Well, that was a year that felt like a decade... At long last, though, 2025 has come to an end (on the calendar; the damage will last lifetimes). So, in addition to the usual monthly update of the main Brightdreamer Books site, it's time once again for my Reading Year in Review, where I look back over highlights and lowlights. (Note that I don't touch on every title I read; any omissions are more about lack of time and/or energy than a specific commentary.)
I went into January knowing that this would be a trying year at best (and it was not, at all, best); on a personal level, my father was in home hospice care for late-stage dementia and other health issues, while on a national level my country had opted to slam the self-destruct button rather than even attempt to progress past the worst parts of our own history. So perhaps it was little wonder that my first review of the year, Libba Bray's peculiar metaphysical young adult romp Going Bovine, disappointed me, though not as deeply as a classic that had a very deceptive description on Libby, Herman Melville's Billy Budd. I was more impressed by P. Djèlí Clark's first foray into middle-grade fantasy, the African-inspired tale Abeni's Song, though my top read - and one of my best of the year - turned out to be a surprise, the contemporary middle-grade fiction title The Remarkable Journey of
Coyote Sunrise by Dan Gemeinhart... a book I found less than a week after my father passed away, which spoke so clearly to family and grief I couldn't not give it top marks.
February continued the year's trend of being cruddy (you can pretty much assume at this point that the best 2025 managed was "not quite as terrible as the month before"; I don't think I can point to one week, let alone month, where I could honestly say something was actually, quantifiably, without any mitigating asterisks and qualifications, "good"), but the reading improved somewhat. Henry. H. Neff's humorous take on family curses and demons in modern Appalachia, The Witchstone, started the month off on the right foot for reviews, while Derek Landy's Skulduggery Pleasant series continued its impressive streak with Death Bringer. I ventured into a little history with All Blood Runs Red by Phil Keith with Tom Clavin, the remarkable tale of a young Black man who fled Jim Crow and America in the early 1900's to become a soldier, war pilot, boxer, spy, and more in France. Ray Nayler's The Tusks of Extinction explored a near future where resurrected mammoths are helped by the uploaded mind of a scientist who was murdered by poachers while trying to protect some of the world's last wild elephants, a thought-provoking tale. The short month ended with Ghostdrift, the fourth and final novel in Suzanne Palmer's highly enjoyable Finder series of sci-fi adventures. In between were a few more middling, sometimes mildly disappointing reads, but no outright clunkers.
The early reads of March were adrift in the three-star doldrums, from Holly Gramazio's deconstruction of love and marriage and the notion of a "perfect" life mate in The Husbands through the surreal dystopian future of Djuna's Counterweight, though it ended on a somewhat brighter note with Fundamentals, an exploration of some of the fundamental concepts of physics by Frank Wilczek. High points were Devin Elle Kurtz's delightful picture book The Bakery Dragon and Derek Landy's seventh Skulduggery Pleasant book, Kingdom of the Wicked, while I dabbled in yet another classic with Oscar Wilde's famed tale about a man whose portrait bears the mark of his depravity and sins in The Picture of Dorian Gray, which was enjoyable but couldn't help showing its age.
April opened with the surreality of Welcome to Night Vale, by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, which had some fun and intriguing parts but ultimately skewed too random and vague for my tastes. I had better luck with Ta-Nehisi Coates's fascinating essays in Between the World and Me, chronicling his experiences as a Black man grappling with the omnipresent specter of American racism. David LaRochelle's silly picture book 100 Mighty Dragons All Named Broccoli still has one of my favorite titles of all time, while Amber McBride's poetic young adult tale Me (Moth) felt like a strange and sometimes beautiful, if poignant, dream of grief and acceptance and love found too late. The rest of the month had a mixed-to-good assortment, from tales of peculiar experiences on the Navajo reservation in Stanley Milford, Jr.'s memoir The Paranormal Ranger to a tale of a shapeshifter finding unexpected love with two-legged prey in John Wiswell's Someone You Can Build a Nest In, concluding with Anne Rice's iconic tale Interview with the Vampire, a trendsetter that also aged a little poorly around the edges.
Derek Landy had two solid entries in May: the eighth chronological entry in his Skulduggery Pleasant series, Last Stand of Dead Men, and the short story collection (that also contained "spoilers" for later entries due to weird series chronology labeling by the publisher) Armageddon Outta Here. Overall, it was a good reading month, including a new Wayward Children novella from Seanan McGuire (Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear), the surprisingly touching tale of an imaginary friend finding his own way in the world (Michelle Cuevas's Confessions of an Imaginary Friend), and Chuck Tingle's brutal takedown of Hollywood's problem with algorithmically-controlled entertainment and non-hetero representation in Bury Your Gays. Another top read was Maya Angelou's recollections of her childhood in the Deep South during Jim Crow years, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Weaker reads included Sung-il Kim's Asian-flavored fantasy Blood of the Old Kings and E. E. Knight's epic dragon adventure Dragon Champion.
June had few standouts. While the Skulduggery Pleasant wrapped up its original run with the ninth book, The Dying of the Light, in spectacular fashion, other titles that I had high hopes for, such as Peter S. Beagle's I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons, left me disappointed or nonplussed. I did enjoy Tochi Onyebuchi's novella Riot Baby, and Alex Bledsoe's melding of private investigation with a fantasy world, The Sword-Edged Blonde, had potential. The month ended with a DK Smithsonian book, Dinosaurs, that suffered mostly from iffy and inconsistent editing and a sometimes-frustrating mix of what was explored and what was glossed over or ignored, though as with most DK titles the pictures were (usually) intriguing enough to make up for weakness in the text.
