Review: The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

Redshirts was John Scalzi’s homage and love-letter to all the tropes and cliches of the original (and still the best) Star Trek.

With his latest novel, The Kaiju Preservation Society, Scalzi brings the same level of love, homage, and poking fun to monster movies involving large creatures destroying large swaths of our world.

I’ll admit I’m not as steeped in the world of kaiju as I was Star Trek, so I probably missed a lot of the deeper nudges and easter eggs that Scalzi includes in this book. However, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy another great offering by one of my favorite writers.

As 2020 begins, Jamie Gray’s professional career is set. Heading into his performance review, Jamie sees great things ahead at his tech company that offers an alternative to UberEats or DoorDash. Jamie is blindsided when his boss not only demotes him but takes away his opportunity at a huge financial windfall that could see Jamie up for the foreseeable future. Instead, he’s offered the chance to be part of the team delivering meals to people.

At first, Jamie is dead-set against it. Then a real-world pandemic sets in and Jamie finds himself unable to find other work and so he begins delivering meals. While delivering one, he meets an old friend from college who needs a guy to “lift heavy stuff.” The pay is great and Jamie jumps at the chance — only to find himself on a plane to Greenland and a whole other universe that includes real-life kaiju creatures like the kind we’ve all seen in movies.

What follows is a fascinating, fun story that, like all good science fiction, brings up more than its fair share of big ideas and world-building. You can be forgiven if you don’t notice that as Scalzi is tickling your funny bone that he’s also engaging your thought processes along the way. In his afterword, Scalzi compares this book to a pop song–an entirely accurate description since a lot of the books will get stuck in your head and pop up when you’re least expecting it.

Overall, this is yet another winner by an author who’s been on a heck of a streak since Old Man’s War debuted all those years ago.

I received a digital ARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Star Trek: Picard: Assimilation & The Watcher

Can we just address the elephant in the room for this fan of Star Trek and Impractical Jokers?

With the cameo by Brian “Q” Quinn from IJ, does this mean that IJ and Star Trek are set in the same universe and that Q is actually a member of the continuum?

OK, so there are probably deeper, more fundamental questions arising from these two episodes of Picard, but it’s still fun for this fan of both shows to ponder.

The first two episodes of the season seem to be about establishing the situation that Picard is addressing in season two – namely that Q has somehow interfered with time and created an alternate timeline. “Assimilation” and “The Watcher” start making steps toward finding a way to correct that adjustment, even if our characters don’t necessarily have a clue yet about where the timeline went wrong and just how to fix it.

Top Ten Tuesday: Future Classics

Many moons ago, when I was taking high school AP English, my teacher pondered which of Stephen King’s prolific library would stand the test of time and be considered a classic of literature. That conversation comes to mind today as I ponder this week’s literary meme Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl). Today, we’re asked which books published since the turn of the century do we think will become classics.

Here’s my list in no particular order.

1. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
2. 11/22/63 by Stephen King
3. Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
4. The Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling
5. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
6. The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins
7. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
8. Daytripper by Fabio Moon

Review: Beautiful Bad by Annie Walker

Can we agree that the unreliable narrator has been used so much in recent mystery/suspense fiction that it’s starting to become a cliche?

Part of what makes The Murder of Roger Ackroyd or Gone Girl work is that the reader becomes invested in the characters in the story, so when the reveal comes that our narrator is unreliable, it’s a clever shock that (looking back) we should have been coming.

Alas, Beautiful Bad overlooks the lesson of having the reader invest in the characters, so when the various twists and turns start to pile on late in the story, they’re not so much earned but seemingly feel inevitable — and not in a good way.

The story starts off in media res, giving us details on the police showing up to the home of Maddie and Ian, where something bad has happened. It then jumps around in time, showing us the unfolding drama that led up to the night in question in which (wait for it….) someone died under mysterious and problematic circumstances.

Jumping around in time, the story catalogs the romance of Maddie and Ian (if you can call it that), how it split two best friends Maddie and Joanna and then offers glimpses into Maddie’s therapy sessions following a life-altering incident. Honestly, part of my problem with the book comes down to the central love triangle of Maddie/Ian/Joanna (and there’s even Ian’s crazy ex-girlfriend who keeps lurking about, but the less said about her, the better), never really gels into anything all that interesting.

