3, 6, 1, 7)

Runners-up: Cleopatra in Space series by Mike Maihack, InterWorld by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves

This award is for books about someone from one world being transported into another. It was formerly known as "The Library Mouse Literary Award for Best Isekai" before I learned that "isekai" is actually a term for a specific Japanese thing, not just general getting-yeeted-into-another-world.

The Library Mouse Literary Award for Teaching Me Math

Winner: Saxon Algebra 1/2: An Incremental Development (Third Edition) by John H. Saxon, Jr.

While the actual plot of this book remains hotly debated among its fans, it seems to be weirdly good at teaching math as a side effect.

The Library Mouse Literary Award for Best Fictional Religion

Winner: Deathless Beast by Andrew D. Meredith

This award is for the book with the best made-up religion in it. (Not best fictional portrayal of a real religion; this has to be a religion it made up out of whole cloth.)

The Library Mouse Literary Award for Making Me Want to Yell at Characters

Winner: The Wondrous World of Violet Barnaby by Jenny Lundquist

Runner-up: Wicked (2024)

Violet Barnaby spends pretty much the entire book holding back the urge to shout at people and tell them exactly what she thinks of them. It's very effective at invoking that urge in readers (i.e. me). And Wicked contains Fiyero; need I say more?

The Library Mouse Literary Award for Explaining Things

Winner: Thing Explainer by Randall Munroe

This award is for books that explain things. Thing Explainer explains a lot of things.

The Library Mouse Literary Award for Being Very Confusing

Winner: The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton

Runner-up: Superliminal by Pillow Castle

"Confusing" and "Kind of trippy" are pretty much synonyms, right?

The Library Mouse Literary Award for Involving Trains

Winner: Murder on the North Pole Express by Patricia Meredith

I need to read more books with trains in them.

The Library Mouse Literary Award for the Best Opening Line

Winner: 

    There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader)

Runners-up: 

    "There are dragons in the twins' vegetable garden." (A Wind in the Door)

    Once upon a time there was a haunted steamroller. ("The Haunted Steamroller", A Stroke of the Pen)

This award is given to the best opening line from any book I've reviwed this year. I've been painstakingly archiving them for this exact purpose.

The Library Mouse Literary Award for the Worst Opening Line

Winner:

    Before she even felt the first twinge in her belly, the she-wolf set out to find a remote birthing den. (Wolves of the Beyond)

Runner-up:

    It was another Spooksville mystery. (Spooksville: The Cold People)

This award is given to the worst opening line from any book I've reviewed this year. I didn't have any intention of doing this when I started archiving, it just kind of happened.

I mean no disres... okay, I mean some disrespect, but I feel no rancor toward the recipients of this award. This is a joke at their expense, but it's not really a mean-spirited one.

The Library Mouse Game of the Year Award

Winner: Hollow Knight: Silksong by Team Cherry

This is perhaps the least prestigious Game of the Year Award to ever be awarded.

The Pointless Trophy of Shame

Winner: Phoenix by S. F. Said

This award is for the book I liked the least but still reviewed.

The Pointy Trophy of Awesomeness

Winner: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

This is the opposite of the Pointless Trophy of Shame: it's for the book I reviewed and liked the most that I hadn't read before. The award was formerly known as the Library Mouse Literary Award for My Favorite New Book I Read This Year, but I changed the name because... come on, past me, that was really long.

(Endnote: The Library Mouse Literary Award for Being An Endnote goes to this parenthetical statement you're reading right now.)

"Murder on the North Pole Express" by Patricia Meredith

I have to say, it's not every day when the villain of your |(almost-)| murder mystery is |an evil macaroni penguin named after a burger|.

This book is honestly less Christmassy than the previous one. I think the author was starting to run out of Christmas references, so she threw in random references to other things as well. On a related note, I liked the first one better, even though this one namedrops Hogfather.

Oh, did I mention the Loch Ness Monster is the train's chef? I didn't. The Loch Ness Monster is the train's chef.

I don't really have much to say about this one. This review is too long to be a mini-review, but it's really short for a full review. Eh, I wrote this the day after Christmas, I can have a bit of a rest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for murder.

3 stars.

(Endnote: This has rather more to do with Murder on the Orient Express than Death of a Christmas Tree Salesman had to do with Death of a Salesman.)

"Death of a Christmas Tree Salesman" by Patricia Meredith

Merry Christmas Eve, everyone!

This is one of the most Christmassy books ever to have Christmassed. Basically, someone has murdered Mr. O. Tannenbaum, the premier seller of Christmas trees at the North Pole. His fairy business partner contacts a snowman named Sam Shovel to help solve the mystery of who killed him.

This book has a truly staggering amount of references to all things Christmas and many things classic mystery. There's O. Tannenbaum, there's Nick and Nora Claus, there's Sam Shovel (think Sam Spade), one of the side characters has a backstory involving his grandmother tragically being run over by a reindeer, there's a hotel called the Nutcracker Suites...

Not to mention all the random phrases that characters will spout off completely naturally in conversation, but which are also lines from Christmas songs or the like. Like calling someone who's named himself Merry Christmas "you filthy animal."

Yes, Patricia Meredith is related to Andrew D. Meredith, who wrote Deathless Beast and Quaint Creatures. They're married.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for murder.

4 stars.  

