Marvel: What If . . . Wanda Maximoff and Peter Parker Were Siblings? (A Scarlet Witch & Spider-Man Story) Seanan McGuire Isaac Asimov  once wrote I am not a compulsive writer. It's just that, when I'm not writing, I want to be. This statement leapt to mind when I first became familiar with  Seanan McGuire . The problem with authors like this is that they tend to lack filters. ( Asimov  certainly did.) I count myself a hard-core  McGuire  fan -- I have read almost every work of fiction she has published. (This is a big job, and complicated -- digging up her many and diverse publications is not a simple job.) Her best, in my opinion, is As Good As It Gets in urban fantasy. (Her best, in my opinion, is the  October Daye  series. I mention that because I know many fantasy readers have a lower opinion than I do. If you are one of those, apply the appropriate discount to my evaluation.) Her worst ( Parasitology , in my opinion), alas, can be pretty bad. ...

Count Zero William Gibson, Reinhard Heinz (translator), Peter Robert (translator),  Mark Bremer (narrator) Apologies for this weird review OK, so this was strange. I wanted an audiobook. I had just listened to and enjoyed the  Neuromancer  audiobook, which was very good. So, naturally, I wanted to continue. Here's the strange thing. The English language  Count Zero  audiobook is not available for sale in North America from any source that I could find. The  Mona Lisa Overdrive  audiobook is similarly unavailable in English. These exist and used to be for sale, but no longer, apparently. Even stranger, German translations of both can be purchased in America. So I decided to try that. even though (1)  William Gibson  wrote  Count Zero  in English, (2) my native language is English, and (3) I have not had a conversation in German in 40 years. I have kept up my Deutsch reading skills, but listening is hard and speaking is essential...

Moment 14 -- Aboard the RMS Aquitania, Autumn 1925 Ben Aaronovitch Our friend  Ben  is going on tour to promote his new Rivers of London novella, and to entice people to read the announcement, he accompanied it with a Moment. He identifies it as number 14, which means that my count (I had  the last one  as number 14) was off. Typically  Ben 's Moments are not quite stories -- they are just brief portraits of a character at a moment in time. This one , however, actually tells a brief story. It's a fun one.  I am very fond of   Ben 's Moments. This is not the best of them, but it's pretty good. It introduces a new character, Mr Berrycloth Young, of whom we will presumably hear more in  The Masquerades of Spring . Moment 14 -- Aboard the RMS Aquitania, Autumn 1925 I hope that link works. If not, let me know!  

The Paper Bag Princess Robert Munsch, Michael Martchenko (illustrator) The Paper Bag Princess  is a picture book by  Robert Munsch , illustrated by  Michael Martchenko . If I write my usual four paragraph review, it will be longer than the text of the story, so I will try not to do that. Honestly, just get the book and read it! It cost $1.76 on kindle (but make sure to read it in color) and will take you ten minutes to read. What have you got to lose? It's a story about Elizabeth, a beautiful princess who lives in a castle. A dragon destroys the castle, which contained all Elizabeth's clothes, so she puts on a paper bag and goes to confront the dragon. I love stories about strong, smart girls, and this is one. Also, it ended with a plot twist that was both thoroughly satisfying and laugh-out-loud funny. The Paper Bag Princess  on Amazon Goodreads review  

A Gathering of Shadows V.E. Schwab I expected to enjoy  A Gathering of Shadows , the second novel in  Victoria Schwab 's  Shades of Magic trilogy , more than the first,  A Darker Shade of Magic . I did, and for exactly the reason I expected.  Darker Shade  was mostly about Kell. Indeed, it is he who is pictured on the cover of the paperback edition    . Kell is, honestly, a bit boring. Or at least, I find him so. But it was obvious when we reached the end that the next book would concentrate more on Lila Bard    . It did, and I am happy. Opinions may differ, of course, but in mine, Lila is just inherently more fun than Kell. That's partly because Lila is discovering her powers, so her magic is more open-ended. But much more important is Lila's character. Lila's approach to life is "Leap first, look later". She has faith in possibility -- that whatever she leaps into, she'll manage to figure it out. I was reminded of  the Mary Chapin...

