★★★★☆ A happy family for a moment

Saga, Volume 9

Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples (Illustrator)

The cover picture of Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples's Saga, Volume 9 is a family picture of Marko, Hazel, and Alana, looking like an ordinary happy family with wings and horns. Does that state of affairs last through to the end of the book? Three guesses...

Most of Volume 9 takes place on Jetsam, the planet that journalists Upsher and Doff come from. The gang's all here: Marko, Alana, and Hazel, as well as Petrichor, Prince Robot IV, his son Squire, and of course Upsher and Doff. Ianthe and The Will show up soon and cause Bad Trouble. (John Lewis would not approve.)

And that's really all I can tell you without major spoilers. However, I will remind you that Volume 9 is the last of Compendium One, and that Saga went into hiatus for four years immediately thereafter. Thus you can expect some things to end.

Amazon review

Goodreads review

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★★★★☆ A history adventure

April Morning Howard Fast As a high-school student, my go-to American historical fiction author was Kenneth Roberts (probably because my father loved his novels). After I had read everything Roberts wrote, I moved on to Howard Fast . I believe April Morning was the first Howard Fast novel I read, but it was not the last. Fast was a prolific and popular author of that time. And I understand why. His novels were entertaining -- fast-moving, with lots of action. Also informative. For a high school student who grew up in New England and had visited the sites of the battles of Lexington and Concord, April Morning held a lot of interest. But, to be honest, I never really felt they broke out of entertaining into anything greater, as occasionally Roberts seemed to, or Esther Forbes 's Johnny Tremain . Compared to such classic writers of children's adventure stories as Robert Louis Stevenson or Laura Ingalls Wilder , Fast pales. I can recommend April Morning as a

★★★☆☆ Destination Uncanny Valley

Someone You Can Build a Nest In John Wiswell I have mixed feelings about John Wiswell 's debut novel Someone You Can Build a Nest In . Intellectually, it's one of the most interesting attempts I've read at a problem Science Fiction authors have always struggled with -- creating aliens that are actually alien. But emotionally, alas, I didn't really connect with it. Sadly, I finished the book with a feeling of relief. I don't guess Wiswell was aiming at Science Fiction, but rather Horror Fantasy. Fine, I don't care where the bookstore shelves it. It stars an alien monster that a science fiction author would be proud of. What's more, the alien monster, Sheshehen, is the main point of view character. And she is truly biologically alien. She's a blob of flesh and can voluntarily take any shape and incorporate anything she eats. Does she have bones? If she wants to, and if she eats something with bones. Her life-cycle, though inhuman, is more familiar. W

★★★★☆ Crimes of Passion

Death in the Spires K.J. Charles K.J. Charles 's Death in the Spires begins in 1905, when our hero Jeremy (Jem) Kite is called into his boss's office. His boss has just received an anonymous letter accusing Jeremey of murder. Jem immediately knows what this is about, because it's something he's been living with for ten years. The REAL beginning of our story is in 1892, when Jem shows up at Oxford as a new student. He is quickly taken up into a group of seven friends, revolving about Toby Feynsham. So brilliant are these seven, both in sports and scholarship, that they become known among their contemporaries as the "seven wonders". Until 1895, when Toby was murdered. The other six know that the murderer had to be one of themselves. But the murder has not been solved. Jem, prodded by the letter, is no longer able to let sleeping dogs lie, and begins to investigate. So it's a murder mystery with some of the usual elements common to most murder mysteries. Tw

★★★☆☆ Explanations and falsification

The Logic of Scientific Discovery Karl Popper I would not advise most people to read Karl Popper 's The Logic of Scientific Discovery , but only because David Deutsch 's The Fabric of Reality contains a better presentation of Popper's ideas. The following quote is a good place to start to understand the significance of The Logic of Scientific Discovery The value today of philosophy to physics seems to me to be something like the value of early nation-states to their peoples. It is only a small exaggeration to say that, until the introduction of the post office, the chief service of nation-states was to protect their peoples from other nation-states. The insights of philosophers have occasionally benefited physicists, but generally in a negative fashion—by protecting them from the preconceptions of other philosophers. --Steven Weinberg One such preconception was the idea that science is based on inductive logic -- whatever that means -- it is far from clear. I was to

★★★★☆ Collected maps of fantasy lands

An Atlas of Fantasy J.B. Post Seanan McGuire recently published a story-like thing called A Traveler's Guide to Fantastic Countries . It purports to be advertising copy for a travel agency that can arrange trips to such places as Avalon, Niflheim, and The Lost City of Z. This naturally made me think of other, less tongue-in-cheek reference works of fantastic lands. Two that I used to own are this one, An Atlas of Fantasy and The Dictionary of Imaginary Places: The Newly Updated and Expanded Classic (which I will also review one of these days). J.B. Post was the map librarian of the Free Library of Philadelphia, and also an avid fantasy reader. (I get these facts from Lester del Rey 's introduction.) Because of this he was aware of something most readers didn't know: that maps existed of the lands in which many fantasy stories take place. Many of these maps were unpublished. For instance, C.S. Lewis drew a map of Narnia, a reproduction of which can be found in the

★★★★☆ Something new!

