Sean

I get that I'm not the target audience for this book.

I also get that this story is completely fabricated and is to real life what Dragonlance is to hanging out with friends...

But at the same time, there's an awful lot of cliched tropes in this story. They work for the intended audience, though. Every generation has their trashy romance novels where the plain girl gets to feel special, and I can see the appeal of this one for fans of the genre.

That said, it was competently written, and I wish I had Jenny Han's success.

As a child of the late '80s and early '90s, I was heavily influenced in my own life by classic rock, hair metal, and eventually the Seattle scene (although I would argue the Minneapolis scene was as good, if not better than Seattle in some aspects in the early and mid-90s).

I was never a Nirvana “fan,” although I liked their stuff. I owned Nevermind, of course. (Who didn't?) And I always admired Dave's drumming ability. I also knew he was a little different. I remember the SNL promo commercial Nirvana did when they played SNL the first time. Dave, with his mousy hair and slight frame, stood stock-still and psycho-stared at the camera during the whole promo. I knew it was being done because they told him to just stand there and say nothing, and this was his way of complying, yet performing. I knew at that moment there was something more to Dave Grohl than met the eye.

When Nirvana ended, I saw the emergence of the Foo Fighters, and I hoped for the best for Dave. It seemed like he was doing the right things. Their videos on MTV were always great. The songs were catchy. I still wasn't a fan, though.

That came about over a course of time when Dave's undeniable charm and work ethic eventually wore more me down. Slowly, I started amazing Foo records now have the whole collection. I'm a booster. I'm a supporter. They're doing things the right way. When Dave came out with this book, I always knew I'd read it eventually, but like so many things of this nature, it just got put off for a while.

This book is written with the same high-energy charm that Dave exudes in interviews and on stage. There is no pretense with this guy. What you see is what you get, and that extends to writing. For a high school dropout with a manic sense of energy, this book comes across without any sort of writer bullshit. There's no fancy prose. There are no deep metaphors or similies. Dave delivers the goods with a straightforward approach. And, like the man himself, the prose is likable. It's easygoing. It's a good read.

It makes you wish you could be one of the guys in the band, and that's about the highest level of praise I can give it.

It's an enjoyable read, although it feels like it only scratches the surface of some things. It leaves you wanting more. When I hit the end, I realized I'd gladly read Volume 2 of this if Dave ever decided to write it, and if he does, I hope he goes into more detail and delivers some insight into some events. If there's a single knock against the book, it was written like he didn't want to offend anyone, and that makes for a superficial feeling tome.

Still, I enjoyed every word. I hope Dave writes more. More songs. More books. Just keep delivering, Dave. You've earned your accolades the old-fashioned way.

Sebastien de Castell's great gift to writing is that he somehow crafts those heroic moments, those “Avengers Assemble” moments that raise the hair on the back of your neck and make tears prick at the corners of your eyes because you know the hero is likely standing up to a fate they cannot possibly beat.

And then he somehow figures out a way to let the hero win that you did not see coming.

He did it repeatedly through his Greatcoats series. He did it with his Spellslinger series. And now, with the inscrutable Ferius Parfax, we get to see one of her great hero moments where she stands up to the world as it crumbles around her and says, “What else you got?”

de Castell writes the books I wish I could write. He crafts the heroes I want to read. His work lies hard in the same veins as Dumas, Thorndike, and Sabatini, and he understands the brazen hero who laughs at the oncoming storm. For that, I will always enjoy his books.

I look forward to my yearly jaunt through Absaroka County. It's always nice to Walt, Henry, Vic, and whoever else might show up in one of Craig's books.

With this one, he uses his considerable platform to call attention to missing indigenous women problem in North America, and he manages to weave a delightful basketball story into it. All this with the standard banter between Walt and Henry and the usual hijinx from Dog.

This is definitely one of the better books of the series. The mysticism of the book is not overpowering, but it's enough to make you wonder about reality and get some creeping shivers up the spine. The police work, the beating the trail for leads, is on display, and while the mystery doesn't take a ton of brain power to unravel, that's not the point of this book.

