Ruby Lang – House Rules

I’m going to out on a limb and guess that Lang’s brief for herself with the “Uptown” series was to write using core romance tropes, but consciously alter some standard pillars of each. So the first portrayed a not-quite fake relationship and the second featured not-really-enemies-to-lovers, and here we have a nonstandard second chance (They

Ruby Lang – Playing House

Delightful. The title suggests a fake relationship trope, and while that’s not completely inaccurate, it’s also a bit of a feint. And I really liked that about this book, it feels less like it’s executing romance tropes, and more like the lives it depicts have resonances with those tropes. Lots of great details make this

Ruby Lang – Open House

I liked that “Playing House,” the first short novel in this series didn’t slot too neatly into the “fake relationship” trope, and “Open House,” similarly, isn’t quite “enemies to lovers” – the protagonists have and acknowledge an immediate attraction, but their roles place them in conflict: Tyson is helping out with a community garden, and

Tim Leong: Super Graphic – A Visual Guide to the Comic Book Universe

Imagine, if you well, a Venn diagram, with circles for people who: * like mainstream comic books * like indie/alternative comic books * are interested in information design * like infographics/”chart porn” * have a sense of whimsy If you’re in the intersection of all these, you want this book. I don’t think every graphic

Mur Lafferty: The Shambling Guide to New York City

The Shambling Guide to New York City is an urban fantasy that starts out with an intriguing exploration into how the human world might interact with a Buffy-esque any-myth-system-is-fair-game secret supernatural world. I was aware that the major plot arc doesn’t really get cranking for quite a few chapters, but I didn’t mind, because Lafferty’s

Bill Loehfelm: The Devil She Knows

Loehfelm’s noirish suspense novel revolves around a memorable trio of characters. Maureen Coughlin is tough, canny, and proud. She’s in a dead-end waitressing job, struggling mightily to make ends meet. She’s a little hard to like and makes some poor choices, but Loehfelm gets the reader well inside her head, so even her worst behavior

Tanith Lee: Wolf Tower

This young adult novel, told in the protagonist’s diary entries, mostly detailing a flight across a hostile land in the company of a handsome prince, offers many opportunities for Lee to play with and subvert assorted fairy tale conventions. This ranges from minor details — female characters who are overweight, old, and/or bald are described

Sara Levine: Treasure Island!!!

Real journalists have to turn in their year’s best lists to be published in the month of December, a practice which invariably makes me cringe. “What,” I always think to myself, “if in the dregs of the year* you hear/see/read something amazing that demands you re-order the list?” And it happens from time to time.

L. Jagi Lamplighter: Prospero in Hell

Like its predecessor, Prospero Lost, aspects of Prospero in Hell evoke other works — most prominently The Tempest and The Inferno, but Lamplighter’s squabbling, centuries-old, magic-wielding siblings recall both Gaiman and Zelazny — while remaining wholly its own thing. Prospero in Hell addresses some of the weaknesses that bothered me about the first volume. Narrator

Dick Lehr & Gerard O’Neill : Black Mass – The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob

The arrest of James “Whitey” Bulger this past June left me feeling like I was missing too much context: it clearly closed a significant chapter for my new home, and I had only a vague (and mostly incorrect, it turns out) awareness of his role in Boston history. And I’d seen people reading Black Mass