Reviews
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Halfway Dead – Book Review
If the tagline “Come for the waffles. Stay for the magic.” doesn’t grab you by the throat and plunge your eyeballs straight into Terry Maggert’s Halfway Dead then you, my friend…well, probably haven’t met the right waffle. Which is all the more reason to visit the good witch Carlie at the diner in Halfway. Halfway…
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Con Me Once – Book Review
Rauch and Frank are two down-on-their-luck roommates who just want better lives – Rauch for the two of them, Frank for other people. It’s why, when Frank isn’t working at the local comic shop, he prowls the streets as the costumed hero Lambda Man, using homemade tools to do whatever small good he can around…
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Redline – Anime Review
While watching Promare’s spectacular animation, I was reminded quite a bit of Redline, and then when writing my Promare review, I realized I’d never actually reviewed Redline. So I’m here to remedy that. Redline is a 2009 anime that follows the gloriously pompadoured Sweet JP as he and his Trans Am compete to win the…
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Promare – Anime Review
Pssh. Right, like a Trigger movie would come to our local theatre and it NOT be a Mandatory Date Night. Promare starts with a literal bang, as half the world’s population spontaneously bursts into flames, thus marking the Great World Blaze and the appearance of the Burnish – people with fire-manipulating powers who set the…
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A Flash of Red – Book Review
Jacob’s sister wrote a book, too, you guys! 😀 Psychological thrillers are a bit out of my wheelhouse, but thanks to this one, I may have found a new genre worth exploring. A Flash of Red by Sarah K. Stephens tells the intertwining stories of three characters: Anna Kline, a psychology professor afraid that she’s…
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Detective Pikachu – Movie Review
I showed up to an early preview of Detective Pikachu in my full-body Pikachu jammies, fueled by 20 years of Pokemon nostalgia and an insatiable love of bad movies, so there was no way I wasn’t going to like this thing. https://www.instagram.com/p/BxQ1BhlnE6e/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link Even so, you can imagine my delight when it proved to be not…
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Suicidal Samurai – Book Review
Several years ago at Anime Weekend Atlanta, we had the pleasure to be table neighbors with Sarah G. Rothman, and when she described her book Suicidal Samurai as “a samurai-cowboy solves mysteries in Victorian Japan,” it was a natural insta-buy. Of course, me being me, I didn’t actually read it until last month. But I…
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Easy to be a God – Book Review
In Robert J. Szmidt’s Easy to be a God, humanity has been expanding through the universe for 300 years, and not once has it encountered any other form of intelligent life – until a rough-and-tumble salvaging crew stumbles upon the 50,000-year-old remains of the first…and comes to regret it. It’s not the last time humanity…
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Food Wars (S1) – Anime Review
After subjecting Jacob to the emasculating experience that was Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE!, I decided to have some mercy and suggest Food Wars, which has become famous (infamous?) for its fanservice. Food Wars (aka Shokugeki no Soma) follows amateur chef Yukihira Soma, whose dream of becoming a full time chef at his father’s…
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Mary Poppins Returns – Movie Review
In Mary Poppins Returns, there’s a song titled “A Cover is not the Book.” It’s about various whimsical figures who are not what they seem on the surface, but it might as well be about the movie itself: What looks to be an expensive, nostalgia-reliant cash grab is…well, still an expensive, nostalgia-reliant cash grab, but…