"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.)

"The Count of Monte Cristo" by Alexandre Dumas (adaptation by Crystal S. Chan, art by Nokman Poon)

In a manga or graphic novel, the art is at least as important to me as the story in determining how much I like it. If a graphic novel has a great story but the art is hideous, I'm probably not going to like it; conversely, if the story is lame but the art is good, I'll usually finish reading it just for the art.

The art in this is great, as is the story.

I don't really have much to say about the plot, because it's just the plot of The Count of Monte Cristo. They stayed very true to it, and it's honestly pretty incredible how well they managed to condense such an absolute brick of a book into this manga.

(Side note: I love how dramatic men's formal wear can look, especially the 1800s-era-ish kind. This manga makes good use of it.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for murder and the like, as well as some delicately handled plot points involving illegitimate children.

4 stars.

(Endnote: At one point, the Count says that he's going to return someone's glove "wrapped around a bullet" [i.e. he's going to shoot him]. |The duel ends up not happening|, so I think it would be funny if |some time later he wrapped the glove around a bullet and gave it back to its original owner|.)

Mini-Reviews 16: Tons of #9 Coal

Just Listen by Sarah Dessen

The main characters of another of Sarah Dessen's books (This Lullaby, I think) cameo in this one. I thought that was neat.

It's about a girl who's trying desperately to pretend everything is fine and hold things together while everything falls apart around her, and also a guy who's into weird music and who she maybe (okay definitely, this is a romance novel) likes.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for discussion of an eating disorder (and possibly also a suicide attempt), an in-the-past and mostly offscreen sexual assault, and swearing (including one instance of The Cardinal Swearword).

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, a kissing book, DRAMA!, modern setting, rated T15+, romance, school drama, YA

Bitter End by Rex Stout

 

It's another Nero Wolfe book. A novella, this time. I read this on a tablet in an airport, which is not my favorite way or place to read books, but it was good enough that I liked it regardless.

 

Basically, someone puts quinine in a can of liver paté (no idea what paté is but I assume it's some kind of meat paste thing) that Nero Wolfe subsequently eats. He Does Not Like This and begins a personal quest to find whoever did that and make them pay.

 

I don't have tons to say about this, but I do have some favorite lines to share.

 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A stern T for violence (people getting shot at and stuff, plus it is a murder mystery).

 

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

 

    "I am under no obligation to catch murderers indiscriminately."

    Page, uh, I have no idea? This is an ebook and it doesn't like telling me the page numbers for whatever reason.

 

     "Some news for you. [NAME REDACTED] is under arrest: they just took |her| away from here. Mr. Wolfe would like to have |her| prosecuted for feeding him quinine, but the cops prefer to try |her| for murder. [REDACTED]'s guilty of both."

    Page nobodyknows. Page numbers are a mess in Ebooks, it's one of the reasons I don't like them as much as actual paper books.

Tags for this one: 4-star, mystery, rated T

Silverwing by Kenneth Oppel (illustrated by Christopher Steininger)

 

Content warning: This is a book about bats. If you don't like bats or are afraid of bats, don't read it.

Basically, a young bat's clan of bats is migrating south after the young bat (our main character) accidentally provoked some owls into burning down their home tree. Then he gets separated from the clan, goes on an a bunch of adventures, and meets the girl deuteragonist. She's not really a love interest, though that may change as the series goes on.

The book is actually pretty creepy. The art doesn't help, but the story features such delightful things as a rat civilization, a cult of bats who can sort of transform into humans, and these carnivorous jungle bats that try to eat whatever they can get their hands on (including some pigeons and the deuteragonist).

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for all that stuff I mentioned above.

3 stars. Could conceivably have been 4 if it hadn't kept talking about evolution.

Tags for this one: 3-star, adventure, modern setting, rated T, talking animals

(Endnote: And the boss man said, "Well bless my soul!")

"Cleopatra In Space" by Mike Maihack

This series was made known to me by one of my classmates in a literature class, who wrote one of her essays on the first book. (Yes, it's the same literature class for which I've been doing essays on things like A Tale of Two Cities and All Quiet on the Western Front. There aren't any actual rules about how highbrow your essay subjects have to be, I just feel silly doing literary analysis on unserious things.)

Anyway, on to the series! I'm not going to bother blacking out the spoilers; ye be warned. There's ending spoilers in the book 6 review, so if you don't want to know how it ends, maybe don't read that one.

Book One: Target Practice 

Fifteen-year-old Cleopatra VIII Philopator (the only Cleopatra most people ever know about) gets isekai'd into the future when she finds a mysterious tablet, leaving her friend Gozi behind. Despite this being middle-grade fiction, she isn't twelve, so I afford the author some extra points for that.

