"Ships, Secrets, and Survivors" by Sarah Rodecker and Helena George

This book is like if you took one of those teenagers-having-a-big-and-slightly-deadly-competition books and abruptly turned it into a seafaring pirate adventure book partway through. And also the teenagers are all actually adults; the protagonist is like 20. And all the ships can talk.

The main character, Ravin, is a sort of ex-assassin. "Sort of" because I'm not sure if, when you've trained to be an assassin but then failed the assassin entrance exam, you count as an ex-assassin or just a never-was-an-assassin-to-begin-with.

But there's also a character, named Shade, who's constantly suspicious of him. And we know Ravin is trustworthy because he's the protagonist, but in a world where assassins are an established system of untrustworthy ne'er-do-wells, it does make quite a bit of sense to not trust the one that suddenly appeared in your midst. On a related note, Shade's change of heart and cessation of suspicion does not seem to me to make sense with how his character is up to that point.

I think this could have used maybe one more proofreading pass. There are a couple places where I think I can see what they're going for, but there are a couple of words left out.

The ending wraps everything up a tad neatly for my taste. It's just oddly convenient how everything works out.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: ...a soft T15+ for sexual references. Honestly I think the movie ratings do a better job with this sort of thing, because they say "parental guidance until the age of [age]", meaning that parents can decide whether or not they want younger children to read it (or, in the case of movies, watch it). But I wouldn't hand this to a 13-year-old without a few reservations (or at least without talking to their parents), so there you are.

4 stars.

(Endnote: In case you were wondering, which you almost certainly weren't, the titular "ships" are not the romance kind of ships. Except for two side characters who are married, there's no romance in this book.)

"Fight Write" by Carla Hoch

As the subtitle says, Fight Write is a book about how to write believable fight scenes. This often means "short and violent," because that's how real fights usually are.

I don't know much about most styles of fighting. The one exception is fencing, which I did for several years, and oddly enough this book doesn't really apply to it. Fencing matches aren't terribly short (they often go for a few minutes), they can get flashy, they have lulls in them, and they're not exactly brutal. 

(Although: modern fencing swords are extremely bated and definitely not envenomed, and we wear protective gear designed to stop anyone from actually getting hurt, so I suspect a fencing match with actual sharp swords would be a lot bloodier.)

The part of this book I found most interesting was the part about the psychology and feelings. What characters (and real people) probably feel before and during and after fights, how fights (whether won or lost) traumatize people, et cetera. That, to me, was more interesting then the mechanical "how does this physically work" bits. Not to say that those aren't good, it's just that I found the other part more interesting.

Also, did you know that this book was written by a Christian? I didn't. At least, I didn't when I started out, but I inferred it from the writing (and then confirmed it by looking it up whilst writing this review).

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for graphic violence and some sexual references. Not a lot of the latter, but there are a couple.

4 stars. 

Favorite lines:

    Defenestration means throwing somebody out of a window. Yes, there's a term for throwing somebody out of a window that's not just "throw somebody out the window."

    Page 49.

(Endnote: Who's Write? I certainly don't want to fight him.) 

"The Beast Player" by Nahoko Uehashi (translated by Cathy Hirano)

Really my only major quibble with this book is that it could have used a bit more denouement. But then it also has like five story arcs one after another, so 80% of them ended properly, even if the last one left off somewhat abruptly.

*looks at Goodreads*

So it turns out there's a sequel. Never mind, the lack of denouement can stand.

This was originally written in Japanese, and had to be translated into English. I suspect that, in Japanese, the prose is beautiful. The translation is, well, a translation, so it can be a bit choppy at times, but one does get used to it fairly quickly. I did, at least.

The titular beasts are these giant flying things called Royal Beasts. I imagined them as birds, but they're not really birdlike; they have fur and teeth, and they don't lay eggs.

As it was originally published (in Japan), this was two separate books. That goes some way toward explaining the abundance of story arcs.

In the first of the several of those, the main character acquires a wise mentor slash surrogate father figure. He keeps bees, and he's really nice. It's entirely possible he's my favorite character in the entire book.

This author likes to put her protagonist through moral dilemmas, which is not something I see often in books. Usually the only moral choices a protagonist will face are A) the ones that are a choice between doing the right but difficult thing or the wrong but easy thing, or B) the ones where the right choice is obvious to the reader, if not the characters. This book opts for C), the ones where there's a choice between two options and both of them are, in some form, the bad option.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: ...a soft T15+ for mostly veiled sexual references. One of the main plot points revolves around the reason why the giant flying bird things don't reproduce in captivity, and it involves them, y'know, reproducing. It's not described in any detail, but it does happen.

