Kilcannon

It's YA (which I didn't realize when I started reading it), but I think it might be a little trite, even in that context.

It probably deserved two stars, since the monster isn't bad and there are a few decent story elements.

But it doesn't know what to do with its far too many characters, and not much actually happens.

Really, though, I deducted a star for the description of flashes of memory as “Snapchats of memory” and for the part where they talk about Ghostbusters, but it's the awful remake.

I don't know what possessed me to buy this YA dreck at a Dollar Tree.

A reluctant three stars.

Three complaints:
1. Lack of motivation for one dramatic moment ... which was unfortunately the climax

2. One dramatic moment glossed over for no reason

3. Two parts where Shirley seemed as if he lost track of what was happening

But I like the world and the characters and the wackiness of working game mechanics into a coherent story. There's no point in applying too much critical thinking to this one.

I'm begrudgingly giving it three stars, because it was a pleasant enough time Easter of a book. The resolution, however, was almost comically anticlimactic and dull. (Spoilers: Superman couldn't do a thing, so he just tried again later and just did it then.)

Apparently the editorial directive to the authors of this series was “We know you're not Douglas Adams, but please pretend to be as hard as you can so that the desperation shines through more clearly with each subsequent sentence.”

I'm sure this all seemed reasonable before Trump won.

Chad Kultgen's “The Average American Male” is a descendent of this book.

It's broad and dated and, yeah, a bit much, but with a purity of purpose.

I just didn't get it, I hate to say. I've liked other Lessing I've read.

The best part was the rambling, pointless afterward about South Pole explorers. No, really. It was at least interesting and coherent.

This is written by from the perspective of someone who has achieved a level of enlightenment, by someone who clearly hasn't. What it amounts to is a guy who hates his former self, but hasn't seemed to learn about life ... just addiction ... from that self.

There are some great stories about stand ups and the business in here, and some nice movie talk, nestled in among judgey, go-nowhere assertions that his current self is where it's at.

I wonder how the book would read if he'd made less money or hadn't had a kid.

I didn't expect that book to have so many racial slurs, so much testicular torture or scenes from the POV of a chimpanzee.

Seemed to miss the point of the characters.

An incoherent mess, and not just because I don't know the characters.

Felt a bit perfunctory. And perhaps a bit fetishistic.

I know it was written with an anti-racist purpose, but I'm not sure it achieved it.

I didn't remember Beatrix Potter being this Kafka-esque.

I was surprised by how much I liked this one. It shied away from the gratuitous shock and lol-so-random nonsense of some bizarro lit.

I would have liked, actually, to see this world expanded.

The character interactions were dead-on, and the action was a lot of fun. That's all you need from a pointless crossover story.

This is among the worst Piers Anthony novels I've read. His usually troubling sex scenes are here, plus a lot of non-pun humor, which is not something he's good at.

I feel like he might've been imitating Norman Spinrad a bit, here. Whatever he was going for with this more bombastic tone, it was a swing and a miss.

A little trite. Probably only deserved two stars, but it could be the basis of a good movie.

I don't read a lot of mysteries, but I see how someone could be hooked on them.

This one took the formula and set it against a pleasant little tale of local Jewish politics. The rabbi is a compelling and unexpected crime solver.

A lot of stupid nonsense that builds into an epic finale of stupid nonsense that is hard to resist. What can't I quit you, Palahniuk?

This series is just pointless. I can see why it ended quickly, despite Saberhagen's popularity.

I'm thrown off by the ending and am tempted to accuse the book of being misogynistic.

I think it probably isn't really and is just too slight a work for the nuance that would save it.

I could be wrong. I finished it only moments ago, and it is at least rich enough to get me thinking about its themes. I may come back later and give it an additional star.

I'm smart and I read smart things. Not Maxwell Smart, though.

What a mess.

From the way he skirts around the issues or only drops in an occasional brief mention of them, it's almost as if Abbott is aware that he utterly fails to apply his own Constitutionalist principles to issues like religion in the public sphere or abortion.

This abject hypocrisy aside, his ideas about the Constitution and the states' ability to amend it are all pretty sound, and most of the proposals in here make sense or are at least intriguing.

The book was a little repetitive, but I guess that makes sense for a manifesto like this.