lannamichaels | Entries tagged with i read things

A disaster + first contact book that is much more interested in the first contact than in anything else, featuring an Unqualified White Male Protagonist who is clear to tell us he's white as early on in the book as possible, who is unfortunately positioned as an Everyman Savior Against His Will. Also features a sentient rock alien and space bacteria that will eat the sun down 10% of its light before going on to other targets, but alas, losing 10% of the sun will be Very Bad. On the upside, the space bacteria will solve all energy scarcity problems forever. A novel.

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The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association by Caitlin Rozakis (2025): DNF. I've come to the conclusion that "X-type-of-book BUT IT'S SCI-FI/FANTASY" is that I have to like the X type of book to actually enjoy the riff on it. In this situation, it's "mom deals with PTA and discrimination against her family BUT IT'S MAGIC PRESCHOOL for her turned-against-their-will-in-traumatic-circumstances werewolf daughter". I got like 80 pages into it and flipped to the end to discover that, yes, the only parent who was being friendly to her was, per the trope, the one who was going to betray her and turn on her, and that, also per the trope, The Big Evil Was High-Stakes Testing All Along. I agree that high-stakes testing is bad! I am not, it turns out, interested in reading a book about how parents hurt other people to subvert the high-stakes testing process so that their kid can get into the school they want to! Even though it's magic! The worldbuilding is not enough to overcome the fact that I don't enjoy reading the underlying plot.

But if that is your thing, this is the book for you.

But on the topic of High-Stakes Testing Is The Enemy: high-stakes testing, like homework and mandatory volunteering, was something I was against when I was the student involved and figured it was just because, hey, I was the student, and now that I am on the other side of it, I loathe it all the more (if the school wants the kids to do 180 hours of mandatory volunteering per year, they can get off their asses and do it during school time. Oh, that's a waste of school time and parents would complain? How interesting.). However. My objection to high-stakes testing is the high-stakes high-pressure environment.

The objection of the villain in this book is not to the high-stakes. That objection is to the purpose of high-stakes testing, which is to attempt to equalize the playing field. The villain's kid isn't good enough academically to get into the desired upper school. In this case, high-stakes testing is the enemy because then admission isn't (in theory) based on who you know and being the right sort of person. (And the book is aware of this! There are consultants who can help get your kid into the school!)

But there is also a question, one that I mentally refer to essentially as The Harvard Question (but it's not specifically Harvard, you could swap in Yale or Oxbridge), which is: is the school prestigious because rich people go there, or do rich people go there because it's prestigious. That is, I feel it's generally understood that, for some schools, the quality of education truly does not matter when it comes to that school's place in the culture; the school is prestigious because of the students who go there (and the reputation it holds from students who have gone there in the past). The purpose is social environment and being around The Right Sort and Making Connections; education is secondary (and, often, education is only important to scholarship students -- these days, especially in prestigious schools at the middle/high school level, my impression has been that the scholarship students are the only ones actually keeping those schools high-ranked in terms of test scores, because they are the only ones who care about test scores and they are the only ones whose place in the school depends on the test scores; the school depends on the scholarship students to maintain the academic prestige level, while not in any way shape or form trying to kick out the students who drag down the test score average so long as they have the right parents. The school is prestigious because of the rich people.)

And so if the rich students all go somewhere else, does that new school become prestigious? Or does it, instead, reflect poorly on the rich students. Would Oxbridge lose some of its prestige if it stopped churning out prime ministers?

Which comes back around to: is the prestigious upper school that the villain's kid can't get into, what makes that school the one everyone wants to get into? Is it because of the rich/well-connected students? Or does it provide a quality education? (Or both.)

But if this is a case where the only way to get into Magical Oxbridge is to go to Magical Eton and the only way to get into Magical Eton is either high-stakes testing, or cheating/fraud, and you are only going to get certain highly-desired jobs if you did go to Magical Oxbridge (or Harvard Law), then the problem is entirely in the system, and switching from legacy-based admissions to high-stakes testing admission for middle/high school does not do a damn thing to help. Because it's just moving the goalpost of when the vital admission occurs, and moving that goalpost younger and younger and younger, and putting the onus on the students to be good enough at taking tests. (Also academic sandbagging can come into play here, but that's irrelevant to this book as far as I read it.)

But of course that's a situation that testing is meant to equalize, so you don't have to make sure your kid gets into the correct middle school to have any hope of that child ever clerking for the Supreme Court.

A lot of these kinds of books that I've read also -- I was gonna say "give short shrift" but often they give zero shrift at all -- for the kids who don't get to go to the Best School. What happens to the rest? What does actually happen if they have to go to the safety school, the third-best school, the worst school. So much is made of making sure the best and the brightest can go to the prestige schools, and little attention is on everyone else. The ones designated not good enough to get a good education, as education standards are presented.

At least in this book, it's made clear the high-stakes nature of the testing for the protag and her daughter: if the daughter fails out at the kindergarten level and isn't admitted to first grade, the alternative is bad. Because discrimination and the inherent decisions made in the worldbuilding in order to give it stakes to the protagonist. (Even though I'm not sure high-stakes testing at this level actually makes any sense here, but, go with it, price of admission and I also did not read a lot of this book.)

(because, okay, the issue is scarcity issues: there are more Deserving Kids than there are spots in the school -- I was once told a statistic with no citation whatsoever, that there are more high school valedictorians with a perfect GPA and perfect SAT scores than there are spots in the freshman class at Harvard, and quite frankly I do actually believe that, without any data whatsoever -- however, there doesn't seem to be other feeder preschools in this fictional situation, so are they artificially having a larger preschool class than they have spots in first grade, thus creating the pressure? What limits their ability to expand their first grade class so they can guarantee a place in first grade for every one of their kindergarteners? Does their exclusive reputation require that they have many more applicants than spots, thus making them seem Exclusive And Prestigious And Good, rather than just a safety school which isn't exclusive or cool or prestigious because it lets in Those Sort Of People, You Know, The Poors.)

Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford (2024): In other news, a noir murder mystery set in alternate history United States. DNF. But hey if I were more into noir murder mysteries...

But among the things that really threw me out of it from the beginning is that the noir detective is a cop. I haven't read as widely as many others in this kind of genre (especially since -- look it may sound like I'm allergic to murder mysteries but really I'm just a little too full of them, in the metaphoric sense, and would prefer some mysteries that aren't murder) but it really threw me that the protagonist was a cop.

This is also one of the kinds of books where I flipped to the end and read the end and was like "well, guess there was clearly a lot of plot going on" and then was like "ah so the author does not want to do a sequel".

A Rome of One's Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire by Emma Southon (2023): Did not finish, through no active fault of the book's own. The author does her absolute best to present a whole lot of misogyny with humor and clarity, but it does not hide the fact that this is all a lot of misogyny being presented. I skipped around, read a few chapters, and just couldn't stomach it. But what I read of it was good!

The Lady With the Gun Asks the Questions: The Ultimate Miss Phryne Fisher Story Collection by Kerry Greenwood (2022): Did not finish. These are short stories, some very short. It poses an interesting question to the reader of what, precisely, makes a mystery/detective book. Should we see the process of the mystery being solved? Should we be able to solve the mystery? Do we need interiority in the solving process? This book has none of that! The stories are stories, very short, as we watch Phryne Fisher encounter a crime/confusing event (I hesitate to even call them mysteries) and then relay the solution, with a minimal amount of detectiving. Some stories have more than others. Some are just essentially lists of events. The short stories are not bad, in of themselves. And not all of them are murder mysteries! They are, however, not at all what I want in my quest for "can I please have a mystery book that isn't a murder mystery".

The Keeper of Magical Things by Julie Leong (2025): I have gotten this out from the library twice and had to return it before getting more than a chapter or two into it. I may have to accept the fact that I don't find it very interesting or gripping. But maybe... maybe the third time out from the library... I'll actually read it.

The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson (2023): DNF. Speaking of acceptance of my literary tastes, I likely must also accept the fact that I don't find Brandon Sanderson books entertaining to read. I read some of it. I flipped to the end, and the ending part did not clearly follow at all from the beginning, so I am certain many many things happened in the meanwhile to get from point A to point B. However, I don't really care. I guess I was hoping for something more like the Tough Guide To Fantasyland or Discworld or something, you know... funny, based on the title. It's a shame because this is, iirc, the third Sanderson I was "meh, this is boring" on, and if I could like his stuff, there would be so many books for me to read.

Strange Houses by Uketsu, translated by Jim Rion (2025): I finished a book! I liked it! This is a "murder mystery" book told via The Author getting interested in a floor plan, talking to someone who is convinced it means the house was being used to murder people, then a bunch of interviews/discussions with people about floor plans of multiple houses and if the floor plans mean that the house must have been used to murder people. This started off as a really convoluted, very "why would they go to all that effort of hiding a child's existence" and then swerved into fantastic "wait so what actually happened" territory, including how much do you trust various sources and various documentary evidence, and ends with a great highlight on "yeah we don't actually know how much of what was presented here is true and what was fabricated and if so by whom and when". There's this hanging plot hole that the epilogue sort of jumps on top of as well, to wit: ( Read more... )

This book is pretty short, which is contributed to by when it refers back to a floor plan, it shows that part of the floor plan, which makes it really easy to follow along but also, frankly, pads the page count. Quick, zippy read, more of a puzzle-that-never-gets-solved book than a murder mystery.

Elevator pitch: Pride & Prejudice but with frum Jews!

Actual reality: this isn't Pride and Prejudice. It's also not good, but beyond that, it's not Pride & Prejudice.