4 stars.

(Endnote: This has nothing to do with the Beast Crest from Hollow Knight: Silksong.)

"How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse" by K. Eason

"Fantasy space opera political intrigue" is not a genre I knew existed. And yet, here we are.

The "fantasy" comes in from the fact that all their advanced technology is actually made of magic (or "arithmancy"). Which means you can hack it with your brain. I don't know why everyone doesn't know arithmancy if it lets you hack into things with your brain; maybe it's harder than it seems. There are also fairies, who the people in-universe didn't think existed until they invited the fairies to Rory's christening and the fairies actually showed up.

Speaking of whom! Rory Thorne, who left the structural integrity of the multiverse entirely unchanged, is a princess (of a space kingdom) who was cursed at birth by a fairy. No, this is not a Sleeping Beauty retelling; she was cursed at birth to... see through politeness. And also lies. This is one of those curses that are also sort of a blessing in disguise.

I think the book started being truly good about a third of the way through, when it decided to drop the snarky feminism and just focus on the fantasy space opera political intrigue. And I have nothing against feminism, but it's like bay leaves: it can make the thing you're making better, but if it insists on being an integral part of the finished product, it's going to mess stuff up.

And once it dropped the snarky feminism (which grated on me, just like a bay leaf), I did enjoy it. Even the fantasy space politics.

This is written in sort of the style of an in-universe history book, which gives it a unique narration voice. The framing also means that it usually just leaves you to figure out the worldbuilding from context, which it mostly does a good job of subtly explaining, aside from a couple of instances of "as you know, Bob" (which, as you know, is not generally a good way to explain lore or backstory).

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: ...a soft T15+ for bad language and some (mostly veiled) sexual references. I had a difficult time deciding whether to give this T or T15+, and eventually decided to err on the side of "there's nothing stopping a 13-year-old from reading this, but I wouldn't give it to them, so I guess T15+." That said, it's a soft T15+.

4 stars.

(Endnote: I have a theory: Rory Thorne is actually a distant descendant of none other than Carswell Thorne, of The Lunar Chronicles fame.)

"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.)

"Winter" by Marissa Meyer

I haven't the faintest idea how to start this review.

We finally go to the moon, in this the final book of a series called the Lunar Chronicles. Though, granted, the "Lunar" part is actually referring to the people who live on the moon. And the people who used to live on the moon, but have moved to Earth because the queen of the moon is a tyrant.

Our Snow White character, Queen Levana's stepdaughter Princess Winter, is insane. Apparently this is what happens if Lunars go too long without using their glamour. (I don't know if I ever mentioned the glamour, actually. Lunars have this thing called glamour, which supposedly works by manipulating bioelectricity or something, and which they can use to change their appearance and/or mind-control people.)

Everyone gets their moment to shine in this book, even Prince/Emperor Kai (our Cinderella prince), who hasn't really had much to do for the entire series. If you don't count the prequel and the short story collection, this is the final book, so all the principals getting to do something cool and cap off their plot threads is only right and proper.

The Evil Queen (Queen Levana) has a very tragic backstory. It's a bit of an explanation for her evilness, but it isn't used as an excuse; whatever made her this way, she's still evil, not just misunderstood. I appreciated that, because it often seems like "tragic villain" and "actually legitimately evil villain" are mutually exclusive in a lot of writing.

We get to see the Lunar aristocracy (and Prince/Emperor Kai has to deal with them), and they are exactly as shallow and vapid and vain as one might expect.

I really liked how they did the poisoned apple in this retelling.

It's pretty clear to me that the author had the entire series basically planned out before she wrote the first one. Each book retells a different fairy tale, but bits of setup for each of them are woven throughout the previous ones.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for sci-fi violence and some sexual references. Also child abuse as part of some backstories. Marissa Meyer managed to go the entire series without descending into lameness or ideology shoehorning (I'm looking at you, Shannon Messenger and Keeper of the Lost Cities), so some extra kudos to her for that.

4 stars. The whole of this series is greater than the sum of its parts, because I'd probably give the series 5 if I did overall series ratings. Maybe I should start doing that.

This has been my second of two contributions to We Love Fairy Tales Week, hosted at Hamlette's Soliloquy.