(Endnote: Despite the title, I don't think this has much of anything to do with Death of a Salesman. Which is probably for the best; I've never read Death of a Salesman, but from my cursory exploration of the summary on Wikipedia, it sounds depressing.)

"Deathless Beast" by Andrew D. Meredith

This book is long as nouns.

(Now, I should qualify that statement. I read this piecemeal whenever I had time. I'm not sure if that was because it's too long to read in a few long sittings, or if it felt long because I read it in small bits.)

But yes. It's really long. It also takes forever to actually get started with the plot; I recall looking up from it once and declaring to my family, "It's page 373 and the main villain has finally put in an appearance."

For all that, though, it's not bad. The author decided to forgo the usual fantasy races (elves, dwarves, etc.) in favor of making up all new ones such as hrelgren and qavyl. They're mostly rather weird. He's also äddicted tö ümlauts when naming pläces (one of them even includes the capital Œ [or OE], which I'm not sure I've ever seen before).

The book contains something I really like, as well: your Fantasy Organized Religion that isn't evil, or even antagonistic. Sure, there are bad guys within the church, but they're bad guys because they're a sort of evil cult trying to bring it down and/or take it over, not because they're in the church. It stands against oppression, its paladins and clerics are the Good Guys (for the most part, although as in any organization there are some jerkfaces), and its patron deity genuinely wants the best for humanity. Every fantasy church should be like these guys, and I say that with absolute certainty.

There are a bunch of glossaries at the back if you want to know how all these ümlaut-läden nämes are actually pronounced. I didn't know those were there. I just took potshots at the pronunciation, and I probably got 50%-70% of it wrong.

This is a low-magic high fantasy. It's set in an extremely original world, but there's barely any magic involved. Most of what magic there is is thanks to the world's pantheon, though there's also this weird seed pod thing one of the main characters has that doesn't seem to have ties to any of them. Yet. That may change.

(Oh, did I mention there are four main characters? One of them is a paladin, one of them is the girl version of a cleric, and we also have a brother-and-sister duo of mercenaries from Morally Greyish Mercenaries Incorporated -- also known as the Black Sentinels.)

Probably my favorite part of this book is |the battle between the nonagenarian paladin leader and the giant evil werewolf king. The werewolf king gets wrecked. It's the first actual magic we see in the book, and it's glorious|.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A hard T for fantasy violence and some sexual references.

4 stars.

(Endnote: Technically, I am also deathless. I have experienced zero deaths.)

"The Empty Grave" by Jonathan Stroud

Well, that was a fitting conclusion to the series.

Basically, |the leader of the premier ghostbusting agency, who's supposed to be the granddaughter of one of the first ghost-hunters, is suspected to actually just be the original one who's somehow used spooky stuff to keep herself alive. So we break into her tomb to see if she's actually inside it or if she's somewhere else|.

The second part involves the main characters |using the afterlife-that's-probably-actually-an-in-between-life (the character George agrees with me on that point) as a fast travel system to escape their house/base, which is under siege. Except it turns out that time goes slower in the inbetweenlife, so it's really just a slow travel system. And they have to leave via the only other exit they know of: the one in the villain's house|.

So our protagonists get to confront the main villain who's behind all this (which, yeah, technically spoilers, but this is the final book so it would be kind of weird if they didn't.) And the series actually ends really satisfactorily; |the villain is defeated, but that doesn't automatically radically alter the world I've come to know and enjoy. There are still ghosts, but it's implied they're going to start going away. And, wonder of wonders, all our main characters are still alive! Despite Lockwood's suspected death wish and some grievous bodily harm to some of the others. (Lucy's Sarcastic Talking Skull of Mild Spookiness is not fine, but he was already dead.)|

Some series would end this by |having all the ghosts just magically go away when the BBEG dies|. And while that would |probably be better for the people in the series's universe|, it would also |feel really weird and out-of-place and not mesh with the tone of the rest of the series|. So all things considered, I prefer the somewhat open ending of this book.

The series as a whole is... probably pretty scary? I've been tagging it as "horror" all this time, but it honestly reads more like an urban fantasy where the fantasy happens to be angry ghost monsters. Maybe it's actually utterly terrifying and I've just somehow gotten desensitized to that.

It also doesn't shy away from adding new primary characters as the series goes on (the skull is added in The Whispering Skull, Holly Munro arrives in The Hollow Boy, and |longtime antagonist Quill Kipps joins the protagonists in The Creeping Shadow|). Granted, it doesn't |kill anyone important off|, but I don't think anybody minds. (Although I did read that the author meant for |Quill Kipps to die|, but changed it because it didn't quite mesh with how the series was going.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for violence.

4 stars.

(Endnote: This has been Spooky Books with Sam. Tune in next time to hear Kittens say, "What? I haven't read it.")

"A Swiftly Tilting Planet" by Madeleine L'Engle

Yup, this one is weird. It's got time travel in it. Also, like half the book is unconnected snippets of time travel, which only really become relevant near the end.

The plot revolves around "Mad Dog" Branzillo, the dictator of the fictional South American country Vespugia, who's about to start a nuclear war. So Charles Wallace teams up with a unicorn to go back in time and stop Branzillo from being evil.

Except, because this is the most infuriating time travel system in the history of time travel systems, they can't actually travel back to specific points in time, nor can they actually be physically present any of these places. So they have to go where the unicorn's time travel magic decides they can go, and they have to be present by having Charles Wallace use their pseudo-telepathy to sort of become the people they're meant to see. There's some sort of Point in there about how you shouldn't try too hard to control everything, but any deep meaningfulness is outweighed for me by how irritating it is to read about this time travel system that just time travels you to where it thinks you should go.

