Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Spellhound by Lian Tanner. I've always said that a well-written YA, MG, or younger book can be enjoyed by an adult reader as well. This book was published for readers aged 7-11, but it was a joy to read as an adult.

The main characters were Flax, a minch-wiggin (a couple inch tall fictional creature) protector of her people. Rose, a human queen-in-training. And Pup, a Spellhound puppy. But the best character in the story was the narrator. He talked to directly the reader through the whole story, it felt like I was being read a bedtime story.

No, it is not a very good rhyme. But you don't need to be good at rhymes when you weigh half a tonne and can breathe fire. I mean, would you walk up to a dragon and say 'Excuse me, that was really dreadful'? Before you answer, please note that dragons do not take kindly to literary criticism.

Sometimes the conversations were almost interactive:

You would be terrified. Yes, you would. Stop arguing with me.

Flax, Rose, and Pup reluctantly team up together to save their homes and parents; it took much of the book before they started to trust each other, and liking each other took even longer.

The story was jam-packed full of imagination, so much worldbuilding, and a fun way to handle magic.

There were only two small issues I had with the book:

The first was that every chapter started with a quote from that chapter, so it tended to spoil things. (Though I think young readers would like it, it would keep them reading.) I tried to not read the quote, but it was in special font surrounded by sparkles, so it was quite eye-catching.

The second was that I couldn't picture Flax. There were some pictures in the book, so eventually I settled on her looking like a teddy bear with an ermine's tail. I suspect the author was vague about her description so that the reader could picture minch-wiggins however they want. (That or there was a description and I missed it.)

This was such an enjoyable book, once I post this review I'm going to go look for more things by her.

DNF #116: Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton. This seems like the type of book I'd like (a pirate adventure set in Jamaica in 1665), but I was having real trouble getting into the story. The characters seemed so paper-thin... but this is a Michael Crichton book, so I was sure the problem was me. I made it about 20% in before I gave up and checked Goodreads. Wow, the reviews are pretty bad. Guess the problem wasn't me after all.

DNF #117: Experiment 9 by Eric Ian Steele. Some kind of vampire horror story. Not my thing at all. (Related: I see Amazon is still doing that "one free book per month" thing for Prime members. I'm so glad I stopped taking them up on that.)

DNF #118: Gamerunner by B. R. Collins. I tried reading it in 2017 (review here) and apparently liked it at the time, but not enough to read a second time.

DNF #119: Extinction Point by Paul Antony Jones. Unbelievable from first page to... however far I got into this book. Main characters, supporting characters, setting, nothing made sense.

DNF #120: Catfantastic 3 by various authors. After my Kindle deleted all my books and I had to find my unread ones to copy them back on, I put this one back onto it even though I knew I had read it before. I knew it had been a long time ago (and it was, I don't even have a review for it).

This is an anthology, all about cats. Usually I don't like anthologies, but the second story in this book was by one of my favorite authors, Clare Bell.

It's lucky her story was the second one, since this was a scan of a physical book. There was no way to move through the stories other than clicking page by page by page. (In modern ebooks, you can move through chapters/stories with a click.)

The first story hadn't worked for me, nor had the third, so once I read Bell's story I gave up on the book, since I couldn't easily get to the other stories to try them.

Clare Bell's story, about the first cat to step foot on Tahiti (I think that was the right tropical island) was fine. Not bad, not great. I see she wrote another story in Catfantastic 2 (Bomber and the Bismarck), I wonder if I can track it down...