A Jungle of Tales

                This 2008-2009 series begins with merchant Lawrence Craft visiting a small town where local tradition holds that a wolf deity ensures a bountiful harvest – if she’s in the right mood! This tradition has been fading due to improvements in wheat breeding but is still honored by a festival. As Lawrence leaves the town, he discovers that a naked girl with the ears and tail of a wolf has hitched a ride in his wagon. The goddess declares that, since she is no longer needed, she wants to go back to the northern forests that were once her home, and Lawrence agrees to take her there. Now, I admit I was a little hesitant to click on this one. It sounded a bit like a born sexy yesterday story – in which a supernatural creature/alien/computer program takes the form of a beautiful woman and falls in love with the protagonist because he’s the first man she’s seen, and she doesn’t know how boringly average he is - and I’...

              This book is a supernatural horror thriller by a Native American author. It follows four Indian men who broke a cardinal rule of hunting 10 years ago when they all lived on the reservation, and now are being hunted in turn. This will be a short review because there are so many interesting twists and turns to this story that I don’t want to give too much away!             The human characters often link their current lives back to history – a history affects them whether they want it to or not: The foreman interviewing him had been thick and windburned and sort of blond, with a beard like a Brillo pad. When he reached across the table to shake Ricky’s hand…the modern world had fallen away for a blink and the two of them were standing in a canvas tent, the foreman in a cavalry jacket, and Ricky…wasn’t thinking at all of the paper on the tab...

              Apart from being outcasts, childhood friends Laurence and Patricia couldn’t be more different – or so it would seem. Laurence is a tech geek who built a wrist-mounted two-second time machine from cryptic instructions on the internet. Patricia is an outdoorsy type with an (initially) erratic ability to talk to animals who dreams of being a proper witch. While their friendship seemingly falls apart multiple times, they are always drawn back together. But will their relationship save the world, or destroy it?             I thought this premise was really intriguing, especially since the dynamic between these characters sounded similar to a pair that I’m writing myself. I overall enjoyed them both. I did want to smack Laurence more than once, since he has a greater desire for conventional success and acceptance than Patricia, which can make him a bit douchey a...

    This is a biography of William Dampier, a 17 th century buccaneer naturalist who was the first to sail around the world 3 times - mostly trying to capture Spanish treasure galleons, but also leading an official expedition to Australia. He wrote several best-selling books about his adventures that not only inspired fictional works - including “Robinson Crusoe” - but also contained enough useful data to be carried as references by later naturalists like Humbolt and Darwin. I first read it when I was in college and could not believe I’d never heard of this guy before. A pirate who, instead of just carousing in his off time, more often wanders off to observe sea turtles or carefully record how soy sauce is made? That is awesome and a little bit funny, and this book would make a terrific base for a historical adventure film.   The Royal Society of London, the first modern scientific organization, was established in 1662 with the goal to “overcome th...

  This is show has a very strange concept: A girl who’s been living in a tent gets taken in by a classmate’s family only to discover that he, and many of his relatives, turn into animals when hugged (even accidentally) by a member of the opposite sex 1 . Then what would seem to be a fantasy sitcom setup turns into something more like a group therapy session. It’s weird but it works…until the very end of season 2, when the show starts to break what I thought was one of its key themes. Season 3 resolves things in a way that the characters are supposedly happy about, but which left me disappointed.   1. And yes, it does appear to be opposite sex, not opposite gender , but more on that later.               The main character, Tohru Honda, is a high school junior who seems cheerful, hardworking, and accepting of others to a nearly supernatural degree. As the story progresses, we learn that – while she is indeed a...

              I started hearing a lot about this book recently: that is was this gorgeously written tale about a boy who finds a book and goes on a search for the author that turns into an “epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love” in post-civil-war Barcelona . Well, that sounded extremely intriguing, so imagine my delight when my mom handed off a sack of books, and this was among them! And how was it? Well, while I have some critiques (which I’ll get to), it certainly lived up to the hype in being a magical, utterly absorbing read!             When we meet our narrator, Daniel, the son of a bookshop owner, he is 10 years old and mourning the loss of his mother. To comfort him, his father takes him to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books: A labyrinth of passageways and crammed bookshelves rose from base to pinnacle like a beehive woven with tunnels...

  I spotted this in my favorite used book shop just after hearing a rave review of the Malazan series. It was only after I started reading that I realized I’d read it before, nearly fifteen years ago. The fact that I hadn’t remembered it and never read the rest of the series didn’t seem promising, but I thought that perhaps it would strike me differently now. The reviewer had noted that a challenging feature of the book is the way it drops you right into a complex world with no explanations, which is something one can better process as a more experienced reader. Well, I certainly did appreciate it more this time around, but I also now can articulate why it doesn’t work for me. The world-building is the strongest yet in some ways most frustrating aspect of this book. We have an expanding empire trying to take over a continent, looming civil war, interfering gods, mages who draw power from realms called “warrens”, soul transfer, multiple human and non-human cultur...