Scan barcode
mrawdon's reviews
206 reviews
The Secrets of Life and Death by Rebecca Alexander
2.0
Mediocre urban fantasy about people rescued from death only to be turned into revenants. Our heroes in the present day include a couple such revenants, and a university professor. They face an adversary whose roots lie in the late 16th century, which we learn by following the exploits of John Dee and Edward Kelley (actual historical figures) in Poland of that time. But all the historical stuff feels superfluous to the main story and could have been boiled down from half the book to a couple of chapters. There's plenty of magic in the story, with little framework governing how it works, so it feels rather arbitrary. The book does have some suspenseful sequences, but overall I found it not very engaging,
Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman
3.0
An entertaining novel about superheroes and supervillains. Not especially profound, but the author clearly has a love for silver age superhero stuff (and a respect for and understanding of the genre that The Incredibles did not). It's reasonably effective at getting into the heads of the two narrating characters (a young hero and an experienced villain). The most fun bits involve the glimpses into the histories of the other characters, their full stories being held tantalizingly out of reach (something that today's superhero comics cannot resist diving into ad nauseous). As a serious examination or deconstruction of the genre (which I always feel mainstream fiction about superheroes is striving to be), it feels simplistic compared to, say, almost anything Alan Moore has written, but on its own terms it's entirely entertaining.