"Hand of Steel" by Jessi L. Roberts

Hey look, more Christian science fiction! Not particularly good Christian science fiction, but it's there nonetheless!

I would like to note that Hand of Steel's protagonist is like Spensa from Skyward if you took out all the parts that made her likeable. She's another perpetually angry teenage girl, and both she and Spensa live in sci-fi space universes, but Spensa is somehow much more fun to read about.

(Actually, if I had a nickel for every time this summer I read a book whose protagonist was a perpetually angry teenage girl, I'd have three nickels: one from Apprentice, one from Skyward, and one from this. That isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened thrice.)

This book seems to assume that you already have the entire setting in your head before you read it. Or something. It'll just tell you "oh, this guy's an elba," without ever bothering to first introduce you to the concept of elbas or what the heck they look like. It does have a brief setting guide in the back, but having to constantly refer to that in order to be like "wait, which of the six alien races was that again?" is really immersion-breaking and doesn't actually help me envision anything.

You can't see it from the cover image, but this book is not very thick. I suppose that goes some way toward explaining why it feels the need to just explain everything in the setting guide, but... surely there could have been space for some grand sweeping descriptions of planets and aliens so readers (like me) don't have such a hard time envisioning everything.

Also, this author has some of the shortest paragraphs I've ever seen.

It's like one sentence to a paragraph. Maybe two if we're lucky.

And this is the entire book.

And while I fully know and understand that giving a sentence its own paragraph can be a way to give that sentence force, it manifestly doesn't work if you do it approximately twelve times a page. All that does is make your prose really choppy. 

Plus, thanks to a combination of this and the author's lack of concrete descriptions, half the fight scenes read more like outlines than actual scenes.

I suppose I might have liked this book a bit more if Skyward and Starsight weren't fresh in my mind to compare it to. The trouble is, those books are really good, and this has enough similarities that I can't help comparing them.

And now to compare it to something else! Specifically The Beast Player. Like that book's author, this one seems to like putting her protagonist through moral dilemmas. But unlike in The Beast Player, it's glaringly obvious to an outside observer (i.e. the reader) what the right thing to do in most of Hand of Steel's dilemmas are. So really they're just the protagonist getting confronted with the fact that she's wrong and not believing it.

Most of those revolve around the Ultimate Ruling Space Corporation Government's habit of using enslavement as a punishment for crimes, coupled with its rather loose definition of what a "crime" actually is. This makes it glaringly obvious to an outside observer (reading this book) that Your Leaders Are Totally Evil. Which, one, the evil government is not my favorite trope, and two, it gets a tad annoying when the protagonist repeatedly fails to realize something that's glaringly obvious to readers.

As I mentioned above, this is Christian science fiction. Sort of. The Christianity feels like it gets lost in the rest of the book, which is not really what one tends to want in Christian fiction. That said, it is still a plot point when it does manage to surface, so that's better than just being set dressing.

In conclusion, I think that Carthage must be destroyed this book needed a better editor.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for sci-fi violence and a lot of slavery. Those, together, only really merit an E10+, except that there is also {T exactly one mention of slaves being sold to a brothel, which feels like it was just thrown in there to be edgy}. And that pushed the rating up.

2 stars.

(Endnote: Did I mention it takes like three chapters for the protagonist to actually get her cybernetic hand? That doesn't seem like a lot, but the book only has fourteen.)

"Apprentice" by Kristen Young

This book is weird. Not in necessarily a bad way, but also not really in a good way either.

It's dystopian. The premise of the book involves a government called the Love Collective (are you weirded out yet?) who claim to promote love and peace and harmony, unlike all the "Haters" who don't constantly promote love and peace and harmony. They also brainwash people, because they're dystopian.

Allow me to point something out. When you're living in a dystopia and you suddenly realize "hey, this is a dystopia" and want to get out, the expected course of action is to, y'know, not tell anyone while you try to figure out how to escape. It builds tension quite easily. Such is the plot of Fahrenheit 451, The Giver, The Sky Inside, the first book of Vega Jane, everybody's lives in Nazi Germany and the USSR... In fact, the one thing you don't do is go around saying seditious things to people.

Our main character, Kerr Flick (these people have the strangest names), is seemingly unable to keep her mouth shut. She goes around saying seditious things to people, which is not generally a quality you want in a dystopia. |It very nearly gets her arrested and brainwashed near the end of the book; she's only saved by Underground Resistance Members Ex Machina.| She's also constantly angry, which does not contribute to fitting in with the other dystopia people.

