Down Cemetery Road by Mick Herron

I'm a HUGE fan of the Slow Horses book series and its TV adaptation. I recently discovered that author Mick Herron had a series that predates Slow Horses, and it was also getting a show on Apple TV. How could I not give it a try?

Down Cemetery Road was Herron's first book, and honestly, it shows. It's a good plot with good characters, and sprinkled throughout are his wonderful turns of phrase and literary magic tricks. The problem here is the pacing, which is terrible. At times, it felt like work reading it. I will say the end was satisfying, but it came at least 50 pages too late.

The Slow Horses seasons have been very faithful adaptations of the books. I hope the Down Cemetery Road series takes a few more liberties with the source material. Inside this book is a good story that needed a few more rounds of editing. Hopefully, the TV show fixes the pacing issues.

There are three more books in the Zoe Boehm series. Will I be back? Hard to say. For now, it's back to Slough House for me. This book gets a maybe generous three outta five stars from me.

I’ve reached the end of Brandon Sanderson’s original Mistborn trilogy! I’d like to give you a nice, comprehensive review of The Hero of Ages, but I can’t really say much of anything about it that won’t spoil the first two installments. So here are some broad thoughts. It’s a five-star, rounded up from four and a half. It’s my least favorite of the trilogy, but man does it stick the ending! Unlike the perfectly paced first book, this one is probably 150 pages too long, similar to the second. There’s a bit too much navel-gazing in both of them. Will I continue into the second era of the series that’s set three hundred years in the future? Most likely sometime next year. Having finished the trilogy, who would I recommend it to? Hunger Games fans for sure, and anyone who is looking to dip their toes into fantasy that isn’t too dense in lore. I think I’m overdue to get back to my staple of quirky detectives and dead Brits, but I did enjoy Vin’s story. Five outta five stars.

 The Well of Ascension

Brandon Sanderson

It's hard to discuss the second book in a series without revealing a few spoilers from the first, but I'll keep it mild. Sanderson's The Well of Ascension is the second piece of the original Mistborn trilogy. In the first book, our heroine Vin and her team defeated the god like Lord Emperor and ended his millennium-long reign. The second book asks a very interesting question I wish Star Wars would tackle head-on: What do you do after you take down the empire? How do you keep the people fed and the trains running on time? What if there was something even worse out there that your enemy was keeping at bay? This book was just as strong as the first in the series. It's just very different. It's a political potboiler. To get real nerdy, think of this one as the Deep Space Nine entry. Like I said about Mistborn, this is a perfect series for people who enjoyed The Hunger Games. Strong FMC, a little romance, and plenty of action. I'm excited to finish the trilogy later this year. Five outta five stars

 The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

So August was a bumpy month to say the least, but I did achieve my goal of finishing The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman before the movie adaptation hit Netflix. Earlier this year, I read his book We Solve Murders and really enjoyed it. Would I enjoy his most famous work? That was a mystery that didn’t take four senior citizens to solve.

There are three bodies and two murders vexing our Thursday Murder Club, but for me, it wasn’t the mysteries that hooked me. It was the character work. Frankly, I found pieces of the mystery plot lacking just a bit, including the resolution to one of the cases. In the end, it didn’t matter, though. I had so much fun hanging out with the four main characters that I would have read a book where they did almost anything. I’ll definitely be back for the next book in the series. Four and a half outta five stars.

(Fingers crossed the movie is good! The trailer has me a little nervous now that I’ve finished the book.)

The last couple of weeks, I’ve been dealing with what I'll call Life Events. It’s really thrown my writing and reading schedules off track. I finally managed to finish The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch last night. This is one of the most recommended fantasy books out there, and it lived up to the hype.