I had hoped to start July off right with yet another Derek Landy book, but Resurrection not only couldn't quite strike a balance between the familiar Skulduggery Pleasant characters and the "next generation" brought in to keep the titles middle-grade/young adult, but suffered from an unfortunate bout of bad timing, as it featured a minor baddie with parallels to a monster currently (literally) demolishing the highest house in my country with impunity. I also had very high hopes for Scott Reintgen's spacefaring dragon romp The Last Dragon of Mars, but my suspension of disbelief was knocked out of orbit and burned up on re-entry. Jim C. Hines offered a fun middle-grade fantasy adventure as a girl tries to rescue her missing friends from a dangerous portal fantasy world in Tamora Carter, Goblin Queen. I ventured into nonfiction and politics with a few reads - Emmanuel Aoki's Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man and Democracy in Retrograde by Sami Sage and Emil Amick - because I'm very tired of feeling ignorant and helpless (and hopeless) about All The Things that are destroying... well, all the things, and the future along with them. To finish off the month, I ventured into thriller territory with Elizabeth Elo's North of Boston.
August was a lean month for reading, for various non-reading-related reasons. Far and away the best book was Daindreth's Assassin by Elisabeth Wheatley, though the rest were generally serviceable. Hannah Whitten's tale of a princess bound to be sacrificed in a cursed forest (that, of course, is not all that it appears) and the sister who will destroy the kingdom if need be to save her, For the Wolf, didn't quite live up to its promise, but was still fairly good. I was somewhat disappointed by a story of Puerto Rican storytellers and the teen girl unexpectedly inheriting a family gift (and burden), Ann Davila Cardinal's The Storyteller's Death. The Kate Elliott novella Servant Mage didn't quite deliver, either. I ventured into teen romance with the anthology Serendipity, edited by Marissa Meyer. Adrian Tchaikovsky wrapped up the month with an interesting subversion of tropes in his tale of a post-apocalyptic Earth threatened by total annihilation when the "gods" return from their space utopia to "fix" a planet they broke to begin with, The Hungry Gods.
I ventured back to a minor sci-fi classic, Elizabeth Moon's Remnant Population, to start September, but it didn't quite live up to the hype for me. It was not the only classic of the month to let me down; I found Robert Sheckley's surreal Mindswap exceptionally dated. Jordanna Max Bordsky's imaginative spin on a prehistoric encounter between the Inuit and Norse explorers (and their respective deities) in The Wolf and the Whale proved much more intriguing. I breezed through Rob Renzetti's fun middle-grade Horrible Handbag trilogy and mostly enjoyed it, and snickered at Freida McFadden's satire of her own thriller genre in The
Widow's Husband's Secret Lie. The best book of the month, however, was Kelly and Zach Weinersmith's speculation on space colonization, A City on Mars.
October was another month that opened with a disappointment; after being suckered in by a shiny cover and intriguing early pages, Frances White's Voyage of the Damned just plain failed to deliver. I did my part to push back against the creeping, crushing grasp of book-banners and censors by checking a few frequently challenged titles off: The Complete Maus by Art Speigelman and Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers, both in their ways unflinching explorations of how terrible humans can be to other humans, and what war does to bodies and minds. Maus was easily the best read of the month, and among the best of the year. I also enjoyed Chuck Tingle's take on classic horror tropes (and examination of gatekeeping and internal schisms in nonhetero communities), Straight. A classic children's tale, Robert C. O'Brien's Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, unfortunately let me down, though I could see how it was a groundbreaker in its way, and it had some intriguing parts, even if I never felt they gelled cohesively. I also felt let down by S. J. Morden's hard sci-fi space thriller One Way, where convicts are recruited to build a Martian colony. Katherine Addison presented a different slant on epic fantasy with The Goblin Emperor, where a half-goblin unexpectedly inherits the throne of the elf king and must navigate courtly politics that he was intentionally never trained to cope with. Adrian Bliss offered humorously offbeat perspectives on historic times and figures with the tales of The Greatest Nobodies of History. I finished off the month with Alix E. Harrow's southern gothic-flavored story of a cursed Kentucky coal town, Starling House.
I started November with a long-anticipated prequel, Christopher Buehlman's The Daughters' War, and enjoyed it, though the tone was darker than The Blacktongue Thief. From there, I ventured through a range of stories and ratings, from the abysmal time loop of Edge of Tomorrow by Hiroshi Sakurazaka to the middle-grade tale of an eventful family vacation in the wake of grief in Cliff Burke's An Occasionally Happy Family, the surreality of Nghi Vo's The City in Glass, and the peculiar tale of a man's terminal antigravity affliction in Elevation by Stephen King. Aldous Huxley's cautionary tale of a dystopian "Fordian" future, Brave New World, prompted an exploration of Henry Ford's draconian, paternalistic vision of "ideal" Americana in Greg Grandin's Fordlandia, which chronicled Ford's efforts to export that vision to the Amazon basin. J. A. White offered a sequel to the middle-grade tale of a boy who loves writing horror stories, Nightbooks, in Gravebooks, which proved just as good. I stumbled across a few
surprises that I wound up enjoying, one in an alternate-history Chicago - Megaera C. Lorenz's tale of a former "spiritualist" con artist forced to confront a real haunting and his old colleagues in The Shabti - and another in an alternate postwar Japan in a world of dragon companions, Emi Watanabe Cohen's The Lost Ryū.
