[Book] Maid by Stephanie Land

Book cover Start from one mistake, one that is tragically common - becoming a parent a little to young.  From that point, almost everything that can go wrong in someone's life while still making the best possible choice for the circumstance is laid out in the first four chapters of this book.  This beginning is a treatise on despair and government anti-poverty programs. The arc doesn't exactly get better from there, but it starts to be framed in a way that shows gratitude for the things that haven't gone completely wrong, though things do continue to go wrong....

15 May 2019 · 2 min · Gary Allen Vollink

[Book] Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

Book cover This is the second book that I've reviewed by Naomi Novik, the first was Uprooted.  At a high level, there are some parallels between these books, but they are definitely different worlds.  Here's a quick overview of the setting: A Jewish girl of about 16 named Miryam lives in a medieval small unwalled town with the name of either Pakel or Pavys, but the residents simply called it town which is a third of the way between two larger cities in the Kingdom of Lithvas....

1 May 2019 · 2 min · Gary Allen Vollink

[Book] Predators Gold by Philip Reeve

Book cover This is book 2 of the Mortal Engines Quartet.  For convenience, here is a link to my review of book 1, Mortal Engines, which I posted a month ago. I'm going to start this review with a note about a changed name.  The books were originally released in the UK with a character named Shrike.  For the initial US release of the books, that character was renamed to Grike....

17 Apr 2019 · 3 min · Gary Allen Vollink

[Book] Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace

Book cover This is a different kind of book about business management.  This book is not about success, at least not an initial success.  Instead, this book is about continuing to succeed after that initial success.  It does this by talking very candidly about narrowly averting complete failure. The very beginning of this book does capture the early history of Pixar up through the release and success of Toy Story....

3 Apr 2019 · 3 min · Gary Allen Vollink