                  This is a very intricately plotted novel, and it feels daunting to try to do a summary. The setting is Camorr, a duchy in a fantasy world with roughly Renaissance level technology that seems lightly based on Venice. Our hero is Locke Lamora, leader of a band of good-hearted thieves who only target the rich nobles of the city-state.  We pick things up with the start of a new heist plot that would feel right at home in the Ocean’s 11 cinematic universe. There are also flashbacks sprinkled throughout the book that tell how Locke and his friends became a team. Just as we start feeling welcome and settled in his world, things in Lamora’s life quickly start to fall apart, and soon, instead of pulling off a long con, the group must save their own lives and perhaps those of Camorr’s citizens.

                  I’ll reach into my bag of cliches and pull out “heartfelt” and “rollicking” to best describe this one. It’s a long book, but it never feels like one. Lynch has the skill to write chapter endings that make you want to ignore the clock and keep reading. I wish I’d read this at a better time of year for me. It might have been an early contender for my book of the year. This can be read as a standalone even though it’s the first in a series, and I will definitely be back for the sequel. A solid five outta five stars.

Of Monsters and Mainframes

Are you a fan of Murderbot? The books or the show? First of all, you should be, and second of all, do I have a book for you! 

Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove is a sci-fi action comedy that felt like Murderbot mixed with a healthy dose of Douglas Adams. Several characters get POV time, but mostly it’s told from the perspective of a self-aware AI that runs an interstellar passenger ship called Demeter. If that name sounds familiar, you can probably guess where we are headed. After a series of weird tragedies that befall her various passengers, Demeter assembles a team to hunt down the immortal villain Dracula. The team consists of a fussy medical AI named Steward, a werewolf named Agnus, a Frankenstein monster, and a mummy named Steve.

It's a comedy. It’s a found family story. Near the end, it weirdly becomes something of a romance. Most of all, it was fun, full of action, and laughs. If you are looking for something light to read by the pool this summer, this just might be the book for you. Four outta five stars. 

Hyperion, by author Dan Simmons, has just moved to the top of my 2025 book rankings, and may have cracked my top five all-time. The Hugo award-winning sci-fi novel tells the story of seven very different characters on a doomed pilgrimage to the title planet. In a nod to The Canterbury Tales, the book consists mainly of the pilgrims sharing the stories of how they became involved in this doomed enterprise. Oh, and we’re told right from the start that one of them is a spy and a traitor!

Humans escaped a destroyed Earth and spread across the universe in a web of planets united by a government called The Hegemony. It’s aided by a mostly friendly collection of AIs and opposed by a rogue group of humans known as The Ousters, who have completely evolved and adapted to life in zero-gravity conditions. The flashpoint of the conflict has settled above the skies of the backwater world of Hyperion.

This odd planet is mostly backwards and forgettable, with two notable exceptions. First, it’s home to the Time Tombs, a collection of seemingly empty burial structures situated in a pocket of space that appears to be moving backward in time. Perhaps tied to this is a malevolent creature known as the Shrike, which inhabits the vicinity of the tombs and kills without remorse. We are told, however, that the Shrike will grant a wish to those who make a pilgrimage to the planet, but these wishes may come at a high cost to the pilgrim's life. A web-wide cult has even grown up around this mysterious character. Our POV characters are making what may be the final Shrike pilgrimage, as the war between the Hegemony and the Outsiders threatens to destroy the entire planet.

The general setup of the book is interesting and well executed, but the real joy lies in the six tales we get to hear. Some verge on horror stories, others are heartbreaking tragedies, but all are beautifully written. This is a genre book that can be given the capital L label of Literature. I thought about this book and its characters constantly and couldn’t wait to steal more time to read about them. It ends without resolution to the overarching story, but I’m almost tempted not to read the sequel. It feels nearly perfect as is.

Near the end of my reading, I discovered that the author was a post-9/11 conservative. Maybe that’s unfair, and he leaned that way before, but it seems he drifted further in that direction after the attacks on New York. This surprised me because two of the messages I took away from this fantastic book were the evil of capitalism run amok and just how horrible colonization is. It also contains a remarkably timely warning about the dangers of AI, given that the book was published in 1989.

If you’re looking for a story that will challenge you as a reader, but make it well worth your while, I’d strongly recommend Hyperion. SIX outta five stars.

