Ribbon

The Fluttershy story is incredibly sweet and features nicely done Zecora humor. The Rainbow Dash/Trixie story is also good. The other two stories are pure slapstick. One is focused on Pinkie Pie so slapstick is to be expected. The other is Rarity/Applejack rehashing the Rarity/Applejack interactions from Look Before You Sleep and The Last Roundup. If you like slapstick, great! But if you don't, half this book is going to be incredibly tedious.

This is an amazing resource for anyone wanting to write about servant life in the Regency period. It goes into extreme detail on a surprising range of topics, right down to the butchering, storage, and cooking of nearly every animal people of that era/location would eat! The ebook does not have chapter breaks so navigation can be difficult. Language was preserved from the original writing, so spelling and grammar can be hard to understand until you get used to it.

Oscar is a housecat who loves to jump up on things, like the refrigerator or the top the bookshelf. One night he jumps out the window and onto the moon! Then the story turns into a cat version of the myth of Hades and Persephone. I thought it was a little disturbing for a picture book but the disturbing bits went right over my four-year-old's head.

There is a page where the black text is placed on top of a dark gray moonscape and it's VERY hard to read. Adult readers will find it hard to read and child readers don't need something like that making reading more difficult.

The concept of a story book that's meant to be colored is genius. I think more publishers should consider it. The art in this book is all suitable for coloring but I'm not a big fan of the style. Mostly due to eye wrinkles. Even the 19-year-old protagonist looks like she's in her early 30s sometimes and older characters look ancient.

The story does not flow well. Things happen like it's a checklist rather than a story. Characters show up out of nowhere. Scotland and England cover a pretty wide area, but somehow everyone knows exactly where Antonia is, though she does not share this power and is always caught by surprise.

Eye roll alert: Her love interest's surname is Claymore and he makes swords.

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from a Goodreads giveaway.

This version of Cinderella is based partly on the Disney movie, in the stepmother and stepsisters' names, but the story doesn't follow the exact same path. No sewing mice or evil cats. More substance to the relationship with the prince.

The story is told in rhyme but not very good rhymes. It took a few pages (read aloud!) to realize it was supposed to be rhyming. The rhythm is good, at least. And the art is gorgeous.

Much better than expected! Granted, I was expecting something like one of those monster girl harem anime, so the bar was very low. But this is good actually!

Monster Core is about as horny as the average romance novel but none of the concent problems, plus the dungeon protagonist power fantasy. The protagonist is standard fare for this kind of book. He worked in marketing so he's good at manipulating others. Odd choice but okay.

The half troll lady is inexplicably hot and well spoken, despite coming from the talk-in-third-person uggo family. The other harem lady is more demure but is still down to party within an hour or so. There's also a non-sexy annoying sidekick character but he gets better.

This is an odd creature, a slice-of-life school romance manga. The main characters were friends for a long time but nobody else seems to realize it and they seem to pair up by default. Nothing much happens. The chapters are short and the continuity between them is minimal.

At the end of the book there's a scene where the boy gets hunted down by the hot music teacher and forced to sing for his grade. It comes off as creepy and out of place.

Honey So Sweet starts with a “romance of intimidation” setup but quickly reveals the boy is actually a “looks like a delinquent but actually totally sweet” type. I can get behind that. A couple more misfits are added to the outcast clique in typical fashion. The lead girl is a bland audience surrogate.

There's nothing revolutionary going on here but it's very fluffy and pretty and those things have become increasingly rare in manga! It hits all the right notes with me.

As the cover picture implies, Rose is heading to Venice this book! But it takes half the book to get there and not nearly enough happens pre-Venice. I would have liked more time spent on Venician magical society.

Rose leaves her housemaid role behind, for the duration of this trip at least. All the minor characters stay in London as well. Mr Fountain is closer at hand for this book, treating his apprentices as important parts of the investigation rather than abandoning them to do “grown up wizard stuff” all the time.

It's a good story but not as good as the previous two. Lots of groundwork is laid for future books, to the detriment of the current book.

Lily is set sometime after the Rose books, probably by a few decades. Magic has been outlawed and the old magical families are under close watch by the Queen's Men. Lily's mother is plotting revenge against the queen, using Lily's sister Georgie as a weapon, so Lily and her sister flee to London in search of their father.

Lily is a pretty standard little girl protagonist. Georgie is annoyingly waif-like. She has good reason to be that way but it still gets annoying. They are also accompanied by a magical talking pug, Henrietta, who's pretty adorable and charming. Henrietta isn't as all-knowing and powerful as Rose's Gustavus, instead being barely more worldly than the sisters. They eventually team up with a clever stage magician and the white rabbit on the back cover becomes relevant.

It's an okay book but if I didn't already know I like the author's work I may not have stuck with it. The ending is unsatisfying and doesn't wrap much up. Hoping to find out what happened between the Rose series and this series and hoping a grown-up Rose turns up are the main things that will push me to read the next book.

A collection of Pokemon-themed motivational posters in book form. Unfortunately it's not very well executed. The art is all screen shots from the anime without being cleaned up at all. Very blurry. Some of the quotes are good but many are lackluster. The opening song appears in fragments over at least four pages. It's still cute and fun but could have been done much better.

Christmas wraps up and all the romantic pairings get settled in. The art is gorgeous but the dialog boxes are scattered around and every sentence drawn out, I found myself reading it Kirk style. Some very nice scenes turned annoying.

If you're looking for a stopping point in the series, at least until more is published, this volume wraps a lot of loose ends up nicely.

I'm less familiar with Dagon than Cthulhu, but this book felt weaker than the first. The art is less clear about what is going on and most of the text is black on a dark blue background. It switches to white text towards the end but the dramatic shift is not worth the early eye strain.

Still looking forward to the next adaptation.

“Disney movie abbreviated as children's book” has come to Big Hero Six. This one's surprisingly good. It doesn't follow the movie word for word and it alters the story to flow better in a book format. Tadashi's classmates are introduced after Professor Callaghan challenges Hiro to invent something awesome, in a scene where the team scavenge parts at a junk yard. Other story elements are condensed without loosing meaning.

The art is nice and laid out in a manga/comic book sort of aesthetic. Major words and points are highlighted in red text. It's a very visually pleasing book.

I'm sure there will be a lot of Big Hero Six books coming out in the next few months. This one, at least, is good.

Kunoichi (“ninja girl” in Japanese) goes to ninja school but isn't very good at it. She is inspired by a new friend, Chibi Samurai (little samurai) to train really hard and excel. The book gives a phonetic spelling of Kunoichi but for all other Japanese words you're on your own. None of them are very hard but if you're not familiar with Japanese beforehand you're likely to butcher at least some of the terms. The last page explains various cultural terms and images in the story, so there's an educational aspect but it's not forced into the story itself. The story focuses on a “practice makes perfect” sort of message. It's quite nonviolent as well, despite some shuriken accidents played for comedy.