For whatever reason, the Love Collective has decided that normal names are for other people. We have people named things like "Buff" and "Pim" and "Freb". I think the most normal name in the entire book is "Lee".

My pseudonymous acquaintance Kittens warned me that this book was really weird. Having read it, I can now confirm that she told me so.

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

2 stars. It's not that the book is bad, exactly, it's just really weird and I don't like the protagonist very much, and I mostly finished it because I wanted to find out what the heck was up with this universe. Which, hey, that did keep me reading, so the author must have done something right. I was originally going to give it three stars until I failed to force myself to read the second book, and realized that I actually disliked reading it. Hence, two stars.

(Endnote: No, monsieur. For loooooooove.)

Mini-Reviews 19: Remaining Quest Objectives

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

I can see why this is such a popular book. I mean, it kept me interested while I was sleep-deprived on an airplane, and that is no mean feat.

Treasure Island doesn't use all the pirate tropes, it started all the pirate tropes.

My mom reviewed this, and this mini-review is part of my first completed quest.

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

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, adventure, classics, pirates, rated E10+

Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling

I didn't enjoy reading this, and I think the reason for that is twofold: A) I'm too old for it, and B) it was meant to be read aloud.

This mini-review is also part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E. It's meant to be read aloud to children.

2 stars. Star ratings are a subjective measure of how much I liked a book, not a more objective measure of how good a book is, and I didn't enjoy reading this.

Tags for this one: 2-star, classics, rated E, talking animals

The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary

Honestly, I like this better now that I'm older. When I was younger, I found the book too tense, but I think it's just right for me now. Also it's about a mouse, so that's a definite plus in my opinion (I am, after all, the person who named his blog "Sam the Library Mouse").

I really enjoyed how the toy motorcycle works. You make it go by making motorcycle noises. It's just such a fun explanation. |And it's made even better by the toy ambulance, which shows up later in the book, being powered by making ambulance noises.|

This mini-review, too, is part of my first completed quest. Hence the title of the collection.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E. Nothing objectionable.

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, rated E, talking animals

(Endnote: Oddly enough, all three of these books have prominently yellow covers.)

"Gulliver's Travels" by Jonathan Swift

Did you know that this book doesn't actually end when Gulliver leaves Lilliput?

Well, it doesn't. Lilliput (the land of the tiny people) is just Part 1, and there are three others. I suspect that Lilliput may be the famous one because by the time most people get through it, they've had about enough Gulliver's Travels for one lifetime.

(Also, the Lilliputians are supposed to be like six inches tall, so they're usually drawn much smaller than they're acutally supposed to be.)

Part 2 is in Brobdingnag, which is the opposite of Lilliput: it's full of giants. Their society is apparently so much more perfect than 1700s England that Jonathan Swift (through Gulliver) feels the need to spend multiple chapters expounding upon this.

Part 3 doesn't confine itself to one fictional society, instead moving rapidly (for this book, at least) through the following:

-Laputa, an island city-state (of normal-sized people!) that flies using a giant magnet. They're good at astronomy and geometry, and almost nothing else.

-Balnibarbi, Laputa's vassal state. They aren't even good at astronomy or geometry. They are in fact an incredibly obvious satire of 1700s science, hence the utterly ridiculous science projects they get up to.

-Glubbdubdrib, an island with magicians (the kind who summon ghosts). Gulliver spends a while talking to the ghosts of random famous dead people, and we get to see Jonathan Swift fanboy over Brutus for a few paragraphs.

-Luggnagg, the most normal of the made-up islands. Its only quirk is that it has people who don't die of old age, but they do age normally so that's not as awesome as you (or Gulliver) might think.

-And finally, Japan, which is literally just Japan. We spend like one chapter there.

And Part 4 involves Gulliver's journey to the land of the Houyhnhnms. It doesn't have an actual name, it's just called the land of the Houyhnhnms. In this land, horses (also known as Houyhnhnms) are sentient and humans (also known as Yahoos) aren't. We spend frankly too much time lampooning modern 1700s European society and comparing it to the much more perfect and truly beautiful utopian society of the Houyhnhnms, and using Yahoos as stand-ins for all the vices Jonathan Swift thinks are ruining the world.