A lot of it stems from a lack of investment in any of these characters — and more a desire to reach into the page and tell everyone involved to grow the heck up already. The story and situations make it difficult to believe that Maddie is attracted to Ian, much less that these two would wait around for each other for seven-plus years before getting married and starting a family.

And then, we get to the twists and turns of the second half of the book. Maddie has a mysterious accident while camping that leaves her permanently scarred physically and emotionally. The novel offers hints of what might have happened that night in an attempt to keep readers second-guessing what we know about the characters and situation. We even get a chapter or two from Ian’s point of view so maybe we can understand a bit of where he’s coming from in this situation.

It all keeps drawing us back to the night in question and the death of a character. Honestly, by the time we get there, I’d pretty much sussed out what was going on. But I was less interested in finding out the impact on the characters than I was in seeing if I’d deduced the solution correctly as I went through the final third of the novel.

There are some flashes of something more to this novel in isolated moments. But this one is probably the literary equivalent of a Lays’ potato chip — vaguely satisfying while you’re chewing on it, but it isn’t going to provide much long-term nutritional value.

I wanted to like this one a lot more than I did.

Review: 56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard

A chance encounter in the local grocery store leads to a growing attraction between Ciara and Oliver, only for this budding romance to be threatened by the early days of Covid-19 and their local lockdown. Rather than risk losing this newfound connection, Oliver invites Ciara to move in with him — after only dating for two weeks.

Weeks later, the police are called to the apartment they shared. There’s a body in the tub and the other person is missing.

So begins the saga of Catherine Ryan Howard’s 56 Days. It’s tempting to call this one a Covid-19 mystery, but doing so probably sells the overall story a bit short.

Over the course of the story, we move back and forth in time and perspective — from the detectives looking into the case to chapters told from Oliver and Ciara’s points of view. Howard deftly toys with reader expectations, creating assumptions and then slyly pulling the rug out from underneath you as new revelations or details unfold. At first, it’s a clever twist or two that keeps the story moving.

And then, we get to the second half of the book, where assumptions are turned entirely on their ear and while looking back they weren’t necessarily unexpected turns, the turns still left me scratching my head, thinking, “Well, that’s an interesting choice.” For the sake of not ruining things, I won’t go into too great a detail on it, except to say that I can’t quite determine if the final twists were really great or just a really interesting choice by Howard. I will give her credit though — she’s kept me thinking about this book long after I finished and even recommending it to several people just so I can see what their reaction to the final third of the novel is.

Star Trek: Picard — The Stargazer, Penance

Watching the second season premiere of Picard, two thoughts kept running through my mind (almost to the point of distraction). One was – why did we spend all of season one getting this crew together only to break them all up again? The other was – when is Q going to show up?

I can understand in the times in which we live that the news of Q showing up wouldn’t have been spoiled by the Internet trolls who get up at 3 a.m. to watch new episodes of everything and then put out clickbait headlines to ruin it for those of us who like to do silly things like sleep, but it still felt like a lot of time in the premiere was treading water waiting for John de Lancie to pop in.

Of course, the question of when Q is going to arrive probably distracted me from the feeling that it took ten episodes of season one to get up to the same moment we got to in ninety-minutes with “Encounter at Farpoint” with the crew being assembled and ready for some adventures, only to see everyone scattered again. Now we have to spend an episode or two bringing everyone back together again so we can get this season’s story underway.

Both of these issues are probably more on me as a viewer than the production itself. But they still stuck out and distracted me from fully engaging with “The Star Gazer” until the final moments.

This probably wasn’t helped by the fact that this viewer is a bit weary of “in media res” openings that tease a huge conflict and then flashback to show us just how we arrived at the said moment. In this case, it’s Picard ordering the destruction of the ship to stop the Borg Queen because Starfleet has incorporated Borg technology in their new ship design. Yes, we get to see the action scene twice and it’s nicely done – but I feel like it wasn’t the best way to start off the season.

