read: The Wild Robot by Peter Brown ★★★★★

The Wild Robot by Peter Brown
My rating: ★★★★★

Delightfully entertaining story that ignores the scary parts of AI to explore more promising possibilities of machine learning, set against a fanciful natural world where animals can get along with each other. And eventually, with a technological creature. Bonus overtones of found family and environmentalism. But ultimately, a story about a robot and a goose on an island.

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read: Wake Up With Purpose!: What I've Learned in My First Hundred Years by Jean Dolores Schmidt ★★★★★

Wake Up With Purpose!: What I've Learned in My First Hundred Years by Jean Dolores Schmidt
My rating: ★★★★★

This book is a breath of fresh air. You don't have to be Catholic, or even Christian, to enjoy Sister Jean's uplifting view about life and living it.

"If you’re not moving forward, you’re going to get left behind real quick."

“I still go to bed every night with a smile on my face, gratitude in my heart, and love in my soul.”

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read: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire ★★

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
My rating: ★★

I don't like to post negative reviews. But I really feel like I would have liked someone to warn me off this before I struggled with it for a couple of weeks.

Nope. Not for me. I didn’t care for a single character (except, perhaps, for Boq). Without that, there was nothing to carry me through to the end. The narrative was confusing, not compelling.

Such a shame, too. I’ve had this in my queue forever, having seen the play and thinking the book would be right up my alley. Now that the film is streaming, it was time to attend to the novel.

But, no. DNF.

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read: Blood Hollow by William Kent Krueger ★★★★★

Blood Hollow by William Kent Krueger
My rating: ★★★★★

Returned to this series at #4 after a long break reading other stuff and after reading a later volume. Still great storytelling that does not suffer from reading out of order.

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reread: How Much for Just the Planet? by John M. Ford ★★★

How Much for Just the Planet? by John M. Ford
My rating: ★★★

So many feelings after rereading this decades after a first reading upon its initial release. It's still such a silly take on Star Trek, right up there with the Original Series episodes, "A Piece of the Action", "Shore Leave" and "The Trouble With Tribbles". And yet I can't reconcile its innocent charm, skewed characterizations and flawed storytelling with ratings I previously gave the book: 2 stars at one point, long forgotten and undeserved, and then 4 stars, apparently based on my faulty memory of how funny I must have found it.

Three stars seems about right. I shouldn't fault the author for playing around with Star Trek lore at a time when it was far less established. And I won't. Although the Klingons never quite ring 'true' here, weighted down as I am with 40 more years of books, TV and film. They are much too personable. Everyone else seems about right, for the time. What kept distracting me, though, were the casual references to what should have been archaic Earth cultural touchpoints. Even the humans of Kirk's time are usually presented with larger gaps in their knowledge of 19th and 20th century British and American stage and film. How the isolated colonists on Direidi, much less the Klingons, know so much about Gilbert and Sullivan, classic Hollywood films and romantic comedy is a mystery.

Leaving all that as the key suspension of disbelief, the reader is left with a pleasant story of cunning locals pulling the wool over the eyes of supposedly more sophisticated visitors out to exploit them.

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read: When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi ★★★★★

When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi
My rating: ★★★★★

I expected this book to be offbeat and entertaining. But John Scalzi took it in a completely different direction than I expected. The reader knows the premise, based on the title and back cover blurb. "What would happen if the moon suddenly and without explanation turned into cheese." But what the author does with that premise caught me off guard. The moon turning into cheese is the both the inciting incident and the only required suspension of disbelief. Everything else follows logically and as true to the real world as possible.

The mass of the moon stays the same. No orbital mechanics are (supposedly) skewed. Other natural processes must and do proceed apace: it's larger in diameter, it's brighter, the surface is too soft for a landing, etc. The book delves into the effect the change has on the population of Earth. Chapters focus on different sets of characters and their unique situations in a somewhat chronological order. Some incidents are humorous. Others not so much. A few characters pop up more than once so we get a fuller picture how the new moon's ramifications on their life. And then something happens to which my response was "he didn't actually go there, did he?" But he did. And it makes for an even more interesting story.

Disclosure: Thank you to Netgalley and Tor Books for allowing me to preview this book.

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read: The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal ★★★★

The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal
My rating: ★★★★

I am loving this series from Mary Robinette Kowal. It pushes all of my buttons as a boomer child of the space age, telling stories of an alternate, sped up space race pitted against nature, rather than Russia. Mary Robinette has done her research and it shows, without getting too pedantic. After spending the previous novel looking into developments at Artemis Base on the moon with Nicole Wargin, this book returns to Elma York and her work on Mars getting things settled in at Earth's new habitat (not colony) there.

Of course, things do not go smoothly. Elma senses something is wrong from the minute she lands with the second expedition and finds certain details mysteriously out of place. But the members of the first expedition are united in their silence about what might have happened on their first trip. The mysteries are set aside while more urgent threats to the mission are addressed. Yet even those situations spark more questions about the first expedition.

A couple of things kept this from being a five star experience for me. The biggest was the repetitiveness of Elma's passive ponderings about the first expedition's problems. I kept wanting her to be the badass she was in her first two novels and get to the bottom of things. She did exhibit great agency when it came to piloting tasks. But it seemed to take forever for her to grab hold of the reigns of command and drive the mission. This bogged things down for me.

On the whole, the storytelling is top notch, even with a bunch of technobabble and cultural conflict. The reader is always rooting for everyone to stay safe, stay happy and be successful in mixing and matching cultures and build a new society on a new planet.

Disclosure: Thank you to Netgalley and Tor Books for allowing me to preview this book.

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