If you ever wondered where the term Yahoo comes from, look no further. It's from this. 

Gulliver's Travels is occasionally oddly prescient (among other things, it did predict magnetic levitation and the moons of Mars), and it should be cut a bit of slack for being one of the first books about entirely made-up places and societies. However, it's also long and mostly rather boring. The biting social satire was mildly interesting in Lilliput, and got increasingly dull with each subsequent new land full of people who symbolize what Jonathan Swift doesn't like.

Let no-one say that nobody ever goes to the bathroom in books, for in this one, people do indeed go to the bathroom. Let no-one also say that said bathroom-going is a point in this book's favor.

I should probably also mention that this Book is written in the older Style of the English Language, wherein all Nouns are begun with capital Letters (as German Nouns are in this Age), and all foreign Words and most proper Nouns are set in Italics. That Style took me some Time before I acclimated to its Difference from the Style of the modern Day.

This review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: I think T15+ for crude humor, violence, sexual references, and nudity (including one rather bizarre section where {T15+ a bunch of Brobdingnag women use Gulliver as a sort of pseudo-sex-toy}). If that section weren't in there, it would probably be T.

2 stars. It's not that the biting satire of 1700s European society isn't fun, but... actually, the biting satire of 1700s European society isn't fun. I'm glad to be done with it. I'm also confused as to why this is on a puzzle of children's books (from which I took my first completed quest), because it gets increasingly less appropriate-for-children after we leave Lilliput. Maybe the people who designed the puzzle didn't realize that the Lilliput sections, which are reasonably family-friendly, weren't the entire book.

(Endnote: I shall now say "Houyhnhnm" and "Yahoo" several times until they lose all meaning.)

"Tikki Tikki Tembo" by Arlene Mosel

This review's wordcount is probably a significant fraction of that of the actual book. Tikki Tikki Tembo is not very long.

I freely confess that I don't know very much about ancient Chinese culture. However, from what I do know, this does not seem like a very accurate depiction. It's less "China specifically" and more "Stuff I vaguely heard about Asia once."

This book is one of those "this is how it got this way" stories, which in my opinion are always fairly pointless. In this case, it's explaining why Chinese first names tend to be kind of short, using the tale of a kid named "Tikki tikki tembo-no sa rembo-chari bari ruchi-pip peri pembo" who falls in a well. Problems ensue because his name is long and hard to say, which messes up his brother's attempts to tell people he's fallen in a well.

There's a character in this, the Old Man with the Ladder, whose two defining characteristics are "is old" and "has a ladder". He's on the cover; you can tell it's him because he's holding a ladder. I'm not sure what he does with his life.

[EDIT, 3/14/2026: Fixed some truncated sentences in the above paragraph.]

Yeah, this review is short. So is the book. But I had more to say than would fit in a mini-review, so here we are.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E. For all its faults, there's nothing really bad in it.

2 stars. If it hadn't been for my first completed quest (which this review is part of), I probably would never have read this book; now that it's over, I probably never will again.

(Endnote: I can't think of an endnote for this post. Maybe I'll just say "Tikki tikki tembo-no sa rembo-chari bari ruchi-pip peri pembo" a few times. That name, what with all the times people say it, also probably makes up a significant fraction of the book's wordcount.)

"Walk Two Moons" by Sharon Creech

I first read this book as a preteen. I didn't like it; later, I came to the conclusion that I was simply too young for it. And I still think I was too young for it then, but I also still don't like it. But I dislike it for different reasons this time!

Walk Two Moons is the sort of children's book that grown-ups think is good. Hence, probably, why it won the Newbery Medal. It's got tragedy, complex characters, that plot-within-a-plot thing that you sometimes get in this sort of book... all the things that make adults go "What a good book!" and make kids go "uhhhhhh..."

Basically, a thirteen-ish-year-old girl (the book does its best to avoid giving us any numbers regarding her age, perhaps in an attempt to make it appeal to a wider age range, but I infer from some context that she's thirteenish) has a mom who, some time ago, went to Idaho. And didn't come back. Our main character, Salamanca "Sal" Hiddle, misses her mom a lot, and embarks upon an Epic Quest (also known as a road trip) with her grandparents to go to Idaho and find her mom.

