needs more demons?

This young adult novel, told in the protagonist’s diary entries, mostly detailing a flight across a hostile land in the company of a handsome prince, offers many opportunities for Lee to play with and subvert assorted fairy tale conventions. This ranges from minor details — female characters who are overweight, old, and/or bald are described [...]

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As a kid, I distinctly remember thinking that A Wind in the Door was even better than A Wrinkle in Time.
I think this was mostly because of Proginoskes, an unusual and seriously awesome character.
But it’s not possible for me to sustain my former opinion of the novels’ relative merit this time around. The events in [...]

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Rebecca Steadman’s When You Reach Me impelled me to renew my affaire de coeur with A Wrinkle in Time. I read things with a different sort of eye than I did when I was, y’know, twelve, and some things stood out for me this time that didn’t before.

Yowza, one of my all-time favorite novels starts [...]

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When You Reach Me is about Miranda’s efforts to solve some puzzles growing up in late 70’s New York city. One set of puzzles is about mysterious notes; another set is about navigating early adolescence, and the largest set of puzzles is about why people act they way they do toward one another.
It’s also a [...]

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Walking the Labyrinth doesn’t sound like it should work anywhere near as well as it does. Molly Travers, a young woman in the modern day Bay area, finds herself investigating her ancestors, a loose-knit family troupe of illusionists who may have commanded powers beyond mere illusion. In addition to structuring the novel around a well-worn [...]

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World’s End felt throughout like a book I expected to like, and I wonder if I might’ve liked it better if I’d encountered it earlier. It’s a heroic fantasy of the magic-returns-to-the-modern-world variety. Chadbourn clearly knows a lot about the myths and legends of the British Isles, and this was what I enjoyed most in [...]

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I was curious but skeptical about Evanovich’s foray into fantasy themed fiction, and was quite pleasantly surprised. (It turns out, it’s not really her first foray; the “Between the Numbers” novels apparently introduced supernatural elements into the Stephanie Plum books some time ago.) Anyway, Wicked Appetite’s find-the-ancient-mystic-artifacts plot and plethora of quirky characters reminded me [...]

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I swore I was absolutely not going to read any more books about white, middle-aged, male academics in romantic entanglements with much younger women, and (despite having read several that I liked a lot), I’m currently kind of down on books about white, middle-aged males going somewhat or completely off-the-rails with the assistance of large [...]

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The good: As supernaturally-themed young adult novels go, the premise of this one is strikingly original: no vampires, werewolves, nor zombies (at least in this first volume of the series…). Instead, Janie finds herself involuntarily drawn into the dreams of anyone dreaming near her. A few SF authors have worked with similar concepts — [...]

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I eventually decided Bacigalupi’s Pump Six and Other Stories was one of the strongest and most-memorable single-author science-fiction story collections I’ve read in the past several years. If The Windup Girl didn’t quite live up to my expectations, it’s at least partly because those expectations were high.
But I also think that The Windup Girl would [...]

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