Book Review: The Raven King

Whenever I review a story which is a later installment in a series I always wonder how to approach it. Part of it is that I truly don't know who my audience is, are you readers folks who haven't tried the series at all? Planning on getting to this installment but haven't yet? Folks who've read the story and are looking for discussion? I honestly have no idea! So I think I'm just going to write about what I liked in this book and the series as a whole since yes, of course I liked it if I read the first three books before it and kept going. I've also been fairly vocal in my praise for this particular series so consider this an endorsement for it as well. It's been years since my review of The Raven Boys, I don't particularly want to go back looking for that review, but Brit Mandelo on Tor has written up a nice series of essays about each of the books (some spoilers, especially the later books in the series) so I would go check out their take on The Raven Boys to see if it's your kind of "teenagers go on a literal and metaphorical journey" type of tale. 

The Raven King by Maggie Stiefvater

Anime Review: Flying Witch

Flying Witch

Movie Review: Little Witch Academia: The Enchanted Parade

Wow sorry folks, a perfect storm of other obligations and impossible to predict events that dominated my time (who would've expected the post office to lose/steal THREE of my packages in one month?!). Which is almost fitting since I also got around to watching this special a year after it came out, I'm sure someone announced when it went up on Netflix and I just missed it. I also didn't see it earlier since I didn't back the kickstarter, I could see it was going to be funded just fine and I was still a cash-strapped college student at that point (which seems weird to write since I graduated a couple of years ago now!). 

Little Witch Academia: The Enchanted Parade

TV Series Review: Voltron: Legendary Defender

As long time readers know, I like my giant robot shows and I haven't had any to watch the past spring season. Sure Kumukuro is airing, but since Netflix licensed the show I couldn't legally watch it week to week. Likewise, Macross Delta is airing this season but since the entire Macross franchise is tied up (I could've sworn I saw an excerpt from the contact on ANN and, as someone who has actually worked with licensing materials etc, holy cow what I thought I saw was baaaaaad) that's also off the table.

Enter the remake of a show I thought I was too young for (I have since been corrected, apparently the original Voltron reruns were showing in the US up to 1997 at least). Everyone else was hyped so I expected to try out an episode and go eh, not for me. Unfortunately if you put an entire season of a show in front of me at once I will binge (now that half of Kumukuro is out I've had to hold back from binging on that as well) and, whelp, I'm a fan now guys!

Voltron: Legendary Defender

Visual Novel Review: Hustle Cat

Every now and then, I actually play video games! Even more rarely, I complete them! I usually just don't have the time or the operating system but I've happily noticed that more and more US-produced visual novels do tend to be Mac compatible (since like heck I'm gonna figure out how to dual-boot my computer for just that). So I was already interested when I saw a kickstarter for a cute dating game at a cat cafe and jokingly told my friends I was going to date all the cats. And then the kickstarter revealed that your coworkers ARE the cats and I wondered if I should regret my words.

Hustle Cat (created by Date Nighto)

Book Review: Sorcerer to the Crown

It seems that right now I only want to write reviews for things that are set to be posted in a few weeks, ho-hum. I mean, it's not that I didn't like this book, on the contrary I enjoyed it from the very first snippets I tried on Tor, although I had to be careful that I didn't read this book and A Darker Shade of Magic back to back since I wasn't sure how similar their settings would be. They are quite different it turns out, DSoM feels like a more generic fantasy even though it revolves specifically around the city of London. However, SttC revolves around England itself, a real England where you can't describe it with just one color. 

Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Chou

Anime Shorts: Wakakozake and This Boy Is A Professional Wizard

It's been so long since I covered anime shorts that most folks probably don't remember I even do! Considering that these are so, well, brief, I like to lump two or more shows together and not make a review that takes longer to read than one episode. Sound good? (and with this I've reviewed my first 2016 anime, I don't feel so behind now!)

