"The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England" by Brandon Sanderson

This book was a Christmas gift from a relative for whom I have no suitable pseudonym.

It's about a guy from |what's eventually revealed to be a sci-fi universe|, who lands in a field in medieval England (hence the title) (well, it's |actually an alternate dimension's version of medieval England|) with no memory. And, thus, no idea why he's here, what he's supposed to be doing, or who he even is.

He actually reminds me a lot of Guy from Minecraft: The Island. They're both amnesiac guys who get portal-fantasied into another world, for one. And for another, they're confident in themselves, mostly, despite not really having the competence to back up that confidence.

(They also both annoy me to varying degrees throughout the earlier parts of their respective books.)

Amnesia is a good way to avoid having to lore dump about your original world, while also being able to integrate the lore about your fantasy world in a fairly natural way. It's really a very useful plot device, especially for portal fantasy.

Our main character is not actually a wizard, though |he does have nanobot augments. And there is magic, of a sort, just not used by him|.

The "frugal" part of the title is an artifact of an earlier book concept of Sanderson's, entitled The Frugal Wizard's Guide to London, which he rejected for being "too Harry Potter". In this, "Frugal Wizard" is a brand name. Frugality really has nothing to do with the plot.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T, probably, for fantasy |and sci-fi| violence. I don't recall anything objectionable. It could be a pretty decent videogame.

4 stars.

(Endnote: Personally, if I got portal-fantasied, I'd rather have a copy of the Adventurer's Guide. That in-universe book is more useful and less of a marketing brochure.)

"A Swiftly Tilting Planet" by Madeleine L'Engle

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 stars.

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

"Five Kingdoms" series by Brandon Mull

Five Kingdoms is a portal fantasy series centering around a boy named Cole and his adventures, some more harrowing than others, in the alternate world of the Outskirts.

 

My apologies for any defects in the above image. The Windows 11 version of MS Paint is vastly inferior to the Windows 10 version, and I haven't gotten used to it yet. 

Book 1: Sky Raiders

We don't actually spend much time with the titular Sky Raiders.

This book seemed like it was going to be serious and traumatic-for-characters and somewhat depressing, and then it... kinda wasn't. I'm not sure whether to be relieved that it's less bad for the characters, or annoyed that it set itself up to be that bad and wasn't.

There's a character in this, Mira, who the main character (named Cole) has a crush on. This is somewhat of a problem, as any actual romance between them is made really weird by the fact that Cole is thirteenish and Mira, while biologically also thirteenish, |has actually been around for like 60 years and is just magically thirteenish forever as a disguise|.

Book 2: Rogue Knight

This book starts in Kingdom 2 of 5 (Book 1 was Sambria the straightforward magic kingdom, book 2 is Elloweer the illusions and shapeshifting kingdom).

Our protagonists are starting to collect a lot of people into their entourage, and I begin to have trouble keeping them all straight. Maybe I should make myself a cheat sheet.

There's a character in this, Trillian the torivor, who is too out-of-nowhere cool not to be important later. He's a sort of ageless extradimensional being who's ridiculously magical but currently stuck in a castle after some normal (well, "normal," they were overpowered wizards fighting a gratuitously overpowered magic being) people sealed him into it. He also may be from one of Brandon Mull's other series, Beyonders, but I'm not entirely clear on that.

 

(You may, but probably won't, notice that the post image actually says The Rogue Knight on the cover of this one. I didn't notice that until I'd already pasted them all into the single image.) 

Book 3: Crystal Keepers

Welcome to Kingdom 3 of 5: Zeropolis, which has decided it's done with high fantasy and wants to be cyberpunk instead. They have Internet.

This is the first book I've ever seen where the climax involves |defeating magic Skynet by siccing a different magic Skynet on her, then blowing them both up with the fantasy equivalent of an atom bomb while they're distracted fighting each other|. Brandon Mull is highly imaginative.

