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Genre: Fiction

The Power and the Glory – A Review

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Have you ever read a book that inspired in you a soul-crushing desire to eat fried chicken, shed undefinable tears through a mouthful of Sprite, and slap someone in the face with a tortilla? My students and I found ourselves in this conflicted state after taking the long hard journey through the jungle of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory.  The story starts in a hot dusty village where a lethargic dentist meets an alcoholic priest who is on the run from the deadly zeal of a hostile lieutenant….

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…

In Search of Sacrifice: The Drama of the Family in Godzilla Minus One

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2023’s Japanese film Godzilla Minus One is more than a monster flick—it’s a true family movie. Not to be confused with CGI-heavy American Monsterverse films like Godzilla x Kong (2024), GMO is a piece of old-fashioned movie magic. What it lacks in budget—the film was made for a mere $15 million!—it more than compensates for in story, acting, and an incredible use of budget-conscious effects that somehow look better than Warner Bros.’ $150 million popcorn flicks. And yes, GMO is a popcorn flick, but it’s so much more. The movie…

Melancholy, Minnesotan Medicine

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In a post-progress Midwest, beside that omnipotent and mercurial god, Lake Superior, Rainy and his wife Lark have the closest thing to happiness that money can’t buy. Roads and bridges are falling to rot, fanaticism and drug use are uncomfortably common, and towns and cities are forced to scrape by in the shadow of a handful of ultra-wealthy “astronauts” who live apart while exploiting those left in America’s ruins. Yet none of these evils need deprive Rainy and Lark of their quiet joy. Rainy, a simple but soulful bassist who…

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…

Manners Make (More Than) the Man

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Some books have you read them slowly. Some books have you keep turning the pages. The best books do both. Such is A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. The gentleman is Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov. In 1922, while living in Moscow’s Hotel Metropol, he is summoned before The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, which is inclined to have him shot for being a noble. They remember, however, that before the Revolution he wrote a poem showing some sympathy for the cause, and so his life is spared. Instead, they…

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…

Skullduggery, Published

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Skullduggery Pleasant is about as bodiless as its titular character. Notice I didn’t say “protagonist,” for Skullduggery, the skinless magical gumshoe on a quest to stop Serpine from bringing back the Nameless Ones, is not really the center of the story. He is, if you pardon the brittle pun, only its frame. The real honor goes to a plucky and wise twelve-year old named Stephanie Edgley.  Stephanie is mature beyond her years, preferring to read books and to correspond with her mysterious uncle rather than get swept up in the…

Everything Sad Is Untrue (A True Story)

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As Roald Dahl did in his childhood memoir, Boy, Nayeri takes painful, embarrassing, and sometimes violent moments, and reframes them. Nayeri’s ultimate theme is the self-consciously Tolkien-ish idea that dark things are only apparent, are passing away, and are therefore, fundamentally untrue.

Miss Peregrine’s World-Weary Children

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Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is a story that grew out of old photographs. When author Ransom Riggs approached Quirk Books with his collection of found photos, many of them in sepia tones and featuring odd or surreal subject matter, the publisher suggested he develop a fictional narrative to explain the pictures. The resulting quirky novel was a New York Times bestseller, which has subsequently been translated to film. The book is absorbing, but is also marred by content that doesn’t seem right for its Young Adult audience. Jacob Portman is…