 

Could have done without the "you're in the future... but you still have to go to school" bit, but it does serve to introduce some characters who'll be important later (namely her history professor, Khensu the cat, as well as her classmates Brian, Zaid, and Akila). Also, apparently she's the prophesied "person who will save us from the evil overlord Xaius Octavian".

 

She gets sent on a training mission to retrieve a magic sword, which will be important later.

Book Two: The Thief and the Sword

Remember how I told you that magic sword would be important later? A guy steals it in this one and delivers it to Xaius Octavian. Said guy turns out to be named Antony, so we all know where this will go. Eventually. They spend a lot of time trying to kill each other first.

 

Did I mention the future world Cleopatra is now in (called the Nile Galaxy) is ruled by a pharaoh, and below her, a bunch of cats? I love the cats. They're awesome. [EDIT: Fixed a there/their/they're mistake.]

 

Also, it turns out the magic sword wasn't actually a real magic sword. Xaius Octavian breaks it in half when he finally receives it at the end of this one. (According to Wikipedia's summary it's actually also the same sword Cleopatra and Gozi found at the very beginning of book 1 right before Cleopatra gets isekai'd. I don't remember that bit at all.)

Book Three: Secret of the Time Tablets

In which Cleopatra acquires a fedora, only to lose it again before the next book starts. Also in which our heroes (Cleopatra, Zaid, Brian, Akila, and Khensu) travel to the planet Hykosis, a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Antony is also here, as is a bartender named Fod Franze who Cleopatra ticks off. He'll be mildly important later.

 

This is where the permanent consequences start to set in, courtesy of Xaius Octavian finally confronting our heroes. Cleopatra develops mysterious pink energy powers. Akila loses an arm. Zaid takes a laser from Xaius Octavian (who, by the way, can shoot lasers) and sort of disintegrates.

 

Y'know how that sword would be important later? It still is. Xaius Octavian has the real one, which has kept him alive for... I think several millenia. He's also actually her friend Gozi, who's been kept alive for I think several millenia by the magic sword. And is very mad at her. And can shoot lasers.

 

Book Four: The Golden Lion

In which Antony and Cleopatra (yes, I know) traverse the ice planet of Hoth Cada'Duun to try to find the Golden Lion, which is not an actual lion. It's a sort of plasma thing, which apparently renders the area around it habitable no matter what said area used to be like. On the ice planet, it manifests as a village of people who talk in math; they're apparently total jokesters to anyone who can understand their math, which Cleopatra doesn't.

 

The Cleo-Antony romance starts happening. Also, Xaius Octavian is revealed to have a mysterious patron who manifests as a giant, vaguely humanoid patch of darkness with glowing red eyes, and Cleopatra's pink energy is revealed to be able to heal her.

 

Cleopatra also gets a pet in this one: Mihos the snow otter. He's adorable but doesn't do much other than "be adorable". He won't even be important later. Plus Akila has a robot arm that can shoot lasers; that will be important later.

Book Five: Fallen Empires

The Empire Strikes Back (Cleopatra in Space edition). Also known as, everything goes to heck.

 

The book opens with a flashback of Gozi/Octavian's tragic backstory: he got imprisoned for losing Cleopatra. Then Egypt was destroyed by space pirates. Gozi activated the self-destruct on the space pirate ships in retaliation, but survived thanks to the immortality-granting sword. He was rescued by aliens who gave him prosthetic tentacle legs; he had a normal happy life with them, but then those aliens were attacked by different space pirates, and he was the only survivor.

 

Also Administrant Khepra, one of the cat council, is secretly a traitor working for Octavian. And is Khensu's mom. Plus we learn what Xaius Octavian wanted the plasma for: he made a budget Death Star. Or several.

Book Six: Queen of the Nile

[ENDING SPOILERS IN THIS ONE]

Cleo has acquired a tan over the course of the series. Cleo has also acquired depression over the course of the series. It's understandable, given all the destruction Xaius Octavian has been wreaking and the fact that she's been stuck in the future for at least a year and a half.

 

We get some background on Octavian's mysterious patron: it's Anubis, who went mad with power/grief and tried to destroy everything. The rest of the Egyptian pantheon stopped him, sort of. It takes the combined power of Cleo's pink magic and Pharaoh Yosira's pink magic (Pharaoh Yosira is apparently a distant descendant of Cleo herself, who gets sent back to the past near the end) to get rid of him.

 

Fod Franze shows back up and is mildly important. He causes some problems and tries to get Xaius Octavian to pay him for doing so, then gets obliterated by a laser from Octavian.

 

All things considered, I think this series ended pretty well.

Overall Notes

Don't be like Kittens and start on book 2. It didn't make much sense to her.

 

Cleopatra in Space is a fun series, and not one I'd have qualms about recommending to kids. If you want a promotional quote from me, use that.

 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for sequences of stylized sci-fi violence. Nothing untoward. It would probably be a pretty good videogame in the right hands (something action-adventure-y).