I really liked the twist in this with the Hunter, a character who's been chasing the protagonists in the background since like the first book. I'm not going to describe it here, since it would require explaining like half the lore; also it's a pretty major twist that I think is going to have repercussions down the line. (I'm writing each book's individual review as I read them, so I don't actually know there'll be repercussions until I've read books 4 and 5.)

Book 4: Death Weavers

And here we are in Kingdom 4 of 5, Necronum the kingdom full of ghosts and Beyonders references.

|Cole's superpowers have now been turned back on. (He sort of got them during Rogue Knight, only for that book's big bad to promptly turn them off again.)|

Y'know how I mentioned Trillian? He hasn't been really important yet, but |there's another torivor who is. He's the bad guy of this book, mostly. His name is Nazeem, but I kept forgetting that, so I just called him Craig for most of the book|.

 

Some characters from Beyonders, one of Brandon Mull's other series, show up in this as ghosts. I suspect their inclusion would be a lot cooler to people who've actually read the series they're from.

 

I think this is the first book where Cole spends a significant portion of the story separated from his giant ever-growing friend group. It was nice to see how he fares on his own for a bit when all his random friends aren't there.

Book 5: Time Jumpers

Kingdom 5 of 5 is Creon, where they screw around with spacetime. They also use a lot of crayons.

A time jumper is not an article of clothing. It's someone who does the "time" part of the screwing around with spacetime.

We have the final bossfight in this one, |against Craig Nazeem|, and |Trillian gets to finally be relevant|. I do have a bit of a quibble, in that their original plan for defeating the final boss was hyped up to be the only way they could think of to defeat it... |and then the final boss catches on to it, so they just randomly improvise another one? One that the final boss's supposed overpowered-magic-ness should have let him escape almost instantly? I'm not entirely sure what Brandon Mull was thinking when he wrote this|.

Overall Notes

I think the series sort of lost its direction toward the end. It's like Brandon Mull realized that |he'd set up the High King in such a way that he'd be an absolute pushover as a final boss|, so he decided to just |sidestep that whole plot and [ENDING SPOILERS] start a new one based around the High King's evil grand vizier, the grand vizier's torivor master Nazeem/Ramarro/Craig, and their whole evil metamagician cult|. So it went from |"let's stop the king and his minions from recapturing his coughMacGuffincough daughters, who we're already invested in because they're characters we know, and save the world from tyranny"| to |"let's stop the grand vizier and the torivor and both their minions from releasing the torivor, who just recently became relavant midway through book 4, and save the world from destruction"|. And the second one would have been a perfectly serviceable plot, if it had been there from the beginning.

I do like the inclusion of the |"shapecrafters" in this universe; basically, the normal magic (or "shaping," which does somewhat trigger the Renamed Concept Rule) changes the real world, and shapecraft is a sort of meta-magic that changes the normal magic|. That's not something I've seen a lot of things do. (In the first few books, it was still somewhat of a mystery. So I theorized the existence of what I called |"shapecraftcraft", or meta-meta-magic, which was magic that changed the magic that changed the magic|. This was mostly a joke.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for fantasy violence and some scary scenes. It could actually be a reasonably good action-adventure videogame; the quests are questy enough, and it has things that could be bosses.

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    "I'm not running because I'm guilty. I'm running because you're chasing me."

    Page 46, Rogue Knight

    Ingredients: Camels, microscopes, yams, hydrogen, coral reefs, mannequins, poems, comets, mousetraps, sarcasm, cacti, labyrinths; contains less than 2% uranium, cyanide, cobwebs, magma, polio

    Page 111, Crystal Keepers. It's the ingredients list for a candy bar. 

(Endnote: I shall now assemble the Kingdoms, the Worlds, the Nights at Freddy's, and the Guys to create the ultimate crossover series. Stay tuned.)

"Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox" by Eoin Colfer

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

Let me explain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

2 stars.

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

"The Time Machine" by H. G. Wells

I don't know why, but, I thought this had Martians in it. It doesn't. I also thought it had evil humans who think the main character's time machine should have a poison gas button, which it also doesn't. I have no idea where I got the Martians from, but I did some poking around and it turns out there are evil humans with poison gas button opinions. Just not in the original.