 Never Flinch

Stephen King

Reading a Stephen King book the past few years is like seeing an aging music legend in concert. Some nights, they play all your favorite songs and hit every note perfectly. Other nights, they play strange album cuts only they like while missing the high notes and playing the chords wrong. Never Flinch falls into the second category. It’s just bad and disappointing and not worth the price of entry. 

The book has three story lines it wants to weave together. One is about a religious extremist stalking a feminist speaker on her national speaking tour. A second is about a man becoming a serial killer to, in some way, avenge a miscarriage of justice. The final one is a returning character falling under the wing of an older soul singer staging a comeback tour. These all meet at the end of the book, but it takes some real acts of contortion to get them there.

Moving back and forth across all the plot lines is King’s returning sleuth, Holly Gibney. I’m a fan of the character and was really looking forward to seeing her in action again. After this outing, I think I’d prefer to see her retired from his work. While King can write Gibney with some skill, he has grown woefully terrible at writing any character under the age of forty. The dialogue literally made me cringe in places, and it shows that he isn’t getting seriously edited anymore, or that the work is being done by a person with the same tin ear.

The end result here is less thrills and chills and more awkward cozy mystery. For a King novel, it surprisingly lacks any teeth. In recent years he has released some good books, so there’s always hope for whatever he decides to drop next year. Two outta five stars.

 The Devils
Joe Abercrombie
I doubt I’ll love a cast of characters in any book I read this year as much as I did the ones in The Devils by Joe Abercrombie. Let’s set the scene: in an alternate history medieval Europe, the countries brace for a new invasion by bloodthirsty, cannibalistic elves. To further complicate matters, the continent is divided by a religious schism. Called in to help are a Suicide Squad/Creature Commandos group of characters who must help a lost empress reclaim her throne. This group is made up of an immortal warrior, a Jill of all Trades adventurer, an egotistical necromancer, a geriatric vampire, an elf liberated from a sideshow, and a Viking werewolf. Hooked yet?
The group, led by the very inexperienced Brother Diaz, must help the lost empress, who’s grown up a street rat, get to the Kingdom of Troy. Hijinks ensue, and for nearly 600 pages, the mismatched group jump back and forth from frying pan to fire. It’s by turns hilarious and ultra-violent, and the characters became as likable to me as any that made the famous trip to Mount Doom. By the end, I was genuinely sad to see them go, but there’s a promise at the end that we haven’t seen the last of, well, most of them.
If there is a downside to this one, it’s that Abercrombie LOVES to write an action scene. Some last for three chapters, and by about halfway through them, I was ready to move on. Also, as I mentioned, it is very violent, and he doesn’t skimp on the gore.
Director James Cameron has bought the rights to this one, and it’s easy to see why. It’s written in a very cinematic style, and I think with the right casting, it could be a big hit. Funny, violent, but also poignant, with deep, rich characters, this one is well worth your time. Five outta five stars.

 Marble Hall Murders

Anthony Horowitz

Literary chameleon Anthony Horowitz is back with Marble Hall Murders, the third and supposedly final installment in the Susan Ryeland/Atticus Pund series. If you, like me, are a fan of Golden Age mysteries ala Agatha Christie, this series is a must-read. Each of the three books is a novel within a novel. Book editor Ryeland is forced to solve present-day mysteries that have clues hidden in novels featuring the very Poirot-like detective Pund.

 

I can’t discuss the setup for this book too much without spoiling the first two. I will say that Horowitz again writes the throwback novel portion with such skill that you’d swear it was a real book from the 1930s. In fact, it was so good that for me this time it overshadowed the present-day mystery, which is grimier and more unpleasant. It’s my least favorite of the series, but it’s still a great read. If you’d like to dive in, Magpie Murders, the first in the series, is on eBook sale for $1.99 at Barnes & Noble and Amazon for the next week or so. 

 

I’ll give the current installment four outta five stars.

