"The Chaos Grid" by Lyndsey Lewellen

The author, in her acknowledgements, describing when she picked up this as a half-finished product after leaving it alone for two years: "It was only halfway written. I had no idea how to end it."

*looks at ending*

Me: "Yeah, that tracks"

And that, I think, is the core of the problem with this book. It has a strong vision going for the first half, but then the main character completes her first journey, and... then what?

The author answered that question with a course of action that felt more like it should have been a second book.

Basically, the story takes place in an alternate future Texas where humans tried to fix global warming (or something) but accidentally broke the world instead, causing all sorts of weird mutated things and crazy weather to take over the land. They then built a bunch of cities inside giant domes, kicked out anyone they didn't like, let the farmers do their own thing because they still needed food, and started doing drugs.

Actually, I'm pretty sure the drugs are a recent development, but yeah. The main antagonist of this book is an evil company that makes drugs, and its minions and drug dealers are the secondary antagonists.

There's also rebels trying to blow up the domes and failing because the domes have their own army, and a bunch of Mad Max wannabes who do nothing but hunt the more giant of the weird mutated things.

Into all this steps our main character, Juniper, a teenage girl with a mysterious triangle necklace and a pair of dead parents. She doesn't want to be in any of the domes, but particularly in one specific dome because her parents died there, so she joins a bunch of monster truckers (who haul food between the domes and the farms-where-people-do-their-own-thing) to escape. Along the way she fights evil drug dealers, her mysterious necklace does mysterious things, there's this guy named Dax who's extremely abrasive and constantly wears sunglasses, and a couple of the monster truckers die.

Then she reaches the farm, and I think that's where the author left off the first time, because it sort of flails around for a while and then starts up something entirely different. Juniper wanders around the farm for a while, then after acquiring a two-headed bird of bad-omen-ness, heads back to a city and... infiltrates the rebels who keep failing to blow up the domes? And then returns to the farm? And then some more evil drug dealers show up, Dax-with-the-sunglasses removes his sunglasses and reveals that he's actually a cyborg supersoldier or something who can stop time, Juniper does more mysterious things with her mysterious necklace to take down the evil drug dealers (just this band of them though), Juniper blacks out for four days, she finally wakes up, and... the book ends.

Did they defeat the evil company that makes the drugs? Nope. Did they do anything to get closure for Juniper's parents' death? Nope. Did we ever find out what happened to Dax? Nope. Did they even make a start at defeating the evil drugs company? Not really.

I would have accepted that last one as an ending, because "actually completely defeat the evil drugs company" would be very hard to do in the last three-eighths of a 250-ish-page novel; the saga of Juniper versus Orange Pipe (or whatever the company is called) could easily have taken a five-book-series to fully flesh out. An ending of "let's get the band together and start pushing back against the drugs" would have tied up the story's themes pretty nicely. Unfortunately, instead we have "We're going back to the dome city and, uh, maybe we can do something there?"

(So she did sort of do what I was expecting, but only sort of.)

The second half almost felt like she was just throwing things in to advance the plot along, similar to how I plotted my first novel. (That book as it now stands will never see the light of day.)

In conclusion, the author's assertion that she didn't know how to end the story was actually pretty spot on.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A strong T for sci-fi violence and some veiled sexual references.

3 stars. If the plot had followed its original direction, it probably would have gotten 4, but as I explained above...

(Endnote: The hardcover editions of all the Enclave Publishing books I've seen have some sort of design embossed in shiny metallic stuff on the cover. I think The Burning Tree had a leaf, and Winter's Maiden had a cool rune circle thing.)

"Minecraft: Story Mode" by Telltale Games

I never expected I'd get to play this.

Let me explain. The original Minecraft has had four spinoffs over the course of its long life: Minecraft Dungeons, a sort-of-roguelike; Minecraft Legends, a real-time strategy; Minecraft Earth, an augmented reality phone game discontinued in 2021 because of the plaaaaague; and Minecraft: Story Mode, which is this one and which was discontinued in 2019 following the demise of the company that made it.

