• Book Reviews

    Spectr vol. 1 by Jordan L. Hawk

    A novella series is tough to review; each book is just a little too short to write about on its own and trying to do the whole series at once is super tiring. But I really liked these books so I’m gonna give it a shot. Hunter of demons So basically all these books are short, but good. I do prefer full-length novels to almost anything else, but novellas are fun because you can finish reading them super quickly. They’re like bon-bons! Bon-bons filled with demons. SPECTR has a somewhat typical paranormal worldbuilding with demons, psychics, and special agents who solve paranormal crimes. Luckily I love all that stuff! This…

  • Book Reviews

    One-Eyed Jack by Elizabeth Bear

    Things I have a soft spot for: gods (or something similar) trying to make it in America, odes to places not much oded to, boyfriends, personifications of cities gaining sentience. Things this book has: all that! Plus Elvis! Any book with American-grown gods is going to be compared to Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, but what’s different about One-Eyed Jack is that they’re not so much GODS as personifications of cities (or certain genres of media!) given life. Their choices affect the city; the city in return affects them. So, for example, if a formerly-important city dries up and turns into a ghost town, the personification either dies, too, or they…

  • Book Reviews

    Iron & Velvet by Alexis Hall (2013)

    As you know, I am a huge fan of Alexis Hall’s Prosperity series, which is a steampunk historical romance horror thing with amazing characters and a fantastic setting. Her Kate Kane series, meanwhile, is an urban paranormal mystery series with romance elements set in modern day London. I burnt out on urban paranormal mystery romances some years ago, but I had faith that AH wouldn’t just regurgitate the same old tropes that originally turned me off the genre. And he didn’t! A lot of the story elements ARE the same as other urban fantasy series– there are werewolves and vampires and witches, the protagonist is a half-faerie princess PI with…

  • Book Reviews

    Runaways, Vol. 1-3 by Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona

    Okay, so this is the first major story arc for Runaways (I think). These three volumes comprise a complete story, so theoretically you could stop there and be perfectly happy![1. Especially because I’m in the second series right now and it’s not as good, nope.] I was perfectly happy, because I love stories about teenage superheroes having personal problems. The fact that their personal problems consisted of evil supervillian parents was just icing on the cake. Other personal problems: friendship, learning to trust, betrayal, romance and squishy teenage feelings, sometimes sounding like they spent too much time watching Dawson’s Creek or whatever show was popular back when this series ran,…

  • Book Reviews

    Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

    Yes, the TV show came before the book! Which explains why I kept thinking “this feels like an adaptation.” I have a love-hate relationship with book adaptations of movies; mostly they always feel derivative and pointless, and not even Neil Gaiman can make one great. The Neverwhere novelization is better than most, but it still can’t top the TV show. The problem might be because when you’re writing an adaptation, you have to stick pretty close to the original source. You can expand things a little (like internal dialogue or whatever), but basically you’ve got a paint-by-numbers kind of thing. It ends up feeling very stale and forced, and it’s…