 

P.S. Horowitz has also written Sherlock Holmes and James Bond novels that do an amazing job of capturing the voices of the original creators. He ALSO has another ongoing series I enjoy where a fictionalized version of himself is the sidekick to a grumpy, eclectic detective!

 Once Was Willem

M.R. Carey

There was some real serendipity involved with this one! I finished a book last Thursday, and two I’m interested in are streeting tomorrow. That meant I needed something not too long to read. I went to the TBR pile and looked for the skinniest tome I could find, and it was Once Was Willem by M.R. Carey. I’ll be honest, I couldn’t even remember why I had purchased it.

 

I ended up reading over a hundred pages in the first sitting, and practically inhaled the rest over the next few days. It’s sort of a hard one to describe. It’s a relatively historically accurate story set in England in the 1100s. It’s also part dark fable, horror story, and found family tale. Willem is a perfectly happy and well-loved twelve-year-old who dies suddenly of a fever. His parents are desperate and turn to a mysterious magician to bring him back. He succeeds, sort of, but the Willem that comes back is a monstrous version of the boy who is soon shunned from his village.

 

Willem discovers he’s not the only monster in the world. He meets new and fantastical friends in the mountains he’s settled in and starts to build a new and contented life. Meanwhile, the magician who raised him from the grave has been up to no good, and soon the villagers who drove him from his home are seeking him out to save their children from a horrific fate. Despite his misgivings, Willem rallies his magical friends and sets out to save his former playmates and cousins.

 

The writing in this one is simply beautiful. There’s a lot of period-specific language, and I’ll admit I hit the dictionary more than once. It is lyrical and adds a great deal to the experience, without affecting the flow of the story. Sometimes the story feels like a fairy tale, other times a horror story, and finally like a proto-superhero team-up. It’s hard to see how a sequel would happen, but I’d be first in line to read it.

 

I’m thrilled I stumbled into this one. Five outta five, and one of the best reads of the year so far.

The Bible Says So: What we get right (and wrong) about scripture's most controversial issues.

So I’m a little wary about discussing this one! I’ve changed my mind three or four times about how to talk about it. Let’s start with the aerial view: I’d give it four out of five stars and recommend that everyone who calls themselves a Christian pick up a copy. In the book, Bible scholar Dan McClellan turns an academic lens on some of the scriptures and beliefs that have been used to weaponize the Bible and attack marginalized communities. 

McClellan is one of my favorite social media content creators, and I preordered this book as soon as he announced it. He works very hard, and mostly successfully, to take the deep academic discussion around the most influential book in human history and “dumb” it down into language more accessible to a casual audience. Oh, and he also manages to throw in Doctor Who and Metallica references, so of course, I love him for that!

His bottom line is that a lot of people, especially those in the evangelical fundamentalist community, have no idea what they are talking about and constantly misquote and misinterpret scripture to attack others while propping up misogynistic, homophobic white supremacy. He talks a lot about the MANY translations that have happened over the years, often for political reasons, and discusses what these stories would have meant to the people who originally wrote and heard them.

To be honest, I don’t read a lot of nonfiction, but I enjoyed this one even while it made me angry chapter by chapter. It made me mad not because it challenged what I was taught as a young person, but because we still give so much weight in our world to an Iron Age and Roman Empire set of manuscripts that often contradict themselves, and were reinterpreted to have new meanings sometimes centuries after the original writing.

While I’m ranting to the zero people who have read this far, let me finish by saying I don’t think I know many genuine Christians. Instead of followers of Christ and his message, I see a lot of people who want to worship the vengeful god of the Old Testament. I’d still oppose it, but I’d be way more impressed if fundies wanted to put The Beatitudes on school walls instead of the Ten Commandments. Here endeth the rant.

The Railway Conspiracy

 

If the sequel isn’t a story continuation, what makes it work? For me, it’s the feeling that I’ve been reunited with old friends. That was definitely the vibe I got reading The Railway Conspiracy, the second installment in the Dee & Lao mysteries. Set in 1920s England, these are straight Sherlock Holmes-inspired adventures interspersed with Hollywood-worthy action sequences.