Sidenote: It's been several months since I DNFed this book. I wasn't sure if I was going to post a review of it or not but decided to get it out of my drafts. Happy end of December!

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I just read The Care & Keeping of You: The Body Book for Girls by Valorie Lee Schaefer for content, focusing on a few things, but primarily ovulation and eating disorders. It doesn't mention ovulation, and while the eating disorder section itself is fine, I wasn't impressed with the overall section on food, and there were other parts of this book that really rubbed me wrong, especially the emphasis on smiling. It's weirdly anti-salt and doesn't seem to believe that insomnia exists.

This book kept making me think "this would be great to use in some kind of dissertation on a very specific culture that this came out of, telling the young girls in this culture how best to grow up to be women." The examples alone of what concerns they thought the girls had about their bodies and their social interactions (they all seem to have very mean friends and want larger breasts, except for the one girl with large breasts, whose friends all dropped her for being ugly and fat. No one is actually fat in this book. Also their bra size chart doesn't go above 36D; people thinking that breasts can't possibly be beyond that was the source of a great many problems in my life, and I kept thinking, while reading this book, that this book would have been negatively helpful to me in my actual experience of puberty.)

So.

Does anyone have recommendations for "what to expect when you're expecting to go through puberty" that are fat-positive? You know, something like "it's very genetic and it's not because you ate too much junk food"?

And is more honest about period pain, and mentions -- at the very least -- ovulation. And that you can get back pain from your breasts.

And also -- okay, there were a bunch of things in this book that made me go "this is the opposite of helpful, I understand why you think it's helpful, but trust me, while you're not contributing to the problem, you're also not helping."

But really, the fat-positive thing would be helpful, and also more realistic about numbers on scales, please and thank you.

(And maybe ones that don't assume everyone has a mom???? I'm just. I'm just. This book is so oddly heteronormative for a book that has nothing in it about dating.)

Summary: The titular girl turning 12 is Katie, a homeschooled girl in Kentucky in summer/autumn 2004. She is enduring the beginning of puberty -- having to wear a bra*, growing leg hair, getting her period -- while her best friends have temporarily moved to Wisconsin, she is getting bullied at church** youth group, discovering her budding feminist rage about dress codes, and, worryingly, might have a crush on a girl in her theater club. A midgrade graphic novel.

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Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson (2023): DNF. Not unenjoyable but also not gripping. His prose here was more engaging than the last Sanderson I tried to read, which actually isn't saying much. Also it was short enough that it didn't physically hurt to try to read it, which is another point in its favor. It had a strange tone, not quite funny, not quite satirical. Despite having nothing in common with Princess Bride The Book, it strangely felt like it was trying to be Princess Bride The Book.

Then after DNFing, I flipped to the end to see that, yes, it was trying to riff on the tone of Princess Bride The Book, so I guess it did it well enough that I could be like "...is this trying to be Princess Bride without understanding what makes Princess Bride funny/satirical?" But hey, the intention came through.

The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming: A Christmas Story by Lemony Snicket (2007): Excellent, hilarious book about a latke that jumps out of the pan while being fried and deals with the fact that that family are the only Jews in the picturesque village full of people celebrating Christmas. Then the latke is eaten. A++, no notes.

I Am Anne Frank by Brad Meltzer (2020): internets, I read this book for content for a 4 year old. I don't even believe in doing that, but here I am. The 4 year old is a big fan of this series, and Somehow, both me and his parents, when getting books from this series out of the library for him, and seeing all the books that there are in the catalog, have not gotten him this one. Then one day he went to the library and picked it out himself. And a lot of the time, he treats getting out books as the joy is just getting them out, not reading them, so I was going to just return this one unread on the logic that he wouldn't remember, and let this problem be his parents problem, but okay, fine, let's read this book and see how bad this would be to read this to him.

I went in fully expecting this to be a Saint Anne book and I was 100% correct. But it's worse than that. Now, this book series, it focuses a lot on the famous person as a kid (because of the target audience), then goes into them doing what makes them famous, and stops before death, and ends with a lovely heartwarming moral lesson for the target audience. This is a problem with Anne Frank, who never did anything notable in her life, because she never had the opportunity, because she was Jewish. There is no "and then I grew up and did the thing that made me famous". There is no "and then I did anything". She has no accomplishments. This already doesn't fit in at all with the other books in the series: those books are about triumphing over adversity, about working hard and accomplishing great things. Anne Frank did not do any of that.

So what can Anne Frank do? Well, you see, she dies and thus teaches you a moral lesson. That's how these books end: they have the person do what makes them famous and then it has a moral lesson for the target audience. The moral lesson of a dead Jewish girl is, *checks notes*, help other people and be kind. The last line of the book is "I am Anne Frank and I believe that people are truly good at heart." Okay. Well, I suspect if you go back in time and ask her in the concentration camp, you may get a different answer. But no one wants to hear that. They want to know that a tragic victim forgave them for it even as she died. No hard feelings!

I've made a metric I call "do they expect any X to read this book/attend this training/watch this video about X". Applicable to many things! Does this book about disability expect anyone with this disability to read it? Does this presentation about mental health problems expect anyone in the audience to have any mental health problems? Does this book about a Jew expect any Jews to read it?

This book is a bit meh on that. (I know the author is Jewish. That's irrelevant to the intended audience.)

But, hey, I had no great expectations anyway.

Anne Frank by Clémentine V. Baron, translated by Catherine Nolan (2018): Gotten out by an older kid at the same time, so the reading for content was less severe, although months ago this kid DNFed the I Survived the Nazi Invasion book really early on because it was too sad (which we were glad of; when she picked it up, we were all like, uh, let us know if you want to talk about it, and then she read for a bit and asked if something really happened, we said yes, and she put the book down), and has complained of nightmares from certain things, so, like, there was some checking the content, but I skimmed it more. On the whole, better than the above book. I think it did a much better job of not flinching at the end. I'd rather read this book to the 4 year old.

Summary: Ezra Safran, age 12, is supposed to fight the manifestation of evil in the world when he turns 13. Unfortunately, evil is manifesting in the world and it's not even his bar mitzvah yet. And is fighting the manifestation of evil and vanquishing it really the right thing to do? A mid-grade book.

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A Diary Of A Wimpy Kid knockoff published by Artscroll, and is exactly what you'd expect given its bona fides.

Dovi is a 4th grader at a new school and is having problems fitting in, except we have no reason to believe he's not fitting in, because that's told and not shown in any way, so it's not clear why his teacher sends him to the school therapist rabbi to be told to keep a diary. He misses his old school but we are never given any specifics about his old school or his old friends. Specifics? What specifics?

We don't even get a good idea of how many siblings he has and the age spread (his oldest brother -- probably -- went off to yeshiva in Israel, except considering the age spread of the kids, that's likely high school, but why mention any details?)

He does a lot of unspecified learning, including running a chavrusa program. He gains friends. He has no real problems and is not a wimpy kid. The shenanigans are generic and probably very boring to the target audience, who are used to the many books in this genre already, and except certain things from a confessional diary of a 4th grader at a new school who has to see the school therapist because he's not fitting in. Those things are not in this book.

Overall, I found it very bland. And that's probably the biggest problem.

Because the thing is, I don't like Diary Of A Wimpy Kid. It's better than Captain Underpants, but most things are better than Captain Underpants. All these Wimpy Kid books and that entire segment of midgrade -- I don't like them.

I'm not supposed to like them. They are written to appeal to a midgrade audience, not to the parents of the midgrade audience.

Dovi Diaries was written to appeal to adults.

But you know what? I've read worse from Artscroll.

Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens by David Mitchell (2023): lirazel posted about the audiobook version of this, which got me to put this on my list, but alas my library only has access to the print version; I feel that the audiobook version is probably superior. There were several parts in the book that were a slog to get through the paragraph, that would be perfectly fine if you were listening to a patented David Mitchell Rant about the subject. In fact, imagining them in David Mitchell's voice is how I got through them. ( Read more... )
Subpar Parks: America's Most Extraordinary National Parks and Their Least Impressed Visitors by Amber Share (2021): A bookified version of a Instagram account I never followed, a copy of which I read at someone's house who was using as a bookmark something that indicated they had gotten it as a gift when it came out and never got past the first fifth of the book. This book would have been fine if it had not decided it was going to fight the one star reviews, and instead just showed the artwork and mentioned how great the park was. As it was, it positioned itself as an argument between the one star reviewers and the author, and the one star reviewers won.( Read more... )

Funnily enough, the thing that gets me to actually read a MXTX novel is to assess getting it as a birthday present for someone who would give me no info on their current reading tastes and said they were willing to get anything, so based on some of their previous tastes, I considered a MXTX book and figured TGCF would be the most likely book of interest. So out from the library I got the first volume out to read it and assess it.

And it's funny and it's good, so I keep reading to see if the volume ends on a cliffhanger or not, and then I get to the Banyue arc. And I had been told the Banyue arc was racist but I was so not prepared for how racist it is. Right off the bat, it's "hello, nice to meet you, I'm a racist caricature" and then it *keeps getting worse*. So I plan to get the other volumes out from the library and read them myself, because this is enjoyable, but I'm unsure of the birthday present situation. I may go with something else.

The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke, illustrated by Victoria Sawdon (2024): A light, forgettable short story previously, per the afterword, broadcast on the radio for a BBC Christmas thing in 2022. It's very Clarke, for better or for worse. The illustrations are good. IDK, this short story basically encapsulates everything about Clarke's magic systems that I don't like. It's a good short story but I would like it to make sense. Whereas Clarke is like "it doesn't have to make sense, it's magic". This worked much better for me in Piranesi.

