A tale may have exactly three beginnings: one for the audience, one for the artist, and one for the poor bastard who has to live in it. The plot of Catherynne Valente’s latest novel Radiance centers around the mysterious disappearance of a woman – Severin, who’s origin is also something of a mystery – during her investigation
Kathryn Tanquary has created a beautiful story of magic, spirits, family, and growing up. It takes place in rural Japan, and each character is more bizarre and whimsical than the last. While the plot is often simplistic and random, younger readers might enjoy the adventure. I kept hoping for some kind of logic to Saki’s journey
Happy New Year, everyone! Time to start looking forward to everything coming in 2016, including the brand-new The X-Files miniseries set to start in (checks imdb) twelve days?! Good grief, I’m way behind on my fangirling here. It’s been more than thirteen years since the last episode aired (seven since the second movie. Which I haven’t
Whelp, it’s that time of year again. Time to look back on fifty-two weeks of book reviews and decide which ones were our favorites. Not gonna lie here, this was a tough decision. Even when ruling out anything that was published before 2015, there were still more than a dozen books that fell into the
“Evil?” Plagueis repeated. “What is that? Moments ago you defined yourself as a storm. You said you were death itself. Are you evil, then, or are you simply stronger and more awake than others?” The question that Darth Sidious’s Master asks his new apprentice is probably the simplest demonstration of the difference between the Light
It was the Dark Times. Evil had triumphed, a light had gone out of the world, and people had lost hope. The destruction of the Jedi? No, I’m talking about how I felt right after Star Wars Episode 3, which is why I’ve never seen an episode of Star Wars Rebels. After the Prequels I pretty much
“We have a problem…” Remember the ending of Return of the Jedi, with the Ewok celebration (and in the re-release, the footage of liberated cities pulling down statues of Emperor Palpatine)? Star Wars: Aftermath starts just a few seconds after that, right when things start to go wrong. Imperial troops fire indiscriminately into
Continuing our month of Star Wars reviews, I wanted to take a look at 1994’s The Crystal Star by Vonda McIntyre, which picks up five or six years after Return of the Jedi. There’s a lot of Expanded Universe books that got into some very deep subjects; topics that questioned the nature of morality, power, responsibility, and
Gregory Maguire has gotten pretty good at giving a voice to minor characters of major fairy tales; witches and stepsisters get a little more to say in books like Wicked, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and Mirror Mirror. Now he’s taking another look at Alice in Wonderland, and instead of following Alice, we follow someone who’s following