The evil demony things from A Wind in the Door show back up to make the time travel even screwier than it's supposed to be.

Meg is now married to Calvin. She's part of the POV of this, too, though she's little more than a framing device; the only real reason I can see for her to be in this is so it can count as a second sequel to A Wrinkle in Time. The actual book is about Charles Wallace.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for violence.

3 stars.

(Endnote: I don't know what's up with the title of this one, either.)

"Cinder" by Marissa Meyer

Behold, it's Cinderella, except it's set in Future China and there's evil moon people. And also Cinderella is a cyborg who's also a mechanic, and there's a plague that nobody can figure out how to treat.

Thankfully, Future China doesn't seem to be Communist anymore. (The fact that apparently this universe has had two more world wars might have something to do with that.) People can own their own businesses now -- or, in the case of the main character, people's stepmoms can own their businesses.

This is a retelling of Cinderella, but it isn't purely Cinderella; I'm pretty sure the author had the entire series at least mostly conceptualized before she started writing this one. So the Rapunzel character (I think book three is about her) and the Evil Queen show up in this one. The Evil Queen is appropriately Evil.

There are four more books in this series, and I intend to continue through them. And not just because this one ended on a cliffhanger.

The pumpkin carriage equivalent in this is a really old, orange car. I don't actually know what kind of car it's supposed to be, so I imagined it as a Volkswagen Beetle.

There's like three different characters who could conceivably be the fairy godmother. Probably they all are. I was pleased that |the doctor guy turned out not to be evil|.

I really liked how they did the "Cinderella has really small feet" plot point: the main character is a cyborg, and one of her cyborg parts is a foot. Which is really small.

[Edited on 2/1/2026; changed cover image.]

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for some bad language, violence, and sexual references.

4 stars.

(Endnote: The plague turns people blue. Or something. It's called "the blue plague", so I can only assume part of its symptoms include turning people blue.)

"Ember's End" by S. D. Smith

I probably should have reread Ember Rising before reading this, because it's been almost a year and a half and I forgot like half the plot.

Much of the book is consumed with the final battle against The Evil Bird Dude and his Evil Bird Dudes (and also The Evil Bird Army, The Other Six Evil Bird Armies, The Evil Wolf Army, The Evil Wolf Army II: Wolf Army Boogaloo, and The Rabbit Traitors Who Were Only Traitors Once). My thoughts on that will follow.

I found it a tad unrealistic how we were like "oh, this is too much, we're out of reserves and weapons and couldn't survive another attack" after the attack of about every other army, then always managed to come up with more reserves and weapons for the next one. It strains my credulity.

(Note: "The Rabbit Traitors Who Were Only Traitors Once" is because earlier in the series, a bunch of rabbits had betrayed the other rabbits and gone to work for the Evil Bird Dude (whose name is Morbin Blackhawk, but I'm just going to keep calling him the Evil Bird Dude). Then, in this book, the good rabbits manage to convince some of the traitor rabbits to be traitors a second time, betray the bad guys, and go back to being good guys. But not all of them did; some stayed behind, hence the Rabbit Traitors Who Were Only Traitors Once.)

Oh, and the gunpowder use is still all out of whack. They have exploding arrowheads now, but still no, y'know, firearms. Or (as has been my perennial refrain for the reviews of pretty much the entire series) landmines. Seriously, the amount of explosives you can pack into a rabbit-scale arrowhead is puny; if you don't have modern high explosives you'll make a loud bang and possibly a flash, and that's it.

(If you did have modern high explosives, I'm not entirely sure you could have any more success at making an effective weapon. An arrowhead--even a human-scale one--is just too small a space to pack a detonator and any reasonable amount of explosive into without making it too heavy to use. I guess maybe if you made an arrowhead out of pure sodium and shot it into water or something? Humans do make explosive harpoons for whaling, though I'm not sure why, but a human-scale harpoon is at least an order of magnitude bigger than a rabbit-scale arrow.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence. I'm not entirely sure what genre of videogame this would fall into.

4 stars.

(Endnote: They're rabbits. With swords. And increasingly unrealistic and idiosyncratic other weapons. And also hang gliders.)

"The Creeping Shadow" by Jonathan Stroud

Unlike the previous three title entities, the Creeping Shadow is |not actually a ghost. Instead, it's the realspace manifestation of the nearby Research Facility of Extreme Spookiness doing experiments with temporarily sending people into the afterlife|. However, it is the main spookiness again.

(Though, |it's not really the afterlife, per se; it's more like the between-life|.)

There was an exchange in this one that went basically:

Bad guy: "Don't pry into my secrets, or you'll regret it."

*bad guy leaves*

Lockwood: "So, show of hands, who thinks we should pry into his secrets?"

And I thought that was funny. It also exemplifies Lockwood's possible |growing borderline-suicidal overconfidence and throwing himself into dangerous situations, which has been a plot point since the last book--Lucy, the protagonist, actually left at the end of that one because she was worried he'd get himself killed trying to protect her. So she's technically an independent at the beginning of this one, but she's teaming up with Lockwood & Co. because the premier ghostbusting agency's leader asked her to|.

