Reviews and Comments

The children are placed with their aunt Josephine who is defined by her fear of everything. It's a bit of a change of pace from the first two. Josephine's fear of everything comes off a bit one-note, even among the typically clueless adults in the series.

Olaf's plot is pretty obvious from the start too.

There is a scene that stands out with a bit of gratuitous transphobia and fatphobia as well.

Despite all that the relationships between the siblings and the fun of watching them work to free themselves from their situation make up for a lot and leave this a pretty enjoyable story.

Really enjoying reading this series to my child. She and I both have a similar dark sense of humor and that fits well with these books.

The villain's scheme is more abstract and less gross than in the first one which is much appreciated.

Already started on the next one. I feel like we're going to blow through the whole series this year.

I came across this book at the library, and, having heard of the associated podcast I decided to give it a try.

I've never actually listened to said podcast, and if I'm being honest I'm not a huge fan of the McElroy Family family of podcasts in general.

That said, this was a delightful read. As with other recent D&D live play adaptations into other media (see: "The Legend of Vox Machina") it really does capture the spontaneous humor of play at the table, while (I assume) cleaning up some of the diversions and focusing on the plot. I enjoyed the DM interjections in particular.

Definitely a fun read, and I'll be on the lookout for others in the series.

Read this to my kid after we'd watched the Netflix show together.

I really enjoyed the asides to the reader. They reminded me a bit of The Hobbit even if the tone was quite different.

It's definitely very dark. My kid and I share a taste for the macabre so we both ate it up. It starts with a tragedy, then moves into a nice mix of farce and heartbreak. I'm excited to start the next one.

I found this book much more interesting than a lot of nonfiction books I've read lately, but it still had that same feeling of "I want to convince you that this thing is good, so I'm going to spend 200 pages telling stories about people who were already convinced".

The stories were actually interesting, though. Demonstrating how experts in construction, aviation, and medicine rely on checklists so they won't trip over the mundane aspects of their jobs. I guess the point is to show that these respected professionals use checklists, so the reader shouldn't feel as if they were beneath them.

I could have used a bit more advice on how to make a useful checklist. There was some in a few places, but it was definitely not the point.

Hard to say much about this book without spoiling the fun. I definitely recommend going into it knowing as little as possible.

This book is full of righteous anger coated in wit and sprinkled with humorous anecdotes.

For example the famous bit about the trumpet (which I quoted earlier bookwyrm.social/user/ssweeny/quotation/3538582#anchor-3538582) starts a chapter about how a musical instrument exchange group on Facebook had to deal with a group of unruly racists.

The "Witches" in the title are, of course, feminists. If you consider yourself one or would like to this book is definitely worth a read. Probably even more so if you don't.

There was one thing that nagged at me as I was reading. This book was written in 2019. Before COVID, the 2020 election, the insurrection at the Capital. There's a lot of stuff about how Trump is terrible and enabling all sorts of evil stuff and the whole time I kept thinking to myself "sister, you have no idea..."

Definitely a fun read. Classic cyberpunk setting that just exists in the background without taking up too much attention.

My only real complaint is that the art style changes a bit too drastically a bit too often, to the point where it can be hard to track which character is doing what between pages.

The overall arc is has been done before but there are some fun twists that completely make sense in the setting but that I haven't seen to often.

Time for a bit of ridiculous fantasy to cleanse the palate.

Overall I think this book had some good points to make. Networking, finding "tribes" at work, and using language to influence that tribe to behave a certain way are useful ideas that are actionable and backed by data.

However like many books in this vein it feels as if the page count was padded with anecdotes that slowed down the pace and perhaps spaced the real lessons too far apart. I found myself having to turn back a few pages to remember what the point of a particular story was supposed to be.

Overall I'd recommend the book but it might be sufficient to read the summary at the end of each chapter.

This one was honestly tough to get through. I almost put it down several times. It felt like a tour of cyberpunk tropes as there are several factions (corporations/police, anarchists, drug lords) each trying to control a dirty and dying LA, and the main character just sort of stumbles into each one seemingly without agency and without any real stakes. About 2/3 of the way through, however, my perseverance was rewarded as some actual stakes seemed to coalesce for him, and he began to take control of his story to push through to the end.

This one was honestly tough to get through. I almost put it down several times. It felt like a tour of cyberpunk tropes as there are several factions (corporations/police, anarchists, drug lords) each trying to control a dirty and dying LA, and the main character just sort of stumbles into each one seemingly without agency and without any real stakes. About 2/3 of the way through, however, my perseverance was rewarded as some actual stakes seemed to coalesce for him, and he began to take control of his story to push through to the end.