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Kell Kressia is a living legend.  A hero about whom tales are told. This stems from an incident when Kell joined a band of rugged warriors to slay the Ice Lich. The Ice Lich was killed, thereby saving the world, according to legend, but Kell was the only human to return.  Since then, he's tried to maintain a low profile, embarrassed by any fawning attention, and prefers to work the fields as a farmer. But a new terror has come to light.  Up north, taking residence in the Ice Lich's lair, is something possibly far worse than the Ice Lich.  The frozen land is spreading south and the clans of the area are calling for men to gather and save the region once again, and the man they want to lead them is the legend himself, Kell Kressia. What Kell has never told anyone, is that he is no hero.  He was lucky the first time and in truth, he's a coward who wants only to be left alone. So... this is a 'reluctant hero' story, taken to the extreme.  Not just reluctant, bu...

 It is 1967 and drugs, Vietnam, and family farms giving way to corporate farming are the topics of conversation in many Iowa communities. Charles Weaver is graduating from his small, Iowa farming town high school as the valedictorian. He has great plans for his last summer in town before going off to Des Moines to attend Drake University - including finally having sex with his long-time sweetheart. But life plans are rarely as well ordered in reality as they are in desire. Charles and his girlfriend break up, and Charles gets a summer job working with the local street crew. Working with the street crew is a surprise to everyone who knows Charles.  The son of a local attorney and city council member, Charles doesn't appear to be cut out of manual labor. He's a scholar, likely to become a lawyer like his father. Could he last more than a day working up a sweat, shoveling tar to fill pot holes or driving tractors?  But Charles will learn valuable lessons from this over-worke...

 Oh, wow.  This is phenomenal. It is 1345 China and the Mongol's rule with an iron fist. Out in the Central Plains of China, peasants toil away and only dream of the possibilities of greatness - something found in prophesies but not real life. Until, that is, the eighth-born son of the Zhu family, Zhu Chongba, is prophesied to come to greatness.  How he'll do that is a mystery to everyone since no one from the Plains ever comes to greatness.  The family's second-born daughter is expected to become just what every daughter will become ... nothing. A brutal raid on the village leaves Zhu Chongba and his sister orphans. Zhu Chongba doesn't take well to this and he falls into a deep despair and dies. His sister on the other hand, shows a remarkable will to survive at all costs and decides to assume Zhu Chongba's identity.  She, now posing as a young boy, enters a monastery, finding it easy to be a boy when there are few expectations other than obedience.  But h...

 I've thought, longer than usual, on how to start this review. Often I'll start with a plot description -- too difficult with this book.  Sometimes I'll start with some general comments about other books I've read by the author -- been there, done that already with Wendig. And sometimes I'll dig right in and talk about what I really liked (or disliked) about a book -- again, too difficult with this. Chuck Wendig's The Book of Accidents is a serious excursion into so many different horrors that it's difficult to summarize.  We enter with a man in an electric chair. Serial killer Edmund Walker Reese who still maintains that the young girls he killed needed to die and he only regrets that the fifth girl got away. Mysteriously. And when the executioner flips the switch to send the killing volts into his body, he mysteriously disappears. We meet Nate and Maddie Graves. Nate, a Philadelphia cop, grew up with a nasty, abusive father.  That father is now dying - p...

Things haven't gone well for Mark Antonelli, a failed young writer with a grim future.  So he puts together a plan.... Mark buys a beat-up old tour bus and hires an ex-vet to be the driver, and he plans to drive/ride across the country. He places ads in newspapers along the route and will pick up a few passengers to join him on the journey. But this is not a typical site-seeing tour. Mark will screen all the potential new passengers and only those ready to cash it in ... to give up their mortal coil ... will be riding the bus.  Mark's plan for the end of the ride is to drive the bus off a cliff in San Francisco for a beautiful sunset view as they crash into the ocean. New friends will be made, and lost; new romances will blossom; there will be multiple betrayals; police chases; politics in play; and a surprisingly 'feel-good' atmosphere despite the aura of pending suicide from cover to cover. Not many authors could get away with writing a novel about a group of stranger...

 I was 100% attracted to this book because of the sub-title: Rhythm, Blues & Coming of Age Through Vinyl . The effect of music, particularly in the age of vinyl, holds a lot of interest to me. What I was expecting, then, was a memoir addressing the role music played in the life and growth of Rashod Ollison ... whoever he is. After reading the book I did a little research and even checked out some of the other book reviews (I rarely do that). Mr. Ollison, it appears, was a respected music critic and journalist who wrote for magazines and papers such as  Dallas Morning News , Philadelphia Inquirer , Journal News (Westchester, New York), Baltimore Sun , and Virginian-Pilot . These are not papers that I read and I think that perhaps the book would be much more interesting to someone who knows who Rashod Ollison is. Or was.  Unfortunately, he has passed away since the publication of this book. The book is much more an exploration of of Ollison's homosexuality - at least m...

