Strong feelings about fiction.
Beach Read kicks off with a premise that’s hard to resist: Romance novelist January Andrews is suffering from a bad case of writer’s block after a family tragedy shakes her belief in happy endings. She moves into her late father’s second home for the summer hoping to churn out a new book. Shortly after arriving, […]
Read More Review: Beach Read by Emily HenryIn Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job, an unnamed woman leaves her career of fourteen years due to burnout. With the help of a job recruiter, she quickly finds a less stressful position, but she doesn’t stay long. By the end of the book, she’s tried out five different jobs. Each […]
Read More review: there’s no such thing as an easy job by kikuko tsumuraI keep wanting to call this movie Love Bubbles Up Like Soda Pop. Maybe I should—it’s an accurate description of what happens in it! What’s it about? Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop is a coming of age romance anime about two teenagers, Cherry and Smile. They meet at their hometown mall where their chance […]
Read More Review: Words Bubble Up Like Soda PopGnosia is a visual novel with addictive short-term gameplay and a satisfying long-term narrative. Every once in a while, I stumble onto a piece of media that feels like it was made specifically for me. The premise of Gnosia alone sounds like the developers were rifling through my brain and turning my disjointed interests into […]
Read More Review: GnosiaThe Missing Heir has too many frustrating gameplay mechanics and by-the-book tropes to be truly interesting. Everyone has their thing. I have many. The list includes bread, books, soft-serve ice cream, and murder mysteries, so it will come as no surprise that I bought both of Nintendo’s Famicom Detective Club games. I’ll cover the first […]
Read More Review: Famicom Detective Club:The Missing HeirSpoilers ahead for the anime and the first three volumes of the manga. Given is one of the most effective love stories I’ve ever experienced. It captures both the thrill and the struggle of falling in love in very few pages (or episodes). What’s it about? High school student Ritsuka Uenoyama is coasting through life […]
Read More Review: Given (manga and anime)Spoilers ahead for all of the Zero Escape games but especially Zero Time Dilemma. Proceed with caution. Time to Decide: Do I take fans at their word that Zero Time Dilemma is bad and choose to play a different game, or do I give it a chance? Since this review exists, I obviously decided to play the […]
Read More Review: Zero Time DilemmaSpoilers ahead. If a complete story exists, do we really need more of it? Based on the number of prequels that exist, it seems like this question is often answered with: “No, but…” and a series of reasons to create more content, most of them involving money. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes takes place in […]
Read More Review: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne CollinsSpoilers abound, particularly for the true ending. Video games are only allowed to make me cry and scream so long as they do it through the story and not the gameplay. This is why I tend to pick games in a genre that has “novel” in the title. But what am I supposed to do […]
Read More Review: Nier: Automata: This Is Supposed To Be HardIn my little pocket of New England, the pandemic hit like this: I was working on a Friday and at home indefinitely the following Monday. I learned how to work from home, then learned my job doesn’t work well from home. I volunteered to be furloughed for the summer because I knew I could make […]
Read More On 2020, The Year I Did Not Write My Novel
Eep the Creep Critiques 