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Tara Conklin’s novel, book-ended by inferred scenes of the end of the world surprised me by being both vivid and intense. The Last Romantics was paced just right- I did not burn through the pages, while keeping a solid cadence. In 2079, poet Fiona Skinner stands before a crowd of fans and critics. She is 102 years old, answering questions about her life long work as an author. From the crowd comes a young woman, asking after the origin of her namesake (Luna) from Fiona’s most famous work ‘The Love Poem’. Fiona, amidst power outages and emergency sirens, narrates the history of the Skinners from the death of their father to a wedding ring with no bride. Well crafted novel.

Based on a review copy Onipress released a sweet and cuddly love story between a woman and the bear who followed her home from the woods. Nora is bad with love and working a crappy telemarketing job. She goes on a picnic with a douchebag hipster. After he mocks and shames her for having some fun trashy magazines to read (and he decants a wine bottle in the woods), she buries her shame in the forest floor.. where the bear is watching. Days later the bear shows up at her house, holding a magazine with Nora’s mailing label. He is absolutely accepting of her. The bear in this story is not a metaphor, not a hairy man, but an actual bear.  I loved this graphicnovel. It was cute and memorable.. and manages to tapdance around zoophilia, focusing instead on the bear’s personality / interactions with the human world (while wearing his Arcade Fire t-shirt). I

Found at Goodwill, this Katie Alender thriftstore find was well loved by it’s previous owner. With pages dog eared so fantastically that the corners were physically missing (I have been told this is ‘purse wear and tear’), this was bought for the pure joy of reading rediculous fiction. It was unregretably enjoyable, while understandably juvenile in most ways, leading readers with any intuition down barely disguised channels. Spoiled and entitled American teen Collette Iselin. She holds a secret back from her rich Bratz doll friends-  Collette has moved into a tiny apartment, wears carefully purchased thrift clothing, and is on scholarship at their elite Private school. Daddy, recently Mid-Life-Crisised to his own space, has left poor Collete in a social  ladder dead zone. In preparation for a ‘life changing’ trip to Paris with her French class, Collette finds a mysterious box in the claustrophobic confines of her apartment storage facility. Handed down from her Grea...

THIS BOOK WAS AMAZING. Robopocalypse (Daniel H Wilson) starts in a different position than most machine armageddon stories, beginning 20 minutes after the Humans have won the war with ‘Big Rob’. Our narrator, Cormac ‘Bright Boy’ Wallace is spraying bursts of fire out across the frozen Alaskan tundra to confuse a swarm of mini-bots called stumpers into premature explosion. Stumpers contain compartmentalized chemicals that are mixed when they feel the warmth of a human leg, leading to a debilitating POP and the loss of an appendage. Bright Boy Squad locates something unexpected in the frozen expanse- a sentient storage device that has been collecting insane amounts of data from the world since the activation day of Archos (the AI ).  The book follows a similar presentation as  World War Z (Max Brooks), depicting the novel as a series of short stories in a historical compilation of key events from pre-war to the end, recorded by the device, and cross commented by Wall...