I've been enjoying all of Philip Reeve's Larklight books and the third one, Mothstorm: The Horror from Beyond Uranus Georgium Sidus!, is no exception. The Victorian steampunky spaceflight thing is still hitting all the right buttons in my brain.
FuzzyCo grade: A
Jill Conner Browne is best known for her series of (non-fiction) Sweet Potato Queens books of "Southern wit and wisdom". Erica assures me that those books are delightful -- she certainly laughs out loud a lot when she's reading them. On our recent roadtrip we listened to her first novel, titled, unsubtly enough, The Sweet Potato Queens' First Big-Ass Novel. It's... a good first try, I suppose.
FuzzyCo grade: C
You know, I kinda gave Twilight some slack with a hand-waving "well, I'm not in the target audience" and then here comes Devilish to show the folly of that. Because it's aimed at the same target market - teenage girls with an interest in supernatural stories - and yet it's actually good.
FuzzyCo grade: A
The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death has a great noir vibe, a great center-piece -- the world of trauma cleaning -- and a suitably f'ed up protagonist. The only problem I have is that Charlie Huston does this thing where instead of perfectly normal quotation marks and "he said"s, he just uses long dashes and never attributes a line of dialog. Which is a real shame, because the dialog would just flow in a very natural manner, except that every 3 pages I'd run across a line where I'd have to pause and parse out the action to figure out who was saying what.
FuzzyCo grade: A-
I am not in the target audience for Twilight, a fact I had to remind myself over and over as I read through the book. I came into the book with a lot of preconceptions, based on all the hype over the movie and so on, and in general my preconceptions were proven true. Why did I read the dang thing, then? As a sometimes comedian, I figured I should stay in touch with the zeitgeist. And heck, I ended up liking all 8000 pages of Harry Potter. Twilight is not a bad book, it's just not a book for me. I mean, the big, climactic vampire fight happens offstage, while the narrator has fainted from pain. I like kisses as much as the next guy, but in books I like vampire fights as much, if not more, than kisses. This book likes kisses more.
FuzzyCo grade: C