 

4 stars. It's pretty similar to Five Worlds, though not quite on that level. The art is good, and as I've mentioned before, art quality is an important factor in my enjoyment of a graphic novel.

Favorite lines:

    Fod Franze: NO ONE SHOOTS FOD FRANZE'S HAT!!

    Cleopatra: Well, I just did so... not true?

    Akila (in background): Yeah. I'm gonna hide.

    Book 3 pages 44-45.

(Endnote: There seems to have been a short-lived TV show of this. It apparently made some pretty weird changes and looked absolutely nothing like the original, so I'm in no hurry to seek it out.)

"Apocalypse Taco" by Nathan Hale

No, this Nathan Hale is not the one who regrets that he has but one life to lose for his country. This Nathan Hale is the one who wrote a hilarious series of history graphic novels featuring that Nathan Hale and various other recurring characters.

Apocalypse Taco is one of those books whose plots are so tangled and outlandish they get hard to explain. I'm going to try anyway, and not bother marking spoilers. It's also a pretty creepy book, so you've been warned.

Basically, a mad scientist (who is also a grad student) decided he could make a 3D printer out of radio-controlled bees. To do this, he had the bees 3D print smaller bees, then had the smaller bees 3D print even smaller bees, and so on until he had nanobot-sized bees that would 3D print things for him (using, as a 3D printer, a cardboard tube connected to his laptop). He also turned the bee queen into an eyeball, which he implanted in his head, and added DNA from about twelve other species until the nanobees no longer even remotely resemble bees.

The nanobees were contained inside the mad grad student's 3D printer (i.e. the cardboard tube). However, then they got out when his roommate broke the 3D printer fighting him off (when he tried to implant another bee-queen-eyeball into her head) and started copypasting everything. Except the mad grad student's laptop and his brain and the brains of all the copypasted clones of him don't have enough power to copy everything perfectly and paste it back, plus the nanobees only really 3D print with wax and everything they print is sort of alive. All of which ends up producing a nightmarish living pseudosentient city full of monsters that try to eat people.

And this is where our protagonists come in: two middle schoolers who were sent by their mom to get supper for the crew of their school's stage production of Brigadoon, the high schooler sister of one of them (she's driving them), and the mad grad student's original roommate (whose bee-queen-eyeball has gone insane and keeps copypasting more arms onto her whenever she lets it see anything). They get stuck in the nightmarish pseudosentient city when they try to go to the fictional taco restaurant Taco Bear for the supper they were sent to get.

Oh, and it turns out the nightmarish pseudosentient city is actually just simulated in the minds of the mad grad student and his copypasted clones (sounds like a rock band). It's basically their "clipboard", where anything they copy goes until they paste it into the real world.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for some body horror (the mad grad student's roommate with the insane arm-copypasting eyeball comes to mind, as does the mad grad student's other roommate who's covered in spikes of dental enamel).

3 stars. The protagonists do escape the nightmarish pseudosentient clipboard city and confront the mad grad student, and if it had just ended there, I'd have given it 4; however, it actually ends with the mad grad student just copying everything back into the clipboard city again. Himself included this time.

(Endnote: My headcanon is that, right after the end of the book, someone from a Men-in-Black-like organization declared the mad grad student a threat to the world and killed his IRL version, dumping everyone back out of the clipboard. I have to have this headcanon because there isn't a sequel, so if I don't headcanon an ending, it's just left hanging unresolved forever.)

Mini-Reviews 10: On Top Of Some Covers, All Covered With Snow

Dragon Kingdom of Wrenly: The Coldfire Curse by Jordan Quinn (graphic novel art by Ornella Greco)

This is rather below my general reading level. Let's just leave it at that. It's about dragons and a curse that's making it be winter (and, surprisingly, isn't the White Witch's fault).

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for cartoon violence, or possibly on the high side of E.

3 stars. It isn't bad, it's just that I would have loved it if I was about ten, and (spoiler alert) I'm not ten.

Tags for this one: 3-star, adventure, dragons, fantasy, junior fiction, manga/graphic novel, rated E10+

Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu

"This is a Hansel and Gretel retelling." You'd like to think that, wouldn't you? But you're actually wrong. It's the Snow Queen.

Now, granted, the title would make a lot more sense if it were a modern-day Hansel and Gretel retelling. But, as I said in the last paragraph, it's actually a modern-day Snow Queen retelling. With a few bits of some other Hans Christian Andersen fairytales thrown in; there's that one about the red dancing shoes, the little match-girl shows up (but, unfortunately, sans |the Death of the Discworld to help|), and there's possibly some Little Red Riding Hood in there as well.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for dangerous bits and violence (among other things, the plot gets kicked off by the main character's best friend getting a shard of glass in his eye). Straightforward enough to be a sort of RPG.