 

Judge Dee is an agent of the Chinese government who does most of his work in Europe, especially in England, as of late. Lao is a Chinese language professor and the Watson of the tale. Plot synopses for these types of character-driven mysteries won’t really tell you whether or not to read them. You might not even remember the story in a month! What sticks with you is the cast of characters, and authors John Shen Yen Nee and S.J. Rozan have created a fantastic group of people you want to spend time with.

 

If I had a complaint, it might be that this one took a little longer than its predecessor to get going. I thought to myself at one point, is anyone getting murdered in this murder mystery? Once the first body falls, it’s 100mph to the finish. The mystery and its conclusion are satisfying, and Dee and Lao even have a little character growth, which is rare in these kinds of series in my experience.

 

If you know one of the authors (wink wink), let them know I’ll be in line to buy a new installment next year! Five outta five corpses, I mean stars!

All System Red

In Martha Wells ' novel All Systems Red, a security robot goes rogue in the laziest way possible. This one’s being adapted into an Apple television show debuting next month, so I thought I’d check out the source material first. Our robot, who somewhat ironically calls himself Murderbot, has been assigned to protect the members of a research team on an alien world. Human interaction makes him uncomfortable, and in the beginning, they don’t need much protection. Instead, he spends his time watching TV shows he’s downloaded, most notably soap operas.

Of course, complications ensue, and he is forced to protect his humans and even attempt to bond with them on some level. I’ll leave the recap there in case you decide to read it or check out the show. Did I like it? Well, I would say I loved the character and liked the story. The resolution to the main conflict seemed a little murky to me, and I actually re-read a section to make sure I didn’t miss something. I’ll definitely check out the show, and I suspect I’ll be back for the next book in the series. It’s a quick read and makes a great palate cleanser if you are in the middle of something longer. Four outta five stars.

A Drop of Corruption

Possibly insane genius detective Ana Dolabra and her apprentice assistant Dinios Kol are back on the job in A Drop of Corruption, the follow-up to Robert Jackson Bennett’s excellent novel The Tainted Cup. Ana and Din work for the Iudex, the investigative arm of the mostly benevolent Empire. The Empire’s primary focus is preparing for the annual emergence from the ocean of giant Titans that try to come ashore and wreak havoc.

 

Many years ago, the Empire learned not only how to kill the Titans but also how to harvest their blood and organs to make enhancements to people to help them better serve society. Some serious research is happening near the port city of Yarrowdale, which is part of a still independent kingdom allied with the Empire. A seemingly mid-level treasury bureaucrat disappears from a locked room and is later found dead, necessitating a visit from Ana and Din.

 

If Ana Dolabra is our Holmes stand-in, her opponent is played up as a Moriarty this time out. He seems to be several steps ahead, and it seems in several places that our detectives might fall just short of complete victory. As it was in the first book, most of the story belongs to Din, a great POV character for the reader. Think Watson, but a much more skilled investigator in his own right. Despite the fantasy setting, this is very much a straight ahead detective novel. The mystery is solid, the clues are well placed, and the ending is very satisfying.

 

I hope Bennett plans to continue the series because I’d definitely be up for a new one of these every year. Five outta five stars.

 Sunrise on the Reaping

May the odds be ever in your favor, or more accurately, may the Kleenex be ever in reach if you decide to read Sunrise on the Reaping, the latest Hunger Games prequel from Suzanne Collins. Let me preface this by saying I liked the previous prequel, The Ballad of Songbird and Snakes, and actually thought it was better written than Mockingjay, which wraps up the original trilogy. This one tops even that installment and, in some ways, might be my favorite of the series.

 

This one is about Haymitch’s triumph in the 50^th Hunger Games. If you ever wondered why he’s actively drinking himself to death in the original books, you sure won’t after reading this one! I think it’s tricky telling a story where your audience knows the general ending, but Collins does a great job creating and maintaining narrative suspense. Fair warning: this book is brutal. It all services the story and character development for Haymitch, President Snow, and a few other returning faces, but it is a relentless tear jerker. She also pulls no punches with the themes and how they are reflected in our current society. Collins is leaving no more room for misinterpretation, as if there was ever really any to begin with. She does provide a bittersweet epilogue that will take away a tiny bit of the sting of the ending, and I appreciated it, although I’m sure some will label it fan service.