December... what to say about December. It was a year ago in December that my father went into the ER for what would turn out to be his last hospital visit, followed by the start of a month of home hospice (he came home the day after Xmas), and only a few months earlier this year other relatives experienced significant health crises, so I was already on a fraying mental rope. After about a year of the axe hanging over my head on the job front, the blade finally began its downward swing; the facility where I have worked for nearly twenty years is relocating out of range of my increasingly unreliable vehicle. It is because of this job and my familiarity with it that I manage to review so many books, as I can lose myself in an audiobook while my hands go through the familiar motions, so changing jobs will likely have a notable impact here (though at least I may have a job to change to, which is hardly a small thing in this economy, especially with my anemic resumé). Between that news and general holiday and year end frustrations, it was a lean review month. Jim Butcher offered a solid, if not exactly standout, tale of swashbuckling and steampunk and airships with a tinge of magic in The Aeronaut's Windlass, while Adam Rex delved into the peculiarities of dreams with the surreal A Little Like Waking. I ventured outside the fiction box with Surely You Can't Be Serious, about the making of the comedy classic film Airplane!, by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker. Otherwise, there wasn't much particularly noteworthy in the month. Veronica Roth's tale of Eastern European monsters (and the "holy" knights who hunt them) hiding in plain sight in modern Chicago, When Among Crows, had some nice ideas but didn't quite click with me, while Margaret Rogerson's young adult fantasy romance An Enchantment of Ravens kept me interested through most of its length.
So... yeah, that was 2025. I anticipated a cruddy year going into it, and what I got was far worse, save some pretty good books along the way. (I'm not even getting into the local, national, and international horrors playing out...) Looking ahead, I'd be lying if I said I thought better things were awaiting in 2026, for the world or my nation, let alone myself. I'm not sure good things are even possible anymore; too much has been destroyed or poisoned, too little has been protected or gained. Hopefully I can at least find a few books to pass the time with between bad things and worse things.
Wednesday, December 31, 2025
Saturday, December 20, 2025
A Little Like Waking (Adam Rex)
A Little Like Waking
Adam Rex
Roaring Brook Press
Fiction, YA Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Zelda's day started like any other. She woke in her bedroom in the little yellow house, she heads out through the front gate whose creaking sounds like a friendly frog, she went jogging into town past the frisbee-playing boys by the courthouse, she smiled at the clown in the laundromat, and suddenly realized she had a geology (or is it geometry?) quiz in five minutes... but today, she grabs a bike and tries to beat the bell to class, cutting in front of a car - and that's when she sees him: a teen boy, who tries to warn her of the danger she doesn't see until nearly too late.
A boy she has never seen before - and she knows every face in town like her own fingerprints.
The next morning, she wakes again in her bedroom, and goes out again on a jog... but she can't shake the memory of the stranger, or the sense that something isn't quite right about the world around her. It's all a little too perfect, like something out of a dream. But is she the dreamer, or is someone else - and what will happen when it's time to wake up for real?
REVIEW: It's very, very seldom that a book can pull of a "dream" ending without becoming an automatic wall-bouncer. It's a different matter entirely when the book admits it's a dream upfront - and when the question at its heart is who the dreamer is, and what the dream is trying to accomplish for them, what story their mind needs to tell itself, before they're allowed to wake. This makes the dream and its inhabitants matter, and allows the reader to invest in them and their fates. With frequently surreal imagery and imaginative turns of phrase, Adam Rex captures the peculiar nature and illogical logic of dreams, which can so often seem much, much bigger than the insides of a single human mind, populated by people and places that can feel as solid as anything in the waking world - complete with sounds, textures, scents, tastes, and even (despite the popular trope) pain.
From the first ring of her alarm clock, Zelda's world is both too perfect and too strange to be truly real, but she never thinks to question it, or question how everything and everyone seems to center on her; the town's inhabitants all know her by name even if she doesn't know them, and the Frisbee bros remind her of the test she's about to miss... even though part of her knows she's graduated already. But it's only the arrival of the stranger, Langston, that shakes her complacency... that, and when she hears a strange, deep, disembodied voice that nobody else hears. The arrival of Patches the cat, who not only died when she was a young girl but now speaks with a decidedly philosophical and poetic bent, also helps tip the scales, as does the realization that she cannot seem to read long stretches of words; letters can be jumbled, and she might read small bits and pieces but they change as often as not when she blinks or looks away. When she alerts the rest of the town to the fact that they're all in a dream, chaos erupts; every one of them believes themselves to be the dreamer, as they all have lives and memories... and the rest cannot handle the idea that they and their memories aren't real, because they are so very real to themselves. Zelda is certain she's the one - doesn't everything in this place seem to center on her? - but Patches also makes convincing arguments, and neither can entirely rule out the shy boy Langston. But this dream has been going on an awfully long time, and grown impossibly complex; surely something must be very, very wrong with whoever is dreaming this world into being. Thus, Zelda determines to find a way to wake up, accompanied by Patches and Langston. Thus begins a trek to the edge of the dream... but any mind that has stayed this deep in slumber is not one that wants to face the waking world, and innumerable distractions and obstacles soon emerge. As the trio travel and navigate challenges, they continue to wonder which of them is the real person, or if any of them are; it's entirely possible that each of them is just a fragment of the dreamer, bits and pieces of their personality given independent form, either to work through something or simply through the random dance of neural electrical firings in a possibly-damaged brain.