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, adventure, fairy tale retelling, magical realism, modern setting, rated E10+

Hercule Poirot's Christmas by Agatha Christie

Apparently this one was written because one of Agatha Christie's nephews (I think) complained that all her murder mysteries were too clean and bloodless, so she wrote this one specifically for him.

 

Yes, it was still Christmastime when I read this.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for mmmuuuuurrrder and discussions of marital infidelity. It's not gory or anything.

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    Colonel Johnson, Chief Constable of Middleshire, might be of the opinion that nothing could beat a wood fire, but Hercule Poirot was of the opinion that central heating could and did every time.

    Page 84.

Tags for this one: 4-star, mystery, rated T

(Endnote: The title for this post was originally going to be "Mini-Reviews 10: 10.0x10^0" before I realized that all three of the books I'm reviewing here have snow on the cover.)

Mini-Reviews 4: Never and Forever

The title is because the first three books in Cressida Crowell's Wizards of Once series all have ordinal-number-themed names (Wizards of Once, Twice Magic, and Knock Three Times) but the fourth one is called Never and Forever, which broke the chain. So when it came time to do the fourth mini-review collection, I named it this. There. Now you know.

 

Dead in the Water by Chris Lynch

This do be historical fiction, about a crewman on the U.S.S. Yorktown during World War II. We all know how well that ended. This dude |does survive, though|. 

The historical stuff is interspersed with baseball (because this was the 1940s and if you were in the States then everything was tangentially related to baseball) (please note that the previous statement is not entirely factually accurate) and a minor dealing-with-racism side plot (courtesy of the main character's friend, who gets hit with it a lot). (Also this paragraph is full of parentheses.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for violence and discussion of racism. Dead in the Water would make a reasonably good videogame in the right hands, although unless you let players change the story, it wouldn't have much replayability.

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, airplanes, historical fiction, military, rated T, WWII

 

 

 

All Summer Long by Hope Larson

I didn't like this one. The art wasn't really good (for me, art quality is an important factor in how much I like a graphic novel; it's like use of language in a print book), and I didn't love the storyline either. Plus it did a |casual homosexuality mention|, which I strongly dislike. If you're going to have that in your book, be overt about it so I can avoid you.

Anyway, T15+ for sexual references. 1 star. Lame.

Tags for this one: 1-star, lame, manga/graphic novel, modern setting, rated T15+, school drama

 

 

 

Truesight by David Stahler Jr.

 

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king illegal. |But also king.|

Basically, this is science fiction about a community where everyone is genetically engineered to be blind. Because... well, honestly it feels quasi-religious, like one of those weird philosophical religion-but-not-really-but-still-kinda things.

Aaaaaaaand then one guy discovers he can see, that the genetic engineering failed on him, and everything goes to pieces.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for delayed-action creepiness. It would be pretty hard to make into a videogame, but it could be done.

4 stars.

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

(Endnote: These have three very different covers. Dead in the Water is mostly realistic, All Summer Long is only vaguely evocative of the book, and Truesight... honestly looks almost like the cover of a horror movie.)

"The Witch Boy" by Molly Knox Ostertag

I picked this one up because it's by the same person who wrote D&D Dungeon Club: Roll Call. It's not as good as that one, unfortunately. I feel like the Five Worlds guys could have done a better job of roughly the same storyline, but I am rather biased towards them.

So anyway! The thing is about a magic family where all of the girls can do magic and all of the boys can turn into animals. Except then one of the boys (here comes our main character) turns out to be crap at turning into animals, but he's fairly decent at magic (even though everyone keeps telling him he's playing with fire and refusing to teach him anything, which means his primary method of learning magic is just to ditch turning-into-animals practice and eavesdrop on his sisters' magic lessons).

Once we've got all that out of the way, the plot starts. During Try To Turn Into Animals: The Field Trip, a wild creepy monster appeared! It promptly kidnaps one of the main character's brothers, then vanishes again. Naturally, everyone panics. 

Also, there's stuff with the main character making friends with a normal, non-magical girl, who ends up helping in the final bossfight by |smacking the creepy(ish) monster in the face with a baseball bat|.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A soft T for some scary imagery and people bleeding fairly badly after getting attacked. This book could make an interesting videogame in the right hands.

[EDIT: T15+, due to (again) {T15+ a character casually mentioning homosexuality as if it's just a normal thing.}. I'd hoped that was a one-time thing with the other book, but apparently not. Sorry, Ostertag, I'll be avoiding you from here on out.

I was going to rate this 2 stars simply for rubbing me wrong, but then I noticed the thing in the content warning tag above, so the rating got shunted down to 1 star.

(Endnote: The art in the kidnapping/abduction scene is pretty appropriately creepy, although when the monster actually fully appears it just kinda builds a bridge across the uncanny valley and stands in the middle of it. It looked a bit silly, is what I'm trying to say.)