Fortunately, I was recently at a place with some PS4s you could play on, and one of the discs they had was for none other than Minecraft: Story Mode.

Its gameplay is kind of hard to describe; I think my best bet would be to say it's basically an interactive TV show. You make various dialogue choices and just choices in general, which shape the narrative going forward, and it's organized into "episodes".

I must make a disclaimer before I continue: I didn't finish this. I did manage to get through the first four episodes, but then I ran out of time. As such, this is mostly a review of those four: "The Order of the Stone," "Assembly Required," "The Last Place You Look," and "A Block and a Hard Place".

They constitute what's basically a story arc, dealing with a giant world-destroying monster called the Wither Storm that's destroying the world. It looks appropriately scary. 

(The other four episodes of Season 1 are just random self-contained adventures, for the most part.)

I described this game to one of my relatives as "basically if Winter Morgan was good." It hits many of the same plot beats as Winter Morgan's myriad series of rather shovelwarey unofficial Minecraft novels: somewhat unrealistic use of command blocks, bands of unlikely everyman heroes, et cetera. Unlike those books, however, this one is official, and its heroes are much more competent. Its villains are also actually competent and threatening, contrary to Winter Morgan's grandiose and pretentious bad guys.

I don't really have any desire to play Minecraft Earth. Unlike the other spinoff games, it was designed to be a mobile game, and those are mostly somewhat interchangeable.

I think Minecraft: Story Mode is the only official Minecraft product to acknowledge the existence of command blocks in-story. Make of that what you will.

This is a videogame, and it's rated E10+.

4 stars.

(Endnote: i have failed to keep to my schedule. oh the horror)

"Wicked" (2024)

I liked this movie once the plot picked up, which unfortunately was about two hours in. 

I also had to keep pausing it because I couldn't take more than a few minutes of these people at a time. (Once the love interest Fiyero showed up, that escalated to not being able to take more than a few lines of dialogue at a time.)

Some of the songs in this are good. Some of them are okay. Some of them are frankly irritating. I liked the main character Elphaba's first solo ("The Wizard and I") for how adorably happy she is at someone finally being nice to her. The dance scene at the Ozdust Ballroom wasn't my favorite, but I was amused by how it was basically Elphaba going like "You don't want to let me into your dance number? WELL HOW ABOUT I MAKE MY OWN DANCE NUMBER!"

I must confess that I watched this solely because I wanted to write a fanfiction where Dr. Dillamond (a talking goat teacher from the movie) is replaced by Asgore Dreemurr (the final boss of Toby Fox's 2015 game Undertale). Don't ask me why, my brain just does this sometimes. And because I can't really write a fanfic about something I haven't seen/read/watched (and also because I was bored), I decided to watch it before writing the fic.

Oh yeah, the clockwork train. They have a train in Oz, except it's made of clockwork and for some reason it runs on a rack-and-pinion system instead of on rails. There are such things as rack railways, but those don't quite work like that; they have normal wheels to support the car, and the rack-and-pinion is just to haul it up the mountain. Also they're pretty much only used on steep inclines, whereas this one is on seemingly completely level ground. It also doesn't seem to be able to pull any cars, which makes it... pretty much completely useless? I really don't understand why they don't just use a normal train, aside from that it's not as aesthetic.

(Plus how are you going to turn without screwing up the gear ratio? Are the giant gear wheels driven by a differential? What even powers the thing? Why the heck did they leave the giant gears on the front exposed where someone could screw up the whole train by just chucking a rock into them? I have so many questions.)

This isn't a videogame, it's a movie, and it's rated PG. I'd personally maybe bump that up to PG-13, but that's just me.

3 stars.

(Endnote: If anyone starts singing "Popular", I'm leaving.)

"Artemis Fowl: The Atlantis Complex" by Eoin Colfer

In which Artemis has an incredibly annoying alter ego.