Basically, for whatever reason, the abridged version I read when I was like seven (which absolutely terrified me, by the way) decided it was going to add a Cold War-esque dystopian future section featuring the main character (who's never named; he's only ever called the Time Traveller) getting interrogated about his time machine. Which includes the very memorable line from one of the interrogators, "Where's the poison gas button?!" (to which the Time Traveller inwardly speculates that, had the guy been building his own time machine, he would have included a poison gas button.) Why the adaptation people decided to do that I honestly can't fathom, but they did.

And it's not like the story isn't unsettling enough on its own. First there's the whole thing with the Eloi and the Morlocks: the Eloi are a race of childlike humanoids who live peacefully in the ruins of a previous society. The narrator surmises that they're |the descendants of humanity (H. G. Wells was pretty clearly an evolutionist), who've had medical and horticultural science advance so far that they've lost all need for things like "physical labor" or "intelligence". They're dubiously sentient and very afraid of the dark|. Meanwhile, the Morlocks are |cannibalistic, subterranean humanoids who seem to be using the Eloi as livestock, may or may not have some kind of fascination with machinery, and steal the time machine for a bit|. There's all kinds of disturbing subtext in there.

And after that, |the narrator goes to the really far future. As in, far enough that the sun has turned into a red giant, plant life is now mostly green slime, and the only animal life visible is giant screaming butterflies and some kind of giant spidery antenna-y crab thing. Then he goes even farther, to an era were the sole living being aside from himself (that we know about) is a bizarre football-shaped tentacle being, which seems to act as an ambush predator of a sort|.

The story is fully sufficiently unnerving and complete without having the Time Traveller drop into a Cold War analogue, and I decry whoever abridged the story and decided making up new parts was a good idea. For shame. If you're abridging a work, your job is to make what there is shorter and easier to understand, not to add new bits.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for spookiness and |cannibalism|.

3 stars. Too evolutiony for my taste.

(Endnote: I think this is the first time travel story, and yet it managed not to be all tropey. Maybe because the guy didn't go into the past?)

"The Silver Dream" by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves and Mallory Reaves

Most of the body of this post will be spoiler tagged, if only because pretty much everything related to Acacia "Don't ever call me Casey" Jones is a spoiler.

Speaking of whom. Acacia "Don't ever call me Casey" Jones is a member of |TimeWatch, which is basically InterWorld on time travel. It fights some ancient nigh-omnipotent beings called Techmaturges who are apparently able to just casually unexist entire universes. She also knows the original Joe Harker, somehow.|

She and Joseph "Joey" "Joe" Harker also sort of |start a bit of romance based on them annoying each other but getting stuck together in a variety of dangerous situations. As romance subplots go, it's pretty understated and not bad (in my admittedly limited experience with romance in YA books)|.

 

Oh, and we also learn (mostly) what FrostNight is? |It's some sort of magical-technological ritual that requires HEX and the Binary to collaborate using the distilled essences of a bunch of interdimensional walkers, and it's supposed to... uh, destroy the multiverse or something. I think it's the Techmaturges' fault.|

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for fantasy violence. It's remarkably clean.

 

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    I hurled the thing [something he found in the trippiness dimension] à la Captain America, silently thanking my Alternative Phys Ed teacher for training us in the dubiously useful art of discus throwing.

    Pages 157-158.

    "The council decided."

    "Are you on the council?"

    "No."

    "Who is?"

    "Councilors."

    Page 187.

 

(Endnote: I think I've figured out a plot twist. |Our main character travels back in time and becomes the leader of InterWorld. I infer this from his newfound insistence on being called Joe, the existence of a picture of a younger InterWorld leader and an older Acacia together, and the fact that he sets out to gather up fellow interdimensional travelers at the end of this one|.)

"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.)