"D&D Dungeon Club: Roll Call", story by Molly Knox Ostertag, art by Xanthe Bouma

I picked this up off the library shelves because why not? It's not like it's especially long, and the worst-case scenario is... probably what happened with Dungeon Academy: No Humans Allowed, honestly. And the art is by one of the people who worked on Five Worlds, so that always inclines me favorably toward a book.

 

Thankfully, this book was far better than DA:NHA. Admittedly, that's a low bar, but the bar being low doesn't mean you didn't jump high. Does that make sense? No? Maybe?

Anyway, this is your classic "loner gets friends" story. Most of it takes place outside the characters' D&D game, but the loner getting friends is mirrored in the game. The red guy with horns on the cover is the main character's D&D character. His name is Sir Corius, and he has a long-lost sister named Corinth.

Yes.

(The main character is the girl in the lower left corner.)

 

There's Drama! when the guy in the lower right corner gets added to the Dungeons & Dragons group that was formerly inhabited solely by Jess (lower left corner girl) and Olivia (the one in the middle with the yellow shirt). Jess (and by extension, Sir Corius) thinks this is a terrible idea. And so, midway through the book, we have the obligatory "main character decides she doesn't need any of this and accidentally-but-kinda-intentionally ruins something someone else cares about" scene, with Sir Corius letting lower right corner guy's character |fall off a cliff into a river of acid|.

 

They left the possibility of a sequel open, which I appreciated, and not just because I like Xanthe Bouma's art. For most of this book (and Five Worlds, for that matter) the art was just good art, but there were a couple spots that looked a lot like parts of Five Worlds. (Did I mention the art is good?)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A hard T for {T or so an antagonist casually saying "You know he's gay, right?" about lower right corner guy, who I'm pretty sure isn't. It's just in one spot and would be pretty easy to censor out if you had your own copy, but it bugged me}. (That's a content warning tag, by the way; see the "Spoiler tag explanation" page at the top for how those work.)

I'm going to give this... 3 stars. It would be 4, except that the thing I put in the content warning tag automatically drops any book a star or so. (I might get this book myself, in which case I would censor the thing and like the book better.

(Endnote: Somewhere in the middle of the book, the two players in Olivia's campaign [but mostly Jess] dramatically derail the story. I've run games, and I've had that happen, and I responded in pretty much the same way that Olivia did: end the session so I can figure out where to go from here.)

"189" series, story by Elliott Ryan, art by Hiroshi Tajiri

I really liked this series. That said, it's fairly odd, is an original English-language work, and involves zeppelins named after Metallica songs.

Yes.

 

It's also a three-book series at the time of writing, so I'll divide the review into three parts. Also, I'm not bothering with spoiler tags. You've been warmed.

 

Book 1 (officially titled "Frenemies")

 

This one introduces our three henceforth main characters: Taku Nakarai/Pale King (the mask on the first volume's cover, and the guy on the left on cover 2), Takeshi Uehara/Lightmorph Revenant (the guy in the cat mask), and Wilhelm Schönfelder/Bone Lord/Administrator of Zerodelve (the guy on the left in the first volume cover).

The three teenagers start out playing an unmemorable Minecraft avoiding-copyright-infringement-rebrand over the Internet, and then all of their chairs spontaneously fall through the floor. They appear in a stone chamber, where it is revealed that they have been transported to another world, and here I quote Wilhelm, "for no reason whatsoever," and they're supposed to build a continent-spanning empire. Taku picks the "artificer" archetype, which revolves around creating robots and things utilizing cheat magic. Takeshi gets the "sensei" archetype, which has him building a martial arts school. And Wilhelm takes "necromancer", which leads to a whole lot of trouble.

And then they are immediately dropped into areas seemingly primed for them to take over, so they take over in one of the more awesome montages I've ever seen.

 

Taku makes a bunch of robots after commandeering a blacksmith shop, takes over a city, renames it Making, and starts industrializing. Takeshi uses his power of sand telekinesis (it makes sense in context) to create a giant sandstone city named Chrysalis. Wilhelm makes a giant fortress which walks around on conglomerated bone legs, wanders around to battle sites obtaining more skeletons, and makes a giant throne out of skulls.

And then the drama begins, as three other people (John Veritas, Kei Hirata, and Lara Janus) are also summoned to provide opposition. Specifically, John Veritas is up against Taku (who's going by Pale King at this point, but I continue to refer to them by first names), Kei Hirata is against Takeshi, and Lara Janus is after Wilhelm. 

 

John Veritas goes dungeon-crawling, acquires a pretty decent set of magic items, steals one of the trains Taku invented, and gatecrashes a board meeting to duel Taku. Then we get an epic battle sequence, with Veritas' giant sword versus Taku's bladestaff (basically a metal-coated stick with knives stuck on one end), which ends in a draw despite Taku's access to a lot more resources (and thus magic) than Veritas has. They part ways semi-amiably after realizing neither of them can beat the other, with Veritas leaving to go fight crime instead of Taku. All the summoned people are informed that "Veritas vs. Pale King" is resolved.

