Review: Only Human

Only Human by Sylvain Neuvel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

At last, I reach the end of Sylvain Neuvel's kick-ass, increasingly apocalyptic trilogy, and as expected, Neuvel goes more all out for the finale than ever before. And I didn't think he could possibly top the War of the Worlds-level alien nightmarishness of Waking Gods...oh, but you kid. Well, ten years have passed in-universe since that game-breaking cliffhanger, and now we get to see where Rose and team went. And what happened on Earth in the meantime, where the apocalypse may not be aliens attacking us, but us attacking us.

Cold War II is upon the world as both the US and Russia resurge, colonizing their neighbors, and putting anyone with alien DNA in concentration camps - which also happens to include a lot of people of color, and especially a lot of Muslims, because almost by coincidence the Middle East was where the aliens mostly interbred with humans a long time ago. Like racists need more excuses to be the assholes they really are, but they're just a sign that the human race in general is a bunch of bastards and needs more than just a good kick in the pants to course-correct. Not that the aliens are much better, though. They're often very hard to read from a moral standpoint, but they display so much of a head-in-the-sand attitude towards the ramifications of their centuries of interstellar colonization that it mostly makes them hard to like.

Overall, this book reminds me a bit of N.K. Jemisin's The Stone Sky in its depiction of a world where everything's gone to shit and even the good guys aren't convinced it's worth it to save said world.

But don't worry, it's Neuvel. He won't give us a complete downer ending. Just like he won't go a whole book without loads of Star Wars references.

To the Themis Files, I now say ave atque vale, and of course au revoir.

View all my reviews

Review: Love Scene, Take Two

Love Scene, Take Two by Alex Evansley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars





I was lucky enough to read this book in its original form, Between Takes, on Wattpad. I enjoyed it so much because it read kinda like an old fantasy of mine from my earliest writing days, in which my books got made into a movie with Chloe Bennet as the leading lady, and I got to date her. The difference being that Teddy Sharpe and Bennett Caldwell are more like Dylan O'Brien and Alex Evansley, but that's okay. The point is, even though this style of book is normally very much not for me, Alex's book was completely the opposite, so much up my alley and enormously lovable.



Now, she's got this new version of her book available for all of us to read, and I'll be damned if I don't get them not to stock it at the Stanford Bookstore where I'll make it yet another Staff Pick.



I did notice a few small changes in the road from BT to LS,T2. Like, for instance, the slight de-aging of both Teddy and Bennett. Teddy's now just a couple of months shy of 21 at the start of this book, so he can't just get a bourbon on the rocks when he boards the flight to Charlotte. And Bennett, she's 18 - so this one part where I remember, from the original version of the story, where Bennett muses about how her creative-writing professor criticized her a bit for writing as if Parachutes was already a movie with trailer-ready snappy dialogue. Or something like that. I'm honestly surprised my own creative-writing professors never went there with my own writing, but then again, they never read more than, oh, maybe twenty pages out of the hundreds I've created for my big old series. And they were far less critical than this one classmate who was just the biggest assbutt of them all...but I'm not affected by his nonsense at all.



I also don't remember much of Liz and Will from the original version, but I'm definitely not going to forget them as written here. Will is so much me - he's a queer guy (though gay, not quite like little bi me) surrounded by family who doesn't understand him in the slightest, and I wouldn't be surprised if my own family, were I ever to really be out to them, would out me to anyone and everyone they could just to embarrass me. The way Liz does, among other truly atrocious things that make her the most supremely unlikable character in the whole book. (And I thought Burt Bridges was the actual worst back in Between Takes.) On a lighter note, I actually have a friend named Liz whom I told about her namesake, and she and I agreed, this fictional Liz felt a little more like she got possessed by the spirit of Mihai, the worst neighbor in Bucharest (or so Romanian Duolingo would have us believe in this little running joke.)



But you know what? I'm very, very glad I went and bought myself this book, because I so badly need the lovely chemistry of #Shardwell5Ever in my life. By sheer coincidence, the week when Teddy and Bennett meet for the first time, in my real life, was marked by me trying an OKCupid date for the first time and getting totally stood up because I'm basically cursed to never be loved.



Yeah, Ted.



Mm-hmm. He's got me pegged.

But then there's Teddy and Bennett, who are almost exactly what I want in a relationship. A little insta-lovey, to be sure, and maybe a little too reliant on repetitive lines for laughs (like the "alphabet of hepatitis" bit, but then Bennett also comments on repetition of lines being literally Teddy's job, so there's that.) But the chemistry they have is Stonefield- or Melwood-grade beautiful and natural and I'm always there for that.



But then again, there's a reason why this book gets a fair few references in my own manuscripts, including a recently-written bit in Peppermint where I have Alex Snow mention two clubbers being a Shardwell couples cosplay. Not gonna lie, if I ever do break my relationship curse, get me a girl I can do this couples cosplay with. I'm pretty sure I resemble Dylan...sorry, Teddy enough to pull off that half already, lol.



As for whoever's the lucky lady who gets to be my Bennett, well, all she's gotta do is make me a real sucker for a chick in a ball cap. (Not that I'm not already.) And the part I liked the best was how the Caldwell family was such a friendly and mellow bunch - the kind of family I wish I had. Certainly the kind that would've let me drink a little even while underage (as long as I didn't cut too loose, y'know). Or the kind that would've let me be openly bi in peace - seriously, Will got the wrong branch of this family tree. He deserves to be a Caldwell, sib to Bennett and Tanner both.