"A Stroke of the Pen" by Terry Pratchett

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

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

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

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

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

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

"A Blink of the Screen" by Terry Pratchett

This is Terry Pratchett's collection of his short stories for adults, including:

"The Hades Business" -- Satan contacts a crooked businessman to renovate Hades into a tourist trap. It works too well. Not my favorite, and by the little author's note at the beginning, Pratchett seems to agree.

"Solution" -- an inspector stows away on a smuggler's plane to confront him about what, exactly, he's smuggling. It's |airplanes|. Short, but decent.

"The Picture" -- a mental patient keeps a horrifyingly wrong picture in his cell. I really liked the twist at the end of this one.

"The Prince and the Partridge" -- a prince meets the demands of his beloved princess's dad by reenacting the 12 Days of Christmas song. I could see what the end was going to be almost as soon as I started reading it.

"Rincemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor" -- the one that eventually became the Bromeliad Trilogy, which I'll read at some point.

"Kindly Breathe in Short, Thick Pants" -- poking fun at pointless governmental statutes with a ministry to counteract pollution by... nobody breathing as much.

"The Glastonbury Tales" -- sort of a retelling of The Canterbury Tales, but with a guy picking up hitchhikers.

"There's No Fool Like an Old Fool Found in an English Queue" -- another poking-fun-at-the-government one, this time being the Minister of Queues getting up on TV and ranting about people who take too long to check out.

"Coo, They've Given Me the Bird" -- Russia trains pigeons to do assembly line jobs in their factories, and one factory's sole remaining human employee--the janitor--writes them a sarcastic letter.

"And Mind the Monoliths" -- living history goes weird.

"The High Meggas" -- the one that became The Long Earth, which I'll also read at some point.

"Twenty Pence, with Envelope and Seasonal Greeting" -- a bunch of travelers get stuck in a Christmas card.

[REDACTED]

"Final Reward" -- a barbarian hero dies and goes to meet his maker. As in, the author who created him. It's an interesting concept.

"Turntables of the Night" -- this one was apparently published in an anthology edited by none other than Diana Wynne Jones. Now I want to read that anthology.

"#ifdefDEBUG + "world/enough" + "time"" -- someone dies in VR, and a repairman is called.

"Hollywood Chickens" -- a bunch of chickens get loose in Hollywood and develop an advanced civilization on one bank of the highway. Especially hilarious because of the reveal at the end.

"The Secret Book of the Dead" -- poem about dead pets.

"Once and Future" -- Merlin is actually Mervin, a time traveler from another world's future, who makes the Sword in the Stone work with... electromagnets.

"FTB" -- Santa Claus visits a bank mainframe because it Believes What It Is Told and someone told it about Santa Claus.

"Sir Joshua Easement: A Biographical Note" -- an extremely tongue-in-cheek biography of an unknown person from a painting.

[And of course, there are the Discworld stories, noted below.]

"Troll Bridge" -- Cohen the Barbarian gets annoyed/sad because the world is running out of adventures for barbarian heroes.

"Theater of Cruelty" -- Captain Carrot discovers a live-action (courtesy of the Discworld having gnomes) Punch and Judy show whose owner has been murdered. 

"The Sea and Little Fishes" -- Granny Weatherwax is told to stop freaking people out by being all spooky, so she decides to freak people out even more by being genuinely nice to them.

"The Ankh-Morpork National Anthem" -- exactly what it says on the tin. Pratchett wrote it because the BBC asked if the Discworld had one. According to the text, it is the only national anthem that "formally has a second verse consisting mainly of embarrassed mumbling."

"Medical Notes" -- about strange mental disorders found on the Discworld. Quite possibly the most hilarious story in this entire collection

"Thud: A Historical Perspective" -- apparently the actual origin of the game of Thud.

"A Few Words from Lord Havelock Vetinari" -- a speech Pratchett wrote for the twinning of Ankh-Morpork with a town in England.

"Death and What Comes Next" -- a philosopher attempts to use quantum uncertainty to convince Death that he's not going to die. It doesn't work.

"A Collegiate Casting-out of Devilish Devices" -- Lord Vetinari sends an inspector to the Unseen University to regulate it. The University faculty ignore him.