(Endnote: Winter's skin is not canonically purple. I'm pretty sure she's dark-skinned in the book.)

"Cress" by Marissa Meyer

I knew it. I knew it! The plague turns people blue!

(Back during the first book, I theorized that the plague in this series--letumosis, also called "the blue plague"--turns people blue as one of its symptoms. This I inferred from the fact that it's called "the blue plague." However, I didn't remember any actual confirmation of that until I ran into some in this book.)

Anyway. As you may be able to guess from the cover, this is a retelling of Rapunzel. But because this is a sci-fi series, Cress (our Rapunzel) is imprisoned on a satellite instead of in a tower, and her escape involves a partially botched reentry after our Gothel character tries to ruin everything. (Despite her best efforts, however, Gothel only ruins some things.)

I actually don't think I've read the original fairy tale. I'd watched Tangled (2010), but that isn't the most faithful adaptation, so I missed out on some details that I think this book did in pretty cool ways.

Case in point, in the original, the prince was blinded after getting shoved out of the tower. Which makes the fact that Carswell Thorne acquires some head-trauma-induced blindness from getting thrown around during the reentry make a lot more sense. Given that blindness from head trauma is actually a thing that can happen, that's actually rather brilliant.

Carswell "Probably Flynn Rider Guy" Thorne, by the way, is our prince for this. He first showed up in the previous book. As I suspected, the reason his cargo ship can go to space is for plot reasons, so he can rescue Cress from her satellite. Cress has an almost comically bad crush on him, because she's sixteen and he (thinks he) is Han Solo. It's honestly kind of adorable.

"Thinks he is Han Solo" is pretty much Thorne's entire character; he wants to be this cool smuggler person with a stolen spaceship, but he can't quite pull it off. Case in point, he starts the series... in jail. For stealing that spaceship. He doesn't even have a grand plan to escape, he just sort of gets dragged along in Cinder's beecause she needs his spaceship.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for some sexual references and a rather disturbing telepathic torture scene.

4 stars.

This has been my first of two contributions to We Love Fairy Tales Week, hosted at Hamlette's Soliloquy.

(Endnote: I'm just glad the author picked "Cress" as the name for her Rapunzel character, and not "Spinach" or "Parsley" or something.)

"Scarlet" by Marissa Meyer

Welcome to the Future European Union, where there are still farmers. This we know because our protagonist, Scarlet Benoit, is one of them. I honestly thought this was going to be set in Future Africa, but I was wrong.

As you may be able to guess, this is a Little Red Riding Hood retelling. Complete with |genetically engineered wolf-hybrid soldiers|. Our Big Bad Wolf is named, [drumroll please]... Wolf. He and Scarlet also fall in love over the course of the book, because of course they do. (This falling-in-love also comes with a side effect of Wolf stopping being evil.)

(The |wolf hybrid people| follow those discredited theories about alpha and beta and omega wolves and pack dynamics and all that. However, putting the best possible construction on this, it's possible that they follow those because |they were engineered by the moon people, who probably haven't seen an actual wolf pack in generations and so are going off those instead of any actual science. But that theory set me wondering if they howl at the moon, and if so, whether they howl at the earth or at the floor when they're on the moon|.)

I suspect our Flynn Rider character, for the next book (which I suspect is going to be a Rapunzel retelling), has shown up in this one. He's slightly insane, or possibly just very weird, and he has a space cargo ship. Well, a space-capable cargo ship, because I don't think there are any Mars or Venus colonies, and I also don't think the evil moon people want to do much trading. So really, I don't know why his cargo ship can go to space, except for plot reasons if he turns out to be Flynn Rider.

(I know Disney made up Flynn Rider for Tangled. But they made him out of the prince who's in the original story, and it's easier to say Flynn Rider than "the prince from Rapunzel".)

Oh, and also: |prison break!| Because Cinder |got thrown into jail| at the end of the last one, at |the behest of the Evil Queen|. That's where we picked up Probably Flynn Rider Guy.

[Edited on 2/1/2025; changed cover image]

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for violence and sexual references. (There might also be some bad language in there, but I don't remember any.)

4 stars.

(Endnote: For whatever reason, I seem to have been obsessed with parentheses (these things (that are on the outside of this clump of words) that I've been using a lot) today.)

"Cinder" by Marissa Meyer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 stars.

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

"Mistborn" by Brandon Sanderson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 stars.

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

Mini-Reviews 17: Again

Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers

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

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

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

3 stars.