Daughter of the Morning Star definitely sets up the next book as being more of a direct sequel, making this feel like the first of a two-parter, but I'll get the next book the day it releases. I haven't missed one, yet.

Stephen King writes a crime novel from a hitman's point of view.

Typical King prose, solid and readable. The characters were interesting. The story itself got a little slow at points. Probably could have hacked 50-100 pages from this thing and still had a banger of a story.

All in all, not my favorite of his works, but definitely a solid entry. I'm kind of enjoying King's work in the world of crime fiction. It's definitely not as interesting as his horror stuff, but I find it in some ways much more readable.

Part semi-truthful memoir, part fictionalized noir mystery novel, this is one of the more original books I've read this year. (Well, listened to on audiobook...)

Brent Spiner, who is highly underrated as a talent in Hollywood, shows that he's not just a good actor, funny, and a wonderful singer–he's also a talented writer. He churns out a funny story based around true events that happened back in his Next Generation days, and he managed to hire on his friends to voice themselves in the audiobook. The result is a delightful treat for fans of ST:TNG and mystery novels alike.

Spiner casts himself in the role of neurotic, desperate-for-attention character actor, and it works. He knows what he's doing by writing himself in some less-than-glamorous lights, and it works.

This book was a lot of fun.

This is an easy contender for “Best Book I'm Going to Read This Year.” I was glad to know that Jerry Bruckheimer has already optioned this book for Paramount, because it is instantly cinematic, and it's going to make a great film.

SA Cosby takes two bottom-of-the-social-ladder everyman types, puts them together in a dark buddy action/revenge plot, but manages to make it about so much more than just two guys from opposite sides of the tracks in a small, poor town getting revenge on the men who killed their sons.

Ike Randolph, who is Black, and Buddy Lee, who is white, are not great people, and they know it. Ike is a former gang member who did some time. Buddy Lee is a white trash hick who also spent some time in the Graybar Hotel. They're older. They're set in their ways. They're coarse. They're unrefined.

And they each have a gay son. And those sons are married to each other.

Much to Ike and Buddy Lee's disappointment.

However, when those boys are murdered, Ike and Buddy Lee make an unusual partnership to set about finding out who murdered their boys, and to vow revenge on those that did it.

Along the way, Ike and Buddy Lee learn about themselves, and why their relationships with their sons went so wrong.

Expertly paced with excellent dialogue, this book was riveting. It unfurls in your mind in full 70mm Surround-Sound, just waiting patiently for its big screen debut.

While this is far and away a five-star book, I still had some knocks with Cosby's prose. For instance, the phrase, “Ike sucked his teeth” feels like it appears about 40 times in the book, to the point where it gets comical. Also, Cosby likes to shoehorn big similes into his work. As a writer and editor myself, I would have hacked out about half of them because he does it to reckless abandon.

However, the dialogue is where this book shines. Cosby has a finely tuned ear for the cadence of rural Virginia and Ike and Buddy Lee come alive in their exchanges with other characters, particularly in their quieter moments with each other when they discuss their sons.

This is a book about revenge. And there's a mystery element to it. But the themes of repression and redemption, and the overarching theme of acceptance will hit home. The finale is big and painful, and the denouement is sweet and closes the story perfectly.

This is one you won't want to miss.

I know a lot of people love Stephen King. I also know a lot of people don't. I'm not a true King fan by any stretch (although I do believe his book on writing/memoir is one of the finest guides to being a better writer I've ever seen), but I do enjoy some of his work. I've also disliked some of his work.

LATER is a book that's clearly not King's best work, but it's definitely compelling and definitely readable. It's a combination ghost story, horror story, and crime story–although it really doesn't oversell any of those. It's all those things, but not any of those things singularly.

The crime in the book is minimal and comes in at the end. The horror is also minimal, aside from a few gory descriptions, one or two literary “jump scares”, and a lingering possibility of what-might-be. The ghosts are constant through the book, but with the way they're treated, it's organic and interesting, not overly scary.

The characters are compelling. The story is interesting enough to keep you turning pages. The work itself is a solid tale.