Will the Pigeon Graduate? by Mo Willems (2025): Good book but at the same time, it's very obviously a cynical ploy to hone in on the market that buys Dr. Seuss's Oh The Places You'll Go for new grads.

Right Back at You by Carolyn Mackler (2025): Midgrade, time traveling letters book. 12 year old Mason lives in New York City in 2023 and is bullied in school. 12 year old Talia lives in an unnamed small town in Western PA in 1987 and is bullied in school. Together, they give each other encouragement and friendship, via letters they leave each other in their closets.

Despite this, neither one of them actually considers in time that the magical time traveling letter wormhole will cease when Mason moves to Atlanta (his dad got a new job on sudden notice and "walked out" (aka did not walk out, but Mason and everyone in school treats it like his dad did, in fact, walk out) and was staying on his brother's couch until he got an apartment and Mason and his mom would move there after school ended in a couple months). This helpfully gives the author a way to wrap up the book at a decent-enough place, while still being within the constraints of a midgrade novel for page count.

Recommended for anyone who thinks that there just aren't enough midgrade books about bullying. I snark, I snark. It's a very quick read, fine and enjoyable, and yes, there are age-appropriate time travel shenangians (Mason tells Talia the baseball game results so she can win bets against her brother; Talia uses Mason mentioning 'google' all the time to buy google stock ASAP for herself and for Mason, and sends him the money.)

Content warning for some really severe antisemitism for a midgrade book that is, to be fair, about bullying. (Talia is Jewish and the only other Jew she knows is her optometrist. Mason isn't Jewish but knows plenty of Jews.)

Thriller in which an Italian cardinal has to run a conclave to replace a Pope who is definitely not Pope Francis, don't be ridiculous.

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YA. Lu Mingshin, a merchant's daughter and a nobleman's niece, falls in love with the wrong crown prince candidate, and ends up used, betrayed, and dead. Then she goes back in time to prevent this from happening. Mingshin has learned an important lesson about falling in love with a crown prince candidate! This is an important lesson! Spoiler: she falls in love with a different crown prince candidate.

This book is aggressively YA. Everyone either loves Mingshin or wants to kill her; there's no middle ground. Her one flaw is that she's not very pretty. Her main strength is that she's smarter than everyone else and also she's rich, so after her bad experiences with her Backstabbing Ex, she assumes everyone will be a backstabbing ex.

She's also 18, gone back in time to being 16, and also somehow all the crown prince candidates AND the random magic dude from a different country 1) all want her, and 2) are all within a "age gap that YA readers won't find strange" range.

Plus she's also a very important reincarnation of someone even more awesomer, and was born with a vitally important magic artifact!

Everyone wants to marry Mingshin! Despite trying not to, she does fall in love with another crown prince candidate! She doesn't actually want to be Queen! She wants to travel and meet people and learn things! What are you doing getting involved in this, just go back home??? But no, if you don't stay here and get involved, a future king could fuck you guys over and take away your merchant business. Uh-huh, right, and your ex murdered you? And was only ever with you for your brains and your money?

This might sound like I didn't enjoy the book. It was a nice relaxing afternoon read. The actual flaw of the book is that the prose is very very clunky. It seems to be setting up for a series, so hopefully the prose improves. Also, the book could stand to acknowledge that her maid is a slave.

Picture Book recommendations:

100 Mighty Dragons All Named Broccoli by David LaRochelle (2023): An unexpected success of a book. 100 dragons named Broccoli are reduced down to 1 dragon named Broccoli by virtue of some dragons going off to start a rock band or join the Green Bay Packers, etc. In the spring, the remaining Broccoli comes out of her cave, followed by 100 baby dragons not all named Broccoli, so you get to gallop through 99 names, ending with... Broccoli Junior!

Really just a delightful subtraction book that I did not actually know was a Learn About Numbers book when I got it out based entirely on the title.

P Is for Pterodactyl by Raj Haldar (2018): Not a new one for me, but always a delight, and I don't think I mentioned it before. Perfect for kids starting at the age of sounding out how words are spelled, and continuing on through fluent readers. The first time I picked it up, I wowed a kid by reading it without hesitation.

The Serious Goose by Jimmy Kimmel (2019): I am skeptical of celeb authors, but this one is actually good. There is a very serious goose that will not smile! Oh, no, the kid made the goose smile.

Midgrade book log:

Mendel the Mess-up by Terry LaBan (2024): Shtetl fantasy graphic novel about 12 year old Mendel, who is the world's worst klutz. Everything he tries to do backfires. This is blamed on him being cursed by the evil eye in utero by a woman whose son Yossel was stolen from her by Cossacks when he was two. Mendel cannot do anything right, no matter what he tries.

But then Cossacks attack the shtetl and Mendel realizes he can use his curse to benefit his shtetl by doing everything he can to help the Cossacks, specifically Pivik The Cossack, who turns out to be the stolen Jewish child, and is reunited with his mother. Yossel doesn't believe her until she feeds him his favorite mushroom barley soup. Happy ending for everyone! Including Mendel, who has not only broken the evil eye curse on him by returning Pivik/Yossel to his mother, but who also now realizes that that curse was confirmation bias and him psyching himself out, for the most part.

A cute, quick read despite dealing with some heavy subject matter. Recommended.

Also, this is somehow both a book with essentially no Yiddish or Hebrew and is completely readable to non-Jews, and ALSO something that Olameinu would have published with only very very very very slight edits. I'm amazed. Like, Mendel is saved in part by the power of learning Bava Metzia.

My Life as a Book by Janet Tashjian, illustrated by Jake Tashjian (2010): 12 year old Derek is a "reluctant reader", who enjoys reading comic books, drawing, and being an absolute terror to everyone around him. Did not finish at page 62. I was asked to read this to assess it as a potential birthday present. What I liked: simple, mostly clear, illustrations in the margins of assumed-difficult vocabulary words. What I didn't like: everything else. My assessment was either the birthday boy will appreciate Derek's antics, or, more likely, it will remind him of his older brother. (In his older brother's defense, he has never tried to set their lawn on fire or freed a monkey from a cage). Also this recipient is not a reluctant reader, and graphic novels help him understand words and concepts, which is a good thing.

The 13-story Treehouse by Andy Griffiths, illustrated by Terry Denton (2023 reprint): The author and illustrator are tween boys living in the titular treehouse, and they have a book due to their publisher by tomorrow. This was much better, I can see it appealing to multiple potential audiences. I found it full of filler, as if they had an idea that would fit 5 pages and then had to pad it out. But the target audience would appreciate the antics and the humor and probably even all the fillter.

Summary: Jake Lightman is a Jewish 7th grader with bitterly divorced parents, and is trying to walk an atom-thin tightrope between what and who each parent wants him to be. Since this is untenable, he relates to his entire life as if it were a tv show. As coping strategies go, I've seen worse.

Wow, this is a good book.

I would not call it delightful like Finn and Ezra's Bar Mitzvah Time Loop because it is absolutely not like that book at all. Despite this also having the "humor" sticker on the side from where the library shelves it, this is a very different kind of humor. This is the kind of humor that you develop as a shield, as self-defense. Jake is very much not okay, and the humor is how he handles his life. ( Read more... )

This book is a delight.

Finn Einstein (Reform, loving parents, good at school, zero friends) and Ezra Rosen (Orthodox, middle child problems, doesn't try in school, many friends) are celebrating their bar mitzvahs right next to each other at the same New Jersey hotel. Finn realizes they are stuck in the same time loop, and together they try to break out of it, relying on Finn's knowledge of time loops in movies, and with help from Ezra's new rabbi and a physicist at the physicist convention also taking place at the hotel that weekend.

Yes, the names Einstein and Rosen are deliberate.

The author is having so much fun here. There are so many great lines. When the rabbi is offering to help them, he says "come with me if you want to learn".

The plotting and the characterization are spectacular, there's so much fun show vs tell that the author is relying on you putting the pieces together. For instance, Finn refers to his parents as helicopter parents, but they are not shown that way at all; in fact, they're so permissive that something has to be wrong. Oh no, thought I, putting some details together, if this is the novels of my childhood, Finn has cancer and is about to die, or his parents have cancer and is about to die. But this is a midgrade humor novel! That would be too depressing! Instead, his mother has stage two thyroid cancer that is depicted as being very treatable, they just don't want to tell him until after his bar mitzvah.

And Ezra? His family's big tension that's causing so many fights? Ah, well, property taxes are going up, they can't afford to live here anymore (Ezra's bar mitzvah is being funded by the community and his Uncle Chaim), so they're moving to a different town. They just didn't want to tell him until after his bar mitzvah that they're moving literally that week because they already sold the house. But it's all going to be fine! His dad will find another job, and his sister Avital's big secret is that she has a job at the local pizza place that she doesn't want anyone to know about because her parents want her to focus on school in her senior year. Even better, now they'll be in the same town as Finn, within walking distance!

They've all learned an important lesson about appreciating every day you have with the people you love, and also gained a good friend. And robbed a bank. And won the lottery. And realized that there are some things, no matter how many time loops you try it in, that you just can't change.

(Yes, it's extremely preslashy.)

Blurb: Yocheved "Yoyo" Gold is a frum girl who gets fed up and posts some kind of bullshit Gossip Girl-wannabee shit on TikTok. ( I hated this book )

Linguistic study about the adult acquisition of Yinglish/Yeshivish among ba'alei teshuva (and a small enough number of gerim in the study that she groups them with BTs), based primarily on fieldwork done in Philadelphia ~2001/2002, but also other places. Sort of doubles as a companion book to Frumspeak.