The |afterlife| in this, which |the Research Facility of Extreme Spookiness is sending people in iron not-quite-EVA-suits into (and which Lockwood and Lucy also enter to get away from the bad guy)|, may not actually be |the afterlife proper|. I don't think it is; it's more like an |in-between-life|.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for scary scenes and violence.

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    "Lucy, I'm a malevolent skull, without an ounce of compassion. You've got to be worried if I'm feeling sorry for you."

    Page 49. It's Lucy's Sarcastic Talking Skull of Mild Spookiness.

(Endnote: This is the first time I've seen any real red herrings in these books.)

"Thing Explainer" by Randall Munroe

This is a book of not-simple stuff explained in simple words. Or, as the person who wrote this said, "the ten hundred words people use most often." It has a place in the back that tells you what those words are.

I decided to write this in the spirit of the book, so I'm also only using those ten hundred words for this. We'll see how that goes.

Thing Explainer explains a lot of things. Some of the ones I like best are:

"Shared space house" (International Space Station)

"The US's laws of the land" (US Constitution)

"Tree" (Tree)

"US Space Team's Up Goer Five" (Saturn V rocket)

(Yes, I know the things inside the bent lines aren't in the ten hundred words. The book does the same thing in the things-in-this-book page, and I felt like it would make it less confusing.)

What If and What If Two had little drawings on most of the pages. This doesn't, because its pages are full of big drawings of the stuff it's explaining. (But there are sometimes little drawings inside the big drawings.)

For some reason, the number after eight is not in the ten hundred words. I don't know why.

If this were a game for computers, I would say it was for: Everyone.

Four stars. Some of the things it explains are things to do with that belief where people think that animals turn into other animals over time and that's how all the animals got to be themselves, but it's easy to just not read those pages. If you were reading it with a small child, they could be a good thing to talk about (like, "this is what a lot of people say, here's why it's wrong.") The rest of the book is good, though.

(End note: I didn't have to look up every single word I used here in the place in the book where all the words are. The computer place for the computer pictures the person who wrote this draws has a nice little thing (or at least it did when I was writing this) where you can write things and it tells you if you used words that aren't in the ten hundred words.)

"Secret Coders" series by Gene Luen Yang

The purpose of this series is, if not entirely, at least primarily to teach kids coding. Well, a bit of coding. By the end of it you can do a lot of stuff with turtles in the Logo programming language, and you learn about some of the principles of coding.

Book 1: Secret Coders

Yeah, this is one of those series where the first book has the series title.

I really like how they used actual turtle-shaped robots for the in-universe turtle graphics. ("Turtle graphics" is a term for pictures drawn by having a pointer move around the screen drawing lines, rather than by some other means.) I'm pretty sure most of the series's initial audience wouldn't get that joke (as I didn't on my first read-through), but it's funny if you know what those are.

There's a character in this, Josh, who's... how do I explain Josh? His reactions to everything are funny, partially because he's kind of clueless but takes everything seriously. Except it's seriously-for-Josh, so he does things like ask the angry janitor to please not feed him to piranhas.

(Our other two main characters are Eni, a deuteragonist, and Hopper, the protagonist. Eni's the dark-skinned one, Hopper's the girl, and Josh is the one with weird spiky hair.) 

Book 2: Paths & Portals

The title refers to Path Portals (in-universe, this means patterns on the floor where you have to program a turtle to walk around them in order to open up a secret door).

We get the first whiff of our minor antagonists and later minor allies the rugby team in this book. I'm not entirely sure why this presumably American school has a rugby team instead of, say, a football team, but it doesn't really matter.

We also get the first whiff of our first BBEG, Principal Dean. ("BBEG" is a roleplaying game term that stands for "Big Bad Evil Guy" [or, as necessary, "Big Bad Evil Girl"].) He's not actually in the "main villain" slot for very long.

Book 3: Secrets & Sequences

In which we're introduced to the Giant Flying Turtle which is actually a Giant Flying Laser Turtle. And in which Principal Dean gets kicked out of the villain chair by the actual villain of the series, Doctor One-Zero.

He actually has some interesting motivation. He used to be your bog-standard try-to-take-over-the-world supervillain with a robot army, but he's reformed. Sort of. Someone told him to use his super-genius status to make people happy, and he did. But by "make people happy" he means "give people a potion that rewires their brains so their sole desire is to see the color green."

Book 4: Robots & Repeats

This one sets up some stuff for later books, most notably the Turtle of Light (who is briefly named Josherella by Josh, before Eni names it Light-Light) and the fact that Doctor One-Zero's super potion, "Green Pop," does a supercharged Diet-Coke-and-Mentos thing when shaken.

This also reveals that Mr. Bee, the coders' mentor who I forgot to mention until now, has no nose and is from an alternate dimension. Which isn't Australia. (That bit will make more sense if you read the Favorite Lines section.)

There's a digression into ASCII encoding for a bit here, when the characters have to decode something written in ASCII.

Book 5: Potions & Parameters

This book ends with the protagonists about to use regular polygons to open a portal to another dimension, and that's rather a weird sentence.

And there are flying antigravity turtles. We use them, the new command we've learned that makes things go in circles, and the fact (established in Book 4) that Green Pop sort of explodes when shaken to ruin his stockpile truck of it. I don't think the flying antigravity turtles see much use in the final book.

Speaking of which,

Book 6: Monsters & Modules

The flying antigravity turtles do not see any use in this book.