 

"Minutes of the Meeting to Form the Proposed Ankh-Morpork Federation of Scouts" -- what happens when you put Captain Carrot, Sergeant Detritus, Bashful Bashfulsson, Chrysoprase the Troll, and Lord Vetinari (among others) in a meeting about creating the Boy Scouts for Ankh-Morpork.

 

"The Ankh-Morpork Football Association Hall of Fame Playing Cards" -- baseball cards for Unseen Academicals.

 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for language and crude humor.

 

4 stars, for being hilarious. 

Favorite lines (this post wasn't long enough yet):

    It was a series Five, which in my opinion were a big mistake. The Fours were pretty near ideal, so why tinker? It's like saying, hey, we've invented the perfect bicycle so, next thing we'll do, we'll put thirteen more wheels on it--

    Page 121, from "#ifdefDEBUG + "world/enough" + "time""

 

    Annoia, or Paranoia Inversa

    The belief that you are out to get everyone.

    Page 240, from "Medical Notes"

 

    According to the trollish philosopher Plateau, "if you wants to understan' an enemy, you gotta walk a mile in his shoes. Den, if he's still your enemy, at least you're a mile away and he's got no shoes."

    Page 247, from "Thud: A Historical Perspective"

    In his opening remarks, Captain Carrot referred to the current problem of delinquency of young people in the city, which has recently been the subject of many articles in the Times.

    Miss Partleigh interjected that this was because there was nothing for them to do.

    Lord Vetinari observed that in fact there was a vast range of things for them to do, running from petty theft to armed gang warfare, and that therefore the question was one of finding something for them to do that, if at all possible, did not actually involve the death of innocent, or presumably innocent, bystanders.

    Page 264, from "Minutes of the Meeting to Form the Proposed Ankh-Morpork Federation of Scouts"

(Endnote: I'd just reprint the entire of "Medical Notes" in the favorite lines section, but A] it would spoil the enjoyment of anyone reading it for themselves, and B] it would probably also be some form of copyright infringement.)

"Night Watch" by Terry Pratchett

Plot summary: A homicidal psychopath yeets himself and Commander Vimes back into the past, then murders past!Vimes's mentor so present!Vimes has to take his place. Unfortunately, the "past" they were yeeted into is the time when Homicidal Lord Winder is being deposed by a revolution in the streets because he decided secret police were a good idea.

This is one of the more somber Discworld books.

I'm starting to suspect that Vimes the chronically angry and cynical actually has some form of depression, though I have no actual evidence for this.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for crude humor, swearing, and violence.

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    His glare ran from face to face, causing most of the squad to do an immediate impression of the Floorboard and Ceiling Inspectors Synchronized Observation Team.

    Page 118.

    He unfolded [the note]. In smudged pencil, but still readable, it read: Morphic Street, 9 o'clock tonight. Password: swordfish.

    Swordfish? Every password was "swordfish"! Whenever anyone tried to think of a word that no one would ever guess, they always chose "swordfish." It was just one of those strange quirks of the human mind.

    Page 157. I'm pretty sure this is a trope in British fiction that didn't quite translate over to America.

    "But suddenly I've got all the aces, Duke," he said.

    "But suddenly I'm not playing cards, Carcer."

    Page 194.

    THERE IS NO MORE TIME, EVEN FOR CAKE. FOR YOU, THE CAKE IS OVER. YOU HAVE REACHED THE END OF CAKE.

    Pages 389-390.

(Endnote: I don't have much to say about this one.)

"Worlds of Adventure" by Al Thibeaux, Jaq Thibeaux, and Tor Thibeaux

Behold, another anthology. I'm doing the micro-reviews for this again.

"Runners Alliance" by Al Thibeaux: Dystopian, with megacorporate warfare involved (because of course).

"Rendezvous" by Tor Thibeaux: A guy defects from another dystopia, then turns out to have the time of his life doing so, severely annoying everyone who's extracting him.