Dreamers Yuyi Morales ** spoiler alert **  One day in 1994  Yuyi Morales  walked across the  Bridge of the Americas  from Ciudad Juárez (Mexico) to El Paso (USA) carrying her two-month-old son Kelly. She went to see Kelly's great-grandfather, thought to be dying, and to be with Kelly's father. She had intended to return to Mexico after her visit, but found herself obliged to move to the USA in order to become and remain a "permanent resident". Suddenly,  Morales  was an immigrant with an infant son, unable to speak the language, unable to continue her former occupation of swimming instructor. Thousands and thousands of steps we took around this land, until the day we found... a place we had never seen before. Suspicious. Improbable. Unbelievable. Surprising. Unimaginable. Where we didn't need to speak, we only need to  trust It was a public library. As she says in  this video , In Mexico we do have public libraries, but we don't have librarie...

Heartless Marissa Meyer In her Acknowledgments for  Heartless ,  Marissa Meyer  writes Years ago, I was out to lunch with my agenting team, discussing fairy tales and villains, when I told them, “I wish that  Gregory Maguire  would write the origin story for the Queen of Hearts.” To which my foreign rights agent, Cheryl Pientka, looked at me and said, “Marissa, why don’t you write it?” She did that thing -- Heartless  is the result. I would have enjoyed it more if I had begun by reading the Acknowledgments. (This happens to me often enough that I probably should just make a habit of beginning that way.) However, it's been long enough since I read  Alice  that I probably would have had to reread it first for  Heartless  to make sense, and let's be honest -- that was not gonna happen. As it was, I could never figure out where  Heartless  was coming from, and when I got to the end, I couldn't figure out where it had got to. It's f...

Hana's Suitcase: A True Story Karen Levine ** spoiler alert ** Hana's Suitcase: A True Story  tells the story of Hana Brady, a Jewish girl who died, like so many, in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. It is she whose photo we see on the cover. Her parents were taken, then she and her brother George were taken to the  Theresienstadt Ghetto , where they were held until 1944. Hana was put on the train to Auschwitz, where she died the day of her arrival. As the book reminds us repeatedly, a million and a half children were among the Jews killed. It is all too common a story. But Hana is special in one important way. Most of the millions who died vanished with barely a trace. Hana's story was told, mostly through the efforts of an extraordinary educator and researcher, Fumiko Ishioka. The problem with writing a children's book about the Holocaust is that, in the words of Aragorn, "it is sad, as are all the tales of Middle-earth". There are no happy stories of the Holoc...

The Red Scholar's Wake Aliette de Bodard The two main characters of  Aliette de Bodard 's  The Red Scholar's Wake  are the pirate ship  The Rice Fish, Resting  and the scavenger Xich Si. Both are widows. Xich Si's partner Diệu Ngà was killed in a pirate raid, the same one in which Xich Si was captured.  Rice Fish  was married to the Red Scholar Huân, who died in the battle. "Red Scholar" is a title.  Rice Fish  and Huân belonged to a pirate alliance. The alliance is composed of five banners -- the Red Banner, the Green, Purple, White and Black. "Red Scholar" is the title of the leader of the Red Banner, a position currently open, although  Rice Fish  is for the moment the de facto leader. Rice Fish  is a  Xuya Universe  mindship. If you have read other  Xuya Universe  stories (if you have not, don't begin with this one), you are familiar with mindships. They are human-machine hybrids capable of faster-than-l...

A Darker Shade of magic V. E. Schwab I was a little disappointed by  Victoria Schwab 's  A Darker Shade of Magic , the first novel of her  Shades of Magic  trilogy, but only a little, because it felt to me like the beginning of a story with yet-to-be-fulfilled promise. Darker Shade  (and presumably the entire trilogy) takes place in a world in which there are four versions of Earth: Grey (ours), Red, White, and Black. Although these are quite different from each other, each of them has a version of London. (London is special in this way -- other world-famous cities don't exist in parallel in the same way.) All the universes have magic, though the magic in Grey London is so attenuated as to be imperceptible for ordinary purposes. Our principle protagonist is a native of Red London named Kell. He is an Antari, that is a magical person. (Magic in this story is of the Harry Potter variety, where only those born with the power can do it, rather than the Rivers of Lon...