Interesting book, trying to appeal to the fact that, quite frankly, who on earth is the audience for a book like this, and that's a wide potential audience. Benor is perhaps best known on the internet for being the person behind the Jewish English Lexicon, which is how someone pitched me this book, essentially "hey, the person who runs the Jewish English Lexicon wrote a book".

This book is linguistically interesting and there were various parts when reading it that validated that vague feeling I had that when I went to college, I discovered I had not, up to that point on time in my life, spoken English and had to learn to speak English, which was such a ridiculous thing since I went to non-Jewish summer programs and was on the internet before college, and yet... somehow I felt like I had to learn to speak English. And then Benor drops in a number like "yeah so there's 2,000-2,500 non-English words they're using in common language" and I'm like "that seems high" and then she gives examples and it's like "just @ me next time".

On the whole, this book is Too Accurate. I did have some quibbles, as I imagine anyone would. ( Read more... )

Be the Bus: The Lost & Profound Wisdom of the Pigeon by Mo Willems (2023): Short cute book where the Pigeon From The Pigeon Books offers his wisdom. I liked this better than I like the Pigeon books (I'm more into Elephant & Piggy). Thank you for finally addressing the question of why the Pigeon is not allowed to drive the bus. (Many, including insurance reasons and the Pigeon doesn't know how to drive).

Dinosaurs in Trucks Because Hey, Why Not? by Sandra Boynton (2024): Here's what I imagine happening. One day, Venerable Board Book Author Sandra Boynton said to herself "some kids are Dinosaur Kids and some kids are Truck Kids, I'm going to write the most epic crossover event of all time" and then she did.

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan (2021): Did Not Finish. Abandoned it at the start of the third part. I couldn't keep slogging through all the misogyny and Ouyang's opinions about fate and revenge that never actually admitted to the reader what that was, just to find out if Zhu and Ouyang's personal names were ever mentioned because it kept increasingly bothering me and I figured that for thematic reasons, we wouldn't get them and they'd just remain named only by their families For Narrative Themes. I wish there hadn't been so much misogyny or I'd really have loved Ouyang. I hope he got to kill the dude who ordered his family's execution. I just wasn't going to keep reading to find out. Sorry, Ouyang, maybe you could stop being so overly disgusted by women sometime. (One wonders cynically if that was a deliberate creative decision by the author to stop Ouyang from stealing the book: make him as unlikable as possible, even when he should be the Second Most Likeable Character, After Poor Unappreciated Lord Wang Who Is The Only One Who Understands That Things Cost Money And Is The Sole Reason They Even Have An Army In The First Place).

Summary: In which Len, a stoned high school art teacher who describes himself as culturally Jewish and does not know Yiddish or Hebrew, decides to create a golem based off of instructions on the internet, and then recruits Miri, a lesbian OTD Chasid who works at his local bodega, to translate between Yiddish and English when it turns out the golem is created only speaking languages it has previously learned. Together, they address important questions, such as: is it morally good or morally bad to take a golem to a KKK rally?

This may be the most Jewish book I have read this year, and I am currently working my way through a linguistic study of yinglish (Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism by Sarah Benor, very good, recommended).

This book is excellent and funny. When I was reading the history of golems chapter, aka "let's do a quick overview of antisemitic violence beginning with the Exodus", I was like "if this book sticks the landing, I am going to buy a copy", because it managed to be so fucking funny even whilst discussing that.

I would be remiss if I did not link to

chestnut_pod's review and

hamsterwoman's review, both of which convinced me to read this book.

Here are my bulletpoints about it! ( Read more... )

I finished this book and said, out loud, "what the fuck".

Did this book really have to change protagonists with about 5% of the book left to go? Really? Really?

What this book is about: in a dark dystopia -- with on-page pogroms, multiple people being burned alive, public executions, prison camps, religious violence and persecution, police violence, people being "disappeared", imperialism, systemized discrimination, plagues (with masking, quarantine, and social distancing), premeditated murder, &etc -- Fetter is being raised to kill his father, who deserves it. There are emails, support groups, and the internet, but those are not any focus; although the blurb talks about Fetter talking about growing up to kill his father in therapy, there is really not a lot of that going on at all.

This could have been a comedy. It is instead absolutely not a comedy. I think the blurb does it no favors.

I kept going at first solely because it was so highly recommended, and then because every time I was about to put it down for good, it did a cool thing. It kept this going all the way through to the end.

"Do I like this book" is an irrelevant question (the answer to which is: not as much as the book I thought it was going to be). Is this a good book? Yeah, for the most part (changing protagonists right at the end of the book, not adequately foreshadowed, why). Is this book going to -- deservedly! -- win a bunch of awards? I assume so.

Like, what do I even have to say about this book? I'm not sure it's science fiction. cahn brought up magical realism and I think that fits better.

I just. I don't think this is secondary world, I think this book is meant to be taking place on Earth. There's a mention of the United Nations, and the Unexpected True Protagonist mentions that there really is an entire other world out there that Fetter doesn't care enough to notice exists.

Question the book doesn't answer: if no one can see the devils/laws and powers, how do they all know what they look like?

It's just... this book is saying a lot of things and has a lot of points to make and is pretty unflinching until the moment it flinches and switches protagonists so we do not have to see Fetter live in the hell of thinking his friends have just been burned alive by his father's cronies, and then have to make nice to his father while working to overthrow him.

I don't have much to say about this book which is why I'm typing this directly into the Post window rather than Word first to organize but... yeah. It's really just like "this book is going to win awards, which it deserves to win. I do not recommend reading this without a whole list of warnings. This is not light reading. At not point is this escapist fiction of someone raised to kill his religious leader father and processes it in therapy. He does not process in therapy. His support group leader recruits him for a revolution. We end the book not knowing if the revolution succeeds. His boyfriend/ex-boyfriend is one of the ruling elite and fled the city for the plague and doesn't care that he left him to it. I don't know if he has any real friends at all. He kills everyone he's supposed to except for his father."

Author website.

Ruthi and Jules Johnson are small-time con artists, making a living by pool sharking on luxury space cruise ships. Jules falls in love with a rich mark named Esteban Mendez-Yuki and tells him the truth. He reacts as you'd expect and breaks things off with her. Jules discovers she's pregnant and decides to keep it and that she wants nothing more to do with Esteban. Ruthi disagrees and sends a letter to the rich mark asking for money for the kid; she receives the expected letter back from his lawyers talking about extortion.

And so Ruthi does what anyone would do: she commits identity fraud, passes herself off as a rich debutant years younger than she actually is, and decides to trap the rich guy into betrothing her, violating the contact, and get enough money for the Johnsons And New Baby to live happily on. Unfortunately, she did not plan for the rich guy's hot older half-sister Sol Mendez-Yuki, who has gotten in debt to Space Mafia because of her other half-brother's college fees, and can't pay it off because all her money is tied up in trying to break into the kosher grocery business via a warehouse full of frozen ducks.

This is a delightful romp. I, who am not usually great on the uptake when it comes to "look these characters are attracted to each other" can feel it coming off the page in spades. Highly recommended! Perfect femslash book of everyone's dreams! Bullet-points behind cut.

( Read more... )

"They all did it." Or: A group project, organized across at least two continents for approximately three years, proves flexible enough to succeed despite last minute unexpected difficulties. A true project management success story.

This book raises several questions, to wit:

I had assumed the graphic novel made some changes by having MacQueen be the son of the district attorney, not as wikipedia says, the lawyer. However, this ebook version says district attorney. Is this a US-edition vs UK-edition thing? The back of the ebook has photos from the 2017 movie; however, I do not assume this ebook has recent changes made to update the book for Present Day, because if it did, the profession of MacQueen's father does not make the top 10 of "not-plot-important" things in the text that I would change.

I will give this book this. It does not go full Dorothy "what this country needs is a Hitler" Sayers. Still, even not going that far, there were things I'd assume they'd change if they were gonna change someone's dad's profession.

What about the rest of Cassetti's gang? Do they just not count, or has this group spent the last three years killing them off, too?

Non-question bullet points:

Having read the graphic novel right before this was great, because I went in fully completely spoiled so could read this with great enjoyment, seeing how it was done.

They absolutely would have completely gotten away with it if the train hadn't been stopped by the snow and/or if Poirot had not been on the train. I truly believe this, and I bet they do, too.

Me: I want to read the fic where they're planning this, I'm sure someone's written it, let me check AO3...

AO3: EVERY SINGLE BOOK IN THIS SERIES ARE SYNNED TO THE SAME TAG. DEAL WITH IT.

Me: Oh, right. Guess I better hope people tagged characters. (LOL, why assume that.)

So, yes, I would like recs. Looking specifically for heist planning or Mary Debenham recs.

Grace Needs Space! by Benjamin A. Wilgus, illustrated by Rii Abrego (2023): Cute midgrade graphic novel about twelve-year-old Grace, who does not, in fact, need space. In fact, what she wants is solid ground. She has been raised on a space station by her mom (Evelyn, "Mom") and gets to go on a fun adventurous trip with her non-custodial mom* (Kendra, "Ba") to Titan, where she gets to touch water and land for the first time!!! Unfortunately, her Ba is busy working and on top of that is not a great, or well-practiced, parent and ruins the entire trip through completely realistic unreliability. There's also a fun, small sideplot of Grace getting her Ba to stop calling her "kiddo". Kendra also calls her "Gracie" and in the end, switches to "Grace".