 

If you enjoyed the original trilogy, I think you will like this one. It feels like it should be our last trip to Panem though. I can’t see where there is room for another story. Collins is a great author, though, and I’ll be in line for whatever she decides to write next. Solid 5 outta 5 stars.

 The Blacktongue Thief

                  One of the ways I judge the quality of a book I’m reading is to ask how much I thought about it when I wasn’t reading it. With books like Mistborn or Dune, I would think about them constantly and wonder when I could steal a few more pages’ worth of reading. With A Wizard of Earthsea, it was out of sight, out of mind. That measuring system is failing me for The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman. When I wasn’t actively reading it, the characters and the story almost never crossed my mind. But, when I read it, I enjoyed myself. How do you review a book like that?

 

                  The main character of this fantasy novel is Kinch, and he is a less than successful graduate of the local thieving academy, essentially behind on his student loans! He meets a mysterious warrior woman, who in turn introduces him to a powerful witch and her lovely apprentice, and hijinks ensue. It’s well written, for sure, and Buehlman gives Kinch an engaging and believable voice. It’s the sometimes jarring tone shifts that made me downgrade my overall review. Most of the book has a tone similar to the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie or the Chris Pine Dungeons and Dragons outing. In other words, light and adventurous. It’s that way until it’s not. Occasionally, for two pages or so, it turns ultra-dark and violent. The worst example is a bad character who survives a pretty harrowing situation, joins up with the heroes, and is then brutally killed in a way that doesn’t really service the plot. It’s jarring, to say the least.

 

                  Overall, I enjoyed it and found the ending satisfying enough to consider revisiting the characters in a potential sequel. There is another book in the series, but it’s a prequel, and I don’t think I need that. I’ll settle in at 4 outta 5 stars.

A Wizard of Earthsea

Hey everybody! Join me while I disparage an icon of 20th-century fiction literature and one of their seminal works! A Wizard of Earthsea is one of those books I missed along the way. I had a copy of it as a teen, but I guess I set it aside to read yet another Star Trek novelization. In my defense, my copy of Wizard back then had a very dour grey cover and tiny print. I know, excuses, excuses. Since I’ve sort of made this my year of fantasy, I thought I should go back and hit some of the classical titles, and this one was high on my list. 

Ged is an aspiring wizard from the archipelago of Earthsea. After demonstrating some power as a kid, he is sent to a master to study, who then sends him to the most renowned wizard school. He gets into an argument with a haughty classmate, tries to prove himself by casting a dangerous spell, and instead unleashes a dangerous dark shadow creature into the world. He runs from it for a while, then he turns and starts chasing it. By the way, during the bulk of the action in the book, he’s about 19, although sometimes he acts 91.

It's a short one, but did I ever struggle to get through it! It reads like an outline or, better yet, a Wikipedia entry instead of a fully formed novel. Ged goes here and does this. Then, he goes to a different place to do a different thing. Then, yet another place where he does something else. Rinse and repeat for the entire book. He wanders, sometimes with a motive but sometimes without. There is barely any dialogue, so each “adventure” plays like a quick tiny vignette. And the conclusion? It is far and away, without a close second, the most anticlimactic ending to any piece of media I have ever consumed that wasn’t written by a fifth grader.

This feels like it could become a movie that is legitimately better than the book. Lots of the adventures he goes on are interesting, but the book asks you to do a lot of the work imagining them. The right writer and director could really turn this into something fun to watch. 95% of the characters we meet, including Ged, are people of color, which is a welcome change to the tropes of the genre. Somebody get on this instead of a Harry Potter series!