Neuromancer William Gibson I first read  William Gibson 's  Neuromancer  in 1986, I think, shortly after  Count Zero  came out. That's because I stumbled on  Count Zero  in an airport bookstore, and after reading it read everything I could find by  Gibson . I loved it. I have since read and reread both  Neuromancer  and  Count Zero  more times than I remember, along with the other books of the  Cyberspace  trilogy. This 2024 reread was provoked by the need for an audiobook. The narration by  Robertson Dean  is competent but not, in my opinion, particularly noteworthy. Perhaps for a book like this that is best -- one really doesn't need the narrator to make more of it than the splendid book it in fact is. The 2004 edition of  Neuromancer  on which this audiobook is based contained two things that were new to me, an introduction entitled "The Sky Above the Port" by  Gibson  himself, and an ...

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything Nate Silver I have mixed feelings about  Nate Silver ’s  On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything , because it is a mixed kind of book. On the one hand, I find  Silver ’s way of thinking: quantitative, probabilistic, epistemically humble, congenial. On the other, his need to make enemies is less congenial. The premise of  On the Edge  is that people who live by managing risks form a community, which  Silver  Calls “The River”. His definition of the River (“River: A geographical metaphor for the territory covered in this book, a sprawling ecosystem of like-minded, highly analytical, and competitive people that includes everything from poker to Wall Street to AI. The demonym is Riverian.”) is broad and vague, but that is not really a problem, because the book consists mostly of profiles of hundreds of Riverians — by the end, you have a clear idea of who (in  Silver 's mind) the members are.  Silver ...

Death at Morning House Maureen Johnson Death at Morning House  is not a  Truly Devious  book, but it will feel familiar to anyone who has read those books. Like the  Truly Devious  books,  Death at Morning House  places a group of teenage kids at an isolated location where, in the distant past, a bunch of people died under suspicious circumstances. The isolated location is Ralston Island in the St Lawrence River. Morning House is a historic house on the Island that has been uninhabited since the 1932 deaths. Some of the chapters (13, if I counted right) take place on Ralston Island in 1932. and record events on the island around the time of the deaths. Recently, someone has purchased the old place and opened it up to visitors for the summer. A group of teenagers, including our first-person narrator Marlowe Wexler, have been hired to show the place to visitors. 28 chapters tell of the events that happen to them. The book is about two mysteries -- that o...

Submit Publish Repeat: How to Publish Your Creative Writing in Literary Journals Emily Harstone I read this little book for a specific and entirely artificial reason. I am currently taking a course called "Poetry Writing" at my local community college. The summer term is nearing its end, and the final unit of the course is called "Business of Writing". For it I am required to produced "a one page promotional campaign for yourself as a poet". I have, in fact, zero interest in publishing my poetry, which mostly stinks, although in occasional flashes of brilliance I may attain mediocrity. But I have to produce a "promotional campaign". So, it seems eminently practical to borrow the one from this book. I mention all this so that you know that I am not reviewing it as a person who actually intends to practice what  Emily Harstone  preaches. Harstone  is a published poet and teacher who also runs the  Authors Publish  web site that aims to help out cre...

Draco Malfoy and the Mortifying Ordeal of Being in Love isthisselfcare ** spoiler alert **  The odd thing about  isthisselfcare  (AKA  Brigitte Knightley )'s  Draco Malfoy and the Mortifying Ordeal of Being in Love  is that it is completely predictable, except that every little thing in it comes as a complete surprise. It's Dramione fanfic, and faithfully follows the enemies-to-lovers ultra-slow-burn formulas. That said, I didn't foresee the nuns vs werewolves battle, or the hot scene in which Malfoy is aroused by Granger's calculations of geodesic polyhedra. The scene in which Malfoy and Granger's secret feelings are revealed by an inconvenient sneakoscope was clever, as was the first scene in which the smell of  Amortentia  reveals that Malfoy and Granger have fallen for each other. (I specify the "first scene, because this device shows up again later and is overused towards the end.) I think the most surprising and (to me) pleasing aspect of th...