Briar’s Book is the final book in Tamora Pierce’s Circle of Magic quartet, which of course is ending just as I’m getting used to the format Pierce wrote them in. Naturally, it focuses on Briar, the former thief and street rat, now plant-mage of Winding Circle Temple. He and the three girls are now a year older than they were in the first book, but still quite young. They’ve adjusted to their new lives and are learning in heaps and loads. For Briar, a large […]
Last train to dementia.
My father’s mother and my husband’s maternal grandmother both passed away last year. They suffered from dementia and Alzheimer’s, respectively. It was just as painful for me to watch my grandmother waste away into a shadow of her former self as it was to have the same conversations with my husband’s grandmother knowing she would never know me for more than minutes at a time. I got that same sadness to a lesser degree while reading Sir Terry Pratchett’s latest Discworld book.
Saved by the Art
I wanted so badly to like this book. Jen Wang’s artwork is so fantastic and it’s pretty much the sole reason I gave it three stars instead of two. It’s a graphic novel with realistically drawn women/girls, it’s got a message, it’s about gaming; in theory, it’s everything I should love. Doctorow starts off with a great introduction that really resonated with me. The internet has revolutionized modern day communication! (Yeah! The internet has cat pictures and stuff!) With the internet, we now have so […]
Egyptian Nights
Target: G. Willow Wilson’s Cairo. Art by M.K. Perker Profile: Modern Fantasy, Urban, Middle Eastern, Graphic Novel Cairo is, in many ways, a prototype for G. Willow Wilson’s later novel, Alif the Unseen. They are stories of clashing cultures. Both the complex internal clash between Islamic hardliners and the culturally diverse youth of the Middle East, and the more external, if no less complex conflict between encroaching western culture and the entrenched lifestyles of Muslims. By necessity, Cairo is more spare, crashing through a much […]