I know Le Guin is hailed as a genre giant for a reason, and I’m going to make a point to read some of her sci-fi. This one was a huge miss for me, though. 2 outta 5 stars

The Fifth Season 

About a third of the way into The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin, I thought, “This is so well written, but it’s just too bleak.” I’ve been making a point to read fantasy this year to try to escape the stumbling collapse of America, and this novel was just as depressing as the 6 o’clock news. 

 

            By the three-quarters mark, I was convinced it was one of the best written books I’ve read in any genre, and I’m committed to finishing the trilogy. But, yeah, it was still super bleak. The novel is set in a pre-industrial society on a super continent under constant threat from seismic instability. The biggest of these shocks can set off the titular Fifth Seasons, which are super winters that can last from years to decades. The people of the continent are divided into two groups. Most are Stills, or regular people, who comprise most of the population. The rest are Orogenes, mutants of a sort who can control the movement of the earth by pulling heat or energy from any nearby source. An untrained Orogene can be dangerous, so they are a tightly controlled class. They are either killed as children as soon as the power manifests, or they are taken from their families and sent to be trained at The Fulcrum. Here, they are taught how to use their powers to soothe seismic threats and protect the Stills. 

 

            We follow three characters through the story. One is a young girl, freshly taken from her family and sent to train at The Fulcrum. The second is a gifted graduate of the institute who is on a mission with the world’s strongest Orogene while being expected to produce a child with him. The last character is a woman fleeing an apocalyptic event on the continent who is searching for her husband, who has killed one of her Orogene children and fled with the other. The stories wind together to paint a picture of life and death in a world where society is cyclically torn down and forced to rebuild again.

 

            The prose and construction of the story are amazing. Even in the darkest moments, it’s a beautiful read. Clues are dropped in so subtly, but not purposefully hidden, that your jaw drops when the twists come. Is it a fantasy novel? Is it a sci-fi story? Could it be both? I guess the only way to know is to keep reading the series! Most of the characters are people of color, and there’s also plenty of queer representation, both of which felt unique and welcome in a fantasy world.

 

            The feel-good read of the year it is not, but it is a journey I think you’ll be happy you started. I’d even recommend it to people with little or no interest in genre books. I think it’s a novel that busts beyond its shelving in the bookshop. I’ll be back later this year for sure to see what happens next to this extraordinary cast of characters.

 Mickey 7

Hey, it's "What are you reading Wednesday" again! I just finished this one last night.

Mickey 7 is coming soon to theaters (as Mickey 17??), and I wanted to read it before I saw it because we all know the book is almost always better than the movie. After reading the book and rewatching the trailers, I’m a little worried that the novel isn’t going to be followed with much fidelity, which is too bad. Mickey needs to get out of town quickly, so he signs up to be an Expendable on a planetary colonization mission. He does all the dangerous or experimental work because if he dies, they just crank out a new copy of him. He uploads his consciousness before sketchy situations, so when a fresh copy comes out, it has all his old memories. If you’ve seen the trailer for the movie, you already know things go sideways when a new Mickey is created, even though the old one isn’t dead. This is a big no-no, and of course, hijinks ensue.

It's a light, quick read that thinks it’s more philosophical than it is. One of the issues for me is that I read it right after a book that blew me away, and that can, unfortunately, influence my feelings. That’s why I’m going four outta five instead of the three I was leaning toward. There’s a sequel, but I don’t think I’ll be in a rush to read it. I’m sure I’ll be back in a few weeks to complain about the movie!

An obligatory biographical blog entry

 

 

I know what you are asking yourself. Who is this genius who gave intellectual birth to the comedic masterpiece Blood Bruvs: A Mick and Lonnie Misadventure?

 

That’s what you’re asking yourself, isn’t it? Maybe it was something closer to what gives this guy the idea that he has the talent to write books. Either way, let me indulge in a little bit of a self-introduction.