Kei Hirata is rather an all-around irritating jerkface, repeatedly beats up everyone like he's in a videogame with zero consequences, and is eventually curb-stomped by Takeshi riding a giant sand mech. His segment took the least time, which I was glad of, because he annoyed me.

Aaaand then Wilhelm goes rather off the rails. From his mobile city-base-thing of Deadwall, he starts wrecking innocent bystanders/forests/what-have-you, all to get at and eliminate Lara. He eventually burns down a forest, which brings the wrath of Takeshi and his sand mech down on him. At the climax of the final fight, Taku shows up out of nowhere, steals Wilhelm's unconscious body, dumps him on an island codenamed "Zero", and thus ends book 1.

 

Favorite lines:

For his entire segment, Kei Hirata is shown screaming "REVENAAAAAAANT!!!" (number of a's and exclamation points varies) during his battles with all and sundry. At the end of the book, there's a "rejected scenes" section; one of them is Kei at the beginning of his journey, screaming "REVENAAAANT!!!!" while chasing a duck through a park with a kitchen knife.

Also from the rejected scenes, we have a final battle comprising Wilhelm, Takeshi, and Lara having a slap fight while Taku looks on like "what the heck, you guys?"

Book 2 (officially titled "Mafia")

 

Apparently, whatever summoned our guys here considers Wilhelm "defeated", so it summons three new people to take his place. [Note: Just before publishing this post, I realized I should put their names here, but I'd already taken the books back by then. Silly me.] They call their organiztion "le mafia" (not making this up). They're the three guys on the cover of Book 2.

In the interim between the end of Book 1 and the beginning of this one, Taku (who, by the way, has the "obtain blueprint" spell, usable on a long cooldown, which gives him a blueprint for whatever device he wants) has developed Monitor-class ironclads and the Gatling gun in addition to his trains. Takeshi has discovered a sort of transferrable blue fire power, which he gives to the other two. Wilhelm decided to mine "Zero" out of boredom. 

 

Anyway, le mafia get into all sorts of trouble and attempt to make drugs, which results in them paying Taku a whole lot of money because he has access to chemical reagents. Takeshi obtains sentient hamsters, which show up whenever needed to provide a break from le mafia and their awfulness.

Taku obtains zeppelins, which he painstakingly fills with hydrogen and enchants to be fire-retardant. He then uses them to spy on le mafia, but as he's deploying the first one, the counterparts show up.

This time, there's Monika Sakurai (vs. le mafia), Natsuki Himekawa (vs. Takeshi), and Jonathan Wright (vs. Taku). In the interest of not having another Wilhelm "no cost too great", Taku and Takeshi bully le mafia into signing a treaty (which the original three also sign) basically ensuring they can't be evil or attack each other.

Jonathan Wright tuns out to be a brilliant lawyer, attempts to take Taku to task for breaking the law, and realizes he hasn't broken the law. Taku and Wright also part ways fairly amiably, with Wright serving as Taku's legal counsel. "Wright vs. Pale King" resolved, etc etc.

Natsuki Himekawa obtains about the same caliber of magics as John Veritas got in book 1, charges through Chrysalis intending to take Takeshi down in a blaze of glory, and does so. I was going "please don't die either of you" throughout their entire battle... which ended with a bunch of sentient trees restraining them both and sending an unconscious Natsuki by train to Deadford (it's Wilhelm's skeleton mech city after he stopped supporting it and it fell over).

 

Monika Sakurai gathers up a bunch of team members, enacts an epic Mission: Impossible-style heist to get evidence to convict le mafia of war crimes, and escapes on the wrong train so she ends up on the ferry to Zero.

 

Aaaaand then Wilhelm (now calling himself Administrator of Zerodelve) sees her evidence, invokes a clause of the treaty, and summons everyone else to put le mafia on trial for war crimes. After a long trial utilizing an entire arsenal of Chekov's guns, we have a war.

 

Which really means that le mafia, currently trying to kick Natsuki and her band of followers out of Deadford, get epically wrecked. We have giant sand people on Takeshi's end, and ironclads/trains/Gatling guns/zeppelins on Taku's. Oh, and enchanted artillery.

 

[WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH]

 

It ends with Evil Mafia Dude One (non-graphically) taking a direct hit from an artillery shell, Evil Mafia Dude Two being impaled by a giant sword made of sand (courtesy of Takeshi; all we get/have to see are silhouettes), and Evil Mafia Dude Ringleader activating a weapon of last resort that misfires and dumps him in a dimension full of darkness and creepy... things. I think he dies. That one was the most evil, though, so he kinda deserves it.