Audiobook Review: Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Big Shot by Jeff Kinney

After sixteen entries, it would be easy to think that Jeff Kinney could be running out of material for his Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. However, if Big Shot is any indication, that won’t happen soon.

This edition finds Greg dipping his toe into the world of sports — first with field day and then with basketball. Both situations have their amusing moments, including some nice moments with Greg and his mother as she pushes his basketball career. Kinney does a nice job of keeping Greg relatable to readers and his asides are usually pretty funny and well observed. There won’t be any huge surprises here, but after sixteen books, you can’t really expect Kinney to reinvent the wheel.

What you do get is a satisfying entry to the series that was entertaining and welcome.

Audiobook Review: Firestarter by Stephen King

Back in the ’80s, my local library had a special section filled with materials for teenage readers. Not only did it have spinner racks full of books, but there were also magazines targeted at developing minds like Starlog and Mad Magazine.

I was aware of Stephen King, though I hadn’t yet dipped my toes into that horror master’s body of work just yet. So, when Firestarter appeared in the spinner rack one day, I decided that it might be time to put aside my worries of being scared to the edge of my seat and give Stephen King a try. And while I wouldn’t say Firestarter is exactly a top-ten classic from King, it made enough of an impression that I picked up another King novel, then another, and now, over thirty years later, I’ve read pretty much everything that King has written.

Now with a new version of Firestarter headed to our screens, I decided it was time to revisit my first King novel, though this time I did so on audio.

Eight-year-old Charlie McGee has a gift — she can start fires with her mind. She got this ability from her parents, who participated in a college experiment sponsored by the mysterious governmental entity known as The Shop. While Andy, her father, has low-level powers that allow him to impose his will upon subjects, Charlie is the focus of the Shop and its leader, Cap. Her power could be a decided advantage to whatever government gets control of her — assuming that Charlie can control them, that is.

Andy and Charlie are on the run, trying to stay one step ahead of the Shop agents. As the net closes in on them, the two are pushed to their breaking point and it could lead to disastrous consequences for all concerned.

I’d forgotten large chunks of Firestarter, so it felt like (at times) I was reading it for the first time. What struck me most this time around was the bond between Andy and Charlie and seeing how far Andy will go to protect his daughter. As a father to a little girl, Andy’s motives and actions come to make complete sense, up to and including the sacrifices and risks he’s willing to take to keep Charlie out of the Shop’s hands. There are some great passages in her that demonstrate this, especially in the first half when Andy and Charlie are on the run.

The novel loses a bit of momentum in the middle third when the Shop finally catches up to them and takes them into custody. King tries to establish their main adversary in John Rainbird, a disfigured man who wants to understand death, but I never quite found myself connecting with Rainbird in quite the way I’d hoped. I can see that King is trying to create a villain who believes he’s the hero of this particular tale, but I’m not entirely sure it succeeds.

The middle third is all about moving pieces into place for the final explosive showdown. We get a preview of it in an early battle between Charlie and the Shop, but it’s the final battle where everything goes for broke.

King’s use of flashbacks to fill in details is an interesting one — especially since a lot of the flashbacks come from Andy’s point of view. The initial experiments and the day that the Shop tortured and killed Andy’s wife, Vicky, are particularly chilling and well done.

And yet, I still can’t help but come away from this one thinking it could have been a bit tighter. It feels like we spend a lot of time between battle one and battle two — and that time feels like it’s treading water a bit.

I still say this is a good entry point to the world of Stephen King, though it’s not necessarily a favorite.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Enjoyed But Didn’t Mention Here (Until Now)

It’s been a few weeks since I celebrated the literary meme Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl).

This week’s prompt is the book you’ve read and enjoyed but didn’t mention. This got me thinking and here are a few that I have neglected to mention or review for whatever reason.

1. What’s Done in Darkness by Laura McHugh
2. How Lucky by Will Leitch
3. Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid
4. Tiny Deaths by Rob Shearman
5. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara
6. If It Bleed by Stephen King
7. Playing for the Ashes by Elizabeth George
8. One Word Kill by Mark Lawrence
9. Star Trek: The Next Generation: Q-Squared by Peter David
10. Star Trek: The Wounded Sky by Diane Duane