Floating Hotel Grace Curtis You know those science fiction novels in which there are four point-of-view characters, and each character gets point of view for a chapter, then we move on to the next? (I think Gibson 's Cyberspace trilogy was the first time I really noticed it.) You know how you never know quite what's going on, and it's all very confusing? Well, in Floating Hotel Grace Curtis takes it to the max, and SOMEHOW, she makes it work! Floating Hotel takes place on the Abeona, a hotel that is also a spaceship, so it floats through space. Don't expect a lot of technobabble -- the Abeona is determinedly retro-chic. For instance, the Abeona's messaging system is paper messages sent through pneumatic tubes. There are of course a whole bunch of people on the Abeona -- staff and guests. Each chapter is told from the point of view of one of these characters, a different one each time. There is just one character who gets two chapters, and by the time that ha

★★★★☆ What is Owen Meany?

A Prayer for Owen Meany John Irving What is Owen Meany? John Irving 's A Prayer for Owen Meany is a very good novel -- the best, in my opinion, of his novels that I have read -- and also a profoundly weird story. Those statements are not unrelated, since I *LOVE* stories that weird me out. *SPOILERS BEGIN* The big question about Owen Meany is "What is he?" Is he the Nth coming of the Lord Jesus Christ? (I say the Nth rather than the second, because if you believe that Owen was a reincarnation of Christ who somehow failed to be recognized as such by most of humanity, then there is no reason to think he is the only one. Perhaps God has been using this trick to intervene in human affairs for 2000 years.) Owen and his mother claim that she was a virgin when she gave birth to him. And Owen has strange abilities. The most difficult of these to explain without invoking the supernatural is foreknowledge -- you may call it prophecy if you like -- he knows of certain things tha

★★★☆☆ Fun, but I didn't believe it

Charlie Thorne and the Royal Society Stuart Gibbs We knew from the ending of Charlie Thorne and the Curse of Cleopatra that the next historic secret Charlie would chase after would be something discovered by Isaac Newton. In fact, as the title suggests, it is broader than that. This one involves not just Newton, but many of his colleagues and fellow members of the Royal Society of London. In fact, at 413 kindle pages, this is the longest Charlie Thorne installment so far, and that is partly because in addition to Newton, we end up chasing the history of several of his contemporary Fellows of the Royal Society. Although I really have no information about Stuart Gibbs 's creative process other than that revealed by the end matter in his books, I have long suspected that he writes his novels backward -- that is, that he imagines the end first, and then writes the earlier sections in order to move his people and pieces to the place where that ending can transpire. For what it'

★★★★☆ If a librarian wrote an adventure novel...

A Short Walk Through a Wide World Douglas Westerbeke Hey! Guess what? That title is not hypothetical. A Librarian *DID* write an adventure novel! And it's pretty good, too. His name is Douglas Westerbeke and the novel (his first) is called A Short Walk Through a Wide World . Here, from the Simon and Schuster web site is everything I know about Westerbeke Douglas Westerbeke is a librarian who lives in Ohio and works at one of the largest libraries in the US. He has spent the last decade on the local panel of the International Dublin Literary Award, which inspired him to write his own book. There's also a photo, in which he looks like a totally ordinary guy called Douglas. SWTaWW is the story of Aubry Tourvel, who, in 1885, at the age of nine, contracts a disease that causes her to convulse and bleed uncontrollably if she spends more than 2-4 days (it's variable) at any one place. It's retroactive -- if she spends time at any place she's been before, she gets s

★★★★★ That a man can stand up

Johnny Tremain Esther Forbes ** spoiler alert ** I was an elementary schoolkid when I read Esther Forbes 's Johnny Tremain for the first time. It quickly became one of my favorite books. It was one of many books I read about American Revolutionary War history, but this one was special. It was special because of Johnny's personal story. For most of the book, Johnny is not an admirable character. As the book begins Johnny is an apprentice silversmith. He is a skilled artist, the chief of Mr Lapham's apprentices. He is not generous to his inferiors -- this is surely how he thinks of the other, less skilled apprentices, and even perhaps Mr Lapham himself. He falls from his lofty position -- an accident injures his hand. From being the lord of Lapham's apprentices he now falls to become the drudge, since his deformed hand allows him no finer work. The other apprentices, whom he treated with hauteur, are now not generous to him. Johnny reacts to his fall by going into wha

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