He's come down with the titular Atlantis Complex, which is a mental disorder criminals with magic get. In his case, it manifests as an irrational fear of the number four, an irrational love of the number five, severe paranoia, and (eventually) the aforementioned incredibly annoying alter ego. That last is named Orion and he's pretty much the opposite of normal Artemis in every way.

This one jumped fewer sharks than The Time Paradox, possibly because there aren't tons of sharks left to jump. It's better than that one, but it's still probably my second least favorite volume. This is Orion's fault.

Artemis's extremely fancy phone has a bunch of mini-programs, or "mi-p's", on it. Tech-savvy readers may recognize these as what we now call "apps". This isn't a Renamed Concept Rule, though, because the book was written in 2006, and mobile apps started being a thing sometime around 2008. So rather than cumbersomely renaming apps, this book actually predicted their existence.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for fantasy violence and Orion being weird. 

3 stars.

Favorite lines:

    "No," said the centaur with absolute certainty. "And I say that with absolute certainty."

    Page 137.

    [for context, there's a giant squid trying to crack open Artemis's sea helmet]

    The noise was exactly what Artemis had always imagined it would sound like if a giant squid tried to crack his sea helmet.

    Page 293.

    Any first-day chemistry student could have told Ragby never to put sparks near a mystery gas.

    Unfortunately, Ragby had never met any first-day chemistry students...

    Page 326. 

(Endnote: The author's name is actually pronounced "Owen," not "Ay-oine" or "Ee-owen" or anything like that.)

"Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox" by Eoin Colfer

Ah yes. The Time Paradox. The only volume of the entire eight-book Artemis Fowl series I do not personally own.

Let me explain.

Now that we have the eighth type of fairies back (as of The Lost Colony) and can do the big magic again, the fairies have the capability to do things like time travel. Which is good, because Artemis's mom is dying of a sickness or something, and in order to save her, he needs a very specific species of lemur. Don't ask me why.

Unfortunately, back when he was still evil, he caused that exact species of lemur to go extinct. Again, don't ask me why. So Holly and present!Artemis go back in time to stop past!Artemis from extinctifying the lemur, which leads to more time-travel-based shenanigans.

And this is where the book gets weird, and it doesn't stop doing so. I would be entirely unsurprised to learn that this was written with the goal of "make Artemis/Holly shipping less problematic;" normally it's super weird and kind of creepy because Artemis is like 15 and Holly is like 80, but this one solves (well, "solves") that by physically re-aging them until they're both biologically the same age. Doesn't really get rid of the mental age gap though, which is where like 87% of the problematicity comes from.

Also, somehow past!Artemis is more competent than present!Artemis? I found that pretty hard to believe. There's also weird stuff with people who want random endangered animals to go extinct if they aren't useful, which is actually |Opal Koboi's fault. Somehow.|

This book's sole saving grace is that it does manage to be plot relevant, with |time-traveled past!Opal| featuring majorly in book 8.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A stern T for being weird.

2 stars.

(Endnote: For all the title says, |book 8|'s time travel is |a lot more paradox-y and confusing|.)

Mini-Reviews 15: It's The Long Title Song!

Handbook of Consolations for the Fears and Trials that Oppress Us in the Struggle with Death by Johann Gerhard 

I thought this book was some sort of grief counseling, for when someone you love dies.

It is not.

This book is for when you are the one dying, or when you're talking to someone who is, and you/they are struggling with your faith. It's written in the classic ancient-greek-philosophy-instruction style of "Student: I have a question, and it's this! Teacher: I have an answer to that question, and it's this."

It's quite good. If I'm ever dying of sickness, someone please send me a copy.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for discussion of death.

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, Christian nonfiction, nonfiction, rated E10+

The Story of Be by David Crystal

I got this out of the library on a whim because it looked interesting. It was, in fact, interesting.

While I (as a firm believer in the Tower of Babel) disagree with it on where languages came from, most of the rest of it is pretty informative.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for sexual references ({T15+ish describing the "sexual be", as in "being with someone"}).