Even given the inherent peculiarity of life in a (literal) dream world, the story managed to keep my interest and make me care about the characters (especially Patches) - even knowing that some (or even all) might not "survive" the ending. Given how hard they work for the sake of the dreamer, the lengths they go to in order to unravel each complication and persist in their quest to wake up, slowly piecing together what happened to create a dream this deep and determined to persist, it becomes a true quest requiring true sacrifice... and even if they aren't all "real" in a conventional sense, they're more than real enough to do their part, and some spark of them may well live on (skirting spoilers, the events of the dream and what the dreamer experiences and learns do indeed matter in the waking world, so it wasn't all wasted effort; some parts of the dream, therefore, do live on beyond the end of the dream itself, and in some way always will).
As a closing note, one point where Rex "failed" in capturing dream logic is where the dream characters don't recognize that they're not real when confronted. In my experience, you never ask someone in a dream if they're real if you don't want to know, because they will tell you the truth (and it will depress you far more than it will them, because danged if some of the best people I meet aren't in my own dreams).
You Might Also Enjoy:
Welcome to Night Vale (Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor) - My Review
The Girl In Between (Laekan Zea Kemp) - My Review
The Glass Town Game (Catherynne M. Valente) - My Review
Adam Rex
Roaring Brook Press
Fiction, YA Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Zelda's day started like any other. She woke in her bedroom in the little yellow house, she heads out through the front gate whose creaking sounds like a friendly frog, she went jogging into town past the frisbee-playing boys by the courthouse, she smiled at the clown in the laundromat, and suddenly realized she had a geology (or is it geometry?) quiz in five minutes... but today, she grabs a bike and tries to beat the bell to class, cutting in front of a car - and that's when she sees him: a teen boy, who tries to warn her of the danger she doesn't see until nearly too late.
A boy she has never seen before - and she knows every face in town like her own fingerprints.
The next morning, she wakes again in her bedroom, and goes out again on a jog... but she can't shake the memory of the stranger, or the sense that something isn't quite right about the world around her. It's all a little too perfect, like something out of a dream. But is she the dreamer, or is someone else - and what will happen when it's time to wake up for real?
REVIEW: It's very, very seldom that a book can pull of a "dream" ending without becoming an automatic wall-bouncer. It's a different matter entirely when the book admits it's a dream upfront - and when the question at its heart is who the dreamer is, and what the dream is trying to accomplish for them, what story their mind needs to tell itself, before they're allowed to wake. This makes the dream and its inhabitants matter, and allows the reader to invest in them and their fates. With frequently surreal imagery and imaginative turns of phrase, Adam Rex captures the peculiar nature and illogical logic of dreams, which can so often seem much, much bigger than the insides of a single human mind, populated by people and places that can feel as solid as anything in the waking world - complete with sounds, textures, scents, tastes, and even (despite the popular trope) pain.
From the first ring of her alarm clock, Zelda's world is both too perfect and too strange to be truly real, but she never thinks to question it, or question how everything and everyone seems to center on her; the town's inhabitants all know her by name even if she doesn't know them, and the Frisbee bros remind her of the test she's about to miss... even though part of her knows she's graduated already. But it's only the arrival of the stranger, Langston, that shakes her complacency... that, and when she hears a strange, deep, disembodied voice that nobody else hears. The arrival of Patches the cat, who not only died when she was a young girl but now speaks with a decidedly philosophical and poetic bent, also helps tip the scales, as does the realization that she cannot seem to read long stretches of words; letters can be jumbled, and she might read small bits and pieces but they change as often as not when she blinks or looks away. When she alerts the rest of the town to the fact that they're all in a dream, chaos erupts; every one of them believes themselves to be the dreamer, as they all have lives and memories... and the rest cannot handle the idea that they and their memories aren't real, because they are so very real to themselves. Zelda is certain she's the one - doesn't everything in this place seem to center on her? - but Patches also makes convincing arguments, and neither can entirely rule out the shy boy Langston. But this dream has been going on an awfully long time, and grown impossibly complex; surely something must be very, very wrong with whoever is dreaming this world into being. Thus, Zelda determines to find a way to wake up, accompanied by Patches and Langston. Thus begins a trek to the edge of the dream... but any mind that has stayed this deep in slumber is not one that wants to face the waking world, and innumerable distractions and obstacles soon emerge. As the trio travel and navigate challenges, they continue to wonder which of them is the real person, or if any of them are; it's entirely possible that each of them is just a fragment of the dreamer, bits and pieces of their personality given independent form, either to work through something or simply through the random dance of neural electrical firings in a possibly-damaged brain.
Even given the inherent peculiarity of life in a (literal) dream world, the story managed to keep my interest and make me care about the characters (especially Patches) - even knowing that some (or even all) might not "survive" the ending. Given how hard they work for the sake of the dreamer, the lengths they go to in order to unravel each complication and persist in their quest to wake up, slowly piecing together what happened to create a dream this deep and determined to persist, it becomes a true quest requiring true sacrifice... and even if they aren't all "real" in a conventional sense, they're more than real enough to do their part, and some spark of them may well live on (skirting spoilers, the events of the dream and what the dreamer experiences and learns do indeed matter in the waking world, so it wasn't all wasted effort; some parts of the dream, therefore, do live on beyond the end of the dream itself, and in some way always will).
