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Genre: Adventure

All Tracks Converge: A Review of The Lincoln Highway

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After a stint in a Nebraska prison over an accidental killing, Emmett Watson prepares to start fresh in California with his wide-eyed eight-year-old brother, Billy, for whom the world is a story. Their plans go south—or east, rather—when jail-mates Duchess and Woolly, an Artful Dodger and his simple-hearted friend, hijack the mission in more ways than one. The journey that unfolds is as hilarious as it is anxiety-inducing. The long-suffering Emmett and his earnest kid brother make for two poles of relative stability in a world that Duchess and Woolly—both…

Cutting Edge, but Get to the Point

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Fantasy authors have a league of their own. They play for various intramural teams, such as The Snarky Sendups (Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series), Cape-Clad Mind Explosions (Wheel of Time), Chemistry Set (Mistborn), or Space Cadets (Speaker for the Dead). Last but not least are the Gravitas Gang (Frank Herbert, C. S. Lewis). Tolkien is relaxing in a comfortable hole in the ground, still writing the rulebook. In Elvish.  With Assassin’s Apprentice, the first of the Farseer Trilogy, Robin Hobb has created a team rather than signed up for one. Most…

Escaping the Void: A Review of Thunderbolts*

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The Marvel Cinematic Universe hasn’t done itself any favors since Endgame (2019). Between emasculating beloved male characters, inserting contemporary ideology at every turn, and generally sacrificing good storytelling on the altars of agenda, Disney has managed to turn a multi-billion-dollar franchise into a string of box office duds. Thanos with his gauntlet couldn’t have ruined things any more thoroughly than has Disney with its blinkered ideological commitments. But amidst the wreckage of the post-Snap MCU, the studio has managed to produce at least two decent films. One was Guardians of…

Pure Murder: A Review of Gladiator II

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I never want to see this movie again. Granted, this might sound a bit harsh coming from a Classics undergrad who spent most of his Classics Club movie nights rewatching the first installation of this movie franchise—yet I remain steadfast: I never want to see this movie again. I have no issue with some of the creative liberties and historical inaccuracies adopted by Ridley Scott that people too often bemoan in movies like this (such as a newspaper being read in a café or sharks in the Colosseum). All those…

Bunnies vs. Bullies: The Green Ember Quadrilogy

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Parents or teachers whose concerns include finding safe literature for their brood of voracious young rabbits might wish to consider S. D. Smith’s The Green Ember series. Redwall it is not, but this quadrilogy offers a morally harmless adventure featuring talking bunnies with swords, which, like Brian Jacques’ better-known series, unfolds in a grounded universe with an epic fantasy feel but with little actual magic.  Heather and Picket Longtreader are brother and sister rabbits whose pastoral existence is turned upside-down when the war between good rabbits and an evil alliance…

Terrible Purpose: Beauty and Contradiction at the Heart of Dune

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In Dune, Part One and Part Two, Denis Villeneuve has adapted the unadaptable. These two impressive films, though they simplify and sometimes alter their source material, manage to distill the heart and soul of Frank Herbert’s original novel (1965). Given the influence of the ideas embodied in the text and now popularized in the films, it seems a good moment to appraise these adaptations, and to reflect on the ideas they promote. Like the films, this essay is divided into two parts, the first being a traditional film review (of…

A Series of Unfortunate Events – Reviewed

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The thirteen books in Daniel Handler’s A Series of Unfortunate Events provide humorous if formulaic escapism which, like an emergency room full of merely-competent doctors, does no obvious harm. While many contemporary children’s series positively ooze with socially-conscious messages that their authors or publishers think “The Children” need to hear, these books are mercifully bereft of such earnest nonsense. True, the series is also free of anything like transcendence, and it offers no remedy to the problem of evil that is its main source of drama (and humor), but at…

It’s Not the Plane; It’s the Pilot: A Review of “Top Gun: Maverick”

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Standing before a handful of elite F/A 18E/F pilots, Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell tells them the hard truth: pulling off this mission will take a miracle. More than one. Looking only at the plot of Top Gun: Maverick,  a moviegoer would be forgiven for assuming the same about this film. And he would be dead wrong, because Top Gun: Maverick is the only movie you have to see this year. On paper, it sounds like a hundred nostalgia-fueled Hollywood cash grabs: an aging Maverick is called into NAS North Island…

The Lost Island

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Island Adventures There is something about an island that makes for a good adventure story.  Three that come to mind are Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, and Ian Cameron’s The Island at the Top of the World. An island, by definition, is cut off; it is remote, separate and unknown. Such stories are often two adventures in one: the adventure of getting to the island, and then the adventure of what is on the island.  (With perhaps a third – the adventure of getting home…

Readers Wanted: A Great Adventure Awaits

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M.L. Forman’s 5-book series, Adventurers Wanted, is a wonderful and fantastical journey, in the true sense of those words. What at first seems like a simple, perhaps even naïve, tale of a boy discovering a new life surprises the reader as it gradually delves deeper into the nuances of honor and responsibility, courage and cowardice, and many other aspects of human nature.  Slathbog’s Gold We enter the story, Slathbog’s Gold, as Alex Taylor, a fairly typical teenage boy, finds himself applying for a position as “adventurer” in a book shop…