The other dimension does get visited, though. It's Flatland (originating in this book), a two-dimensional universe from which Professor Bee hails.

I really like that this series has an in-universe reason for the random coding challenges sprinkled throughout the books. It makes it to where they have a plot purpose rather than just "kids learn to code yay!"

Overall Notes

I should probably clarify: "secret coders" does not mean people who make secret codes, it means coders (i.e. programmers) who are secret.

These books are really rather short, enough so that I had trouble making some of the books' sections longer than a sentence or two.

If you want to get someone interested in coding, these books would probably be a good vector for that.

The art is by Mike Holmes, who also did the art for the Wings of Fire graphic novel series.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A soft E10+ for some cartoon violence.

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    "Who are we?"

    "Stately Academy Rugby!"

    "And do we fear anything?"

    "Well--"

    "Usually not--"

    "but snakes--"

    Page 65, Paths & Portals. It's the rugby team.

    Mr. Bee: "Where I'm from, noses are rather rare."

    Eni: "And where is that, exactly?"

    Josh: "Australia!"

    Hopper, facepalming: "Such a dummy."

    Page 9, Robots & Repeats. Follows close upon the reveal of Mr. Bee having no nose.

    "Ducks aren't supposed to have teeth! That's cheating!"

    Page 89, Robots & Repeats. Josh, reacting to a duck-shaped robot which suddenly revealed that it has teeth.

    "You kids are taking Advanced Chemistry?"

    Page 31, Potions & Parameters. It's a random NPC doctor who doesn't believe that those kids are taking Advanced Chemistry. (My high school course in Advanced Chemistry caused me to quote this relentlessly for a few weeks.)

    "With regular polygons, we're going to open a portal to another dimension!"

    Page 79, Potions & Parameters. This one is Mr. Bee.

    "Quiet, B. Square!"

    Page 89, Monsters & Modules. It's the Circles from Flatland, who've been convinced that Doctor One-Zero is actually escaped criminal B. Square.

(Endnote: Despite what you might think, there isn't a secret seventh book named Dungeons & Dragons.)

"Hollow Knight: Silksong" by Team Cherry

Me: "I'm going to buy Hollow Knight: Silksong!"

*sixty hours of playtime later*

Me: "That was fun!"

Seriously, this game is huge. I've played about seventy hours of the original Hollow Knight, and I've gone through that one three times.

It was about seven years in the making, most of which was "Team Cherry works on the game and doesn't share any news about it because they're having too much fun working on the game, while the fandom slowly goes stark raving mad." (And yes, that's the actual explanation; there was an interview where they were basically asked "why didn't you say anything for 7 years" and they basically answered "we were having too much fun working on the game.")

But as befits a game that took seven years, and as I've said, it's huge. It's also, as with Hollow Knight, not for the faint of heart, because it, too, is difficult as nouns.

(The final boss of Silksong took me slightly fewer tries than the final boss of Hollow Knight, but I attribute that to my being more skilled now.)

Anyway. Silksong's art is at least as beautiful as Hollow Knight's, and everything in the game is similarly some combination of elegant, adorable, and horrifying. It has the same hand-drawn aesthetic, and it's also full of unique areas with distinct looks.

Some of my favorites:

-Moss Grotto (similar to Greenpath from Hollow Knight, it's a verdant forest of moss. And I love moss.)

-Mount Fay (a really annoying parkour challenge, but I have to give it kudos for all the snow)

-High Halls (also kind of annoying, but also really pretty)

And dishonorable mentions to Bilewater, Putrified Ducts, and Sinner's Road (all of which are annoying and swampy/sewery), as well as the Sands of Karak (a coral desert place with a boss whose runback is entirely too long).

And now it's time to explain the story!

(Caveat lector: This game is best experienced as unspoiled as possible. If you ever intend to play it and don't already know the plot, I suggest not reading inside any of the spoiler tags.)

Basically, in the past, the |malevolent goddess at the top of the kingdom| decided to make |spider people|. Said |spider people rebelled against her and put her to sleep, then noped out of the kingdom when she woke up| and started possessing people and making them go insane.

Flash forward an indeterminate amount of time. The |Citadel at the top of the kingdom| has taken over everything, and is subtly tugging everyone to |make pilgrimages to it|. Most of them |die along the way|, because Pharloom (Silksong's game world) is even more dangerous than Hallownest from the original. |The Citadel's bugs| also sent out envoys to capture any descendents of |the malevolent goddess's spider people|, including the player character, Hornet. Hornet is brought to Pharloom and promptly decides that the bugs capturing her can get yeeted, yeets them, and makes her way up to the top of Pharloom to figure out what's making people go insane. And, hopefully, talk it out of it or slap it until it decides not to.

There are multiple ways of doing that. In the normal ending, "Weaver Queen," Hornet |kills Grand Mother Silk (the malevolent goddess, henceforth "GMS"), sort of eats her power, and apotheoses|. Unlike with Hollow Knight's "The Hollow Knight" ending, wherein it's implied |the player character will eventually fail in its containing-the-Infection task just like its predecessor did|, I'm not entirely sure that "Weaver Queen" |isn't the good ending. Hornet apotheoses (replacing the evil overlord with a good overlord), most of the characters are still alive, and aside from the Citadel getting covered in silk, everything is fine|. This is in contrast to the second and third endings, |"Snared Silk"| and |"Sister of the Void"|. In |"Snared Silk"|, Hornet |teams up with an NPC named the Caretaker to trap GMS and kill her without Hornet apotheosing. I'm not sure why she doesn't want to; maybe she doesn't want the responsibility of having to run a kingdom now|. Except |it goes wrong, because Lace (Hornet's foil character) screws everything up, meaning that instead of getting eaten by the void, GMS is now violently resisting to try to protect her daughter|.

