Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Before I get to the reviews: I finally, after more than 20 years, stopped paying for webhosting and a domain name. Long ago, owning a website was a lot more common and more necessary. Nowadays there's really little need.

Unfortunately that means a number of images in old posts will be broken now. Not much I can do about that, but how often do people go back and look at my really old posts? I doubt too often.

Also, tomorrow (if all goes well) I'm closing on my first home. Sometime after that I'll be moving, so there might be a break in my already infrequent posting.



The Dragon and the Stars by assorted authors. An anthology of Chinese culture-inspired science fiction. I wish there were a way to find all the anthologies on my Kindle so I can try them, delete them, and be done with them.

Like most of the others I've read, this one was mostly a bust. It had one outstanding story (the first one, of course), then two that were pretty good. The rest I either DNFed or wished I had.

I checked Amazon's reviews to refresh my memory of the good one, and this other reviewer hit it on the nose:

The anthology began with exactly what I expected and hoped for; the first story ("The Character of the Hound") is one of my favorites. The second was... not as good, but okay. I loathed the third ("Goin' Down to Anglotown") and the fourth ("The Polar Bear Carries the Mail") to the point that I very nearly set the book aside.

The Character of the Hound (by Tony Pi) was so good, I had a reaction to it I never had before: I felt honored to have been able to read it. Set mostly in the real world, it had such wonderful elements of mythology and spiritualism.

Maybe this one was finally the last anthology on my Kindle, but I guess we'll see.

DNF

63: Threader by Rebekah Turner. Sometimes when I have a run of DNF books, I think it must be me. Maybe I'm too bored and unfocused to read. Maybe work is distracting me. Maybe it's some other issue I don't realize. So, even though this book annoyed the living hell out of me, I stuck with it for days thinking it might just be me.

Set in the most generic dystopian world ever, the most generic female-character-in-a-dystopian-world was, of course, living in the poorest section. She, of course, had a super special magic talent. She, of course, was picked to go off to some super special rare magic school.

She, of course, got magically bound to the hottest, edgiest, most powerful man in the school. He, of course, spent all his time thinking about her, wanting her, lusting after her. They, of course, couldn't be together.

This was the most annoyingly generic book I have read in a long time. Nothing original in it. I got to about the halfway point of the book and had predicted every single beat of the story at each step. Nothing new, nothing surprising.

Maybe it isn't me after all...

64: Beast by Donna Jo Napoli. isiscolo read this a couple years back, and my thoughts were the same as hers. In this retelling of Beauty and the Beast, a Persian prince gets cursed because he "incorrectly" sacrificed an animal. That he did it "incorrectly" was really confusing, because he talked through his logic of doing it, and the logic seemed perfectly sound.

I didn't even get to the part where he was turned into a "beast" (a lion), because it was just so annoying to read. Every other paragraph, the author would translate some word into Persian or Arabic. It added nothing at all to the story. The first sentence of her author bio is: Donna Jo Napoli is both a linguist and a writer of children's and YA fiction. Linguist is listed even before writer, and that showed.

67: Any House in a Storm (Hidden Sanctuary Book 1) by Jenny Schwartz. Oddly, just by random chance, I read another retelling of 'Beauty and the Beast' right after Beast (I never would have guessed I had two books that did that, I really don't usually like retellings).

This one was better than Beast, but not good enough to finish. If it had been an original instead of a retelling, I might have stuck with it.

In it a goblin was caught in a storm and had to take refuge in a magical house. The master of the house was another goblin... but guess what! Neither was really a goblin, they were both beautiful humans! Ho hum zzz.

In addition, this story was set in the author's book series. She claimed you could read it as a stand-alone, but that really didn't work at all.

65: Malevil: The Powerful, Provocative Story of a brave, New World born in the Wake of a Nuclear Holocaust by Robert Merle. First off, what's with the capitalization in that title?

I barely got a few pages into this one. It was about as good as you would expect from someone who used "Powerful, Provocative Story" in the title of their book.

66: Cathadeus: Book One of the Walking Gates by Jeff J. Peters. It's pretty telling that I only read 2% of this book and my biggest reason for quitting was there were too many POV characters. Based on reviews, I made the right decision. "Brax, our protagonist, is a chosen one without even trying. Everything is handed to him with little effort on his end."