As a closing note, one point where Rex "failed" in capturing dream logic is where the dream characters don't recognize that they're not real when confronted. In my experience, you never ask someone in a dream if they're real if you don't want to know, because they will tell you the truth (and it will depress you far more than it will them, because danged if some of the best people I meet aren't in my own dreams).
You Might Also Enjoy:
Welcome to Night Vale (Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor) - My Review
The Girl In Between (Laekan Zea Kemp) - My Review
The Glass Town Game (Catherynne M. Valente) - My Review
Friday, December 19, 2025
An Enchantment of Ravens (Margaret Rogerson)
An Enchantment of Ravens
Margaret Rogerson
Margaret K. Elderberry Books
Fiction, YA Fantasy/Romance
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: The town of Whimsy exists in a perpetual summer, thanks to its proximity to the fairy courts and the influence of the Alder King. The immortal fair folk cannot get enough of crafted works - art, poetry, anything worked and shaped and made, even cooked food and brewed drinks - for all that they themselves cannot hold so much as a frying pan without risking death. In exchange for these works of mortal hands, they pay in kind with enchantments and blessings... though, as in anything related to the fae, one must be very careful what one asks, and how one asks it, lest a loophole be found. One must also be careful not to give offense, be impolite, or otherwise imply that life in Whimsy can feel less like a privilege and more like a trap... not even when the odd monster borne in the magical woods ventures into town and kills locals. Above all else, one must never delude oneself into believing that one is in love with a fairy; the Good Laws of the Alder King strictly forbid relations, with death for any offender.
A gifted artist since she could hold a brush, seventeen-year-old Isobel is renowned through the town of Whimsy and the fairy courts for her portraits. When her reputation spreads as far as the reclusive Rook, the Autumn Prince who has not been seen in the mortal realm for centuries, some see it as a testament to her skill and the greatest of fortune; after all, the more powerful the fair folk, the greater the gifts they might bestow. But ever since her parents were killed by a magical beast, Isobel has known better than to consider dealings with fairies as fortunate in any way, or to be tempted by their more extravagant promises; for payment, she keeps to strictly practical, useful enchantments, such as blessings on the household chickens or protections for her family. With the many immortals she has painted, the countless hours she's observed them, she knows better than anyone just how inhuman and empty they truly are within.
Rook is nothing at all like any fair folk she has painted before - but it's not until she paints his picture that she realizes why. Her brush captures the sorrow she sees deep in his amethyst eyes - and one thing no faerie ever shows, or would even admit to experiencing, is a mortal emotion. Rook is enraged, and demands she fix the "flaw" - snatching her away from Whimsy and bringing her into the heart of the fairy realm to do so. But a greater threat lurks here, in the endless woods and cruel courts, one that turns Isobel and Rook into unlikely allies... and, before either realizes it, the two become something more to each other, something that violates the Good Law itself.
REVIEW: There is no shortage of "romantasy" on the shelves these days, just as there's no shortage of fairies. This title, however, manages to avoid the more obvious traps many of those books fall into, presenting a reasonably competent heroine and fairies who retain the sharp edges and inscrutable, dangerous nature that makes relations with the fair folk - even casual meetings, let alone love affairs - so deadly.
In many books with the fae, there's an inherent power imbalance; aside from the usual weakness to iron, the fair folk are ageless, physically and mentally superior, innately magical, and unburdened with anything like what a human would recognize as morality (even if they are sometimes encumbered by their own peculiar customs and rituals), against which humans stand little chance. Here, however, mortals hold a couple advantages that puts them closer to a level playing field (if still often outmatched and easily duped by fae illusions and cunning). The biggest of these is humanity's ability to craft items, to change and shape natural things, something that is so antithetical to faerie nature that they could die if they even attempted to write a single letter or hold a sewing needle. Fairies can (and do) covet crafted items, but can never make them themselves, a "magic" they can never possess - and they burn with envy, even as they lust after mortal craftings. The other advantage, which can also be a disadvantage, is of course the range of human emotions. Fae have something like emotions, but not in a way humans readily recognize most of the time; more often than not they're simply mimicking or emulating rather than experiencing such things as joy or sorrow (though they do seem to have quite genuine streaks of envy and anger). The fairies see mortal emotions as weaknesses, and one thing their society will not tolerate is weakness in any form. This is what makes Isobel's "mistake" in Rook's portrait such a source of scandal and rage; by showing the sorrow that she saw in him, she was potentially showing the faerie world that the Autumn King is weak. Thus, his fury and his demand that she make it right... but there are games afoot in the courts that even Rook misjudges, putting them both at risk.
Neither Rook nor Isobel are perfect, and both make mistakes and missteps that cost them, but they also learn along the way. The dangers the two face are real, tangible, and occasionally terrifying; the fairies are only barely human beneath their glamours, more akin to predatory ghouls or conniving demons who delight in tormenting mortals even as they obsessively emulate humans - in part to mock, or simply to study their favored prey, but also out of an unspoken yearning toward something they can never truly understand. Only a few, such as Rook, even come close. The relationship between the two has sparks early on, but takes some time to spark a flame, yet even in the midst of attraction Isobel is never a helpless victim of her own hormones or emotions. She can (and does) step back and recognize what an unwise idea it is, even if the heart ultimately cannot be restrained. Rook, too, never forces the issue, and is as surprised as she is to find his own heart betraying him.
