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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,…
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The Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine
I love GV’s previous book, Mechanique, and I absolutely adore fairy tale retellings, so I was fairly certain The Girls at the Kingfisher Club would be a huge hit with me. No surprise: it was! It’s not just the fact that it’s a retelling of one of my favorite fairy tales, the 12 Dancing Princess. It’s because the writing was so beautiful, the setting so interesting, the characters so lovable in a tragic kind of way. True, the father-villain was over the top with his nutsoid views about family and heirs (surely 12 healthy daughters are better than any nonexistent son?) but such is the world of the fairy tale…
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Ascension by Jacqueline Koyanagi
I bought Ascension because of some review I read somewhere on a blog (which I can’t find now), because I love scifi and I love space stories and I’m tired of scifi space stories with straight white people in them. Ascension, while not a perfect book, has a LOT of exciting things in it that should make any scifi fan happy to read it. It started off very strong. The first half of the book was fantastic; it introduces us to the world of Ascension and the people who navigate through it. There are alien planets! Creepy aliens with creepy alien technology! Spaceships and space pirates and also psychics who…
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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…
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REVIEW: Shadows on the Moon by Zoe Marriott
This is an AWESOME book. What makes it awesome? I’ll tell you what makes it awesome: 1. the characters! Specifically, Suzume and her development over the course of the book. She goes from spoiled normal kid to PTSD-ed refugee with magical powers to someone with a lot of spoilers hanging around. It’s great!
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REVIEW: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin
Read for The Women of Fantasy Book Club I’ve written and rewritten this review three times now, and I’m getting really sick of it. So this review is now going going to be short, to the point, and AWESOME. It’s always good to start on a positive note, right? So: I loved The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. I love the writing, the themes, how it doesn’t gloss over important issues that pop up in the relationship between humans and gods or humans and humans. I like the action, the intrigue, the characters, the setting. I loved the language, especially in the parts that tell stories about the mythology of the world…
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Review Notes: Kissing the Witch, The Commitments, The Tale of Despereaux
245. Kissing the Witch by Emma Donaghue Publication: HarperTeen (April 25, 1997), Hardcover, 240pp / ISBN 0060275758 Genre: Fantasy, GLBT Rating: 3.5 birds Read: December 17-18, 2009 Source: Library Summary from Amazon: Focusing on women and their self-perception, this book contains 13 interconnected stories which update classical European fairy tales. Each story forms a narrative chain, with characters passing the storyteller’s baton from tale to tale. Notes – Its kinda like The Rose & the Beast in that it takes an unconventional route in its retelling, but I like Kissing the Witch better than TR&TB because I think it’s more universal in what it says: first loves, finding inner strength,…
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Review Notes: The Broken Teaglass, Ash
Continuing with my “short reviews = happy holidays” plan of action. The Broken Teaglass by Emily Arsenault Publication: Delacorte Press; 1 edition (September 29, 2009), Hardcover, 384pp / ISBN 0553807331 Genre: Mystery Rating: 4 birds Read: December 16, 2009 Source: Library Summary: The dusty files of a venerable dictionary publisher . . . a hidden cache of coded clues . . . a story written by a phantom author . . . an unsolved murder in a gritty urban park–all collide memorably in Emily Arsenault’s magnificent debut, at once a teasing literary puzzle, an ingenious suspense novel, and an exploration of definitions: of words, of who we are, and of…