hpholo
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The Order of Odd-Fish – Book Review
In the pre-Adventure Time days, there was no easy way to describe James Kennedy’s The Order of Odd-Fish. After all, how does one simply describe a book that is equal parts the snap-quick grotesquerie of Roald Dahl, the cracked-out madness of every late-late-night cartoon, and even the bizarre randomness of a select band of comedy anime? There is…
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Pacific Rim: Tales from Year Zero – Book Review
One movie reviewer commented that the Pacific Rim movie watched like a sequel to a previous movie that the filmmakers forgot to make. This was possibly due to its quick prologue, which summed up the movie’s tagline (“To fight monsters we created monsters”) via disaster montage and then fast forwarded to the present of the…
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Future Diary, Volume 1 – Book Review
Yukiteru Amano is a perpetual bystander. Since he prefers not to interact with other people, he occupies his time by keeping a cell phone diary of random goings-on that occur around him. Oh, and by hanging out with his imagined friend Deus ex Machina, the God of Time and Space…who, Yuki finds, is not so…
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Airman – Book Review
Conor Broekhart was made for the air. Born in the middle of a hot air balloon crash, he has ever since sought to reenter the atmosphere. As the student of a French aeronautics expert, not to mention a family friend of the king of the scientifically-curious Saltee Islands, he’s in a perfect position to make…
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Lizzie Newton: Victorian Mysteries, Volume 1 – Book Review
Lizzie Newton is equal parts Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes, a budding mystery writer who does more than write mysteries—She solves them, too. No one wants to believe this of her, though, because this is the Victorian era, after all, and women don’t do that sort of thing. This is why Lizzie must hide her…
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Ral & Grad Volume 1 by Tsuneo Takano and Takeshi Obata – Manga Review
Fifteen years ago, a child was born at the cost of his mother’s life, and through that child, a dragon appeared. This dragon obliterated the landscape and was followed shortly by a horde of Shadows–dark beasts that enter and possess bodies via those bodies’ shadows. The only way to contain a Shadow is to keep it…
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Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor – Book Review
Sometimes there are books that you like. And sometimes there are books that you love so much, you want to run around the library screaming their praises and wondering why they’ve only been checked out twice because OMG THEY ARE AWESOME and why wouldn’t anyone want to pick them up because OMGTHEYAREJUSTTHATAWESOME,YOUGUYSdssfhsjfjkseyrkjhs !!1!!1@ 😀 This…
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The Friday Society by Adrienne Kress – Book Review
Caution: Contains one spoiler. Anyone who has ever spoken to me at length about steampunk will know this: While I do love steampunk, I’m a bigger fan of the idea of steampunk than I am of most steampunk books. My main complaint against them is that they tend to treat the pseudo-Victorian aesthetic as a decoration, rather than…
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BZRK by Michael Grant – Book Review
Conjoined twins Charles and Benjamin Armstrong have a vision of a utopian future—a future in which war, hunger, even minor conflict is nonexistent. They wish to see human society perfected. Which sounds pretty sweet, except that they hope to achieve it by sending brain-manipulating nanobots into the minds of the most powerful leaders on the…
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Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve – Book Review
The people of the future no longer live on the ground. In the time between our period, theirs, and the pivotal Sixty Minute War, they’ve moved onto enormous mobile cities known as Traction Cities, which carry them around the world to escape the geological dangers created by the Sixty Minute War…and also away from other cities.…