"Symbiosis" by Jaq Thibeaux: All the trees are sentient and can talk to each other. Then one of them dies, and another one gets depressed.

"Star Harvest" by Tor Thibeaux: I'm not sure if what these people are harvesting are actual real stars or if they're just called stars for some reason.

"To a Better Time" by Al Thibeaux: In which the Lady of the Lake is a time traveler.

"Escape" by Tor Thibeaux: Remember the guy who has the time of his life defecting from a dystopia? He's back, having the time of his life rescuing another person from a dystopia. And ticking off basically everyone else in his organization by Not Acting Like A Proper Secret Agent.

"Adventure for Two" by Al Thibeaux: A guy from a singularly boring village is GOING ON AN ADVENTURE!!! And then he meets a dragon.

"One Last Shot" by Jaq Thibeaux: A random person and her mysterious floating sphere buddy have to get past a guard robot.

"The Aim High" by Tor Thibeaux: A salvage ship finds a mysteriously abandoned ship. With spooky things on it.

"Seven Strong" by Al Thibeaux: Basically just a sci-fi retelling of Snow White.

"Treachery Aboard the Nautilus" by Tor Thibeaux: What if Professor Arronax was evil?

"The Queen's Cure" by Al Thibeaux: A peaceful kingdom with fairies is abruptly invaded by an evil guy and his robot army.

"Raid on the Zone" by Tor Thibeaux: Turns out oil fields can get attacked by angry furries. 

 

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

4 stars.

(Endnote: A "furry" is basically a humanoid animal.)

"York" trilogy by Laura Ruby

Book One: The Shadow Cipher

This looks steampunk, but it isn't steampunk. It's more like National Treasure (2004), in that there's a bunch of clues hidden in old stuff to find a secret treasure that nobody thinks exists except some random weird people. But with kids, because this is middle-grade-ish fiction.

I call it "middle-grade-ish fiction" because it is 476 pages long, too long for junior fiction, but it's shelved in the kids' section at the library (making it not YA) and it's cleaner than much of the middle-grade fiction I've been reading.

(Ew, I just realized that the average cleanliness for middle-grade fiction is way worse than it should be.)

 

The main characters, Tess and Theo, are treasure hunting because (they think) if they prove the secret treasure exists, they can save the building they live in from being demolished. |Except they don't find the treasure in this one. Instead, they end up unleashing a bunch of robotic moths that blow up the building they're trying to save|.

Videogame and star ratings for this book as an individual: E10+, 4.

Book Two: The Clockwork Ghost

There is no actual ghost here. There is clockwork, though; the main characters have to |stop the giant clock in not-Grand-Central-Station for one of the clues|. Except they end up |releasing a bunch of robots|. Again.

This one is basically like if the author said, "I see you read The Shadow Cipher. Do you want another The Shadow Cipher?" Which was fine, because I did actually want another The Shadow Cipher. This does mean I don't really have much to say about it, though.

There is one new character who was quite funny: Ono, the tiny Rubik's-cube-sized robot. He's named Ono because he can say exactly two things: "Oh no" and "To the land of kings" (well, he can drop words from the second one, making things like "Land of kings" or just "Kings"). Also, he occasionally does helpful transformation-y things like turning into a ladder.

While this is the middle book in a trilogy, it's not the one where everything goes all terrible. I was glad of that.

Videogame and star ratings for this book as an individual: E10+, 4.

Book Three: The Map of Stars

That gave me a sense of impending lameness, and then it was fine, and then it was confusing. 

 

It involves |time travel, and possibly parallel universes? I'm not actually sure. As I said, it was confusing. I did like the hints that Tess and Theo traveled back in time to set the whole clue thing up for themselves; it made the first two books a lot more believable with their "we keep finding all the clues first try and never run into dead ends or tangents"|. Although they are just hints, if strong ones; we never get anything definite.

And I'm honestly not sure what the title is referring to. Maybe I missed that part?

