Category: Reviews

Movie, TV, and book reviews

All Aboard! Images from the Golden Age of Rail Travel [Review]

All Aboard! Images from the Golden Age of Rail Travel by Lynn Johnson & Michael O’Leary Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1999 If you were a graphic artist in the 1980s and 1990s Chronicle Books of San Francisco was your crack, publishing tons of art, art history, design and architecture books every. All were beautifully designed …

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The Little Prince (1974) [Review]

If you were an elementary school student in the 1970s, your school library probably contained a copy of The Little Prince. Written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a French nobleman, pilot, and adventurer, and published in 1943, it has since become an oddball but revered children’s classic, standing beside The Phantom Tollbooth, Willie Wonka and the …

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The Storyteller
[Reading Challenge 2024]

The Storyteller by Dave Grohl HarperCollins, 2021 [ # 19  Like a novel, only real: Creative nonfiction.] Dave Grohl’s The Storyteller is not the usual kind of rock and roll autobiography whose arc most often goes from rags to riches with a side tour into addiction. Instead it’s a series of short vignettes that illustrate …

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Nettle & Bone
[Reading Challenge 2024]

Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher Tor Books, 2022 [ #24  Top of the Heap: A book on any Top Whatever list. ] This is another of those books I got from the Little Free Library down the street. I was surprised to find it there, because it’s so recent, so niche, and was so …

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Of Mist and Shadow [Review]

Of Mist and Shadow by Jenna Wolfhart Self-published, 2022 This was the second of the Romantasy books I read. The book starts off similar to a YA novel: “I’d been born to fulfill a promise to the fae king. It was an ancient promise, bound in powerful magic. I was sworn to serve his every …

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An Heir Comes to Rise [Review]

An Heir Comes to Rise by C. C. Penaranda Lumarias Press, 2021 This book was one of a bundle I got for free – five romantic fantasies, all of them self-published, clearly some sort of cooperative deal between the authors — it was advertised on the r/fantasyromace subreddit.They all seemed typical of what’s available these …

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Crown of Starlight (Chapter One) [Review]

Crown of Starlight (Chapter One) by Cait Corrain Everybody’s been talking lately about the publishing scandal involving debut author Cait Corrain and her fantasy novel Crown of Starlight, so I thought I’d put in my opinion. The whole story is here and tells it more eloquently and completely than I can, but the gist is …

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American Born Chinese [Review]

American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang First Second Books, 2006 American Born Chinese is a graphic novel about the experience of Asian Americans trying to come to terms with their heritage in mainstream American society. It was published in 2006, so it’s a few years short of its much-deserved twentieth anniversary –- it’s still …

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