 This is not my first Martha Wells book, but it is my first foray into The Murderbot Diaries, despite this being book number six. A quick background ... "Murderbot" is the name a self-aware robot has given itself, though it doesn't refer to itself that way out loud for fear of scaring off the humans who are already pretty wary of the destructive power of the machines. Being self-aware (I'm not sure how this happened), Murderbot hacked into its own programming and is searching for the meaning of life. To that end, it just wants to be left alone to search for the answer. In Fugitive Telemetry , Murderbot is on Preservation Station where it discovers a dead body. It must now work, voluntarily, with the station humans to discover what happened. I'm really torn on what to make of this novella.  It's really little more than a locked room mystery set in the future, with a robot as detective. The big appeal is not so much the mystery as it is the character(s). Coming ...

John Scalzi is writing a sci-fi novel with dragons?!  Hell, yeah! WARNING - POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD!! Jamie Gray is a delivery driver for a food delivery app.  It's a dead-end job for a man with Jamie's skills, but what with the pandemic, any job is a good job. But things aren't going well and Jamie wants to do something better.  This hits home even more-so when his roommates, whom he relies on to help pay the rent, tell him they are moving out.  As luck would have it, Jamie runs into an old friend, Tom, who works with an animal rights organization and they need someone to do mostly grunt work. Tom makes the arrangements for Jamie to get an immediate interview and then the job offer.  The job itself is kept mysteriously vague. All Jamie needs to know is that he'll be paid well, he'll be out of communication with society for his contracted time away, and that his job will be to lift and move things. Jamie joins a few other 'newbies' on a plane - their whereab...

 Whoa ... where did this come from?! 'Discovering' a book like this is one of the joys of reading to review. Marie Madeleine was not likely to be on my radar, but I found her work to be significant. Baroness Gertrud Freifrau von Puttkamer (born Gertrud Günther) was a German writer of lesbian-themed erotica. She published under the name 'Marie Madeleine'. It is interesting that so few of us know anything about her today given that her first book,  Auf Kypros ( On Cyprus ), sold over a million copies in her lifetime. She published nearly thirty books of plays, short stories, poetry, and novels. Those who know me or have read my reviews for awhile now probably know that I do not care for poetry.  Only one book of poetry has ever appealed to me (Galway Kinnell's The Book of Nightmares ) ... until now.  Many of the poems here had a great deal of power and imagery. I particularly liked "Hate"  (... Sex-hate! -- an odd vibration of nerves, Remembrance from ancie...

 Katharine “Kay” Swift was a young woman -  a socialite - married to a wealthy banker but frustrated because she wished to be taken seriously as a concert pianist. In one night her life will change when she attends a concert and hears a stirring new piece. She is determined to meet the brash young composer ... George Gershwin. That meeting would lead to a ten-year affair, ending only with Gershwin's death. Throughout that time, Kay struggled to gain recognition for her own work, struggled with her conflicting emotions for her husband and her lover, and struggled knowing that Gershwin would never be able to commit to a relationship because he was too busy being adored by the rest of the country. I've lately found that I can really enjoy a well-written historical fiction novel and when I saw the subject ... Gershwin, Swift, and the music of the jazz age ... I knew I had to read this. Unfortunately, author Mitchel James Kaplan delivers an un-inspiring story. This is Kay's stor...

 Let's see... The Beatles reached their peak as a working band almost 55 years ago and still we can't seem to get enough of them.  I wonder how many new Beatles-related books are still published each year.  They broke up as a band well over 50 years ago, never had a reunion tour, two of the members have passed away ... what more can we write and publish about them? Answer: Who cares ... just keep 'em coming! Author Marc Shapiro digs deep to come up with a new twist on Beatlebilia - let's look at their wives.   Why didn't anyone think of this before? A spouse has considerable influence on an artist (or at least often can), as evidenced by so much hatred by many Beatle fans for Yoko Ono and the sometimes tepid reactions to Linda McCartney. The book isn't really written so much as it is pieced together. Shapiro has researched old interviews, and visited a good number of Beatles-specialty websites to gather a clear snapshot of the former and current Beatle wives. Be...

What kind of book is this? The drawings and narrative feel like a poetic children’s book. But the creator suggests it’s more of a meditative book … something to put on the night stand and read a couple of pages before bed after a long day? Whatever it is, it’s pretty to look at. These watercolor paintings (created before the story, according to the author’s introduction) feature a woman in a winter wonderland nature environment, curling up with bear and hugging fox. It’s a fantasy world where fish fly in the sky, as do winged rabbits, and a ship at sea becomes a dragon. There is a very pastoral quality to the artwork and they certainly do have a calming effect. I am reminded of the Japanese sumi-e style of brush and ink paintings.   The fact that the women painted here are quite Asian in appearance (not just their features, but their clothing) likely contributes to this feeling. But whereas the artwork guides the reader to a sleepy melancholy, the narrative is just odd en...