Despite the generally positive reviews, I avoided Lucy Parker’s follow-up to the delightful Act Like It for fear that it wouldn’t live up to the hype. Big shock: the book is excellent. (Though Act Like It will probably remain my favorite.) Pretty Face has an additional 100 pages which Parker uses well. Lily and Luc are both three-dimensional characters. Lily is a vampy soap actress with her first role in a big ticket West End production. Professionally, her overblown Marilyn Monroe-esque features and breathy, sex kitten […]
Su Yi’s dying, who’s got the will?
The short, short review: YESSSSSSS! The short review: the Youngs of Tyersall Park are back in fine form in the last entry in the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy. If you enjoyed either of the first two books, you’re going to want to read this one. The long review: from the end of Crazy Rich Asians, readers had to know this book was coming. With Nick, the long-presumed heir of Tyersall Park, disinherited, who was going to get the estate and all that fabulous wealth? Ethereal […]
Awkward dudes are awkward
Let’s get this much out of the way: though it figures into the title, W. Kamau Bell does not address his asthma in this book. If you were reading the title and twigged on that word, there’s very little here for you. It’s a shame, really, because Bell thoughtfully addresses pretty much everything else and I might have been interested to know what he had to say on the topic, especially given the high incidence of asthma in African Americans. I can only wonder what […]
The one with the kid in a cravat and top hat
Author M. M. “Mimi” Banning wrote a beloved book, married a movie star, moved to Hollywood, and dropped out of the public eye. Some years later, Mimi, who has always been “good with numbers and bad with money”, finds herself in dire financial circumstances. There’s nothing for it: she’s going to have to write a second book.* To allow Mimi the freedom to write her book in relative peace, Mimi’s publisher sends her a personal assistant, the naive Alice Whitley. Alice’s role is to be […]
Working 5 to 9
Once again, I’m reviewing a sequel book in a series without having covered the first book. Some of the review will be very lightly spoiler-ish. The central conceit of the series: Fred Fletcher lived a quiet, boring life as an accountant. He liked this life. Then he died. (Hot tip: nothing good can happen at your high school reunion.) Fred did what any of us would do after becoming a vampire: made his day job his night job. Only the clients look a lot different now than […]
Meanwhile, inside the Brotherhood of Mutants
I started writing the synopsis for this story and everything made it sound like pretty much what you’d get if you set a story in Discworld’s Thieves’s Guild merged with the Assassins’s Guild with a splash of the Fast and Furious franchise. Which it kind of is. But isn’t entirely.* And it works. Tori Rivas gets busted while breaking into a secret file cabinet of a global tech firm. See, Tori was unaware that the firm is owned by one of the world’s most infamous […]
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