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

Quaint Creatures by Andrew D. Meredith

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

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

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

4 stars.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Creatures of the Deep" by Erich Hoyt

Also known as, "the book with the creepy fish pictures."

Okay, they're not that scary, but I still wouldn't want some of those to suddenly show up in a movie or videogame. Granted, the SamTheLibraryMouse Theory of Jumpscares (which I made up just now) states that the content of a jumpscare is secondary to the vibes of the scene in which the jumpscare takes place as regards the overall scariness of the jumpscare, (whew that's a mouthful) but still.

(One corrolary of the SamTheLibraryMouse Theory of Jumpscares is my joke that a box of cereal appearing out of nowhere into your face in a dark and well-spookified spooky alley is at least as scary as a scary monster appearing out of nowhere in a normal and cheerful forest. But enough about jumpscares. How did I even get this sidetracked?)

This book has an entire chapter dedicated primarily to giant squids. It also has an entire chapter dedicated to "oh no we're killing the oceans niuuuuuuu," which... On the one hand, overfishing is a legitimate problem, but on the other hand, what do you expect your readers to do about it?

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for sexual references (describing modes of reproduction of various undersea animals; it's not lurid or anything, but it does describe the weird ones.)

4 stars.

(Endnote: There's plenty of fish in the sea, and most of them are weird as nouns.)

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!")

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

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

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

It is not.

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

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

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

4 stars.

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

The Story of Be by David Crystal

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

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

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

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

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

The Innocent by David Baldacci

I have now read a thriller. Yay me.

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

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

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

3 stars.

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

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

"Winter's Maiden" by Morgan L. Busse

One of the promotional quotes on the back of the dustjacket says that this book "captivates from page one". And I agree. It captivates from page one until page 136.

 

Unfortunately, that's not the end of the book.

 

I only read the first half of this, which follows a fantasy!Norse warrior named Brighid as Murphy decides to enforce his Law. I liked that part and I wish the entire book was about her, because that would have meant some proper Epic Fantasy Drama.

 

But on page 136, a guy named Kaeden shows up, which is the first we've seen or heard of him this entire time; he hasn't been foreshadowed even a little bit. Kaeden is our second protagonist, and he's the embodiment of one of my least favorite main character types: the overpowered chosen one who doesn't want to be the overpowered chosen one and angsts about it despite having no real reason to do so. Like I said in my review of Steal Fire from the Gods, it felt like the story had suddenly turned into a teenager's self-insert fanfiction. The contrast of this guy's whining about his imagined problems with Brighid's bearing up under her actual problems was so jarring I stopped reading within a few pages, simply because I didn't want to have to deal with him any longer than I had to.

 

That said, I do want to provide a full review of this book. However, not having finished it, I can't write one. So I have turned to my pseudonymous relative Kittens, who actually has finished it, for assistance in this difficult task.

 

Without further ado, here's Kittens on the second half of Winter's Maiden.  

 

<kittens>

 

The second half was definitely less good, mostly due to Kaeden being less cool than Brighid. He kind of annoys me in that he's a grown man and acts like he's a teenager in the sulky phase. He has this whole melodramatic attitude toward his problems that makes you just want to shake him and tell him to deal with it and act like a man.

 

He and Brighid do eventually meet up and he does pretty much get over his problems, mostly because he's finally decided to embrace his whole 'overpowered chosen one'-ness.

 

Brighid's still way cooler and I think it would've been better if the whole thing was about her, because she deals with problems way better than Kaeden does. She takes life with a 'nothing can stop me' sort of attitude and toughs through it, Kaeden doesn't. He takes life with a 'if I don't like it, I'ma run away!' attitude - that's literally what he was doing in the beginning.

 

There are parts in Kaeden's half from her point of view, too, and those make you appreciate the personality difference more (and by appreciate I mean notice).

 

Anyhow, it was still a good book (good enough I did finish it) and I'll read the sequel when it comes out, but I feel like there was enough material for Brighid to have the whole book without dragging in Kaeden and putting half of it in his point of view. He could still've been in it, that would have been fine, but I don't think his POV was entirely necessary. 

</kittens>

 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for violence and some implied sexual content.

 

4 stars.

 

(Endnote: Brighid's adopted mom is named Elphsaba, which is an unfortunate name in a world where Wicked is the whole thing it is now.)

"The Ocean at the End of the Lane" by Neil Gaiman

This... was weird.