Along the way, she tells her grandparents the tale of Phoebe Winterbottom, one of her classmates. Phoebe's family has gone slightly weird from trying to be too perfect, and it's also (maybe) being stalked by a (maybe) lunatic. (Phoebe has a very vivid imagination and is convinced that this person she keeps seeing is a lunatic who's going to murder them all.) The tale of Phoebe Winterbottom also incudes general bits about Sal's school and home life. These sections serve as the "plot-within-a-plot" I mentioned above.

Sal's mom, by the way, |is dead|. I debated whether or not to spoiler that, because there's a lot of subtext that points to it. However, I can't speak to how clear that subtext is; I entirely missed it the first time I read this, but I was also bad at subtext in general at that age, and this time around I knew what it pointed to.

All right, the two main reasons why I didn't like it this time.

First: Phoebe Winterbottom annoys me. She's a good character, because she has both flaws and personality, but unfortunately one of her flaws is "getting on my nerves". Part of that may be because I don't like stuck-up characters in general, and Phoebe has acquired some upsticking as part of her family's attempt to be too perfect.

Second: Animism. Y'know how the book is named from a Native American proverb--something like "Before you judge a man, first walk two moons in his moccasins"? That sort of flavor runs throughout the whole book. There's random throwaway lines about praying to trees (don't pray to trees, by the way, they can't hear you so there's no point) and the like, and there's also a wistful and vaguely spritiualist denouement featuring a quote that quite conclusively shows the incompleteness of worldviews that don't include the Fall.

(I know I broke parallelism in the above two paragraphs. I couldn't figure out a better way to say them.)

This review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+. I don't like the book, but there's nothing really objectionable in it, aside from the animism and such (which I think ten-year-olds should be able to handle).

2 stars.

Unfavorite Lines Which I Wish To Refute:

    It seems to me that we can't explain all the truly awful things in the world like war and murder and brain tumors...

    Page 263. We can explain all the truly awful things in the world. They're Satan's fault. They came in via the Fall. That's literally what the Fall was.

(Endnote: Personally, I prefer the Discworld version of the proverb, that being the words of the trollish philosopher Plateau: "If you wants to understan' an enemy, you gotta walk a mile in his shoes. Den, if he's still your enemy, at least you're a mile away and he's got no shoes.")

"Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing" by Judy Blume

I did not expect to like this book. Turns out, I don't like this book, so my expectations were correct. And that is entirely due to:

"Look for the other books about Peter, Sheila, and the irrepressible Fudge!"

     -the back cover

"Fudge should be repressed."

     -me to my family midway through reading this

Fudge is the protagonist's incredibly annoying younger brother. He is, as you may have guessed, incredibly annoying. So kudos to Judy Blume for making him authentically awful, but at the same time, he's so awful that he ruins pretty much the entire book for me. Much like he ruins pretty much the entire book for his older brother, come to think of it.

Really, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing is a cautionary tale on how toddlers (in general) will be as awful as they can get away with, and if you parent your toddler wrong (i.e. letting them get away with things) the toddler will be awful. If you ever find anyone who doesn't believe in original sin, just point them at a small child who's been parented badly (i.e. allowed to get away with things).

But hey, fourth graders aren't twelve! So there's that, at least.

Note: To be clear, I have nothing against twelve-year-olds. It's just that they comprise approximately 96% of all middle-grade fiction protagonists, so I'm kind of tired of reading about them.

I expected to dislike this, because I expected it to be a ten-year-old girl having school drama. Instead I disliked it because it was a nine-year-old boy having family drama with his incredibly annoying younger brother. I've never had an incredibly annoying younger brother, but I'm glad of that fact and have no desire to experience such a sibling vicariously.

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

2 stars. Which rating it only manages because I generally reserve one-star ratings for things like "wildly inappropriate content" or "portraying Satan as a good guy".

(Endnote: I'm starting a petition to put Fudge in a timeout and ignore him until he behaves.)

"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.)

"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|.)

"The Science of Discworld" by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, & Jack Cohen

This is not, in fact, a book about how the various concepts of the Discworld could actually work. It's a book about how real-world science works, interspersed with the Discworld wizards accidentally creating our universe. I'd have liked it a lot better if the "real-world science" in it wasn't old-earth evolution.

