Review: The Luminaries

The Luminaries by Susan Dennard
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

While we await the long-developing conclusion to Dennard's signature work in The Witchlands, here she brings us readers a smaller piece of more modern fantasy, based on the "Sooz Your Own Adventure" (as she called it) games she entertained readers with on Twitter a few years back. It's not an exact match to how the story went based on Twitter polls, but then again, I barely remember most of what went down in those polls anyway. What I do remember, though, is feeling the whole time like Dennard had every intention of writing The Luminaries into an actual book, and now the time has come for her to present this book, the first in a series if the loose ends at the conclusion are anything to go by. I've seen other reviews that say this book feels like a throwback to 2000s or early 2010s YA, and to an extent, those reviews are pretty well correct. It's a relatively short book set in a small town where there's a lot of fantastic mystery around every corner, and the protagonist is a misfit in this town because her father went bad and now everyone else, especially outside her clan, thinks it's open season to subject her to perpetual Mean Girls kind of crap. Everyone, that is, except for the stereotypical bad boy with a heart of gold, who constantly smells of cigarettes and weed, but was the leading lady's old friend so that's the source of their tension. So yeah, Dennard gets pretty tropey in this one, but it's still a zippy little read, easily done in a single sitting (Marie Lu certainly wasn't wrong about that in her blurb.) And yeah, those loose ends really do make me want to keep going and read the inevitable sequel. Hopefully, though, Dennard finishes The Witchlands first...

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Review: The Sunbearer Trials

The Sunbearer Trials by Aiden Thomas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Aiden Thomas returns to the style of their debut novel Cemetery Boys in the start of their first official series, a duology said to be a Percy Jackson and Hunger Games hybrid in a world inspired by Mexican cultures (particularly the old legends of the Aztec and Maya) and very modern in its sensibilities. Naturally, Thomas writes a great number of LGBTQ+ characters, including trans protagonist Teo, who, while still battling dysphoria (represented by his wings, which are smaller and less bright in color than are typical of cis boy semidioses), is fortunate enough to live in a society that affirms his identity quite freely. (Unsurprisingly, given that even the gods of this world are diverse in terms of gender - Sol, for instance, is established as nonbinary straight from the prologue.)

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever - Don't Ever Say Marvel Has No Heart. Ever. Again.

 **NO SPOILERS FOR WAKANDA FOREVER, BUT SPOILERS FOR PREVIOUS MCU MOVIES AND SHOWS ABOUND WITHIN. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.***

T'Challa is dead.

Long live the king.

You know you're in for a vibranium spear to the feels when this movie opens with Shuri scrambling in her lab to synthesize the heart-shaped herb, lost when Killmonger burned the whole crop in the first Black Panther movie almost a full five years ago, in a last-ditch attempt to save her ailing brother T'Challa. Not unlike Chadwick Boseman in real life, T'Challa dies very suddenly of a terminal illness which no one had known about, and by the time it became clear, it was too late.

Then cue the Marvel Studios logo, the same specifically Black Panther edition which Disney+ placed on the streaming version of the first film in Boseman's honor, with the logo background in purple instead of red.

Total silence.

Don't reach for your popcorn.

And if you think that's the most intense tearjerker this movie has to offer, just you bloody wait.

As T'Challa once famously said, "This never gets old."

Review: Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman

Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman by Alan Rickman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Alan Rickman…may he rest in peace. I was surprised to learn that one of the most iconic actors of this generation was a prolific diarist, and even more so that they were going to be published. Chronicling his life and career from 1993 through 2015, ending mere weeks before his death, we get to know a man of sharp wit, strong opinions, and terrific devotion to his craft and his friends. Frequent themes recur through his entries: the surreal nature of having to work after a dreadful disaster (as he observes in the wake of such events as 9/11 and the Northridge earthquake), the utter ridicule to which he subjects British and American politics and politicians (rare exceptions being his longtime partner Rima Horton, a Labour organizer and twice failed candidate for Parliament, and of course President Obama), and his innermost thoughts about what the hell is Snape’s motivation? Or any other character he played, for that matter, but rest assured that Snape is the role that confounded him the most, and David Yates in particular caused him much vexation. Not to mention his frequent digs at the talent level of the Golden Trio’s younger selves (he grew to respect them much more as he grew up, though.) Bottom line, Rickman was a serious fellow, loath to be typecast, but complex as it gets.

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Review: Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution

Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R.F. Kuang
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

R.F. Kuang's long awaited entry in the dark academia genre turned a lot of heads for months, even years, before its publication - and already the phenomenon is looking to repeat itself in her next novel Yellowface, her most realistic book yet but also very incisive in its social commentary from all the buzz I'm seeing about it already. Kuang is no stranger to harsh critiques of Western society and history, and this book, in which she shifts away from the largely allegorical parallels of the Poppy War trilogy and towards the real history of English imperialism (and yet still with some magical allegories to underline her thesis, as it were), is no exception. Kuang devotes hundreds of pages to the density of university learning and the subject of language, and the rapacious true purpose of the Babel Institute at Oxford, and the danger inherent in joining a revolutionary group that's been spending years and years planting the seeds for their eventual attack against a system that covers so many continents. And not unlike Kuang's previous novel The Burning God, this book builds up slowly to an ending that absolutely lays waste to everything and everyone in its path. And while there's easy room to assume that there could still be more stories to follow The Burning God, Babel has pretty clearly ended, though its presence in my mind will linger for quite a long time.

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