As I wandered through social media this morning—scrolling past posts, comments, headlines, and hot takes—I noticed a familiar pattern. People tend to cluster around voices that echo their own. It’s human nature, really. We gravitate toward viewpoints that align with ours because it feels safer, simpler, and more validating. Especially as we get older, we become less tolerant of cognitive dissonance—the discomfort that comes from holding or encountering conflicting ideas. We start pruning our...
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Warning: a couple wee spoilers.
I finished this book today. It wasn’t the kind I normally read, but it was recommended by someone I love, so I gave it a try.
It was melodramatic. There were no magical spells, spaceships, or alternate dimensions. It was about people. Relationships. Love, hate, anger, envy, and above all else, a relentless frontier spirit that drives the plot forward.
It’s set in Alaska, and I live in Alaska, so that pretty slick. But it’s set in the 70’s, which is different, and...
Warning: not spoilers, but kinda-sorta hints will reveal themselves in this review.
Ok, this isn’t a perfect book. You won’t walk away from it as a changed person, you won’t fall in love with any of the characters, and you won’t cry, or scream in horror, or anything like that.
But it is fun.
It’s campy, satirical, creative, and entertaining in the way that merry-go-rounds and waffle cones are fun. Dean Koontz seems better known for suspense, sci-fi, supernatural works, and this has some of that...
It is rare that one comes across a novel that is truly original. Often, we just see characters and plots that are reminiscent of so many others we’ve read, albeit seasoned in some slightly new way. Stories like those are enjoyable, if not for their uniqueness, but perhaps for their familiarity.
This is no such book.
The world-building is new, for sure, and I commend Shusterman for it. Very fun. But world-building is just the construction of the stage on which a play is acted out; it cannot...
I saw a funny meme the other day. It depicted our solar system, complete with the sun and all the planets, but our earth was flat as a board while the celestial bodies that surrounded it were depicted as spheres. The caption read, “Well, this is awkward.”
The cartoon elicited a quick chuckle from me, then I expected to move on to absorb whatever other nonsense the interwebs had for me that day. Instead, I paused. There were smart people on this rock when a flat earth was the prevailing wisdom...