Excellent art, especially of all the space stuff, and "what happens when an exciting trip you've been looking forward to is actually boring and goes badly because an adult doesn't plan very well" is an excellent, relatable plot both for the target audience and any adults who picked the book up, too.

*I do not recall any mention of a divorce in the book, just that they had been married. However, Evelyn and Kendra's interactions come off very (Mostly) Amicably Divorced to me.

Also I really love just how casual all this queer stuff is these days??? The relationship is not explained, the same way you, as a kid, are not given an exposition-dump into the parental statuses of all of your classmates when you are in third grade. Evelyn and Kendra got married at some point and traveled together. They no longer live together or travel together. Grace does not see Kendra very often. That's not the plot! The plot is about Grace being disappointed that her Titan trip doesn't go the way she wanted it to!

Sometimes you really realize you live in the future. Not only did I not get it out from the library specifically because it's queer moms, I didn't know it was queer moms when I got it out. I got it out because I was looking for space books for that age group. If it weren't for the line about Evelyn and Kendra getting married, and you just had the back copy to tell you that Kendra is the fun mom, you could assume that Kendra was a step-mom or bio-mom after an open adoption, and if you didn't look at the back or trust it to be correct, Kendra could have been any other relative or a family friend. There's no queer plotline! It's just queer folks living lives and having kids and also spaceships! It's not about them!

Can you imagine, a midgrade book with queer parents that is not about being a kid with queer parents?????? Queer divorced or separated queer parents???????

Livin' in the future.

Murder on the Orient Express: The Graphic Novel, originally by Agatha Christie, adapted by Bob Al-Greene (2023): This is one of those books that I have never read and yet, through osmosis know all about it: they all did it and they get away with it because the victim deserved it.

So, not having read the original, I can't speak for how well this adaptation works as an adaptation, but standing on its own, it's very good.

With one, very strange, caveat. There seems to be a printer's error where a lot of pages are missing. This is a brand-new graphic novel. I checked the binding. We are not missing a bunch of pages because they fell out. They're just not in here. It goes from page 122 to page 139, chapter 5 is followed by chapter 8. I checked the front and the back to see if there's some kind of indication that this was done on purpose, I cannot find any. It is not jarring in the moment; I only noticed because I was checking the page numbers to make sure I didn't accidentally do two at a time. It really only became apparent when they were going over the suspects again and mentioning things that didn't happen on page, and even then you could say, well, it's an adaptation, maybe they just cut that stuff.

It may say something not complimentary about this book that you can go from one Talking To A Suspect chapter to another Talking To A Suspect chapter and not notice that a bunch of pages have gone missing.

I stuck a note on the library book to make sure to highlight this issue for the library staff.

As for the original, I'm not sure I'm gonna read it. I got the ebook out but I'm not sure if the subject matter of the backstory would be too much for me; on the other hand, perhaps the nature of a graphic novel, with pictures and all that, evoke more than it does in the original.

In general, I'm open to recommendations for mystery books that are not murder mysteries. (I've read Sherlock Holmes.)

( The Dark Lord's Daughter by Patricia C. Wrede and The Sinister Booksellers of Bath by Garth Nix )

Reading Josh Funk's Lady Pancake & Sir French Toast series, I was struck by the same impression I had the first time I read Mo Willems: this is a children's author to remember.

This book series is excellent. It's fantastic iambic pentameter rhyming couplets, so you can gallop through it with great glee. The worldplay is great, the pictures are great, a++++

I was slightly less enchanted (but still entertained) by the It's Not A Fairy Tale series for a couple reasons. These are in the "wry, self-aware fairy tale" genre, but 1) undercut their stories entirely with some changes -- for instance, the big bad wolf in the Three Little Pigs is actually a door to door vacuum cleaner salesman, and the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk is a vegan, and 2) because of all the interuptions in the text, it's not that easy, when reading aloud, to make it clear what's the narrator and what's each character. I did my best but I felt like -- unlike the fridge books series -- this one was not necessarily made to be read aloud by a single person. Which is not a bad thing! But adds difficulty when you are, in fact, reading aloud as a single person. On the plus side, it gets massive points from me by having Jack from Jack & The Beanstalk, and Fred The Giant become (business) partners.

How to Code a Sandcastle was perfectly fine, I was charmed by the "hello world" and "pearl" jokes, because I'm an easy audience. In terms of coding, I've read worse books at explaining that you need to keep testing and changing your code when it does what you tell it do it, but you didn't want what it actually did.

Third in a series, follows Divinity 36 and Demigod 12.

This book made choices and I hated all of them. ( Read more... )

The Left-handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix: this book is fine, I guess. But it says something about it that after finishing it and starting my write up, I couldn't remember the protagonist's name. Sharon? Susan? (I was about to say "it's Sharon, I looked" but then I actually looked and discovered it was Susan.) I remembered Merlin and Vivian, the booksellers. I remembered various other booksellers. But the demigod on a quest to find her father... oh well. This book is perfectly fine and not very memorable. Would have liked to see Merlin transition, but I have hope that maybe fic has already done that and provided Merlin/Susan femslash.

I feel like I have read Garth Nix before but none of the titles in the beginning sound familiar. Was there someone with a similar name, who published scifi books between the mid-90s and, like, 2001?

Consolation Songs: Optimistic Speculative Fiction For A Time of Pandemic, edited by Iona Datt Sharma: An excellent short story collection. Some of the stories were not to my taste but overall, it was great. The two stand out highlights were:

1) This Is New Gehesran Calling by Rebecca Fraimow, which is a wonderful story about pirate radio uniting a diaspora community. It was my absolute favorite, it definitely deserves its status as a Yuletide fandom

2) Storm Story by Llinos Cathryn Thomas, which takes place on a generation ship that travels on water in search of Land and is narrated very nicely by a young magician, very excellent on how the limited knowledge of a POV character can shape worldbuilding.

Demigod 12 by Gail Carriger: A light, enjoyable sequel where Phex And His Band Go On Tour, and Phex continues to be exploited by the Alien-Pop Powers That Be.

The blurb on the back makes it sound like there's something sinister and I was nervous about what kind of tonal shift was going to happen, so I feel the need to mention that there is nothing sinister going on. It continues the plot point from the first book of obsessed fans attacking the band members, but treats this like it's an untreatable condition and also sadly inevitable, a side effect of how fantastic this music is. There is no twist; what you do find out is that the Dyesi have three life stages and the ones we see are the middle ones. The adult life form is called imago, and the imago character lets it be known that the imagos do not take this whole divinity thing seriously at all, it's just stuff the nymphs get up to, and they've based it on the natural acoustics of the Dyesi's home cave systems and how the adults can sing sounds to convey instructions to the nymphs, and that became domes and pantheons. So. The sinister plot is that there is no sinister plot. They are not hiding that people become "fixed". That is well-known, although not, it seems, formally acknowledged, in the way that real life pop music industries also don't want to air their dirty laundry. There is no mystery of the Dyesi in this book; I suspect their life stages are not a secret and Phex just doesn't know much about them and doesn't spend time on Space Wikipedia.

Phex achieves excellent character growth and the romance with him and Missit remains the best part of this.

Note: the first chapter is where the not-really-informed-consent physical alteration surgeries occur; this is all theoretically agreed to, but the band members do not know in advance what's going to happen to them and did not agree to all the details, even the one that was buried in their contracts. It's unclear how many of the changes are permanent and how many are reversible; some will fade over time. One character's eye lid shape is changed. One character is upset about a change that was in the contract and he didn't realize would happen; it is reversible but it was not explained to him that it would be reversible when they told him about it and he discovers that something he thought he was born with was actually a surgical modification done to him by his society and then lied to about. No one is upset about anything else. I don't think you'll miss anything important if you skip this chapter.

As in the first book, a side character's terminal illness is a plot point, but more in the effect it has on the people in his life, and how it leads to Phex's exploitation as his understudy. There are no details on the illness itself. It remains possible that this illness can be cured/recovered from.

( The Iliad, translated by Emily Wilson; Starter Villain by John Scalzi; The Dubious Pranks of Shaindy Goodman by Mari Lowe )

Oh, this is delightful.

marginaliana recced this as low-stakes SFF and more relaxing than Legends and Lattes, and I agree completely. There is no Surprise Arson here, just engaging worldbuilding, excellent character work, and realistic stakes all the way through.

The premise of the book is: K-Pop Idols In Space With Aliens!!!!!!!

Bullet-points behind the cut, full spoilers: ( Read more... )

Jack, Sadie, and infant Elizabeth Rosenblum arrive in England from Berlin in 1937, the only ones of their families to make it out; no one else was able to get exit visas. Jack devotes himself to assimilating perfectly, revising a list he got from a refugee pamphlet as he goes. However, he learns that no matter how much you assimilate, you're still a Jew. And so he sells his home in London and buys a country property, all without telling his wife, so he can build his own golf course. None of the ones he has applied to will let him in, you see. And he's never actually golfed. But to be an Englishman, you must belong to a golf course. This is an unwritten rule that Jack has observed as existing in practice and so he diligently tries to follow it.

This is a book about survival. Jack is endlessly focused on the future and that fact that he very rarely thinks on who has been massacred and what has been destroyed is highlighted by Sadie's decades-long mourning and depression. They have so little in common as the years go on and can barely relate to each other, but they rely strongly on each other still being there, and Sadie especially relies on Jack's endless optimism as a touchstone and a reason to keep going; when she is in crisis and nearly accidentally kills herself, Jack is the one who rescues her and saves her life. They do not have a good marriage, but neither of them ever thinks of leaving each other; they both know they need each other, because there's no one else left.