Well, everything Neil Gaiman writes is weird somehow. He seems to have a weird imagination. But this one is extra weird.

It's a guy remembering stuff that happened when he was a kid. The stuff includes a cat, a weird miner guy, a very strange pond, some witch-ish people (related to a character from his other story The Graveyard Book) who live at the end of the lane, and monsters that could be very effectively played for cosmic horror if this were that kind of story.

My mom reviewed this on her blog, here. Her thoughts are much more coherent than mine.

Neil Gaiman did a very good job of making the main villain, |Ursula Monkton the human incarnation of the extradimensional monster|, be the kind of person who both kids and adults hate with a flaming passion. I.E. a slightly lower caliber a near-exact clone of Dolores Umbridge.

I honestly don't have a lot to say about this one.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for, as my mom said in her review, "scenes where a 7-yr-old witnesses two adults engaged in adult activity (not described explicitly, but what they're doing is very obvious), scary scenes, and suicide."

4 stars.

(Endnote: In case you're wondering, it's pretty clear that the titular ocean is neither the Pacific nor the Atlantic.)

"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.)

"What If?" by Randall Munroe

This book is a little like the Imponderables series, except Imponderables asks "why does this happen?" and this asks "what if this happened?"

It's also the most hilarious thing I've read since Discworld. My favorite of the approximately 60 hypothetical situations in here are:

"What would happen if you made a periodic table out of cube-shaped bricks, where each brick was made of the corresponding element?" (|Toxic gas, fire, explosions, and radiation poisoning would happen.|)

"Is it possible to build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns?" (|Theoretically yes|)

"What would happen if you strapped C4 to a boomerang? Could this be an effective weapon, or would it be as stupid as it sounds?" (|The author didn't give an actual answer to this one, instead briefly wondering why you would want the high explosive to come back to you if you missed.|)

"What if a glass of water was, all of a sudden, literally half empty?" (|It would either make a loud bang or explode violently, depending on whether it was the top half or the bottom half that suddenly became a vacuum.|)

"Is it possible to boil a cup of water by stirring?" (|No, it isn't|)

And my personal favorite, "If a bullet with the density of a neutron star were fired from a handgun (ignoring the how) at the Earth's surface, would the Earth be destroyed?" (|No, though it would do weird things while burrowing into the core, and if you put it on a sufficiently sturdy pedestal it would do even weirder things to anyone who tried to touch it|)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A stern T for some bad language, for all the explanations except {T15+ish "If a woman were to have sperm cells made from her own stem cells and impregnate herself, what would be her relationship with her daughter?"}, which is T15+ for sexual references. This could be an awesome videogame.

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    "Well, you know what they say -- 'Lightning always strikes in the same place. That place is in Venezuela. You shouldn't stand there.'"

    Page 269, from "If all the lightning strikes happening in the world on any given day all happened in the same place at once, what would happen to that place?"

 

    "I'm ruined! Where did it all go wrong?"

    "Uh. I'm guessing the part at the beginning where you decided to print out Wikipedia."

    Page 254, from "If you had a printed version of the whole of (say, the English) Wikipedia, how many printers would you need to keep up with the changes made to the live version?" (|Only about 6, but the ink would ruin you.|)

    "Then the 92nd little pig built a house out of depleted uranium. And the wolf was like, 'Dude.'"

    Page 3, from "What would happen if the Earth and all terrestrial objects suddenly stopped spinning, but the atmosphere retained its velocity?"

 

    Remember: I am a cartoonist. If you follow my advice on safety around nuclear materials, you probably deserve whatever happens to you.

    Page 12, from "What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? Would I need to dive to actually experience a fatal amount of radiation? How long could I stay safely at the surface?"

 

    "Oh, that's easy. There are tons of parachutes lying around on a submarine."

    Page 81, from "How long could a nuclear submarine last in orbit?"

 

(Endnote: As befits a book by the author of xkcd, there are little comics interspersed with the normal words. These are the source of most of my favorite lines.)

"Monster of the Week" by Michael Sands

This is basically Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The TTRPG. Or so I'm told (by the cover blurb), having never actually watched Buffy. It describes itself as an "action-horror RPG".

 

Its proportion of number-crunching to narrative runs to about 10%:90% (as opposed to Dungeons & Dragons which has about 90%:10%, and Lancer with approximately 50%:50%). It relies heavily on the collaborative storytelling element of TTRPGs; the only thing keeping either players or Keeper (who runs the non-player elements of the story) in check is a mutual agreement that if they play fair with each other, it makes for a better story. Basically, it's putting a lot of weight on everyone's appreciation for narrative.

