This book is a sequel, and this review may contain spoilers for the first book in the series, Cinder. I was initially surprised to see the direction Meyer chose to go when continuing her series, The Lunar Chronicles, in that she introduced a new protagonist and switched between character POVs, rather than just sticking with Cinder’s. A lot of time, this is a YA contrivance that bothers me somewhat, because it’s frequently a shortcut into another character’s emotions without having to write them descriptively (e.g. […]
Is Mankind Capable of Remaking Itself, asks Atwood
This final book in the trilogy offers a hopeful conclusion to Atwood’s frankly horrific depiction of our possible future. Maddaddam is the name of an action-oriented splitoff from the God’s Gardeners cult who—together with Crake’s bioengineered “children” who survived the so-called waterless flood that wiped most of humanity off the face of Earth—drive the action of this last book. While the Maddaddam survivors forage the ruins of their civilization for such things as tampons and flashlight batteries, they also learn how to raise a new […]
A trip through Dante’s Inferno
As a true lover of Dante’s Divine Comedy, I must confess that Brown’s choice of inspiration for his fourth Langdon novel hit just the right spot for me. While some readers may be bored by his lengthy descriptions of Dante’s cantos on the odyssey from Inferno and Purgatory to Paradise, I wanted more. Some readers may find his near tour-guide-style descriptions of Florence and Istanbul to be a divergence from the plot, but I was entranced and nearly salivating at the chance to visit […]