Jack would be an infuriating character if it were not so clear to him and to the reader why he keeps pressing on and doing as he does. These are two characters responding to what happened and continues to happen. No matter what, Jack is still the Jew, and the best thing that happens to him because of being Jewish is being invited to drinks at someone's house so everyone can laugh at him and his strange, earnest ways, and then later undermine his attempts at building a golf course.

The golf course is, of course, a symbol. Another character even points out that if it's golfing he wants, he can join a Jewish golf club. But it's not about golf. It's about Becoming English, as defined by written and unwritten rules, in order for himself and his family to survive.

Before building the golf course, Jack has never played golf. He doesn't play a single second of golf until the golf course is completed and opened. He doesn't even practice. Because this is never, ever, ever actually about golf.

I don't understand the pull quote on the front calling the book "hilarious" and on the back calling it "very funny". While there is occasional humor, this book is a tragedy. I burst out crying three times, the second bad enough to have to clean my glasses, and the third requiring a long break to decide if I wanted to push through to the end or if I should just leave it be.

This book is only not a complete tragedy because it ends triumphantly for Jack's goals. But even then, the epilogue has Sadie buried on a hill outside of a cemetery (because even after fifty years in England, she won't be buried in a churchyard -- and those are the only two options?), and her grave is marked by a flagpole, and explicitly not with a gravestone. This, after the book takes pains earlier to describe the fate of the massacred family members as not having graves or gravestones.

So, in the end, Sadie assimilated fully, gave up everything that made her different, lost even the three photos of her family and the last gift her mother ever gave her, and to show for it, even she doesn't get a gravestone.

And what's the full assimilation like for Jack? He fails to assimilate into London, but assimilates into village life in the Dorset countryside, which is symbolized by, in other things, constantly drinking alcohol from a flask, because that's how you fit in.

I will note that I give this book a completely free pass on something that I usually hate: it renders low-class/poor people's accents phonetically. This makes it hard to understand some characters, including a Heartfelt And Plot Important Deathbed Note Written Down By Someone Who Talks In An Accent, but the book is doing it for a very clear purpose. These people are allowed to have accents that mark them as different. These people are allowed to speak an English that is not fully "correct". These people are allowed to mock and ignore the law. These people are indisputably Englishmen, and Jack can never, ever, actually fully become one of them, because his accent he can't get rid of marks him as foreign, even when he gets rid of everything, including both his first and his last name, that marks him as the Jew.

And this is partially why their daughter is able to assimilate completely while Jack and Sadie never fully can: she's doesn't remember what they've lost, and Jack was so adamant on assimilation that Sadie had to pick and choose what she could share with their daughter, and chose German fairytales and light family stories. Elizabeth has nothing to give up to become English; her parents gave it up on her behalf: her birth name when they came over, everything else afterward. So she sheds her last name, as the only remnant connecting her to Berlin, and that's nothing to her to have done. Meanwhile, Jack and Sadie are both wracked with emotion when they follow her into the last name change, because for them, it's not giving up nothing.

This book is a tragedy, and part of the "happy" ending is that the golf course returns to the land in the end anyway. Which makes sense, since Jack didn't buy it with the idea of making it a golf course, decided to turn it into one only after that, and the terrain was completely unsuited to becoming a golf course. It got shoved that way anyway. Possibly another metaphor, I guess.

( The Odyssey, Prophet, Jeopardy UK )

For some reason, I'd thought this was f/f, probably because of the cover. As I was reading it, I started spotting a few tropes and went oh, oh no, this is belligerent m/f hatred to love, isn't it. I flipped to the back, saw the protagonist described as Mother Of Kings, and faced a quandary. The book is enjoyable, so either I could suck it up and keep reading it despite the book being focused around Gunnhild/a man she can't stand, rather than Gunnhild/her childhood bff, or I could put it down. I kept going, but reluctantly.

And by the end, I wished I'd put it down when I first realized this was going in ways I Do Not Want.

I got so mad at this book, it gets bullet points: ( Spoilers of course )

Extremely readable, unlike whatever translation I had to read in college. Enjoyable, too.

I felt the biggest weaknesses of the translation were 1) not having a clear idea of who the audience is (i.e. total beginner to Beowulf vs someone steeped in the literature), and 2) occasionally falling into some Expertise Bias. Those problems are intertwined.

This would probably read amazingly to someone like the author and to others who have read and understood and appreciated Beowulf before. To someone who last read it 20 years ago and even then, not very well, I give this datapoint:

The author previously wrote a book called The Mere Wife, about Grendel's mother.

When she mentions this book in the preface, I read that as a textual quote insult about Grendel's mother, that she's "mere".

After reading the translation and puzzling out for myself that "mere" is being used to mean "lake", I realized that The Mere Wife means, basically, the woman who lives in the lake. Or, to be Arthurian about it: the lady of the lake.

"Mere" and "Scop" were the two words that blazed out the most to me as words that were used extensively and would have been footnoted or translated in a translation with a different idea of itself. I eventually decided they meant lake and bard, respectively, and googling says I'm right. Still, considering the common meaning of "mere", it felt very off to me, like I had to constantly correct what I thought it meant in the sentence to what it actually did. And "bard" is a perfectly cromulent word.

Why leave these particular words untranslated? In the preface, the author says she is, paraphrasingly, playing with the language, using both high and low, using both old words and new ("hashtag: blessed" makes an appearance). But why these words? I don't know.

But I think, when it comes to "mere", expertise bias reared its head. After all, she wrote a book called The Mere Wife! Everyone knows what mere means!

Spoiler: I do not.

(Please do not "well actually" me about the word "mere" still existing in modern English; I have never heard of it before. There are many specialized words for bodies of water, I only guessed it meant lake because first I thought it was mer = the sea, and then from description, realized it had to be smaller bounds, so call it a lake, but for all I knew it was a river.)

This is a good book and a good version of Beowulf; as I am not a scholar and she made no translator notes other than the preface, and footnoted nothing, I cannot speak to how good it is as a translation. It is well-written and I finally understood how all the tangents fit together. There were some very good lines in it, the kinds of things I'd highlight if I was prone to highlighting and it wasn't a library copy.

On Beowulf's merits as a story, I don't... really... like it? But I feel like liking it is completely secondary; I wasn't reading this because I enjoy Beowulf, I was reading it because it's a version of Beowulf that refers to Grendel as "fucked by fate".

I feel like she should have played less with the old vs new language and kept it all cutting-edge contemporary, which would have aged very very badly but, for the age in which the translation is written, work amazingly, and also would have stood as a testament to current slang in a way potentially useful to later scholarship. This is a very specific conceit for a very specific book, so embrace it and be specific. (I personally could have done without the word "stan" but that is for personal preference because I despise that term.)

Thinking it over, I guess my summary of this book is: Beowulf for people who don't actually want to read Beowulf. And that's an endorsement.

I don't have enough to say about this book to justify an entire post for it, but it took me long enough to slog through it, that it's getting its own post.

In short, this book does what it says on the tin. It focuses on cuneiform tablets and monument inscriptions primarily, and archaeological evidence a very long-distance secondarily, to discuss multiple civilizations across multiple millennia, focusing mostly on non-royalty, although still with a lot of royalty involved.

It's very dry. It should be drier. I kept stumbling on moments where Podany tried to liven it up with speculated details about that person's life. I get that it can be hard to paint a picture of someone when all you have is a couple tablets, but the speculation sometimes raised my eyebrows at the assumptions she made.

I also kept randomly stumbling over Podany's prejudices about Me The Reader. She kept making certain assumptions about what I'd think of things, which I don't know if they reflect her own prejudices or comments she's received during her career from students or the general public. But it kept randomly being like "this is not X, like you'd expect" or "you have negative connotations for this term", and I'd blink a lot and say "?????"

She also... mostly remembers about survivorship bias? She even discusses it! But then she'll say things like "this kingdom kept no written records, they probably didn't need to, since they were small" and no!!!!!!! That archeologists have not yet found written records does not mean they never existed!!!!!! You know this! You even mention that various places probably did it on materials that aren't as durable as clay tablets! You mention that several of the clay tablets you discuss only survived to be archeological finds by happenstance! You focused all your research on clay tablets and privileged cuneiform, and that's fine, but that doesn't mean that places where clay tablets haven't been found means they didn't keep written records or write letters to each other!!!! You know this! You mention this! Stop randomly stating this anyway!

But I digress.

If you heard me mention I was reading a book about cuneiform tablets that deliberately chose not to discuss Ea-Nasir because he's internet famous, it's this one.

It is a good book! My overall rating is: Needs More Maps.

This book has a few maps (five?). It needs more. The fact that I don't even know how many maps there are is because they randomly show up as figures during chapters; there's no maps section. There's no map at the preface of every chapter. The maps aren't even necessarily very good as maps.

It needs more maps. It needs bigger ones, that have more focus areas. Stop assuming I know where every city or archeological site is, and give me more maps.

Thus ends the recommendation. It's a good book! But it took me Very Long to slog through it.