[END SPOILERS]

Favorite lines:

    Evil Mafia Dude Ringleader: "You realize you'll need something pretty powerful to compel us to sign this, right?"

    Taku: *pulls a gun on him*

    Takeshi: "Why did you decide to dig out the middle of an entire island?"

    Wilhelm: "I got bored."

Book 3 (officially titled "Proxies")

 

This one starts off with the new guy, Satoru Ohmori, playing the Civilization-copyright-infringement-avoidance-knockoff endgame. Then he saves, gets up, walks out of the room, and falls through the floor.

I won't bore you with a lengthy recap of the first bit; this post is long enough already. It did provide me with one of my overall favorite lines from the series, though. Basically, Satoru bases his world-conquering strategy on his Civilization strategy, which involves such useful-as-game-mechanics-but-super-awful-when-real-people-are-involved things such as a police state and state property. 

This leads to thing such as Takeshi repeatedly saying "Big Brother is watching you..." around Satoru, and Taku calling him "Little Bro" (tying in to that). Satoru and Takeshi get into some odd proxy wars, into which stumble the three who try to topple them: an American mechanic whose name I've forgotten, a Korean (I think) doctor named Yi Suchong, and another Japanese gamer dude named Takao Suzuhara. 

 

The mechanic guy ends up amassing a whole lot of money retooling trains and going dungeon-delving; then he buys a tank and drives straight into one of the Satoru-Takeshi proxy wars. He quickly racks up quite the killcount, which makes Satoru try to sic Taku or Wilhelm on him. This led to a fairly funny exchange, which I put in my favorite lines section.

Dr. Suchong promptly decides to settle down in Chrysalis (Takeshi's capital) and practice his chosen profession. He's a sort of general physician, and I'm pretty sure the author researched what he was talking about, but I don't know enough about medicine to be sure. He eventually ends up performing an autopsy on someone suspected to have been assassinated, figures out that (in his words) it "isn't natural, doesn't appear to be caused by anything at all, and I would have to conclude it was either chemical or radiological if I didn't know about magic now." This tips Takeshi off that he's the summoned enemy, so Takeshi promptly officially employs him.

Takao Suzuhara acts like he's in a videogame and grinds (grinding, in videogame parlance, is repeatedly performing the same action in order to advance) until he's very powerful. Then he magically nukes Making, defeating Taku.

WHAT???

Taku ends up on a flotilla of galleons, zeppelins, and ironclads which he'd intended to explore with, sailing away from his continent with most of his create material-equipped subordinates with him.

 

And then the book ends.

 

Again, WHAT??? I'm sure Taku will end up finding the magical Americas or something in Book 4, but BOOK 4 ISN'T OUT YET!!!

Angery. 

Favorite lines:

 

    (for context, the three are delivering Satoru some dire warnings)

    Taku: "Then the grave..."

    Wilhelm: "...will be..."

    Takeshi: "...your density."

    Taku: "It's 'destiny', Takeshi."

 

    Satoru: "Come on, this guy is costing me millions of gold in tanks!"

    Taku: "Y'know, this is the guy who's making me millions of gold selling you tanks. And while you are well within your rights to try to get Wilhelm to smack me for it, be aware it's not going to work."

    Wilhelm (walking into the room): "Smack you for what?"

This series gets an overall 4 stars. That's as a series average; I'd probably rate book 1 at 5 stars, book 2 at 4 (despite le mafia), and book 3 at 3 (though I am biased due to the cliffhanger).

 

Were this series made of videogames, I'd rate them: T for books 1 and 3, but the upper limit of T15+ for book 2; the villains in that one get up to some pretty creepy and awful stuff.

 

TL/DR This series does not actually exist, as this post is an April Fools' Day joke. However, the joke's also kind of on me, because now I really want the series to exist. 

I was inspired in the joke by my mom's review of a noir Hamlet retelling, which movie also doesn't exist. In that, she said something to the effect of "I know, no fair, it's not April Fools' Day or anything," which made me wonder if I could do sort of the same thing for April Fools' Day. Except nobody reads my blog posts on the day they come out, so the joke will be lost.

"Five Worlds" series by Mark Siegel, Alexis Siegel, Xanthe Bouma, Matt Rockefeller, and Boya Sun

So, yeah. As you may see, "5" is a bit of a theme number for this series. Five books, five worlds, five authors, five different types of sand (it makes sense in context), five |races| in book 4, five |filters| in book 5... yeah. There are a lot of fives. I think the only important non-fives are The Living Fire (see the blue fire on book 5) and the main characters (which I understand, as five of them would have been kind of an ensemble cast).

But anyway, I suppose I should tell you what the series is about. Oona (the girl), Jax (the blue-haired guy who's |secretly an android|), and An Tzu (the guy with red hair) have to save the worlds from the Mimic, an evil spirit/force/corruption/thing who's trying to mind-control the worlds and, eventually, the universe. 