So |the kingdom starts falling apart and void is taking over everything|. That's where "Sister of the Void" comes in, as Hornet has to |fix everything by going down into the void and taking Lace back out of it so GMS will stop trying to pull herself out of the void and unintentionally wrecking things|. Hornet doesn't |apotheose, but a bunch of people get killed, and Pharloom is in tatters. Aside from Hornet not having to run a kingdom, I can't see how this is really a better ending than "Weaver Queen"|.

This has been the story of Hollow Knight: Silksong. (I find it interesting that Pharloom is currently going through what Hallownest went through in the past; Pharloom is |actively dying|, while Hallownest |has already died and is now just sort of decaying|.

Unlike the Knight from Hollow Knight, Hornet has a foil: Lace. Like Hornet, Lace is the daughter of |one of the Hollow Knight universe's gods (Hornet's dad is the Pale King, Lace's mom is Grand Mother Silk|. Like Hornet, Lace has wandered around the game world stabbing people before the player character showed up, and like Hornet, Lace is a boss you fight twice who survives both battles. They even have similar fighting styles. Also, in Hollow Knight, Hornet |jumps in and stabs the first final boss at the climax of the bossfight, giving you access to the true final boss|; Lace does the same thing in the |"Snared Silk" bossfight with GMS|.

Except that what Hornet did in |the fight against the Hollow Knight| was entirely helpful, and didn't cause the huge amounts of problems that Lace's actions did. And there's other differences, too; Hornet was stabbing people to protect the kingdom, Lace seems to just be stabbing people for the sake of stabbing people. Lace is also, despite being ageless-ish like Hornet, still rather immature, spoiled, and bitter. The difference between them is exemplified by the differences between Lace's opening monologue in Silksong and Hornet's opening monologue in Hollow Knight; Hornet's is like "look, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have stop you here," and Lace is like "I'mma stab you because I caaaaaan" before Hornet tells her to shut up and get on with it.

This game also contains probably the third-saddest bossfight I've ever encountered: the Cogwork Dancers. (First- and second-saddest bossfights are here.)

Honestly, I could write an individual review of every boss and area in the game. But instead I'll just mention a few more NPCs before I go:

-Shakra, the mapmaker, who's much more capable of handling herself than Cornifer from Hollow Knight is (Shakra can fight and, in fact, |helps you out in one of the arena battles|; Cornifer really can't).

-Sherma, a smol adorable guy wearing a cymbal as a hat who shows up in random places throughout the game.

-Caretaker, an exceedingly curmudgeonly shrine-tender-person who's |actually one of the Snail Shamans (first seen in the original Hollow Knight)|. For a while, I had a theory that he was the reincarnation of |the Pale King, who's dead in Hollow Knight but who is known to reincarnate when he dies|; that theory did not turn out to be true.

And a dishonorable mention to the boss Disgraced Chef Lugoli, who was kicked out of being a chef for thinking the Pickled Muckmaggot was a good idea.

I intentionally avoided wikis while I was playing this, in order to avoid spoilers. That was really annoying to do.

This is a videogame, and it's rated E10+, presumably for fantasy violence. (For whatever reason, I can't find the official rating documentation anywhere.)

5 stars. My only real quibble is that I don't like the various wave defense sections scattered throughout the game, but that's really just me.

(Endnote: This game is magnificent.)

"The Nest" by Kenneth Oppel

This is rather a creepy book.

Its villain wouldn't be out of place in the Hollow Knight universe, because the villain is bugs. More specifically, supernatural wasps led by a wasp queen who would slot right into the Hollow Knight pantheon.

Basically, our protagonist's baby sibling has birth defects and keeps being about to die. But then some angels visit the protagonist in a dream and tell him that if he agrees to let them help, they can fix the baby. Except they're actually evil supernatural wasps whose method of fixing the baby is to kill it and replace it with a changeling.

There's also a Spookyman who keeps wandering around offering to sharpen people's knives, and a different Spookyman who calls the protagonist's younger sister on her toy phone. |Actually, they're the same Spookyman, who's apparently either one of the wasp changelings or one of the babies the wasps killed. Or possibly someone who had a sibling killed and replaced by the wasps, tried to stop it, and died in the attempt? It's definitely one of those, but I don't know exactly which one|.

The cover of the hardcover book does this cool thing where the words are written on a lower layer than the dustjacket, so they're barely visible normally (at least to me; I got this from the library so it has one of those transparent plastic covers) but if you push the dustjacket back down onto them you can see the words properly. I thought that was cool.

The titular "Nest" refers to the wasp nest that the evil supernatural wasps are growing the replacement baby in.

Kenneth Oppel writes a lot of very unique stuff. So far I've reviewed a steampunkish airship book, a graphic novel about bats, and now... whatever this is. And I know he's also written at least a book about Frankenstein (the doctor, not the monster), not to mention all the other stuff I assume he's written that I don't know about.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for some body horror and entirely too many wasps.

