A review of Jackie’s Boy, a post-apocalyptic Huck Finn: Eleven-year-old orphan Michael scrabbles to survive the violent chaos after deliberate plagues killed 99% of the world’s population. He still writes letters to Mom. Jackie, an elephant bioengineered to speak, has … Continue reading
Sherwood Smith specializes in fantasy, especially for young adults. She manages to tell rip-roaring adventures about young people while still tucking a few good lessons gracefully into the narrative of her stories. Whether her heroine has become a figurehead for … Continue reading
SHAMAN, by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, is a collection of tales that concern the adventures of eccentric kilt-wearing anthropologist/archaeologist/xenologist Rhys Llewellyn and his assistants Yoshi Umeki and Roderick Halfax.
Continue readingLiving my entire life on or near the coast of Massachusetts, I’ve kind of taken it for granted that any walk on a beach of my home state might turn up treasures beyond a pretty scallop shell or a tumbled … Continue reading
In a nutshell—Lovely Chloe is trapped in a dead end existence, dating bums and working as a brand rep for a glitzy liquor distributor. Her friend and secret crush Archie is the hot bartender with a secret—he’s a sex demon.
No, really.
Continue readingIf you love big historical fantasies, Irene Radford’s Pendragon novels should be on your radar. Radford has created a style that has echoes of the way her period characters would have thought and written, without interfering with the understanding of a modern audience.
One thing you can count on in this book is character change and growth.
Continue readingby Brenda W. Clough Margaret Atwood’s most famous novel was published in 1985. It is appropriate however to review it today, in this first week of November 2016. The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopia of a very specific sort. The … Continue reading
My cousin Lee has loaned me a wonderful book called Fastest Things on Wings by Terry Masear. It’s a memoir of Masear’s early days as a hummingbird rehab specialist–how she fell into it, stuck with it through the nadir days … Continue reading
By Brenda Clough When he tried to plow through Pilgrim’s Progress Huckleberry Finn famously remarked that it was tough. Hah! He never read Boneland, the new novel by Alan Garner. Billed as a third book following the classic Weirdstone of … Continue reading
Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a generation of swashbuckling Jews carved out an empire in the New World in their quest for treasure, religious freedom–and revenge by Edward Kritzler. What happened in 1492? Chances are, the answer that springs … Continue reading