Also, |I don't know if the treasure actually exists, but I don't think so. They never find it, anyway|. The last third-ish was confusing. If you've read these and understood that bit, please tell me what's going on, because I don't know.

Videogame and star ratings for this book as an individual: E10+, 3.

Overall, this series gets 4 stars.

Were it a videogame, I'd rate the series: E10+ for tense scenes. This would actually make a pretty good puzzle game.

(Endnote: In case you couldn't tell, this is set in an alternate version of New York City.)

"A Tale of Time City" by Diana Wynne Jones

Despite the title evoking A Tale of Two Cities, this book has functionally nothing to do with Dickens. Instead, it involves time travel.

How this book's time travel works is there are "Stable Eras" and "Unstable Eras." This obviates confusion about "but what if you go back in time and change history?", because history is always changing in the Unstable Eras. Those always turn out the same way, though, so the Stable Eras (where nothing messes with history) don't get messed up. It's a good way to have time travel work, in other words.

Anyway, on to the plot! Vivian Smith is a normal girl being evacuated from London during the Blitz. She's supposed to be staying with a cousin in the country, but instead she gets abducted by aliens two teenage boys from Time City. They think they're saving the city from disintegrating or something (I don't actually remember what was going to happen if the city finally wore out the patch of weird altered time it was sitting on) by getting the person who's going to mess it up out of history, but they kidnap the wrong person.

(I have a sneaking suspicion none of that made any sense.)

Then they have to pretend Vivian is supposed to be there, which she isn't, long enough that they can figure out who's screwing with history. And, ideally, stop them. Plus there's a group of four MacGuffins that keep Time City anchored to history so it doesn't go flying off to nowhere and get lost, and people keep stealing them.

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

I'm giving A Tale of Time City 4 stars, one for each MacGuffin.

Favorite lines:

I actually do have... well, it's more of a favorite page, but still. Since it's so long, I've put it on my brand new Very Long Quotes Page, as quote 1. Vivian's despair over her miserable failure to translate it, and Dr. Wilander's sarcasm, are quite hilarious. I actually went back and read that page several times because it made me laugh so much.

(Endnote: The time travel in this isn't really dwelt upon, and nobody even bothers trying to explain any of it. I think that's part of the reason it doesn't invite speculation and/or plot holes as much as in other books.)

"Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony" by Eoin Colfer

I liked this one altogether better than the last one. Less of Opal Koboi, maybe? Fewer |major characters dying|? Actually, Holly does |die in this one|. She gets better, though, due to some |time travel shenanigans by Artemis.| Time travel kind of always leads to shenanigans. 

The plot of this is basically: the lost eighth type of fairies yeeted their island into a temporal rift because they got annoyed. The spell they used to do that is starting to fall apart. So now they start randomly appearing, and everyone's trying to stop it. 

Due to plot stuff with other humans figuring out about the time spell, Artemis, Holly, and two of those new fairies |go back to the island and hatch a plan to convert a bomb explosion to magic and put the island back where it's supposed to be. (I KNOW THIS IS SPOILER TAGGED BUT THIS IS LITERALLY THE ENDING I'M SPOILING HERE) Well, almost. It comes back twenty miles off target and three years after they left.|

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for fantasy violence, some crude humor, and some bad language.

I'm giving this one... well guess. If you guessed 4 stars, congratulations, you win an imaginary cookie and some fake internet points.

Favorite lines:

    "Talk straight or die!" shrieked the human into his face.

    N⁰1 shrieked right back at him. "How can I talk straight, you son of a three-legged dog? I don't speak Taiwanese!"

    All of this was said in perfect Taiwanese.

    Page 168.

    It was like a scene from a scary movie, complete with its own sound track.

    Minerva frowned. Real life did not have a sound track. There was music coming from somewhere.

    Page 233.

    "I know magic can be stolen," said Artemis. "Because I stole some myself."

    Page 313. (He's calling out the bad guy for magically hypnotizing his superiors, even though the bad guy shouldn't be able to have magic.)

(Endnote: I've taken to calling Artemis "dear Arty" in my head.)