Thomas & Friends: Race for the Sodor Cup (2022): This movie has very nearly nothing at all to do with Thomas The Tank Engine as a long-established media property. It takes the general characters and the general setting, and tossed out nearly everything else that makes it Thomas The Tank Engine. Some engines are now children. Some engines are now adults. They are able to jump up and turn around on the tracks. Multiple trains can be on the same tracks at the same times. The engines are able to get themselves back up if they derail. It is now essentially "characters who happen to be shaped like trains and theoretically move around on tracks"; they are not actually trains. The trains can go up on "their toes" by having their wheels down and their bodies up, and things can go underneath them. At one pivotal moment, two trains deliberately jump off the tracks and onto a grassy hill, drive on it for a bit as a detour, and then jump onto a boat.

This might sound like a complaint. An indictment, if you will. They took a beloved children's media property and removed everything that made it what it was. They turned it into a hollow shell with a cutesy animation scheme and kept the branding to keep the market share from the existing audience. You may think I have a problem with this decision.

I don't.

Because I didn't notice a single moment anyone in this movie was called Really Useful, or prized for being able to work, or follow orders blindly, or not question their superiors, or work overtime in dangerous conditions.

This movie is a wholly contrived story about a train race around Sodor that has three teams of two engines. It has to be two engines because Kana's partner Kenji gets injured before the race, so Thomas has to substitute in. Despite them being fully outclassed, they, of course, win the race. They also are the only team to finish the race, thus necessarily winning by default, but let us not delve too deeply into this.

Meanwhile, the engines all learn the importance of teamwork.

Thomas & Friends: The Mystery of Lookout Mountain (2023): Not yet completed but same as above, with the addition that there is now an autistic train named Bruno, who is a brake car. Thomas The Tank Engine has completed its journey into becoming a kids television show. Welcome.

Diesel is also able to use the front of his bumper as hands.

My Aunt Is A Monster by Reimena Yee: a delightful mid-grade graphic novel about a blind orphan named Safia who is taken in by her Famous Adventurer Aunt (who was turned into a monstrous form eight years ago) and her aunt's former-nanny-later-adventuring-partner, who used to work for a dastardly agency determined to cause chaos. Chaotic actions include stealing artifacts and selling them to private collectors, oh no! Don't worry, the nanny/partner is retired from that life.

When the aunt's old childhood friend/rival/possibly former-significant-other risks befalling the same monstrous fate that she did, she comes out of retirement, and they prevent current chaos agents from causing chaos, on an Exciting Adventure. Great story, great illustrations.

Unicorn on A Roll: Another Phoebe and Her Unicorn Adventure by Dana Simpson: I haven't read the first one but that doesn't really matter; this isn't a single narrative, it's a collection of comic panels/strips about the characters. Enjoyable!

Frankenstein Doesn't Plant Petunias. Graphic novel by Pearl Low, original book by Marcia Thornton Jones and Debbie Dadey. Enjoyable graphic-ization of the original book!

( National Geographic Little Kids First Big Book of Space; Desmond by Ulysses Dietz; A Study in Charlotte by Brittany Cavallaro )

Other Covenants: Alternate Histories of the Jewish People, edited by Andrea D. Lobel and Mark Shainblum: Meh. I was much more liberal in noping out and skipping ones I didn't like than with Jewish Futures, but even with the ones I did read, none of them were any fun.

The most fun of any of this was when I was explaining the plot of one of them to a RL person and the look on his face when I got to the second half of this sentence: "it's about if the Exodus never happened and the Roman Empire conquered the world, and it's present day and there hasn't been slavery in Egypt in thousands of years anyway, and there's a second exodus led by a guy named Moshe who builds a spaceship to have the Exodus be into space, and then the spaceship blows up after launch with Moshe on board, and they decide to call Moshe the son of god."

Also, I guess I was wrong, dealing with the Jewish Autonomous Oblast actually is enough of a thing that it's in this, too, so I guess it's a trope I just never knew about, and yet again a completely wasted plotline, this time about having to decide the ethics of providing life-saving surgery on Stalin, but it's actually fine, she doesn't need to operate on him after all.

People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy, edited by Rachel Swirsky and Sean Wallace: Also meh. In general, it had a higher quality of writing than the above and Jewish Futures, but still... meh. I note that there is an overlap of one story between this and the above: a "what if India was the dominant cultural force/conquered the world" where the only Jews are Karaites. There is no ending to this short story, which I suspect is part of the point. It was not good enough to be read twice.

After finishing this book and wondering why it felt so meh, I reminded myself that I tend to only like genre fiction. This is not genre fiction. I did not like it. Jewish Futures was genre fiction, but I still didn't like it. Oh well.

The Cybernetic Tea Shop by Meredith Katz: I read, like, a fourth of this? Maybe? It's a small book with large print. Seemed fine but wasn't gripping me. I was too bored to deal with this, the plot seemed really obvious, and the prose was... like, it was fine. If you like middle grade (I don't know if this is middle grade, but it felt middle grade) and you also like Legends And Lattes, you'll probably like this, from the parts of it that I read.

Crush by Richard Siken: this poetry collection is so incredibly 2005. I don't know how else to describe it. It is the essence of 2005. The copyright page says 2005 and it's like, yep, it sure is. It's 2005. It won an award in 2004? Very well, I will allow that is also incredibly 2004.

The Muppets (2011): 1) Based on what I saw of the next film (Muppets Most Wanted), this is much better, especially since it did not make the bizarre choice of sending Kermit to the gulag, good job in not doing that. 2) Wow, this is not the Muppets.

Okay, so, my osmosised knowledge of this film was that it was driven entirely from Jason Segel wanting to be in a Muppet movie, and so he basically did everything he possibly could to get the Muppets doing movies again, so he could be in it, because he loves the Muppets so much. Whether or not this is accurate, I do not know, but watching the movie made me believe this even more.

Jason Segel plays this like the Muppets are the Most Wholesome Children's Entertainment Ever. He is more wholesome than Mr. Rogers is. Not a single emotion goes on his face without him thinking to himself, "I'm in a movie that I've wanted to be in since I was a child, wheeee!!!"

The plot is that Walter, Jason Segel's brother who is a muppet, imprints on the Muppets and ends up getting the band back together to Save The Muppets. Walter himself is a fairly strange character and can only be described as Jason Segel's Character But Happens To Be A Puppet (He's Not Much Of A Muppet).

Amy Adams has nothing to do in this movie. Sorry, Amy Adams. You deserve better.

This isn't a particularly bad movie (Muppets Most Wanted is a bad movie and I only saw maybe 40% of that one) but it's heavily nostalgia-driven and that makes it fail entirely at being The Muppets.

They say never meet your heroes? Well, never become big enough in Hollywood where you can hire your heroes and have them perform as themselves in a self-insert movie out of your childhood dreams and then release it as a film.

All the Horses of Iceland by Sarah Tolmie: Read off of skygiants's rec. This is excellent. It reads exactly like a translation, keeping its sentence and prose structure to mimic the original, but throwing in various slang or modern terms to convey nuance that's in the original or make it accessible to the reader. The reason you know it's not a translation is because there's no footnotes and no map.

This is one book that could really have used a map. If I'd gone and kept googling what various places corresponded to, I'd probably have gotten more out of the geography. But as I didn't, it still worked fine. It's just, like, you know *handwave* that part of the world. You know. Around there.

The plot is about an Icelandic guy who joins a trading caravan ran by a Jew from Khazaria and ends up in Mongolia where he meets a ghost and also gets horses. There is light narration by the Christian scribe from three hundred years later, named Jor, who is the one actually writing this. The book is completely unsentimental and not interested in emotions, adding even more to its feeling of being in translation and not a book written for the audience of a Tor book.

I feel like this book is both "must a book have plot? Can it not simply be a mood?" and also successfully has a plot, which is well-done in a book that's a hundred pages long.

Does anyone know if this author is in fandom and is open about their username? I was also going to say "if you like Specific Author's fic, you will love this, because it has some of the same mood" but then it occurred to me that I might be unintentionally making a correct connection and outing someone.

So, off of last week's Multiple Authors Fail To Imagine A Compelling Jewish Future But Publish Them Anyway, we turn to a book where an author imagines a very compelling Jewish future, where a Jewish interfaith polyamorous family conducts first contact with two alien species.

I have Thoughts and they are disorganized, so, bullet points: ( Read more... )

Thomas The Tank Engine and friends should unionize. Their working conditions are bad, they don't get benefits, their boss is a nightmare and blames them for things that are not their fault.

So. Like. Either union or overthrow Sir Toppem Hat. *shrug emoji*

This is a Jewish scifi short story anthology, built around the idea of imagining Jewish futures.

This anthology is a mixed bag, as you'd probably expect. I recommend completely skipping the first story; starting an anthology about Jewish Futures with a story about the successful genocide of all remaining Jews, including the narrator, was certainly a Choice That Was Made. Skip the book's intro, too, which is self-serving and tells you nothing about the stories actually in the anthology or what to expect from it.

Highlights of the anthology:

Rachel Nussbaum Saves The World by Esther Friesner: I almost skipped this one. I saw on the first page that it was about zombies and I very nearly noped. But then I skimmed and noticed it had a great narrative voice, so I hung on and I'm glad I did. Because this fixes my actual problem with zombies in fiction, which is no understanding or feeling that these are the dead people of our communities and we love them and miss them. This is instead a story about how Flatbush managed to live as humans and zombies together while everyone else did a zombie apocalypse.

Baby Golem by Barbara Krasnoff: delightful story about a Jewish woman on a spaceship making a robot golem to appease some Pushy Well-Meaning Christians. She turns to her rabbinical student friend back home to teach the golem how to Judaism. Told entirely through email, with some shades of Jerry Was A Man when the Christians decide they want ownership of the golem.

Frummer House by Leah Cypess: hilarious story about several house-running programs that get an update to make them frummer than the people who live there.