3 stars. Not amazing, but it's definitely not bad.

Tags for this one: 3-star, nonfiction, rated T15+

The Innocent by David Baldacci

I have now read a thriller. Yay me.

It's about this special forces assassin guy who gets almost assassinated himself (repeatedly), then teams up with a teenage girl who's been having a bad time in foster care and whose parents have just been murdered. Because person or persons unknown keep trying to assassinate the both of them, and also keep assassinating other people who they try to get evidence from.

Also known as "489 pages of the plot thickening and 57 pages of 'oh yeah, it's all coming together.'"

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: M for mostly offscreen sexual content between two adults (which I skipped over anyway), strong language (though no Cardinal Swearwords that I recall), and semi-graphic violence. This is a book for adults.

3 stars.

Tags for this one: 3-star, modern setting, rated M, thriller

(Endnote: I'm really starting to run out of titles for these things.)

"Keeper of the Rend" by Lisa Maxwell

The cover makes it look like horror, but it's not really. It's more magical realism than anything.

This book has a symbolism-laden main villain (a colorless and lifeless alternate dimension inhabited by an entity that wants to make our dimension colorless and lifeless) that it doesn't attempt to use as a heavy-handed allegory for something in real life, and I'm not sure what to make of that.

On the one hand, it's kind of nice to have a book like this not be bashing you over the head with its philosophy. On the other hand, it does leave the book feeling kind of... uh... unfinished? Incomplete? It's got a sort of space in it where it feels like something is supposed to go, where you expect there to be that aforementioned allegory, but there's nothing in it. There's no overwhelming central message to the book, contrary to the rest of the text that feels like it should have one.

Which honestly makes it seem more mature than a lot of other middle-grade fiction. Now that I think about it, I don't know if what I'm seeing is this book being nuanced, or other books being overly direct. Granted, the maturity and nuance is kind of undermined by its tacking on a weirdly trite bit at the end, but still.

(Basically, there's two intermingled subplots, one about how the main character's brother is being a more-than-usual jerk to him, and one about how the main character's dad ignores him and thinks his birdwatching hobby is for wimps. The first one ends with a "well, now that he's no longer |pretty much mind-controlled by the evil dimension entity's spooky marbles of doom| he's nicer, but there have been some permanent effects and this isn't just going to magically go away." Which makes the resolution of the second one, which I expected to also have some variant of "this isn't just going to magically go away," seem weird -- "the dad suddenly realizes he needs to spend more time with his other son, and asks him about birdwatching to do so, despite not having had any sort of character arc leading up to this" doesn't really mesh with the rest of the book. The rest of the book is intricate and well-plotted enough that I'm just going to blame the editor for this weird juxtaposition.)

The book doesn't shy away from having the boy protagonist get rescued from things by the girl deuteragonist, but it also doesn't shy away from reversing that and having the girl deuteragonist get rescued from things by the boy protagonist. I thought that was interesting; usually if you flip the damsel-in-distress trope around by having the damsel be a guy, you don't also flip it around again and have the rescuer also have to get rescued herself.

It's possible that part of the message of this book is "parents should be there for their kids, who shouldn't have to be solving problems that should be solved by adults." Both Xavier (the protagonist) and Clementine (the deuteragonist) really shouldn't be fighting this evil entity, and they both grow up significantly over the course of the story. They're also |not actually able to stop it by themselves; if Clementine's dad hadn't realized what was going on and come to the rescue, they would have lost, and probably both died.|

That being (at least some of) the message would explain the weird tacked-on bit I mentioned above, if the editor was trying to make it more obvious or something.

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

4 stars. I'd really like to read this with a book club sometime so I can see what other people think of it, as it was really thought-provoking. Maybe that's what the lack of hitting-you-over-the-head-with-real-world-applicability is for; it's so you actually think about it instead of being like "okay, this is what this book is unsubtly saying, I get it, on to the next one."

(Endnote: Blogger insists "deuteragonist" isn't a word, which it totally is. Look it up if you don't believe me.)