3 stars. 

(Endnote: Everything I come up with for this endnote seems like it would go better in the main body of the review.)

"Mistborn" by Brandon Sanderson

This book kept reminding me of Hollow Knight: Silksong while I was reading it, and I eventually figured out why: the settings are basically the same if you ignore the fact that one of them is made of bugs.

I mean, think about it. A dying kingdom ruled by an evil god who the female protagonist doesn't like? Without asking a clarifying question like "is everyone bugs," there's really no way to know whether that's describing the Final Empire from Mistborn or Pharloom from Hollow Knight: Silksong.

(There's a review of Silksong coming soon, but I hadn't finished it yet when I wrote this review--the game is really long, as befits something that took seven years to make.)

As it turns out, "grabbing random books off the middle-grade fiction shelves" does not find you books that are nearly as good as those found by the far superior method of "getting your friends to recommend them to you". This was recommended by the same person who introduced me to Cleopatra in Space.

This book is very well-written. It has a unique setting, not just Generic Fantasy Medieval Europe Setting #3587, and it feels very atmospheric within the setting.

Mistborn is apparently the start of a ridiculously long series/universe/thing, the Cosmere. If I do end up reading the entire series, it'll be over the course of years; I'm not going to binge it, both because I suspect that it would make the overall experience worse and because it sounds like too much work.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A soft T15+ for fantasy violence and some sexual references (people talk about prostitution and children born out of wedlock, and there are a couple mentions of rape in there).

4 stars.

(Endnote: This universe, instead of sandwiches, has "baywraps", which are basically fantasy burritos. I am inordinately fond of them.)

"A Wind in the Door" by Madeleine L'Engle

I suspect that A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels are at least partially ways for Madeleine L'Engle to be as weird as she wants. Why else would the plot involve Meg and Calvin |teaming up with a cherubim (the eyes-and-wings kind), a microscopic being, and Charles Wallace's principal (who's been duplicated by some evil demony-spirit things) to fix Charles Wallace's mitochondria so they can continue being the powerhouse of the cell and he'll stop dying|?

I'm just going to spoil it a little bit so I can talk about things without having to redact absolutely everything, so if you don't want a very mild spoiler, don't read farther in this paragraph: the plot involves mitochondria. There. That wasn't too hard, was it?

Anyway, the author made up some internal structures of mitochondria in order to have the plot work. There's no such thing as farandolae. Then again, there's no such thing as tessering, either, so it's not like she didn't make up stuff for A Wrinkle in Time.

Unlike the previous book, it's not clear to me what the title is actually referring to. The "Wrinkle in Time" is basically the time travel used by the book's mentor characters to make it to where the whole several-days-long adventure doesn't result in Meg and Calvin being missing for several days, but I'm not sure what the wind or the door are referring to here.

A Wind in the Door kind of defies genres. A Wrinkle in Time was pretty clearly science fantasy, but this does away with most of the "science" element. While one might think that means it's just straight fantasy, it's not really; it's also not quite magical realism (though admittedly I judge that based on vibes), so...

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for violence. It would be rather a pain to turn this into a videogame, what with the telepathy (or kything; I'll excuse the Renamed Concept Rule breach because it's not really basic telepathy) and all.

4 stars.

(Endnote: Where did "the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell" even come from? Why is it a meme? Also, shouldn't it be "mitochondrion"?)

"The Hollow Boy" by Jonathan Stroud

The titles of these are starting to refer to less and less major plot points as the series progresses. First we had the Screaming Staircase (which was the main spookiness of its book), then the Whispering Skull (not the main spookiness, but it was a decently big plot point in its book), and now... the Hollow Boy. It |only shows up at the end, and though it's probably going to have a decent impact on later books, it's only in a small slice of this one before getting unceremoniously stabbed by Lockwood|.

The actual main plot of the book revolves around an outbreak of ghosts in Chelsea (I had to look up what that was; it's a district thing in London), which is eventually revealed to be because Chelsea contains a Department Store of Extreme Spookiness. (Granted, the only reason the department store is Of Extreme Spookiness is that it's |built over an Abandoned Medieval Prison of Extreme Spookiness|, but the characters didn't know that at the time.)

This book demonstrates that the best way to stop being enemies with someone is to save each other's lives several times. (I'm not sure if that's actually true in real life, but it seems to work out in books.)

Oh, y'know the |mirror that was supposed to let you see into the afterlife but actually just kills you| from the last book? Someone's |trying to make another one of those, or so it's implied|. Glorious.

I don't actually know what the mask on the cover is supposed to be.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for being a horror book. 

4 stars.

(Endnote: As far as I can tell, the Hollow Boy has nothing to do with the Hollow Knight.)

"The Wednesday Wars" by Gary D. Schmidt

The Wednesday Wars is a book about a 1960s schoolboy who has interpersonal interactions, makes friends, and discovers that Shakespeare doesn't have to be boring. That's one of the most stereotypical book-review sentences I've ever written, but I couldn't figure out a better way to start it, so there you are.

 

The titular Wednesday Wars refer to the fact that our protagonist Holling Hoodhood is the only person in his entire class who's neither Catholic nor Jewish (he's Presbyterian) and therefore doesn't have a reason to not be in school on Wednesdays. So he's stuck in his English class with a teacher who (at least at first) he's pretty sure hates him; after all, what other reason could she have for making him read Shakespeare outside of class? 