"It's complicated":

The Ascent by S.I. Rosenbaum and Abraham Josephine Reisman: this is unsatisfactory as a short story and should be a novel. It tells a whole story within its word count limit but I dislike specific choices that were made so it would fit into a short story. It is good at what it is but it shouldn't be that, it should be much longer. However, it seems to be trying to be a spiritual successor to On Venus, Have We Got A Rabbi, which I recall not liking when I read it and have never gone back and reread, but in comparison to what I remember of that story, this one is much better.

The Kuiper Gemara by Shane Tourtellotte: this could have been so good if the rabbi hadn't decided to stop the AI's conversion process because the AI didn't believe in God, while on a space station that explicitly has multiple denominations of Jews and even includes one character saying that the AI could be Reform and so would work on shabbos (they currently turn it off on shabbos). Surely, in Space Judaism Future, there is a denomination of Judaism that does not require an avowed belief in God for conversion to happen. It's not even clear what denomination the rabbi himself belongs to! And he's the only rabbi on this station!

Moon Melody by SM Rosenberg: a hard to quantify and summarize story, but excellent nonetheless, about a school for people with superpowers, featuring an Orthodox Jewish mind reader and a goy who has Ultra Healing Powers. It's very good and also does the thing I wish all superpowers stories did, which was allow for space, nay, indulge in the space, of having normal careers for superpowered people where they can use their superpowers in that career, rather than being superheros/etc. And then it swerved away from that and ended way too abruptly. Of the three in this section, this is the one I liked the most but also the one I felt had too much frustrated potential and too many things brought up but then left unexplored.

Anti-rec:

One Must Imagine by Harry Turtledove: hey what if the Jewish future was just incessant conversion attempts, but it was on Mars instead? Annoying and depressing. In an anthology of short stories that didn't lack for antisemitism and pogroms, this is the one I felt missed the mark the most. There is nothing science fictional or fantastical about this story. There is no plot, the only through-line is conversion attempts, and the only thing that makes it "science fiction" is instead of the character being a mechanic on Earth, he's a mechanic on Mars.

For hours after reading this story, I kept flashing back and going and another thing about it. A Wiccan character blames the Jews for all religious persecution anywhere, ever, on the argument that Jews invented monotheism, and monotheism invented religious persecution, and every religious persecution in history that doesn't involve monotheists is just because they learned it from monotheists, and so it's the fault of the Jews even when Jews aren't involved. Just! What! The! Fuck! Is! That! I once read a book by Turtledove, but if I had never read him before, after reading this short story, I would avoid him forever.

My overall rating of this anthology: ...meh. Not as good as I'd hoped. A few good stories, some meh ones, and some "are you fucking serious on including this" ones. I don't plan to keep this on my bookshelf; I may pass it along to some Youth Of Today, or might just shove it in a Little Free Library. Considering the short stories this book starts and ends with, I'm not sure I'm comfortable saying to the kid who might be interested, "hey, here's an anthology of science fiction stories about Jewish futures! It starts and ends with successful genocides. Enjoy!" So the little free library, it may be.

Because. Yeah. I really feel like the first rule of submission for an anthology of stories about Jewish Futures should have been: there has to be one. And that sums up my feelings a lot in general about the anthology overall.

But the nice thing about mediocre short stories is that as soon as I went to the next one, I pretty much forgot the previous one, except for the ones with the Lingering Annoyance. (You made the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the Soviet Union into its own independent Yiddish-speaking country and you wasted it on that plot line?????? That you didn't even resolve??????)

This book is also very short and slim, coming in at barely 250 pages, including intro and ending stuff. It's short stories! They don't take up that many pages! You could have included more! You could have cast a wider net! You could have given the short stories you had more words, so they'd all have endings instead of just stopping!

Anyway, I don't actually rec this anthology, which is frustrating, believe me. I really wanted to love it.

I know, I know. If you want something niche, do it yourself. But I guess I've just been spoiled by the times I haven't had to.

Great Muppet Caper: The ending did not change my opinion on the quality of the movie.

The Muppets Take Manhattan: This movie benefits from comparison to the Great Muppet Caper, because it has a much better script and songs. However. That said. I would have appreciated a spoiler for the whole "Kermit gets hit by a car and then has amnesia" plotline. Which is on me for not reading the Wikipedia summary, I guess, but what the fuck was that choice.

Also, it has not escaped me how terrible Miss Piggy's plotlines are in these two movies.

The best part of having watched these movies is this opportunity to use my We're Here To Heckle The Muppet Movie icon in a supremely on-topic way.

The City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty: I gave it about 150 pages and gave up. If you want a book about Fantasy Discrimination, this is the book for you. Since I don't, it's not.

Catfishing on Catnet by Naomi Kritzer: This is as delightful as everyone says it is. From the cover and the blurb, I was a little concerned. I feel like this is one of those "yes, it's filled with this and this and this heavy stuff, but it's good and it's funny" books. So yes this is definitely a mother and daughter on the run from abuser, and how technology and the panopticon makes life awful and difficult for them, and about terrible high schools, and it takes its responsibility to the target audience seriously by giving them tips on internet security, sex, gender identity, and even namedrops Scarleteen. And it's good!

Chaos on CatNet by Naomi Kritzer: Okay, this one I had problems with. ( Read more... )

I was gonna leave this in my ongoing I Read/Watch Things document to eventually get posted with other stuff but I was just SO ANGRY AT THIS BOOK and ranted for so long, it's getting its own post, so:

A Strange and Stubborn Endurance by Foz Meadows: Velasin, a minor noble from Bigotry Land, ends up arranged married to Caethari, a minor noble from Diversity Land, which is so much better at everything than Bigotry Land, including their food. Alas, it also has political intrigue around inheritance and a plot to frame Caethari for inciting incompetant and unsuccessful political assassinations that are clearly just stunts. But Velasin and Caethari are united to solve the case!

I will give it this: unlike other slashfic!novels I've read in the last year, it kept its stakes reasonable, and the plot did not abruptly stop for a chapter of hurt/comfort in a location where the villain knew where they were and could attack at any point. The hurt/comfort chapters were in safe locations.

However. I ended up very angry at this book. ( Spoilers )

KinnPorsche (TV): I started this after watching some fanvids and reading some fic. I needed to rely heavily on spoilers for getting through the second episode, then read a spoiler in a fic that made me not want to watch the rest of the show. I wish the show had been more like the fic.

The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older (2023): F/F mystery novella taking place above Jupiter.

Stilted prose and not particularly engaging; I read it because it was short. I eventually realized it was attempting Sherlock Holmes pastiche, which explained some of the stylistic choices, but I wish the author had gone all the way with it. Doing it only partially was very jarring. The f/f 'ship makes no sense in the context of them being exes, even if it was amicable; only the Holmesianness explains why "dear" gets used immediately.

I also dispute the entire idea that a post-apocalyptic Earth would be a tabula rasa where you can carefully recreate anything and can mess it up by tossing some genes into it. I just could not buy a basic assumption of the book's worldbuilding and that was a problem.

The title feels way too tongue in cheek. The phrase did eventually show up toward the end of the book, but it felt way too much like "ha ha, get it? Because it's Holmes? Which is a known success? And this is mimicking it?"

It's telling that the two things I remember about this book are the things I feel the editor should have cut: the first is a really tumblr joke based on "unhinged" meaning there's a lack of hinges, and a reference to the phrase "why are men?" as wisdom of the ancestors. Ugh. Cut them both.

Not recommended. Could have been much better if it really had gone all the way Holmes.

The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty (2023): Retired pirate Amina Al-Sirafi reunites with her old crew to find a missing person.

Excellent prose and excellent narrative voice. I understand why this was so highly recommended. However, it is about a hundred pages too long. It was well-structured and with great plot beats and foreshadowing in the first half, and then kept throwing more and more complications and repetitiveness in the second half. A whole lot could and should have been cut. It would have really improved the flow and kept the narrative tension going.

I wonder if part of that was due to a page count thing I've been noticing: that the difference between YA and non-YA in current publishing is that YA is 300 pages and non-YA is 500 pages. Since this book comes in at 460ish pages, if they'd cut it down, it would have been YA length. I am only partially kidding/conspiracy theorizing here; I don't know why books have gotten to this length, there's nothing wrong with a book that's 300 pages long.

The book is good, but the last hundred pages or so involved a lot of skimming/skipping.

The Great Muppet Caper (1981): Serviceable but not very good movie, nothing like the original Muppet Movie. The joke about Kermit and Fozzie being identical twins (with Fozzie not being able to tell them apart -- and yet he kept his usual bit of calling Kermit "sir") was mystifying and got old very fast. It's the kind of thing that must come from some specific movie this one is parodying, but since it's so bizarre, it doesn't stand at all on its own, and the internet does not inform me that it's actually parodying anything in particular. Such a weird plot element. Didn't finish but may eventually watch the ending.

( Various Sesame Street media )

( Two books: For This We Left Egypt?: A Passover Haggadah for Jews and Those Who Love Them Hardcover by Dave Barry, Alan Zweibel, Adam Mansbach and Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia by Natasha Lance Rogoff. )

The Obsidian Tower by Melissa Caruso: A hereditary magic user named Ryxander has screwed up magic that means she destroys anything she touches; she's Rogue from the x-men but also destroys plants and stuff. ( I didn't like it )

Honey and Me by Meira Drazin:

This is a midgrade novel about Orthodox Jewish bas mitzvah girls, published by Scholastic. ( It's amazing this book exists )