Book Review: A Darker Shade of Magic

Man, colds are terrible. So are unpredictable weather patterns, neck aches, and everything else that gives me headaches. Since Wednesday's review was already going to be a shorter one I'm going to wrap it into my round-up on later today (along with last week's posts, it's going to be a long post) and instead just keep moving forward and getting some of these posts out on time (or close) for once.

I'm glad that I enjoyed all of the books I read between Thanksgiving and Christmas since it means I can still remember a lot of aspects of the stories and give them the reviews their deserve! At this point I'm still just getting started with all of the 2015 releases so hilariously enough for this book I just found out today that the sequel is already out! Doesn't change my feelings on the book thankfully (I thought I had heard/suspected from reading the book that this wouldn't be a standalone) and hopefully I'll get around to reading A Gathering of Shadows sooner rather than later.

A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab

Book Review: The Last Dragonslayer

The curse of reviewing mediocre things "man there are so many things I'd rather be doing right now than trying to find the energy to talk about THIS". And I'm afraid this might be happening a lot in the next few weeks, I've been reading my usual book and a half a week but very few of the fiction works have really been grabbing me (I tend to alternate reading fiction and non-fiction but I find non-fiction tricky enough to review that those thoughts tend to get shoved into the weekly round-ups). It's not a burn-out per say, alternating with non-fiction is helping, but it's frustrating week after week I start up an interesting looking book and am completely bored with it by the end.

The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde

Anime Review: Happiness Charge Precure

"Didn't you say you were trying to be more on time last week?" FIFTEEN HOUR WORK DAYS MAN and this is why I keep planning on building up my buffer of reviews and it doesn't happen. But this show is already a year old so a few days don't matter as much, I already have to explain to people why I'm watching last year's iteration of Pretty Cure instead of this year's Go Princess (which is apparently quite good!). So here it is: two years ago I watched Heartcatch Precure and loved it so I tried out the new series that year, Doki Doki Precure as well as the original. I plan to go back to the original someday but it starts slowly and all of the official streams are pretty low quality, Doki Doki just ended up being really nuts so I gave up on it after a bit. So then I returned last year to HaCha and while I liked it I just fell behind with everything else I was watching.

And so, after I finished Wish Upon the Pleiades it seemed like a good time to go, finish HaCha and see if I could maybe, maybe catch up with GoPri before the end of it's run next January.

Happiness Charge Pretty Cure

Anime Review: Witch Craft Works

Alright, back to the blogging game. The summer anime season is winding down and the leaves are starting to fall on my block, let's get to a few older shows before jumping into the new stuff and the new new fall stuff first shall we?

Witch Craft Works

Book Review: Born Wicked

Sorry for the delay in all of the reviews this week guys, details tomorrow but it's nothing exciting, just too many things going wrong at once. And speaking of things going wrong....

Born Wicked by Jessica Spotswood

Anime Review: Fate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works Part Two (2015)

God that is the longest title ever and this is my last review of the spring 2015 anime season! We're right around the halfway mark for the summer 2015 anime season so I know a lot of people have been doing mid-season review posts and I'm going to post mine next week, just wanted to finish what I started first.

Fate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works Part Two (2015)

Radio Drama Review: Earthsea

It's con season so I'm spending an embarrassingly large amount of my time working on sewing and have accomplished the nigh-miraculous task of catching up with my podcasts in the process so I had to look elsewhere for listening material. Lucky for me BBC is doing a special on Ursula Le Guin, celebrating her 85th birthday this year (and she's still writing which is absolutely bonkers) and turned both The Left Hand of Darkness and Earthsea into two, multi-part radio dramas which typically are free online to listen to for a month after broadcast (I don't know what the region restrictions are but I had no problem hearing them in the US). I actually tried LHoD first but realized partway through that I just wasn't connecting with it. The story was fine but somehow I just wasn't getting into it as much as I wanted to (and I've had it on my to-read list for years since it's such a celebrated work) so I switched to Earthsea and decided to simply read it later. I actually did read A Wizard of Earthsea, and maybe a part of the second one, as a young teen since my parents were forever recommending it to me but I didn't connect with that work either, it's an older style of writing that felt stuffy and impersonal at 14. But I was hoping that with a full cast of characters it would flow better for me and at three hours it was going to be faster than even I could read the books.

