Kevin Guertin

This could have been 400 pages instead of a thousand.

Absolutely amazing series!

I am a gay man in my 40s who grew up as a child and teenager in a small Conservative town. Growing up in that toxic environment as a gay boy was very difficult. You couldn't come out for the risk of rejection and violence from multiple sources.

Although I kind of knew I was gay at a very young age, it was made absolutely clear when I developed a mad crush on a boy in High School. That didn't develop into anything. He was straight, of course.

I wanted to watch the Netflix series, but not before I read the original source material. I love these feel-good coming of age (and coming out) LGBTQ love stories because I think back to that crush and wish I was able to experience that when I was a boy. To just... be. I lost so much of my life because I couldn't do that.

It is nice to see that the current young generations are in a much more accepting society of fluid sexualities and genders. That's not to say that it's not bad in a lot of areas, but it is drastically better than when I was a boy.

This graphic novel perfectly captures that young love.

I really liked this book. It was short and fun to read. It was actually comforting. It made me feel like I was tucked in a corner of a quaint hole-in-the-wall café reading a book even though I was in my living room. And now I want to quit my job and own my own coffee shop!

When I finished all the books in The Expanse series, I was only really disappointed with two things:

1. We never heard from Filip again. We never learned what happened to him. It felt like a wasted character. A lost opportunity.

2. When the gates permanently closed and drifted towards their suns to their deaths, we never got a chance to experience the lives and worlds stuck behind those gates. We'd never know how any would survive or not, cut off from the rest of humanity forever. What would those worlds do to survive on their own?

Well, this novella scratched the itch on both of those counts, if only slightly. Besides Filip, another minor character we know, daughter of Anna, is in this story. I wish it was longer and we could get to explore more of that survival of humanity behind the gates.

Perhaps the authors will explore that in the future. Maybe with immortal Amos, starting from the epilogue of Leviathan Falls, 1000 years in the future...

This is only the second time I read this series, including The Hobbit, which I read over the holidays. For some reason, I seem to gravitate to classic fantasy or science fiction during the holidays. I first read this back in 2003 when I was in college. At that time, the 3rd movie was about to come out and I wanted to read the books before watching the movies. The trailers had hooked me.

So, I started reading my first fantasy series with The Hobbit. It was my first fantasy novel if you don’t count any of Stephen King’s stuff. So reading The Fellowship of the Ring back then felt like a huge and difficult novel. I was not used to so many strange names and places and found it a bit hard to read. Then, I watched the first movie. And then I read The Two Towers and watched the movie. However, I ended up never reading The Return of the King and just watched the movie instead.

This time around, I told myself I’d read all 4 books. On this second read-through of The Fellowship of the Ring, I found it too simple! Maybe it’s the prose. It felt… dry? It felt more like a young adult book. I found myself being bored, probably because I knew the story so well from the movies. So, I’m giving this 4 stars this time around.

This is not so much a review, but reminiscing about how this was the absolute first novel I ever read that wasn't for school back in grade 8 in the early nineties. A friend lent it to me, a book that belonged to her mother who was a teacher and thus began a lifetime of reading all of his works. On the cusp of becoming a teenager, I clearly remember reading it in my closet inside my sleeping bag with a little lamp and munching on sunflower seeds, scared of leaving the security of the closet. I would end up sleeping in it until the morning. My bedroom was in a windowless basement of an old house. It got suffocatingly dark in that basement and I liked it in my closet!

My friend lent me more of her mother's Stephen King novels and that became a ritual, reading Stephen King in my closet with a lamp and sunflower seeds. It annoyed my mother, for some reason, that I wasn't sleeping in my bed.

This is a must-read classic ghost story, the best of its kind. I reread it a few years ago because I had planned to read the sequel, Doctor Sleep, and it was just as good outside of the closet! ;)

I just can't continue reading this garbage. I have never abandoned a book, but this is like reading Fan-fic from someone who isn't even a fan of Star Wars.