LATER is not going to go down on any list of King's top ten books, but it is definitely enjoyable. It's worthy of a read. And would I read a sequel? Yes. Absolutely.

On a secondary note, I listened to this one on audiobook (as I sometimes do), and Seth Numrich was the narrator. His narration was excellent and a considerable reason I enjoyed this book as much as I did. I don't know that I would have liked it as much as I did without the narration.

Not your typical “how to write” book. It's a series of essays by crime writers on various aspects of writing. For that, this book is a must-read for writers and readers alike. It gives interesting insights to all parts of the novel-construction process.

This was a book with a good premise, but the execution just wasn't there. I don't like to write bad reviews, so go find Bjorn Smars's review of it–everything he says is correct.

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OLD MAN'S WAR is a book that was recommended to me by a friend ages ago. I downloaded a copy on my Kindle and promptly forgot about it for a year or two because my to-be-read pile is an ever-growing beast that threatens to avalanche nightly and kill me in my sleep. When I finally got around to reading it, I was immediately kicking myself for not starting it when I originally bought it. OLD MAN'S WAR is the type of sci-fi war novel that I love to read.

The premise is simple enough: Far in the future, the elderly are given a chance to be declared “dead” on Earth on their 75th birthday, and then shuttled off into the vast reaches of colonized space to fight as soldiers for the Colonial Defense Force. In exchange for their service as soldiers, they are basically gifted a “second life.” Their consciousness is transferred into a genetically modified and enhanced clone version of themselves and they go off to fight the many races of intelligent species on the edge of civilized space to gain new colonies for humankind and defend the settlers that are already tilling exo-soil. We follow John Perry, a widower still very much grieving his ex-wife, as he signs up for the CDF and goes to war.

OLD MAN'S WAR has had plenty of praise heaped upon it already. It won a pile of book awards and was extended into a series (the second of which, THE GHOST BRIGADES, I have already downloaded). I won't be able to add anything new to the already existing, glowing reviews except to say that I found the book intelligent, interesting, and well-written.

Scalzi's prose is simple and direct. He doesn't over-flower things. When I wrote AFTER EVERYONE DIED, I attempted to capture a similar voice. Both books are written in the first-person in a journal-like style. Scalzi is a better writer than I am, though. Though the books are simple in style and writing, they are complex in thought and idea. The first book touches on a lot of concepts about age, mortality, and the rationalization for war, as well as the futility and senselessness of it. The book isn't preachy. It isn't too serious. And while there are jokes and humor in it, none of them are stretches. All in all, this was a highly enjoyable book. All awards for it were well earned.

When I read books, I want them to be like OLD MAN'S WAR. The protagonist is likable and intelligent, without being a pain-in-the-ass, he might border on being a Mary Sue, but not overly so. The situations on the book are intriguing and make the pages turn quickly. There is a matter-of-fact reasoning to the deaths in the books (sure, the new/old soldiers die...but if they'd stayed on Earth, they'd still die...), and a simplicity and elegance to his musing on mortality.

Maybe this book hit me at a time when I'm doing a lot of questioning of mortality while battling my own existential dread, but I found it to the exact medicine I've been seeking. I highly recommend giving this one a glance, if you haven't already.

Michael Connelly always delivers. In this outing, he figured out a way to put Mickey Haller's back all the way up against the wall, but Haller had the Law of Innocence on his side, and that's all that he needed.

This was a slightly atypical Haller outing. The mystery was still there. The elaborate descriptions of the courtroom ballet was still there. But, Connelly was able to keep the book topical by occasionally touching on the start of the growing COVID-19 pandemic, which would have been occurring at the same time in the world of the novel. It was deftly done, and well done.

Solid stuff from Connelly. Very enjoyable.

A decent enough, well-written foray into the High Republic era of Star Wars. This book is the original prequel. Soule is a solid writer, and I had no issues with his prose.