 

They're not super antagonistic for super long, although there are some clashes over Shakespeare when the teacher wants Holling to read it for the Literary Value, and Holling wants to read it for the murder and the interesting new things to shout at people. Most of the plot comes from Holling's day-to-day interactions with the people around him (the teacher, his classmates, his parents, his attempted-flower-child sister) and the world around him (his school, the escaped rats in his school, a school bus, et cetera). Though when I say "plot" that should really have some air quotes around it, because this is slice-of-life so it doesn't really have a proper plot.

 

(Not that that's necessarily a bad thing; not having a properly plotty plot is pretty much the entire basis of slice-of-life. Which this is. Just because it doesn't have a plot per se doesn't mean it's bad.)

 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for some violence.

 

4 stars. 

 

Favorite lines:

 

    I mean, a potion to almost kill you? She drinks a potion to almost kill you? Who would drink a potion to almost kill you?

    Page 134. It's Holling describing his low opinion of Romeo and Juliet.

 

(Endnote: Toads, beetles, bats light upon thee!) 

Mini-Reviews 17: Again

Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers

My mom reviewed this, here. Go there for some actual thoughts on the book.

I honestly wouldn't have done even this utter placeholder of a mini-review normally. However, this (sad excuse for a) review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+.

3 stars.

Tags for this one: 3-star, classics, junior fiction, magical realism, rated E10+

Quaint Creatures by Andrew D. Meredith

This is a book about a veterinarian in what's basically a D&D world. It's quite fun and I wish it were a series so I could read more of it.

I think it balances the slice-of-life aspect with the plot quite well. That, however, is my personal opinion; other people might think it needs more plot or more slice-of-life.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence. It could be a reasonably good videogame; I'd play it.

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, fantasy, rated E10+, slice-of-life

The Strange and Deadly Portraits of Bryony Gray by E. Latimer

This book involves (posthumously) Dorian Gray, of The Picture of Dorian Gray fame. That would be a spoiler, but come on, the book's about spooky magic paintings and the protagonist's last name is Gray.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for scary scenes and {T15+ implied past homosexuality, thanks to the subject matter involving Oscar Wilde. It's pretty veiled, and if you didn't know about Wilde you probably wouldn't notice it, but it's there and it bugged me. It was also kind of sprung on you near the end, so I'd already read most of the book before I noticed.}

1 star. Honestly I probably should have quit reading it, but I wanted to know how it ended. It's rather a shame about the above-mentioned redactedness, because Bryony herself could have been quite a compelling protagonist.

Tags for this one: 1-star, magical realism, rated T15+

(Endnote: Zac Efron is in none of these books.)

"The Golden Compass" by Philip Pullman

If you're going to get theology in your fantasy, be like C. S. Lewis and do it respectfully. Don't be like Philip Pullman and do... whatever this was.

Basically, an orphan girl named Lyra growing up in alternate-universe Oxford University is given the titular Golden Compass (actually a sort-of-prophetic clockwork measuring device called an alethiometer) and tasked, sort of, to bring it to her estranged uncle who's been imprisoned in Norway by the bears. Along the way she |gets tangled up in this whole plot with some evil child-stealing people|.

It's rather hard to pin down when this is set. From dates of lore events in the past I'd put it at some time after the 19th century (1800s), but the technology is kind of all over the place. It kind of vibes like 1800s-era scientific methods, there are firearms but also catapult things, the air travel is achieved by zeppelins (making me want a crossover between this and Leviathan), the fantasy!Romani have motorboats (or possibly steamboats) but also |charter a sailing ship| when they're |setting out to find the missing kids|, and there are occasional mentions of something called "atomcraft" which may or may not run on uranium.

(This is quite obviously an alternate history, but Lyra doesn't know a lot of history, so we don't get a lot of details. Except that apparently the Protestant Reformation may not have happened, and the Roman Catholic Church has taken over everything. Note to authors: if you want me to like your book unreservedly, you'd do well to maybe not portray the Church as antagonistic; or, if you do, make it clear that actual Christianity itself is not the problem. Like Frederick Douglass did.)

There's a character in this, Lord Asriel, who may have his own set of merits but who shares his name with Asriel |Dreemurr, a posthumous character who's mentioned in some exposition in Undertale (Toby Fox, 2015)|. The fact that to the best of my knowledge |we never see Asriel Dreemurr in-game| prevented me from imagining Lord Asriel as him, but I did have twinges of "wait, |that guy's in Undertale|" whenever Lord Asriel showed up in the book.

Oh, and giving everyone a magical animal companion? That's fine. Darkbeast did that, and the book was kinda lame, but it the animals were fine. Calling them "daemons," however, is not fine.

If you're going to namedrop original sin, you might at least get what it is right. The doctrine of original sin is the doctrine that all humans are inherently sinful thanks to the Fall, not the doctrine that the Fall actually happened. I know that, and you now know that, but Philip Pullman apparently didn't. Or he did, and he just didn't care.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for violence against children and brief suggestive content (two adults making out). That said, I don't recommend it to anyone who cares at all about Christianity.

2 stars. It's extremely well-written, I'll give it that, but it also flirts with blasphemy as much as it can get away with.

(Endnote: One of my friends recommended this book to me. He likes it. I would have liked it if it were by C. S. Lewis, or at least in the style of C. S. Lewis -- i.e. respectful of the religion it revolves around.)