The story hits a few lulls and can be a touch repetitious in its description of fae cruelties, drawing out some torments and scenes, but only really stumbles with a climax that draws itself out a little too long for its own good. There are also some elements that were set up to be more meaningful or plot relevant than they ultimately were, such as Isobel's little "sisters", March and May; they used to be a pair of goats until fairy magic intervened, and they retain several goatlike traits (a streak for mischief and a tendency toward destructive behavior and even head-butting), but ultimately don't contribute anything meaningful to the plot. I get the feeling there's supposed to be a sequel at least, which may explain why parts of the ending feel unfinished. But it does more right than it does wrong, so I ended up forgiving it some weaknesses and gave it the solid fourth star in the ratings it came close to losing.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Darkest Part of the Forest (Holly Black) - My Review
Thornhedge (T. Kingfisher) - My Review
Rosemary and Rue (Seanan McGuire) - My Review
Wednesday, December 10, 2025
Surely You Can't Be Serious (David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker)
Surely You Can't Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!
David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker
St. Martin's Press
Nonfiction, Autobiography/Media Reference
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Few movies can claim to have changed the entertainment landscape like the 1980 classic Airplane!. From the opening shot of the jet plane tail slicing through the clouds to the menacing chords of the Jaws theme to the final roll of credits riddled with humorous inserts, it redefined what comedy could do and changed the lives of most everyone involved, not to mention numerous fans in the decades since its premiere. But long before Ted Striker developed his drinking problem or Captain Oveur asked a young boy about gladiator movies, the Zucker brothers and their best friend Jim Abrahams were just three Midwestern boys who loved to laugh and make others laugh. This is the story of the long, unlikely journey that took them from Wisconsin to Los Angeles, from improvised stage shows to the silver screen, and from obscurity to international stardom.
REVIEW: Airplane! was a staple of my childhood (as was the criminally short-lived and ahead-of-its-time TV series Police Squad!; I never found the Naked Gun trilogy quite as consistently funny as the series, myself, even before the whole O. J. Simpson thing soured me on rewatches); it's one of those movies where one can watch it a dozen time and catch something new each and every time through. For all the silliness, though, it would've fallen flat on its face if it hadn't been so meticulously and artfully constructed, from the script to the cinematography to the casting choices to the score. This book delves into how the trio learned to work together, hone their sense of humor and writing skills via live theater, and not only survived the culture shock of 1970's Los Angeles but managed to eventually live every creator's dream of landing a studio contract and filming a genre-defining hit. It was not a straightforward road, nor was it one without doubts or setbacks or mistakes.
The story wanders somewhat in the telling; written in something like screenplay format, the book is a dialog, like an interview where the trio are sitting down to tell their story to the audience of the reader. Along the way are extras and interjections from colleagues, cast members, executives, and several people whose lives were influenced by Airplane!. (The audiobook features several guest narrators for these different "parts".) As a result, the story sometimes feels a little scattershot, moving back and forth and wandering on tangents before getting back to the main "plot" of the making of the movie. This lack of focus almost cost it a half-star, but overall it's an interesting examination of the movie that never should've existed, and a lost era when Hollywood still embraced unique, new voices and was willing to take risks. The Zuckers and Abrahams are right that Airplane! couldn't have happened today. (Though I personally always take such assertions with a little grain of salt; no envelope-pushing classic could be "made today", in part because different times have different envelopes and in part because they themselves already pushed that envelope, so any attempt to make the same thing again isn't close enough to the edge anymore to push anything. That doesn't mean today's metaphoric envelopes don't still have edges to be pushed, or that nobody is capable of pushing them, though in today's climate of endless franchises and remakes, it's far less likely a major studio would back such an experiment. But I digress...) The whole is an intriguing glimpse of cinematic lore for anyone who enjoys the film or the history of cinema and comedy.
You Might Also Enjoy:
This Book is Not Yet Rated (Peter Bognanni) - My Review
Young Frankenstein: A Mel Brooks Book: The Story of the Making of the Film (Mel Brooks with Rebecca Keegan) - My Review
Fan Fiction: A Mem-Noir (Brent Spiner) - My Review
David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker
St. Martin's Press
Nonfiction, Autobiography/Media Reference
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Few movies can claim to have changed the entertainment landscape like the 1980 classic Airplane!. From the opening shot of the jet plane tail slicing through the clouds to the menacing chords of the Jaws theme to the final roll of credits riddled with humorous inserts, it redefined what comedy could do and changed the lives of most everyone involved, not to mention numerous fans in the decades since its premiere. But long before Ted Striker developed his drinking problem or Captain Oveur asked a young boy about gladiator movies, the Zucker brothers and their best friend Jim Abrahams were just three Midwestern boys who loved to laugh and make others laugh. This is the story of the long, unlikely journey that took them from Wisconsin to Los Angeles, from improvised stage shows to the silver screen, and from obscurity to international stardom.
REVIEW: Airplane! was a staple of my childhood (as was the criminally short-lived and ahead-of-its-time TV series Police Squad!; I never found the Naked Gun trilogy quite as consistently funny as the series, myself, even before the whole O. J. Simpson thing soured me on rewatches); it's one of those movies where one can watch it a dozen time and catch something new each and every time through. For all the silliness, though, it would've fallen flat on its face if it hadn't been so meticulously and artfully constructed, from the script to the cinematography to the casting choices to the score. This book delves into how the trio learned to work together, hone their sense of humor and writing skills via live theater, and not only survived the culture shock of 1970's Los Angeles but managed to eventually live every creator's dream of landing a studio contract and filming a genre-defining hit. It was not a straightforward road, nor was it one without doubts or setbacks or mistakes.