I wanted to like it more than I did. I had really high hopes for the launch of the SW book series given how Disney approached it by getting writers together and building the stories out with a concerted effort, much like Kevin Feige did to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

However...what I got was an exciting, over-the-top space search-and-rescue with a whole bunch of Jedi when the Jedi were the prized peacekeepers of the Republic. There were a whole bunch of names and races thrown at me in the first few chapters, and by mid-book I realized I didn't really have a whole lot of care for any of them. The book failed to grab me the way I wanted it to. I wanted a new Luke Skywalker or Han Solo to care about. I wanted a new Din Djarin to follow. Instead, we get a whole bunch of names and non-faces that just ran in and out of my head like songs on the muzak at the grocery store.

Another big fault was going all the way back to the High Republic era. We know how the Republic falls. We know how the Jedi order gets scattered. Ultimately, to me, their stories are largely pointless because of that.

Move the franchise forward. Stop mining stories in the past, Disney.

One of Craig Johnson's favorite movies is the unheralded modern western comedy “Rancho Deluxe” starring Jeff Bridges and Sam Waterston. He likes it because it's laid back and lackadaisical in its approach. Much like Rancho Deluxe, Johnson's newest Longmire jaunt, “Next to Last Stand,” takes a similarly laid-back approach.

It's summer in Absaroka County. (Anyone who reads Longmire knows that they follow a seasonal pattern.) The death of an elderly military vet at the Soldiers' and Sailors' Home leads to the discovery of a million dollars in cash in the man's room, and this then sends the usual gang of sheriff's department regulars down a winding trail involving an art heist tied to Custer's Last Stand (or the Battle of Greasy Grass–as Henry Standing Bear would call it).

Like most of Johnson's books, the plot moves along at a crisp pace, the back-and-forth banter is razor-sharp, and the denizens of Absaroka fill out the what would otherwise be a thin plot.

By the end of the book, I realized that I didn't care who stole the art and who might have killed Charley Lee. I didn't care because finding out meant that I would have to stop watching Walt and Vic and Henry and Ruby and everyone else launch one-liners for another year until the seventeenth installment comes out.

At this point, the world that Johnson has created has taken over the mysteries. He could write a book that was entirely Walt hanging out with the locals, and I'd probably enjoy it more than a mystery novel. Don't get me wrong–I like the mystery, too. And it helps get Walt out of the office and interacting with the rest of the crew. But, I'd read a book where Walt just hangs out at the Red Pony for 300 pages and relish every word of it.

As wild and witty as the man himself. This is what autobiographies should be.

CJ Box writes a competent novel with solid characters and rich landscapes. I look forward to reading more about Joe Pickett and his family.

That said, there's something relentless about Joe Pickett. There's a simmering frustration and very little joy. Compared to Pickett's contemporary, Craig Johnson's Walt Longmire, ol' Joe just doesn't have a lot of laughs. There's a lot of heart in CJ Box's writing, and he likes intensity in action, but there's just no humor. No joy. No great one-liners.

I could use more banter, more conversations about nothing.

Still, I'll be looking to pick up book #4 with all due haste.

Sebastien de Castell writes the books I wish I was writing. They're full of clever twists, bravado, and flawed heroes who say the right things at the right moments. He's writing the books that fall right into the legacy Alexandre Dumas, Russell Thorndike, and Rafael Sabatini started. I loved his Greatcoats series, and the Spellslinger series was great.

This book is the origin of Ferius Parfax, easily the most intriguing character in the Spellslinger series. As with all of de Castell's books, there is plenty of attitude, gumption, and a central character who can't catch a break.

However, while the glimpse at young Ferius is appreciated and fascinating, I kind of liked Ferius because of who she was in Spellslinger, not necessarily who she was before she learned to walk the Path of the Wild Daisies.

In a way, it feels a lot like seeing young Boba Fett in those Star Wars movies. It's neat, I guess...but it's not the character I grew to love in her later years, and that disconnect is throwing me.

But, it's still a grand de Castell adventure, and worthy of being read. Looking forward to more.

Very funny and entertaining. I hope the characters come back for a sequel.

This book was solid. It paints an interesting picture of Rez life, and the struggles faced by Native peoples therein. The main character, Virgil Wounded Horse, is definitely the sort of lead character a writer can build a long-term series around, and I hope to see more of this world.

