Been over a month and I'm procrastinating again...
Recently Read:
The House in the Cerulean Sea (TJ Klune, fantasy, hardcover): 40-year-old Linus Barker is the perfect caseworker in the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, sent to monitor the "orphanages" where unusual children are sent to keep them safely locked away from goodly folk. For all that he always keeps the interests of the children in sight, he believes, blindly and wholeheartedly, in the system for which he works and the society it represents... and if doing so means he doesn't think to ask certain questions, well, he is a busy man and it is a bigger system than he could hope to navigate. When Extremely Upper Management selects him for a special assignment, it could make his career or be the end of it: he's to spend one month monitoring the orphanage run by one Arthur Parnassus, a classified and isolated place where only the strangest, most dangerous children go. Among their numbers are a young wyvern, an immature forest sprite so powerful she has transformed men into trees, a boy who changes into a Pomeranian when scared, a young lady gnome with an aggressive streak, a sea creature boy whose species nobody can decide, and a six-year old Antichrist... but the one with the greatest secret may be Arthur himself.
This has gotten pretty much universal praise, and I agree. A fairy tale for grown-ups, it makes for a fun and adventurous story of overcoming prejudice, learning to see the shadows in the world, and finding the courage to not only want more out of life, but to challenge an unjust system. There's a mild, sweet and clean love story between Linus and Arthur, complicated by Arthur's mistrust of DICOMY and Linus's determination to remain impartial (and willfully blind to his own loneliness.) The ending feels a touch stretched, and there are one or two points I thought could've used more focus or follow-through, but all in all it's a great read and a perfect antidote to anyone who thinks that the fantasy genre (and reality as a whole) has skewed a little too grim of late.
Die Volume 1: Fantasy Heartbreaker (Kieron Gillen with illustrations by Stephanie Hans, fantasy/graphic novel, digital via hoopla): Long ago, six British teenagers decided to spend an evening on a new role-playing game one of them had devised using a peculiar set of dice... but they vanished. Two years later, five returned, scarred and traumatized and utterly incapable of explaining where they'd been... or what happened to their friend Solomon. Now 40, the discovery of Solomon's twelve-sided die brings the five back together again - pulling them into the fantasy world of Die, which they barely managed to escape once. This time it will be that much harder, not just because they're older and more jaded, but because their new enemy, the Gamemaster who seeks total dominion, is their former friend Solomon.
This is a decent graphic novel, if a trifle confusing at the outset (the art and layout make it a bit difficult to parse who is who for a while), but unrelentingly dark. Still, there are some nice ideas at play and the characters are interesting. I'm just getting a little tired of pitch-dark worlds without the faintest glimmer of hope.
Their Fractured Light (Book 3 of the Starbound trilogy, Amie Kaufman & Meagan Spooner, YA romance/SF, paperback): The famous "Avon Broadcast" revealed to the galaxy that tycoon Roderick LaRoux was using and abusing interdimensional aliens to not only build his hyperspace-drive empire, but to cruelly manipulate and control humans... but nobody seemed to be listening outside of fringe conspiracy theorists. Gideon, known online as the notorious hacker Knave of Hearts, has long has his own bone to pick with Roderick, and fully believes the broadcast. He intends to expose the company's lies once and for all, in a way that can't be ignored. Meanwhile, Avon native Sophie's drive to personally make Roderick pay for what she did to her world in general and her father specifically takes her across the galaxy, from con to con and false identity to false identity, until she can get close enough to put a bullet in the man. Gideon and Sophie meet at a LaRoux gala, thrown together when their covers are about to be blown - just as Roderick reveals a scheme that could make him the literal master of the entire galaxy.
I didn't expect the first book (These Broken Stars) to grab me, but it did. The second volume, too, had plenty of action and emotion. This one... this one falls down on the job after a promising start. Sophie and Gideon have decent chemistry, both broken people who have built lives entirely of lies to the point where true connections and emotions are all but impossible. It moves at a fair clip without too much recapping, too. Then, about halfway through, things start going wrong. The couples from the previous books turn up, and Gideon and Sophie become just two more gamepieces on a crowded board. And the finale devolves into a treacle-soaked Message and Lesson about faith. Not specifically religious faith, but just the general concept of faith as humanity's great gift to the universe. It totally knocked me out of what was left of my suspension of disbelief.
Currently Reading:
Middlegame (SeananMcGuire, fantasy, on Kindle): Literally just started it. It involves the twins Roger (language whiz) and Dodger (math genius), an alchemical formula to remake reality, and an alchemist determined that the world must be remade in her own image even if she dies trying... and a children's book that McGuire has written under a pseudonym that's coming out in October, which spurred me to finally clear this from the backlog. So far, it's grabbing me.