The story wanders somewhat in the telling; written in something like screenplay format, the book is a dialog, like an interview where the trio are sitting down to tell their story to the audience of the reader. Along the way are extras and interjections from colleagues, cast members, executives, and several people whose lives were influenced by Airplane!. (The audiobook features several guest narrators for these different "parts".) As a result, the story sometimes feels a little scattershot, moving back and forth and wandering on tangents before getting back to the main "plot" of the making of the movie. This lack of focus almost cost it a half-star, but overall it's an interesting examination of the movie that never should've existed, and a lost era when Hollywood still embraced unique, new voices and was willing to take risks. The Zuckers and Abrahams are right that Airplane! couldn't have happened today. (Though I personally always take such assertions with a little grain of salt; no envelope-pushing classic could be "made today", in part because different times have different envelopes and in part because they themselves already pushed that envelope, so any attempt to make the same thing again isn't close enough to the edge anymore to push anything. That doesn't mean today's metaphoric envelopes don't still have edges to be pushed, or that nobody is capable of pushing them, though in today's climate of endless franchises and remakes, it's far less likely a major studio would back such an experiment. But I digress...) The whole is an intriguing glimpse of cinematic lore for anyone who enjoys the film or the history of cinema and comedy.
You Might Also Enjoy:
This Book is Not Yet Rated (Peter Bognanni) - My Review
Young Frankenstein: A Mel Brooks Book: The Story of the Making of the Film (Mel Brooks with Rebecca Keegan) - My Review
Fan Fiction: A Mem-Noir (Brent Spiner) - My Review
Friday, December 5, 2025
The Aeronaut's Windlass (Jim Butcher)
The Aeronaut's Windlass
The Cinder Spires series, Book 1
Jim Butcher
Penguin
Fiction, Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Captain Francis Grimm used to be a rising star in the airship forces of Spire Albion, one of the massive, ancient structures towering over the deadly, mist-shrouded outside world to pierce the skies. But when a mission went terribly wrong, Grimm was left holding the bag, drummed out of service... officially, that is. As a privateer aboard the vessel AMS Predator, Grimm and his loyal crew still serve the spire in their own way. After a chase left the Predator damaged, Grimm finds himself out of commission, on the hook for repairs he can ill afford.
Then, in a bold surprise attack, ships from Spire Aurora descend on Albion, the opening salvo of an audacious plan.
Along with green Guard recruits Gwendolyn Lancaster, headstrong daughter of a wealthy family whose crystal-growing vats literally keep the spire powered and the airships aloft, and Bridget Tagwynn, whose lack of social graces and manners nearly bring disaster on her before she's officially in uniform, the feline-eyed warrior-born Benedict Sorellin-Lancaster, and the cat prince Rowl of the House of the Silent Paws, Grimm and the crew of the Predator are recruited by Albion's secretive Spirearch Addison for a secret mission. Aurora's attack not only left an unknown number of enemies hiding in the labyrinth of ventilation shafts and other hidden places of the spire, but has to have been coordinated and planned by a traitor - hence, Addison turning to those outside the existing military ranks or too fresh to have been compromised. With them also travel two peculiar Etherealists, Master Ferus and apprentice Folly, whose ability to perceive and manipulate the ethereal currents of the world may be instrumental to untangling the real reason for Aurora's attack. But what the mismatched crew discovers is something far bigger and more dangerous than mere war... at least, mere war among earthly humans. This may be the beginning of the end of the spires themselves, and all the life that depends on them.
REVIEW: The Aeronaut's Windlass promises a steampunk-flavored swashbuckling yarn in a fantastic world of crystal-powered airships, vast towers, a colorful culture with such oddities as "warrior-born" people born with recessive catlike genes granting them superior strength and agility (but which are seen as slightly less than fully human), and sapient, mildly evolved cats with their own culture and politics and language, set on a world that 's either in a far enough (or alternate enough) future as to be near-unrecognizable - populated with monsters that have a dash of Lovecraftian inexplicability and malice - or is an actual alien planet. Like many a swashbuckler before it, it incorporates liberal dashes of nautical warfare into its airship battles, and it populates itself with a cast that is not entirely unexpected or excessively complex: the brilliant captain wrongly maligned by politics yet loyal to the flag, the hotheaded young noblewoman eager to prove herself beyond the shelter of family privilege, the less sophisticated newcomer who partially exists for the world and its rules to be explained to (as a proxy for the reader), and so forth. This is, indeed, pretty much what Butcher delivers.
From the opening pages, the story offers adventure and action and danger, managing to trickle in the strangeness and the peculiarities of its setting - a world where unseen "ethereal" currents act on airships like wind, "gauntlets" discharging rays of bright heat in lieu of firearms and "guns" that work on steam rather than traditional gunpowder, and where the ground beyond the towers is shrouded in perpetual mist and populated with dangerous beasts - between thrilling bursts of action and the odd touch of humor and humanity. If the people and situations are somewhat familiar from other, similar swashbucklers and action stories, well, there's a reason such things become tropes: they tend to work more often than not. For the most part, the story's interesting enough and the characters have sufficient chemistry that it's easy to gloss over the sense of familiarity (and a few instances of plot convenient developments and nick-of-time reversals of fortune). Grimm and company must navigate intraspire politics and friction, as well as interspecies tensions in dealing with the cat clans who only rarely interact with humans, as they attempt to grapple with foes who are equally cunning and dedicated to their own masters and plans. For a sizeable volume, it moves at a decent clip for the most part, only bogging down when Butcher gets a little too involved and intricate in blow-by-blows of action sequences and fights, particularly the climactic one at the end. It's more a stagger than outright stumble, though, even if it makes the conclusion itself less definitively conclusive than it might have been, and thus a little weak.
