Lucas Blogs About Books

Ya gotta have blue hair! So, what's this book's deal? Well, we're on volume 4 of Kamome Shirahama's Witch Hat Atelier  manga. The one about the tween girl who needs to learn magic after she accidentally petrified her mother? The very same. Okay. You're taking a much more blithe attitude about this than I expected. I can grow and change. Fair enough. Anyway, in this volume, Coco takes a backseat as some of the other students at the atelier are preparing for their next test. Specifically Coco's roommate/frenemy (froomenate?), Agott, and Richeh. In case you can't recall, Agott is driven by a desire to live up to her family legacy and Richeh just wants to do magic her  way. In any case, they have to take the second test of their magical abilities, the Sincerity of the Shield. Basically, they have to lead a bunch of gryphons (in this case, four legged penguins with floppy ears) down a magical road without the gryphons catching wise that they...

Wow, name bigger than title status, nicely done, Powell. So, what's this book's deal? Embers of War  is the start of a new series by Gareth L. Powell, the British Science Fiction Award-winning author of Ack-Ack Macaque . Oh, you liked those books didn't you? I did. Did you like this one? I couldn't get into it. Sadly, this joins the " books that I didn't finish " club with Bloody Rose  and Into the Drowning Deep . So, it's not good? I wouldn't go that far. Look, I've never thought that Powell was an amazing prose writer. His style is proficient enough, but I was definitely more into Ack-Ack Macaque and its sequels because of the story and characters than because of the writing. But let's get an idea of the book's deal. Yes, let's. So it begins with a space battle over the planet Pelapatarn where Captain Annelida Deal gives an order that will simultaneously do two things: 1) end the immediate conflict and possib...

Huh, my hand looks like it's at a weird angle in this picture. Happy 13th of the month, readers (both hypothetical and otherwise)! You know what that means: it's time for me to revisit another entry in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events! Sticking with that intro? Yes. All right. SPOILERS  ahoy! Okay, last we checked in you were feeling a tad burnt out on all things A Series of Unfortunate Events. Well, not all things, mostly Lemony Snicket's stylistic tics. Fair enough. Do you still feel that way. Since I write the opening pretty soon after I post the previous entry, yes. Okay, so what do you remember abo— Hey, I'm the one who gets to say that this is where we talk about Book the Eleventh: The Grim Grotto . Fine, what do you remember about it. It involves a submarine and mushrooms. That's it? It might also reveal what became of Hector's self-sustaining hot-air mobile home. Okay, but you thought that about The Sl...

I suppose I could make a joke about how manly this picture isn't, but that seems out of keeping with the spirit of a book about being true to yourself, traditional gender roles be damned. Hmm, is pointing that out a way of trying to have my cake and  eat it? ‾\_(ツ)_/‾ So, what's this book's dea—oh, wasn't this in your Unhelpfully Specific Holiday Gift Guide ? Yep! I gave it to my first cousin once removed. She's a precocious eight-year-old. You mentioned that. What did she think? Well, her mom said it was a hit, so I guess she liked it. [ UPDATE:  I just received a thank you note in which she claims to have read the book ~2,000 times. There isn't a date on the note, but even conservatively, that's more than 100 readings per day, I think we can safely say that this one was a hit. - 1/9/2020] So . . . what's it about? Well, Jen Wang's The Prince and Dressmaker  is a graphic novel (but let's be real, it's a comic book) set in Paris...