The enigmatic Pendergast returns to solve the mystery of why a crap-ton of cheap shoes with human feet still in them washed up on a beach in a ritzy part of Florida.

After 19 Pendergast novels, I'm not about to abandon the series, but at the same time–they're not really breaking new ground anymore. Most of Pendergast's personal mysteries have been laid to rest. The stories have gravitated back toward the odd, but regal FBI agent actually doing his job again. (Even if he seems displeased by having to kowtow to the Bureau's demands.)

The best thing Lincoln and Child have done with this series is to introduce Coldmoon as a partner and foil for Pendergast. I hope they continue with him, because he's a perfect foil to the debonair southerner. Coldmoon is dark where Pendergast is pale. He's unrefined where Pendergast is egalitarian. He's blunt where Pendergast is elusive. Whether Aloyuis wants to admit it or not, Coldmoon is a good match for him, and I will gladly continue to read books where the two agents banter and one-up each other.

This was an enjoyable outing, and the whodunit twist was pure Pendergast. The climax was outstanding, as well. Well done, gentlemen. Well done.

You know, this is a solid entry in what appears to be a very successful series. That said: I liked the characters, but the prose annoyed me. It's competently written, but just not for me. I can understand its appeal, though. Winspear is a fine writer, it's just not my bag.

It's one of those sorts of series that I'm not going to read any of sequels, but if/when this gets made into the inevitable BBC mysteries series, I'll watch the hell out of it.

Always rough to come to the end of a journey. I wasn't certain what to expect after de Castell finished the Greatcoats series and this series started, but after six books, I'm glad I went along for the ride. The series, which deviates from traditional fantasy by taking on an almost steampunky, Old West vibe, works through de Castell's brilliant characters and their relationships.

In this final go-round, the spellslinger Kellen finally has to step up and face down his father, a battle that has been coming for years. Gone is the boy who wanted to be a mage to please his parents, and instead we see the full Argosi, the Path of Endless Stars. There is no going back to the Jan'Tep oasis. Kellen's path no longer goes there. Thus, he's left with only one choice: victory or his life. ‘

I love de Castell's writing, and I love his view on heroics from guys who don't see themselves as heroes. I will miss Kellen and Ferius Parfax, but this was a fun ride. Maybe we'll see them all again down the line. Maybe we won't. Wherever they are, let's hope Kellen has enough tricks to get them out of whatever trouble they'll inevitably be in.

Another fine outing from John Flanagan. As an adult, I keep craving something a shade or two darker than what the Brotherband Chronicles is about, and I have to keep reminding myself that's a middle-grades book, written for tweens. However, the lack of grimdark aside, the Brotherband's wholesome adventures are still fun to read.

Walt's getting old, the years of treating his body badly are starting to catch up to him, and he's not recovered from his showdown with Bidarte, and there's a wolf in the wilderness that may or may not be a shaman in disguise. Things are lookin' mighty bleak for the beloved sheriff of Absaroka County in this, the fifteenth go-round from Craig Johnson.

LAND OF WOLVES is one of the better books in a series that maintains a high bar for character, dialogue, and prose. After focusing so hard on Walt Longmire alone in the previous book, Walt's back on familiar turf, and the glib, often funny dialogue from Vic, Sancho, Ruby, and Henry comes at a breakneck pace. It was a welcome return to form for Johnson. This is why I read the books. This is why so many people are so invested in the series. At this point in the series, there doesn't even need to be a mystery anymore. I'd read 300 pages of Walt, Vic, and Henry talking to each other.

Walt's getting up there in years. Thoughts of retirement loom large, and there might be a new contender to wear the Stetson of command in Absaroka County, but is Walt really ready to step back? Walt's internal struggles with the weight of the world on his mind and the abuse his body suffered finally catching up to him really drive the plot of this book. The murder mystery is secondary to Walt's personal plot, and for that–this book is ranks right up there in the top three that Craig's written.

I love when these books come out. I hate when I finish reading them because I know it'll be another year before I can clamber up into the sheriff's Bronco for another spin around the county with Walt and Dog.