Earthsea

Book Review: Death Sworn

"Helen didn't you say that you weren't reading any more books about assassins?" I did but wanted to make an exception here since this book is by an author who I've both loved and disliked and really wanted to read another book by her to try and figure out if I should keep up with her works or not. Plus, the main character in this book, she's a mage losing her powers which sounded like a really cool premise and I'm willing to overlook a couple of personal biases for that.

Death Sworn by Leah Cypress

Anime Review: Maria the Virgin Witch

I did purposely shuffle this post to the end of my winter 2015 anime reviews since I was hoping I could stall long enough that the manga would be fully out in English so that I could compare the two but alas, even with my unexpected week delay here it wasn't long enough. I'm not sure if people have noticed but starting this season I'm reviewing the finished shows in the order that I enjoyed them so this series should have been one of my middle reviews, it's far from the worst show I saw over the winter even if it did have a lot of flaws.

Maria the Virgin Witch

Manga Review: Magi (volumes one through five)

In case anyone has looked at their title and then double-checked their calendar, yes this week should technically be a Webcomic Wednesday. However, in March all of my Wednesdays will be Webcomic Wednesday and that means if I don't review Magi now I won't get to it until April, nearly four months after I read it. So fret not, webcomics are coming next week and I would now like to talk about a series which was hot stuff in Japan for a while (and may still be) but never quite caught on in the US the way some other shonen series have.

Magi by Shinobu Ohtaka

Anime Review: Mekaku City Actors

A couple of years ago I first heard of the Kagero Project and went looking for information on it, I wasn't even sure what exactly it was, and was horribly confused when I tried skimming tvtropes and wikipedia articles on it. The basic set-up is that an editor, Jin, used the vocaloid program to make a series of songs, which were later put to videos, that sort of told a story and then were later adapted into a light novel series, a manga, and then eventually this anime, think of it as the story becoming more accessible each time it was adapted. So I tried out a few videos and liked some but was just plain confused by others and decided to wait it out until the adaptation to see if the story worked any better here, especially since in an odd twist Jin himself was doing the writing for the series (I can't find a staff listing that credits him with a particular role so I'm assuming he helped with the series composition or scenario instead of writing the actual scripts). So, while this is certainly the easiest version of the story for people to get into and finish, is it the "best" one?

Mekaku City Actors

Anime Review: Chaika the Coffin Princess

And I'm back! It feels a bit weird after that mini hiatus but also because wow we're almost halfway through the summer season of anime and I'm still playing catchup with all of the spring shows. Although this show would have felt odd to review no matter what the time, as people probably remember I was only lukewarm at best about it during the round-UP and only ended up continuing because I needed something to watch during my lunch breaks. I was seeing a lot of praise for it, hence why I choose that show over some other shows to be my catch-up show, but this is one of those cases were I never quite got the hype.

Chaika the Coffin Princess

Book Review: Battle Magic

Hi management here, initially my plan was to just take the week of August 3rd off to work on Otakon things but it looks like I really need to take this week off as well, between work and my sewing machine finding new and creative ways to break I'm just really far behind. So, I will put up my next review August 11th and things should be much more regular at that point!

Some books I have to wait longer for than others and this is one of them. When I was a freshman in highschool The Will of the Empress came out which I really enjoyed. I was curious where Pierce would take her Circle of Magic universe next, it's her lesser known series but I've always liked the imagination in the magic and the settings. I had almost forgotten this boom was coming out when I saw her at the 2013 National Book Festival (and, in a twist that made me feel like I was at a con, I had to miss her talk to get in a good spot in line for her signing). Since that's in the fall obviously it took me a bit longer to actually get to the book but, given the longer and longer breaks between her books, this wasn't necessarily a bad thing!

Battle Magic  by Tamora Pierce