This is a horror game (at least it's meant to be, though the actual level of scariness is up to the Keeper). As such, I have even less chance of getting my family to play it with me than I have of getting them to play Lancer. Also I actually own the Lancer rulebook, unlike this one, which I just borrowed from the library.

That aside, it does look like it would be fun to play if the players and Keeper knew and liked each other. The classes (called "playbooks" in this) are innovative, and fit well with the highly narrative style of play, and there are some gentlemen's-agreement-style restrictions on what the Keeper is allowed to do. (They mostly boil down to "play fair and don't drop things on people out of the blue.")

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for swearing, violence, and gore. And spookiness. It's already a game, though it relies so much on the players and Keeper collaborating to tell the story (necessitating a human Keeper) that making it into a videogame would be very hard. The best I can think of would be making a virtual tabletop thing like D&D Beyond for it.

4 stars, though if you scare easily or just don't like horror, you would probably dislike this. I have a relatively high tolerance for that sort of thing, in print at least.

(Endnote: This is the first multiplayer TTRPG I've encountered that doesn't require more than a d6. Lancer needs a d6 and a d20, and D&D and Pathfinder both use d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20. The singleplayer game Four Against Darkness also uses only d6s, but that one's just for one person.)

"Children of the Mind" by Orson Scott Card

I thought the title referred to the Children of the Mind of Christ, the Catholic monastic order from Speaker for the Dead, but it's most likely actually talking about |the clones of his siblings his subconscious created while Jane was teleporting him|.

Also, apparently |souls are subatomic particles in the Enderverse? Or something. Jane's teleporting works by flipping whatever she's moving into the not-quite-a-dimension where souls without bodies live, then flipping it back into realspace somewhere else. This does weird things, like Ender's subconscious creating clones of Peter and Jane, and a side character intentionally synthesizing some viruses|.

Okay, to explain that last bit I'm going to have to get into some plot bits from the other two that I didn't mention in my previous reviews. Basically, an important part of the pequeninos' life cycle is the fact that they |turn into trees if they die in specific ways; this is accomplished by the descolada, a virus that basically uncoils and rearranges DNA. Except it wasn't engineered for humans, so it just takes apart their internal organs if they don't eat special vitamin supplements that kill it. The side character who synthesized the viruses was working on ways to A) make a version of the descolada that still turns pequeninos into trees but doesn't kill humans (dubbed the recolada) and B) make a version of the descolada that would un-OCD the OCD cult on the planet Path|.

This book (and Xenocide, for that matter) get way farther into space metaphysics than I normally see in anything but Star Wars.

Much of the drama here is driven by the fact that, |thanks to the clones it made, Ender's lifeforce/soul/whatnot is spread across three bodies and can't actually sustain that. [ENDING SPOILERS] His original body ends up disintegrating after he / his soul decides he's/it's bored with being Ender and leaves to go pay attention to what Peter and Val (the sibling clones) are doing. Then Jane has to move into the Val-clone when Starways Congress turns off the computers she lives in, and Ender's soul (for better or worse) is stuck in the Peter-clone. Thankfully, this doesn't turn Peter into a clone of Ender, so his romance with Wang-mu (she's from Path with the OCD cult) isn't made super weird|.

Speaking of |the Peter-clone, he's formed from Ender's subconscious perception of him, and is thus a bizarrely charismatic psychopath. (Ender's perception of him is flawed, as Peter himself points out; he wouldn't have been able to become ruler of the world as Ender imagines him.) His romance with Wang-mu is mostly predicated on her being like "I can fix him" (which actually works for once) and taking none of his crap|.

 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for sexual references and some bad language. It has too many POV characters to be easily made into a videogame.

3 stars.

Favorite lines:

    Of course, thinking of two things is rather useless if both trains of thought are dumb.

    Page 244. When |Peter (with all of Ender's soul in him now) is discovering his new ability to parallel process|. 

    "...now I realize that just getting through the day without killing somebody can be an achievement."

    "It gets to be a habit. Most of us manage to keep our body count quite low. It's the neighborly way to live."

    Pages 258-259. When |Jane (with a human body now) is discovering her new ability to feel emotions|.

(Endnote: My apologies for redacting so much of the post. Since this was originally the second half of Xenocide, it has a lot of plot threads that are direct continuations of spoilers for that book.)