The world and the characters in Love, Lies, and Hocus Pocus: Beginnings are so much fun that it really annoys me how short the stories and the book are. To some extent, the two main characters are pretty standard. Lily is bookish, socially awkward, and talented with magic; she’s a wizard. Sebastian is friendly, good looking, a troublemaker, and has little magic talent, but he is a witch. This to me is a tradition buddy mystery-solving/adventure team. What makes them fun is their dynamic and […]
Kill Your Darlings
Deborah Harkness knows a lot about a lot of things. Her depth and breadth of knowledge on things ranging from wine to Elizabethan England to brewing tea is certainly impressive, but the amount of detail crammed into these books sure does make for some slow going. The All Souls Trilogy is about a world in which witches, vampires, and daemons (in this case, daemons are humans who are more than us regular folk–musical prodigies, artistic savants, financial wizards, scientific geniuses–or sometimes drug addicts or mentally […]
Plutonium may give you grief for thousands of years, but arsenic is forever.
It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people. I cannot emphasize enough how much of a treat Good Omens is. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett will also tell you how much of a treat it is. They will tell you in their introduction and their afterward how much they wrote it for the love of it […]
God bless busybody community matriarchs, and all that sail in them.
More, please. More, more, more. I just love me some Peter Grant. And fair warning to the reader who may be interested in this series: this book, Broken Homes, which is Book 4 of the “Rivers of London” series, isn’t the strongest of the bunch. But it’s still a delight and a treat, and I will fight anyone who isn’t a fan. Listen, I have five more “Dark Tower” books to read in the next five weeks, but I still just checked out Foxglove Summer […]