The parts with the wizards were fun, though! Basically, the Unseen University's nerds built a nuclear thaumic reactor, which kicked out so much excess magic that they had to burn it off or risk blowing up the Discworld. So Hex (UU's magical computer thing) funneled all that magic into a mostly-defunct create-a-magicless-universe project, which was scrapped for the sheer amount of magic it would take.

I ended up mostly skimming the "science" parts to get to the Discworld parts.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A soft T15+ for swearing and sexual references.

2 stars. Too much evolution.

Favorite lines:

    ...uranium-235 is mixed up with ordinary uranium (uranium-238), and getting it out is like looking for a needle in a haystack when the needle is made of straw.

    Page 23.

    'Perhaps you would care to say a few words, sir?' said Ponder.

    'Yes.' Ridcully looked thoughtful for a moment, and then brightened up. 'Let's get this over quickly, and have lunch.'

    Page 27.

(Endnote: This book was published two years after the first Harry Potter book, in which Dumbledore also features in a "say a few words" gag. I can neither confirm nor deny that the one inspired the other.)

"Area 51 Interns: Alien Summer" by James S. Murray and Carsen Smith

This book could have been good. I give it an A for premise. And once you've mastered the concept, all you need is to master the execution.

Unfortunately, these people didn't.

Now, bear in mind that I can't point out any specific instance of "this is lame," and it's not like there's bad stuff in it. It's just also not very good.

They're addicted to having people go like "I'm saying this IN ALL CAPS!". The prose is a bit (and occasionally more than just a bit) choppy and kinda lame. None of the characters have any real personality (more than just "I have a crush on this guy," "I'm scared of the aliens," "I'm nice to the person who has a crush on me," and "I'm brash and talk like a stereotypical Australian.") The one main plot twist is well-conceived but not well-executed.

There is one silver lining to this, though. It showed me that Mike Maihack's graphic novel series Cleopatra in Space, despite having arguably an even sillier premise, is actually pretty good. (There'll be a review of that coming as soon as I can get my hands on a copy of volume 6.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy (well, sci-fi) violence (lasers and energy beams and such). Also some crude humor. And scared-of-the-aliens-guy defeats a laser turret by throwing his pants at it, then wanders around in his underwear without ever going and finding new pants for... I think the rest of the book.

2 stars. As before, it's not that there was bad stuff in it, the book was just lame.

(Endnote: There are at least two other books in this series. I will not be bothering with them.)

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

This is either a very intricately plotted book or an utter mess of one--seriously, that cover is highly representative of the plotting. Did you know the Egyptians had a secret number? I didn't. It's not even important to the plot, except as a very minor vestigial subplot where a couple of the characters keep trying to deduce it from its relationship with other numbers.

Robin Hood and his 140 Merry Men show up occasionally, though never for long, and make me question the otherwise modern setting this book seems to have. The narration is weirdly insistent that there are 140 of these Merry Men, and I'm not sure what they're doing here.

There's a rotating cast of idiosyncratically named characters that seem to be obsessed with driving away from each other in cars. And occasionally driving toward each other in cars. Some of them will also pair up and do math problems, which at least one invariably gets wrong. They also undertake a surprising number of building and home improvement projects.

 

I kept finding parts that made me think it was trying to be a realistic commercial and business-running drama, what with the lists of people buying and selling things for specific prices. Except it never tells you much about them aside from what they bought or sold for how much money. Those might have been included by mistake? Or maybe a remnant of an earlier plot? Or possibly another vestigial subplot; there are a lot of those.

And don't even get me started on the people who roll dice and take randomly colored marbles out of urns. Why do they have so many dice and urns of marbles? Is it a cult? Is it related to the mysterious character known only as "X" that the narration repeatedly breaks the fourth wall to insist the reader find him? Is it a cult of X? 

On that note, there's also, occasionally, "Y". She (it's never specified as a she and I know the y-chromosome is actually for guys, but "Y" still gives off girl vibes don't ask me how) anyway where was I? Oh yes. She seems to have some connection to X, possibly an attempt to impersonate and kill him (or, as the narration insistently terms it, "substitution and elimination"). Although I'm not entirely sure who's doing the impersonation and murder here.

Those two also have some bizarre relationship with two other people named "M" and "B", involving cars driving up and down hills. Still not sure what that's about. There may also be an indeterminate number of clones of all four, because they occasionally make two different hills at the same time, and at times a careful reading of the text would suggest that more than one of X is actually present at a time. ("Y" does that too, though less often.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for being labyrinthine and strange. It would be even more incomprehensible as a videogame.

