Tag: reading community

Book Review: Strange Animals by Jarod K. Anderson

I had to write another book review, because oh my gosh, Strange Animals by Jarod K. Anderson turned out to be the story I've been looking for since I watched and fell in love with my favorite show, Mushishi. I already knew I'd found similarity in The Cryptonaturalist, Anderson's scripted podcast, but the narrative of Strange Animals expands on that established universe, highlighting the pacifist and coexistent attitude toward nature and difference I've long sought, especially in my own fiction. Which is to say, if you've enjoyed The Hopeful Wanderer, you will love Strange Animals.

Very Good Books of 2022

As this is December, the most final of months in the year, I'm doing a quick roundup of books I enjoyed in 2022. It just so happens I didn’t read much this year. Probably because I spent more time writing and editing, but also because I tended to DNF books more often than be swept away by them. A handful of books did grip my imagination and demand reading in one day, though, and all of those appear here.

So here we go!

Book Review: Archivist Wasp by Nicole Kornher-Stace

The plot of Archivist Wasp by Nicole Kornher-Stace asks what unfinished business might make effectively a superhero unable to find peace and pass on. Wasp, a desperately lonely archivist of ghost behavior, is tasked with finding out what happened to the world long ago from any ghost that might talk to her, in addition to fighting upstarts each year who want to take her life and her place.

But she meets the dangerous, unnamed ghost of a supersoldier on the hunt for someone he has lost in the underworld. And he thinks Wasp can help.

Book Review: The Good Fortune of Bad Luck by Travis Erwin

In The Good Fortune of Bad Luck, Destiny Holt has laid out a plan for the trajectory of her life to take her out of a childhood of abandonment and poverty into a nursing degree, a nice home, and a family. She believes in making her own luck through the will to forge an escape from the fate that her impoverished birth would dictate.

By contrast, Dillon Konrad has kept his life in a holding pattern of waiting for the stars to align and bring him his soul mate, a job he likes, and lottery winnings, all based on a prophecy from his grandmother, who accurately predicted the death of his parents. He believes in letting fate make his decisions, trusting that openness to the will of the universe will bring him good fortune.

The Good Fortune of Bad Luck examines which of these two philosophies, if either, will prove true as Destiny's and Dillon's lives spin around—and inexorably toward—each other.