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Genre: Sci-fi

“If it isn’t official, then it can’t be real, now can it?”

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When I first saw Trenton Lee Stewart’s The Mysterious Benedict Society on a shelf in Barnes & Noble, my first thought was, “Great, another New York Times Best seller children’s series.” In general, great art—the possession for all time—seems to me to gain more approval as the generations pass, whereas the accolades for the piece that is designed for a favorable hearing start loud and dwindle with the attention spans that it has helped to erode. So I usually avoid bestsellers until they are a few decades old. It is summer, though, and the…

A Riveting Page Turner That’s Short on Substance

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The Hunger Games, the first installment of a trilogy by Suzanne Collins, appears to raise profound questions about group violence, the angst of youth, and the power of love, but, unfortunately, the well-written book becomes a victim of its own entertainment value. Fatherless on both a personal and political level, Katniss Everdeen, as her first name seems to suggest, has been rendered hard on the outside, but soft on the inside. She’s “not the forgiving type”, in her own words, and yet “kind people have a way of working inside…