2 stars. I don't know what the heck this book is on.

(Endnote: Did I mention the book also has a bizarrely large amount of random mathematical diatribes sprinkled throughout the whole thing? It feels weirdly like it's almost trying to teach me math.)

(Endnote Squared: This was immensely fun to write.)

"A Stroke of the Pen" by Terry Pratchett

This is a collection of short stories Terry Pratchett wrote pseudonymously for various newspapers. Sadly, most of them are... not up to his usual standard. Some of them are also later reprinted in collections of his short stories for kids (most notably Dragons at Crumbling Castle), wherein he spruced them up quite a bit.

My two particular favorites were "The Haunted Steamroller" (about a haunted steamroller) and "Pilgarlic Towers" (about a bunch of ghosts who move into a government building and cause chaos because the government is trying to tear down the old castle they usually live in.)

Now, full disclosure: I didn't actually fully read like half the stories in this. They're from before he really started being a writer, so they're not exactly peak Pratchett, and as mentioned before, about a quarter of them have been published in other places. And I don't exactly want to see the less-than-stellar original story of Dragons at Crumbling Castle. (Well, had I not read the spiffed-up edited version Pratchett put in the anthology of the same name, I'd probably have happily read it. But eh, I have the actual anthology, which I should review at some point.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ to T for rude humor, probably. These were stories for children, published in newspapers, so they're not going to have the same content level as the main-series Discworld books or his short stories for adults.

2 stars. This would probably be a fairly okay anthology by anyone else, but it somewhat pales in comparison to Terry Pratchett's normal writing, which made me not like it as much.

(Endnote: Sadly, our library system is missing several of Terry Pratchett's books, notably The Dark Side of the Sun and The Last Hero. I've been looking out for a copy of either of those, but haven't found them yet.)

"Five Elements: The Emerald Tablet" by Dan Jolley

The first four elements in this are fire, water, earth, and air, like normal (or like Greece). Now, place your bets on what Element #5 is!

-Quintessence

-Heart

-The Element of Surprise 

-Grimbo (E)

-Magic

-Boron

-Lifeforce

-Green

-Cold

-Metal

-Aether

-Wood

-Space

-Lightning

-Babies

-Awesomesauce

-Oregano

-Magick (with a K)

It's the last one, and their spelling annoyed me. The only books I've ever seen call it "magick" (with a K) and pull it off are The Adventurer's Guide to Successful Escapes and its two sequels, and it works for them because they have the right vibe for it. This doesn't.

Actually, when you consider that calling it magick (with a K) was invented by none other than Aleister Crowley the popularizer of the occult, this book absolutely does have the right vibe for that... though not the right vibe for me to take it in stride.

Which, yeah, this had too much occult stuff and magick (with a K) for me to enjoy. So I'm rating it 2 stars for that. The sole reason I finished this was that I wanted to know what Element #5 was.

And were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A stern T for occult, blood magic, blood in general, and violence.

By the way, the evil eyeless dragon thing on the cover (it does actually look pretty cool, which is why I picked the book up; yes, I judged a book by its cover and discovered that wasn't such a great idea) is called a null draak. I, even I, have come up with better names for evil dragons than that. Maybe the whole magick (with a K) thing is just Dan Jolley having bad naming sense.

This review barely conforms at all to my usual format, but if it did, all the trains of thought would suddenly have giant gaps. The review is enough of a mess as it is.

Also, apparently there was an actual thing called the Emerald Tablet, which had something to do with alchemy. Or something. There's also a pseudohistorical (i.e. someone made it up) book about lizardmen and Atlantis by the same name. 

(Endnote: In addition to it making me pine for Adventurer's Guide, after having played Undertale I also couldn't read "magick" (with a K) without thinking of the character Madjick. [EDITED 2/3/2026 to change link to the non-Fandom wiki])

Mini-Reviews 9: Fantastic Number 9

deadly ... pink by Vivian Vande Velde

In which we've developed VR that interfaces with your brain. It starts to be unsafe after playing it for eight hours straight, which is why you get kicked out after thirty minutes. Except if you're an admin and can make it not do that, in which case you're at risk of brain damage and your sister has to come talk you out of staying in the game.