Overall, even if it's a little familiar underneath the interesting worldbuilding, I enjoyed it. I even liked the parts with the cats more than I anticipated, with Rowr and his kin coming across as distinct and intelligent characters in their own right, less stilted and stereotyped than some people portray felines. I'd be game to continue the series at some point, when I'm next in the mood for a steampunk-flavored swashbuckler with a side of clever cats.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Senlin Ascends (Josiah Bancroft) - My Review
Arabella of Mars (David D. Levine) - My Review
Leviathan (Scott Westerfield) - My Review
The Cinder Spires series, Book 1
Jim Butcher
Penguin
Fiction, Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Captain Francis Grimm used to be a rising star in the airship forces of Spire Albion, one of the massive, ancient structures towering over the deadly, mist-shrouded outside world to pierce the skies. But when a mission went terribly wrong, Grimm was left holding the bag, drummed out of service... officially, that is. As a privateer aboard the vessel AMS Predator, Grimm and his loyal crew still serve the spire in their own way. After a chase left the Predator damaged, Grimm finds himself out of commission, on the hook for repairs he can ill afford.
Then, in a bold surprise attack, ships from Spire Aurora descend on Albion, the opening salvo of an audacious plan.
Along with green Guard recruits Gwendolyn Lancaster, headstrong daughter of a wealthy family whose crystal-growing vats literally keep the spire powered and the airships aloft, and Bridget Tagwynn, whose lack of social graces and manners nearly bring disaster on her before she's officially in uniform, the feline-eyed warrior-born Benedict Sorellin-Lancaster, and the cat prince Rowl of the House of the Silent Paws, Grimm and the crew of the Predator are recruited by Albion's secretive Spirearch Addison for a secret mission. Aurora's attack not only left an unknown number of enemies hiding in the labyrinth of ventilation shafts and other hidden places of the spire, but has to have been coordinated and planned by a traitor - hence, Addison turning to those outside the existing military ranks or too fresh to have been compromised. With them also travel two peculiar Etherealists, Master Ferus and apprentice Folly, whose ability to perceive and manipulate the ethereal currents of the world may be instrumental to untangling the real reason for Aurora's attack. But what the mismatched crew discovers is something far bigger and more dangerous than mere war... at least, mere war among earthly humans. This may be the beginning of the end of the spires themselves, and all the life that depends on them.
REVIEW: The Aeronaut's Windlass promises a steampunk-flavored swashbuckling yarn in a fantastic world of crystal-powered airships, vast towers, a colorful culture with such oddities as "warrior-born" people born with recessive catlike genes granting them superior strength and agility (but which are seen as slightly less than fully human), and sapient, mildly evolved cats with their own culture and politics and language, set on a world that 's either in a far enough (or alternate enough) future as to be near-unrecognizable - populated with monsters that have a dash of Lovecraftian inexplicability and malice - or is an actual alien planet. Like many a swashbuckler before it, it incorporates liberal dashes of nautical warfare into its airship battles, and it populates itself with a cast that is not entirely unexpected or excessively complex: the brilliant captain wrongly maligned by politics yet loyal to the flag, the hotheaded young noblewoman eager to prove herself beyond the shelter of family privilege, the less sophisticated newcomer who partially exists for the world and its rules to be explained to (as a proxy for the reader), and so forth. This is, indeed, pretty much what Butcher delivers.
From the opening pages, the story offers adventure and action and danger, managing to trickle in the strangeness and the peculiarities of its setting - a world where unseen "ethereal" currents act on airships like wind, "gauntlets" discharging rays of bright heat in lieu of firearms and "guns" that work on steam rather than traditional gunpowder, and where the ground beyond the towers is shrouded in perpetual mist and populated with dangerous beasts - between thrilling bursts of action and the odd touch of humor and humanity. If the people and situations are somewhat familiar from other, similar swashbucklers and action stories, well, there's a reason such things become tropes: they tend to work more often than not. For the most part, the story's interesting enough and the characters have sufficient chemistry that it's easy to gloss over the sense of familiarity (and a few instances of plot convenient developments and nick-of-time reversals of fortune). Grimm and company must navigate intraspire politics and friction, as well as interspecies tensions in dealing with the cat clans who only rarely interact with humans, as they attempt to grapple with foes who are equally cunning and dedicated to their own masters and plans. For a sizeable volume, it moves at a decent clip for the most part, only bogging down when Butcher gets a little too involved and intricate in blow-by-blows of action sequences and fights, particularly the climactic one at the end. It's more a stagger than outright stumble, though, even if it makes the conclusion itself less definitively conclusive than it might have been, and thus a little weak.
Overall, even if it's a little familiar underneath the interesting worldbuilding, I enjoyed it. I even liked the parts with the cats more than I anticipated, with Rowr and his kin coming across as distinct and intelligent characters in their own right, less stilted and stereotyped than some people portray felines. I'd be game to continue the series at some point, when I'm next in the mood for a steampunk-flavored swashbuckler with a side of clever cats.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Senlin Ascends (Josiah Bancroft) - My Review
Arabella of Mars (David D. Levine) - My Review
Leviathan (Scott Westerfield) - My Review
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