I remember Alex was working a bit on a sequel, titled Outtakes at the time, but I'm sure if she writes it now, it'll have a different title. I just hope it comes, though. I'm not sure I can handle a world where this is the only Shardwell tale we get! And though I'm not sure I'll get to publish my own books through SwoonReads, if I do, I know me and mine will be in great company with Alex and hers. (Which reminds me, I need to try and revive my SwoonReads account. It's been dead for quite a while.)



View all my reviews

Review: Exo

Exo by Fonda Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I admit, when I first heard about this book, I had to smile because the author's name, Fonda Lee, so strongly resembles that of a character I created for my own books - Fionna Lee. Enough that I'm going to write in a few references to my own characters picking up this book just because of that name similarity. But I digress. Exo here is a pretty kickass book, loaded with action and thought-provoking sci-fi scenarios reminiscent, very strongly, of the TV series Colony and Falling Skies. I can promise you, this book doesn't end with a single character unscathed, and the reader won't be unscathed either. And if you're like me, you're going to read it all in one sitting. It's that good.

View all my reviews

Ant-Man And The Wasp: Mind. Bent.

***NO SPOILERS FOR ANT-MAN AND THE WASP, BUT SPOILERS FOR PREVIOUS MCU FILMS WILL APPEAR WITHIN. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.***

The first Ant-Man movie, three years ago, was refreshingly different from most of the rest of the MCU, being centered on the West Coast instead of the East and also, to a degree not shown in any previous MCU movie up to that point besides Guardians of the Galaxy, being very humor-oriented without sacrificing a great deal of heart in the process. It also served as a coda to Phase Two, following up on a game-changing episode in Age of Ultron. Here, the stakes are a little different. Ant-Man and the Wasp isn't a coda to Phase Three - that phase still has a year to go yet! Instead, it builds up to an ending that ties this latest San Francisco side trip back to Infinity War and its legendarily Rick Riordan-grade cliffhanger. But until that point, this movie continues the stylistic and emotional trend of its predecessor, heavy on heart and humor both and also managing to outdo the first Ant-Man in the visual department.

Golder than the gate in the center of the poster, accurately reflecting just how killer fun this movie is.

Review: The Hazel Wood

The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

It's not often that I get a book that I find severely overhyped, but I'm sorry to say that The Hazel Wood is the latest addition to that list. Promising to be kind of another Alice in Wonderland retelling, it does play out a little like the Splintered trilogy in that it's heavy on the meta-fiction style, stories within stories and dreamy imagery and all that. But unlike Splintered, I couldn't bring myself to care one whit about this Alice. Or any of the other characters in this book, really, save for one - who of course winds up dying, and somehow coming back later, and...and by that point, I found myself skimming through the book because I'd just plain lost interest. This book just wound up trying too hard to imitate Holly Black for me, much to its detriment. Really, that one character who dies was the glue keeping me attached to this story. So I'm going to consider this one a DNF.

View all my reviews

Review: Blackfish City

Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

My first taste of Sam J. Miller's work, and I'm actually really sorry that first taste wasn't The Art of Starving - which I've gone ahead and ordered at the library. But this book? I'm sorry to say it didn't really deliver like I was hoping for. Maybe I should've looked a little closer at the cover and seen the endorsement by Ann Leckie more properly. I didn't like the Imperial Radch trilogy, like, at all, and this book treads some similar stylistic ground - which made this book almost impossible for me to really enjoy. I found myself not caring about any of the characters in the main narrative, with the exception of Soq - they were pretty cool. Everyone else, though? They were either "Ankit who?" or "Fill's a horny piece of crap and I don't like being in his head anymore." Probably the best thing about this book is that it's full of diversity, especially with regards to queerness - especially-especially with Soq, whom, as you'll note above, uses they/them pronouns. And it's got a glitzy cover too. But aside from that, it's just one of those really weird, detached narratives (again, a lot in the style of Ann Leckie) that really just isn't for me, I'm sorry to say.

View all my reviews

Review: The Burning Maze

The Burning Maze by Rick Riordan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The latest in the Trials of Apollo series continues the increased darkness trend started in the second book, while also raising the memorable humor and smartassery back to the levels we've long come to expect from Rick Riordan. I pretty much couldn't remember a single joke from The Dark Prophecy, but here, we get a lot more stuff to make us laugh, usually from the Arrow of Dodona, who for some reason or other keeps shouting in bad Shakespearean every time Apollo tries to ask it for help.

That said, though, that darkness lurks hard on this book, even more so than in The Dark Prophecy. There's some ironic darkness with the main villain in this book, Caligula, whose goal is basically to usurp Apollo as the sun god. And because he can't get his way that easily, he's helping cause so much natural unbalancing in Southern California - even more "California Burnin'" than usual, that's for sure.

What really surprised me in this book was the inclusion of a certain death scene. It's a really unexpected step of maturity on Riordan's part, since he's spent much of his kidlit career actually making sure that a lot of dead characters still get parts to play later. Hell, just look at Magnus Chase - his trilogy's entire premise is built on him dying to start off. But here, there's that one death that's all but final...though of course there's every chance Riordan might still undo it in one of the two books we're still to get in this series.

Naturally, this book ends on a bit of a cliffhanger. Not as nasty as the ones Riordan's been known to deliver before, but more in line with the cliffhangers he's employed in recent years with this series and Magnus Chase, dropping huge hints about which fan fave is due back next.

And one more thing - I thought it was a nice touch of Riordan to include a reference to the mythology of India - specifically, pandai - which I thought was a subtle way of further nudging readers in the direction of Roshani Chokshi's Aru Shah and the End of Time if they hadn't picked it up yet.

View all my reviews