When Kindle asked me to rate this out of 5 stars, I had a moment’s pause. My confession: it took me over six months to make it through this collection of 17 short stories by Jane Yolen. Some I read in a single sitting, desperately flicking through the pages without hesitation. But unfortunately, most of the stories were a hard slog that I struggled to finish. This is my first (and likely, last) Jane Yolen novel. The stories of The Emerald Circus are typically slanted […]
He was a user of his own consciousness, but he did not have owner privileges
I thought about the rating for this one for awhile, and a solid three stars doesn’t quite capture it. It’s better than that, but has some issues that I found…not frustrating….or off-putting exactly, but definitely distracting. So we are in the future, 2144 to be exact, and the patenting of technology, medical research, information, and biotech is one of the driving features of our society. We follow a few different storylines here, both parallel and intersecting. We have Jack Chen, an underground medical researcher/gene coder […]
So Jacob galloped over the fields of Essex, flopped in the mud, lost the hunt, and rode by himself eating sandwiches…
So I am going to spoil this novel about part way through the review, and I will indicate that it’s coming, so be forewarned. This is Virginia Woolf’s third novel, and according to my looking into it, this one forms a kind of departure in style. I haven’t read The Voyage Out or Night and Day, her first two novels, but I have read her next two novels after this one, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and given those two, it surprises me not that this book situates in a kind […]
fabricati diem, pvnc
First Watch is a buddy cop movie in a high fantasy setting, where our two comically mismatched partners (a wet-behind-the-ears human and a grizzled veteran dwarf) have to find a way to get along and solve an increasingly complicated mystery in an early-modern city riven by factionalism and peopled by elves, orcs, mages, humans and dwarves. The premise would have sold me on this book immediately… if it was 1988 and Guards! Guards! By Sir Terry Pratchett didn’t exist. Unfortunately for Dale Lucas, Pratchett’s […]