Oona can control sand (although, initially, she's kind of bad at it), which usually manifests itself as ribbons (see the Book 5 cover) or little sand people, the latter of which are called "aniforms". Also, if you're good enough at it, you can make giant sand people to ride around in (the Sand Warrior), and it looks really awesome. Did I mention these are graphic novels?

Jax is really really good at the fictional sport of Starball, and is as previously mentioned |an android|. He also gets a prosthetic hand that lets him shoot lasers. He also |fuses with a Salassi energy spirit/creature/thing| in the prologue of book 3.

An Tzu is slowly vanishing, can talk to plants (if by "talk to it" you mean "play music at it"), and |is actually a Felid, who are a race of uberpowerful energy beings from the sun|. He also has a tendency to start being an idiot if left alone for too long. 

Also there's Stan Moon, an evil tentacle monster centaur guy (look on the covers of books 2 and 4), Ram Sam Sam (an extremely happy little green sentient blob), the Felids (giant light people who look kind of like humanoid cats; there's one in the book 4 cover background), and a whole host of other minor characters.

Aaaaaaand the fifth world, Grimbo (E) (Yes, the "E" does get explained eventually, but I'm not going to), is covered in moss. Like, its nickname is "The Moss Ocean". Pretty much anyone who knows me knows I am borderline obsessed with moss. Needless to say, if I was in this series, I would live on Grimbo (E).

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence and the aforementioned tentacle monster and Mimic. It'd probably make a fun videogame, as long as the makers didn't royally mess it up.

The series gets to join Kiki's Delivery Service, The Adventurer's Guide to Successful Escapes, and The Mystwick School of Musicraft in getting five stars (fitting, considering the theme number). No, this does not mean that each book gets one star, nor that there are five stars within the book (although I think there are). This rating is a series average, meaning that were I to rate each book, they would all get five stars (with the possible exception of The Red Maze, which might get four).

Favorite lines:

   The phrase "old-fuel shoeboxes". It's spawned dozens of jokes, including a hypothetical shoe company called "Old Fuel Shoes".

  Page 61, The Sand Warrior

   "Your highness? Are you feeling indisposed?". This one's also spawned a lot of jokes, mostly due to the extremely silly face and pose of the guy who says it.

  Page 156, The Sand Warrior

   "Everywhere you'll go-- urg glrg". It was supposed to be a terrifying threat, but the thing giving it started to fall apart before finishing it.

  Page 218, The Cobalt Prince

   "We no longer have an air force, sir...". I don't know why, but this line just struck me as really funny.

  Page 147, The Amber Anthem

    "Beautiful! A whole world carpeted with moss." I agree with Jax wholeheartedly on this one. (In the process of finding lines, I ended up rereading the entirety of The Emerald Gate; 10/10 would reread yet again.)

  Page 12, The Emerald Gate

 

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"Emma" by Jane Austen (adapted to manga by Crystal S. Chan)

This was a good book, even if I did have to stop every ten pages or so to shake my fist in the air and yell "EMMA!!! QUIT MEDDLING!!!". The parts when she wasn't meddling were indubitably (yes, I like that word) my favorite.

As you can see from the cover picture, I actually read a manga adaptation, not the real thing. The series of adaptations is very faithful to the originals, though, so I feel comfortable reviewing this as the actual story. (Also, manga reads a lot quicker, because you don't have to spend eons describing the dance or someone's dress, you can show it.)

I really, really, really hate Mrs. Elton. The art they have for her doesn't exactly help (it's kind of ugly), but she somehow manages to be the most exact blend of condescending and egotistical to just be the most unlikable character in the history of the universe. 

Mr. Woodhouse, on the other hand, was very awesome and funny. I alternated between two ways of reading him: 1) as a severe hypochondriac, and 2) as someone who genuinely cares about other people's health (but he's still a hypochondriac). I don't know which of them Austen intended. Option 1 is funnier, but option 2 is nicer, I think.

My only major disappointment (and really, this is irrational) is that I watched the movie version first, so two lines ("Be careful! The baby! It might have an infection", said by Mr. Woodhouse; and "We know nothing about her parents. They may have been pirates!", said by Emma) aren't in the real thing. Actually, they might be, but they got cut in the manga adaptation, because you can only fit so much dialogue in a manga before the pages become walls of text.

Emma gets four stars, basically meaning that I liked it despite its faults. 

Favorite lines:

    Frank Churchill: "[Emma] requests that you each say something entertaining, in a general way. One very clever thing, or three dull things if you cannot be clever." [Note: Emma actually didn't request that, it was Frank's idea.)

    Miss Bates: "Oh! Very well, I can manage that. I shall be sure to say three dull things as soon as I open my mouth."

    Pages 231-232. (It's so true, though. And she's the one making the joke, which makes it funnier until Emma immediately ruins it. Badly done, Emma!)

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