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

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, modern setting, rated E10+, science fiction

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

This was good until it was abruptly depressing. Did Ray Bradbury ever write anything that didn't have dystopia and/or |nuclear war| somewhere in it?

Much of the science in this is a bit dated (humans can't survive without a spacesuit on Mars, and crewed Mars rockets aren't exactly easy to build) but it's still a good read.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for violence and (I think) some bad language. It's too disjointed to make one cohesive narrative, though you could do something like release each mini-story as its own chapter or DLC for the main game. 

3 stars. The ending was too melancholy for my taste.

Tags for this one: 3-star, rated T, science fiction, space

Legend of the Ghost Dog by Elizabeth Cody Kimmel

This one would have been good if it had played the scary straight. It ought to have been creepypasta material instead of sadpasta material. But instead of a ghost dog that's insane and attacking people, we get a ghost dog that's trying to lead people to the resting place of a kid who got lost looking for it and froze to death. I'd have spoiler tagged that, but I saw it coming by like chapter 3, so why bother.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for dangerous situations (characters get stuck in a blizzard). It's not even spooky.

2 stars. Just lame.

Tags for this one: 2-star, horror [at least I think it was supposed to be], junior fiction, lame, modern setting, rated E10+

(Endnote: It's been a while since I did one of these, hasn't it.)

"The Last of the Mohicans" by James Fenimore Cooper

Essay written for literature class. You know how this works. Also, happy new year from my first post of 2025. (Well, first post published in 2025; my backlog of stuff written in 2024 stretches until mid-February.)

The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper

[EDIT: Somehow I didn't realize his middle name is "Fenimore" and not "Fenmore" so I had to go change that]

[EDIT 2: Missed one]

 

Set against the backdrop of the French and Indian War, The Last of the Mohicans is a story about a quest to find a man’s daughters. Its point revolves around the inevitability of change, but this is hampered by the author’s needlessly archaic use of language, sentence length issues, and strange approach to punctuation.

The book’s prose and writing style leaves much to be desired with regard to quality. It felt as though James Fenimore Cooper was trying to write in a style appropriate for the setting’s time period and hadn’t quite mastered it, leaving the sentences clunky, overlong, and needlessly archaic. This is clearly not simply the result of the author’s time period, as other books from roughly the same era—such as the works of Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, and Washington Irving—are far more easily intelligible and comprehensible. These authors also possess mastery of the comma, something Cooper apparently lacked; he seemed to insert them wherever he thought they should go without regarding rules of punctuation. However well-plotted and well-written the book may otherwise be, the stylistic errors are too egregious for me to ignore and kept pulling me out of the story.

The plot of The Last of the Mohicans revolves around Colonel Heyward’s two daughters, Alice and Cora, who are repeatedly kidnapped by the Huron Magua and rescued by a varied cast of other characters. Among others, these include the titular Last of the Mohicans, Uncas, and his father Chingachgook. Most of the book is spent during the multiple extended periods of trying to find the sisters, with various smaller arcs fused together to create one longer story. The true climax of the book arrives when Native American warriors allied with the protagonists clash with different Native American warriors allied with Magua, rescuing the younger daughter Alice and killing Magua but also getting Cora and Uncas killed in the process. Overall, the plot holds together well, though it could have been rather shorter without detracting from the quality of the story.

James Fenimore Cooper’s point for this story seems to be about the inevitability of change and the futility of resisting it, though he does appear to see the value in preserving the original state of affairs where possible. Throughout the book there are multiple philosophical discussions on the general subject of European interference in the Native American culture, practices, and way of life that preceded their arrival. Despite providing the title, Uncas and Chingachgook’s status as the last living members of the Mohican tribe is a relatively minor plot point, and is not dwelt upon much by the narrative; however, Uncas’ death and the subsequent (though implied) inevitable permanent death of the Mohican tribe do add to this point.

In conclusion, The Last of the Mohicans is a book that touches on the difficult subject of inevitable change with a simple yet elegant storyline. However, James Fenimore Cooper’s apparent lack of prowess with punctuation and sentence structure created a jarring contrast that made the book difficult and annoying to read.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for violence. It would probably make a better videogame than it does a book.

In that vein, 2 stars. If I hadn't been reading this for school, I would have DNF'd it.

(Endnote: Can you tell I wasn't a fan of James Fenimore Cooper and his sentence structure?)