 

My name is Steven Thomas. Pretty generic, and I did consider a pen name, but my ego demanded to see my name on a published book. I was born in the year of somebody’s lord 1970, making me 100% purebred Generation X. I grew up in Oklahoma, in a small city called Muskogee. Yes, the one Merle Haggard sang about. I had a very unremarkable middle-class upbringing, so sadly, I have no childhood trauma to fuel my creativity.

 

After graduating high school with a middling GPA, I attended Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Why yes, that is the capital of the Cherokee Nation. Look how smart you are! I blossomed academically in college and was president of the honor society, which was a cool but ultimately useless thing to put on resumes. In 1992, I left with a bachelor’s in history education, sure I was on the road to being a beloved high school teacher.

 

It's hard to picture now, but there were no teacher shortages in 1992. Also, if you couldn’t coach a sport, you weren’t landing a job as a high school history teacher. Fortunately, Kansas State University generously invited me to attend graduate school in beautiful Manhattan, Kansas. They hired me as a graduate teaching assistant, which meant they covered my tuition and paid me a small monthly salary. A dream come true, right?

 

Long story short, things didn’t work out, and I was done with grad school after a year. Still unable to get a teaching gig, I started a long and exciting career in the glamorous field of retail sales and management. Here’s a probably not comprehensive list of the businesses that trusted me with keys to one of their locations: Fan Fair, Camelot Music, Borders, Hollywood Video, Famous Footwear, and Barnes and Noble. I’ll skip the joke here and confess that this was a pretty miserable two decades of my life.

 

While pushing the retail boulder up the hill every day, I managed to find time to get married, have a child, and get divorced. I trudged through each day as a single dad with joint custody, working paycheck to paycheck. I know there were good days mixed in, but I think I have pretty successfully blocked out almost the entirety of my twenties and thirties. My therapist once suggested that that isn’t a super healthy thing to do, but oh well!

 

How many people do you know who can say their life took a wild turn for the better at 40? Well, now you know at least one! I met a beautiful nurse who married me, and I ended up with one of my better retail jobs at Barnes & Noble. I enjoyed my job, loved my wife, had another kid, and even visited Spain and Costa Rica. What a second act in my life! Then, a friend told me I could return to Kansas State and enroll in a new year-long intensive program that would result in a master’s degree and a certificate to teach elementary school. Like the lady sang, everything’s coming up roses!

 

My wife supported me through the program even as she was getting her doctorate, and I became a fifth-grade teacher. Thanks, teacher shortages! Teaching was a mixed bag, sometimes wonderful beyond words and sometimes soul-crushingly awful. After seven years, I tapped out and went to work doing the books for my wife’s new business. That left me with one thing I’d never had before – plenty of free time.

 

And now we come full circle. I used that free time to achieve a lifelong dream of writing a book. For a dude’s first book, I think it’s pretty damn solid. I’m about halfway through the sequel now, and I even have an idea for a different series. If I didn’t also have to be my own publicist, I’d say life for me is almost perfect!

 

If you plan to join me on my storytelling journey, here are a few other quick things to know. I’m a woke, progressive liberal. I will always support the end of the patriarchy and stand with the LGBTQ community. I believe we can do better than capitalism, and I oppose fascism, both the mid-twentieth-century German variety and the 21^st-century American version. I’m an agnostic who’s likely an atheist and also enjoys secular Buddhism. Sporting Kansas City is my team, for better or worse. I love to read, and I can’t imagine a world without music.

 

That’s probably enough about me for now. Everything you really need to know about artists you can find in their work. Even if that work is about an emo vampire and his slacker werewolf best bud.

I’m a published author.

 

That’s fun to type, and it’s true, which makes it even better. I’m a self-publishing indie author, and my new book dropped at the start of this month. It’s called Blood Bruvs: A Mick and Lonnie Misadventure. You probably already know this if you are here, but a friendly reminder never hurts anyone, right?

 

It turns out that when you publish a book yourself, the job is only half done. You are not only the author but also the publicity team! I’ve been told that part of playing the publicity game is having a website, a blog, or both. I’ve decided a blog will probably suffice for now. Let’s see if I can keep it up and make it worth your while to visit from time to time.