"The Son of Neptune" by Rick Riordan

 So I've been reading this book on and off since the summer due to other commitments and also logistics of having to constantly return it to the library. You'll have to forgive me if this summary is a little haphazard as a result, but such is life.

This is the sequel to The Lost Hero and the second book of the Heroes of Olympus series by Rick Riordan. While The Lost Hero followed Jason Grace and his arrival at Camp Half-Blood, this book follows Percy Jackson and his adventures at the Roman counterpart, Camp Jupiter. He's completely lost his memory except for one name, "Annabeth," and he has to navigate his way through a quest with new friends to defeat the god of death. New friends include Frank, a newly recognized son of Mars, and Hazel, a daughter of Pluto. Percy eventually regains his memory, and warns the Romans that Greek demigods are on their way to join forces with them.

The nice thing about this book is that it allows for a return to our favorite protagonist, Percy Jackson. The narration style is still different though, it's all in third person, so it's definitely distinct from the original Percy Jackson series. Still, it's nice to have a familiar face. Nico di Angelo also plays a role in this book, and serves as another bridge to both Camp Half-Blood and the original series. Having said that is it a little jarring to not be in Percy's head anymore. I was able to ignore this by the end of the book, but it's certainly an adjustment.

I also really enjoy the look at Camp Jupiter and the distinctions between the two camps. Camp Half-Blood is really for teens, while Camp Jupiter is more of a functional city where you can retire from killing monsters and all that. It's a little like Riordan picked up on some issues that his original camp could have and plugged them here! And of course getting to see how Roman traditions have been adapted to the modern day is always neat.

The new characters are also very endearing. Frank is described multiple times as a big teddy bear, despite being a child of the god of war, and it's hard to not adore him as a result. There's a prominent story line about his family that really fleshes our his character and background. Seeing how the Roman history gets combined with his Asian ancestry is really cool, and something that I could imagine Asian readers resonating with. Hazel is also a wonderful addition. Her backstory still has some holes to be filled, but we love to see daughters of the gods kicking butt and taking names! Both Frank and Hazel are the underdogs of the camp when we meet them, and if that isn't enough to love them from the get-go then I don't know what is.

No real complaints here, a solid continuation of The Lost Hero that reintroduces what Percy's been up to and catches us all up. Mostly just looking forward to when both parties (Greek and Roman) come together in the next book to actually start the real adventure!

This Is Beautiful: Animal Crossing Update

 I don't think I've talked about this yet, but I've been loving the new Animal Crossing Update! It finally feels like this is a full game haha. Much of the update is simply expanding the levels of customization and things like that, but there's some neat gems there as well. 

In particular, I love having Brewster in the museum! It's so fun to see who you run into at his cafe. And the gyroids! I've been expanding my collection and trying to collect all of the lil dudes and get them to dance together.

Will I put this down in a few weeks? Probably. But the update has renewed my interest in it for at least a little while which is nice!

"Moonflower Murders" by Anthony Horowitz

 You might remember when I previously wrote about two other novels by Anthony Horowitz, Magpie Murders and The Word is Murder. Well I'm back at it again with Moonflower Murders!

Similarly to his other two books, Moonflower Murders is really a book about mystery books. It's a direct sequel to Magpie Murders in that it still follows the publisher Susan Ryeland as she attempts to solve another murder mystery that has jumped from the page of a book and into her life. And that's really my main complaint about this book, that it's so similar to its predecessor.

There's a lot about both books to love. But in many ways, Moonflower Murders is just a rehash of the things he did in Magpie Murders that played with established murder mystery tropes. There's a book within a book that gets included in its entirety. The protagonist often comments on how similar her real life is to a murder mystery, especially at the end with the gathering of all the suspects and going through her logic. She also comments on the choices made within the book within a book, how cliche some aspects are. The thing is, when I read Magpie Murders this all took me completely by surprise. Now it's a little old hat.

I would have expected Horowitz to go a little further with how he subverts tropes here. He tends to simply identify the tropes, make a statement about how this feels like a film, and move on with it. Maybe commenting on how many conclusions the detective draws weren't based on evidence that the reader has access to, making it seem like it was a stroke of genius. Or deliberately avoiding tropes altogether and commenting on that! 

Don't get me wrong, I had a great time reading this book. And catching up on the characters was quite fun as well. It just left me wanting a little more. I hope that in whatever Horowitz tackles next, he pushes those boundaries more instead of rehashing what he's already done.

This Is Beautiful: The Beatles Get Back

 Over Thanksgiving break I, like many Beatles fans I'm sure, watched the entirety of The Beatles: Get Back documentary on Disney+. It's a marathon, there's about eight hours of footage split into three parts. But man is it fun to watch! 

You really feel as though you're in the studio with the musicians, seeing them have these intimate conversations and recording sessions. There's footage of Paul McCartney just pulling "Get Back" out of thin air, or John taking playful bites out of his microphone. There's many instances of them just noodling around and playing songs that they enjoy on their instruments. And slightly meta conversations about what they want this project to look like. It's all been wonderfully restored too, I cannot believe that this is from 1969!

Of course it culminates in the performance on the roof of their recording studio, with Paul gleefully embracing the possibility of them being arrested. The entire concert was included, along with captions detailing which recordings made it on the album, which in nice. In general I think it's edited really well, they tell you who everyone is and explain obscure references with images and text so it isn't hard to follow.

I totally get it if an 8 hour Beatles documentary isn't your thing, but it was a ton of fun to watch! You can put it on in the background, or sit and pay attention to every detail. The project rewards you either way.

"Gideon the Ninth" by Tamsyn Muir

 The way I was introduced to this book was by being told that it's about "lesbian necromancers in space" and let's be honest, that's really enough to get me interested. Plus last October Tor.com had it available as a free ebook for downloading and that is also enough to get me interested. (You can sign up for future books if you'd like!)

Honestly reading this book was a really bizarre experience. I had no idea what was happening half the time, the world building is hard to figure out at first, but I was still sucked in. I think part of it was hearing all of these details and knowing that they'll be explained eventually. A huge part of the appeal though is that the protagonist's voice (so Gideon's voice) is so distinctive and so so so incredibly hilarious!

Gideon is a swordfighter from the Ninth House, a planet made up of black depressing nuns who do the bidding of Harrow, the current heir to the planet. Harrow is a talented necromancer, her specialty is conjuring skeletons from individual bones to do her bidding. Gideon and Harrow have a kind of rivalry between them where they continually sabotage each other. At the start, Gideon wants nothing more than to get off of this planet, but Harrow foils her plans every time. Things get changed up when the Emperor calls a necromancer/cavalier pair from each planet to the First House to become a Lyctor, or a servant to the Emperor. This would be a great honor, so Harrow plans to leave and takes Gideon as her cavalier. Once they get to the First House, they meet the necromancers from the other houses, two through eight. And there they learn that they have to figure out how to become Lyctors themselves. So Harrow leaves Gideon behind and throws herself at the challenges. Eventually they learn to work together, as the others start dying off mysteriously. No one knows if this is part of the challenge or if it's murder. 

The end is devastating and I'm going to spoil it. One of the other necromancers ends up being a Lyctor in disguise, and this Lyctor is hell bent on sabotaging this gathering and killing them all. It turns out that the way to become a Lyctor involves the necromancer killing and eating the soul of their cavalier. Now the knowledge of death and swordsmanship are united in one, giving the necromancer more power. To defeat the Lyctor, Gideon sacrifices herself forcing Harrow to become a Lyctor and emerge victorious.

As I said earlier, the world building is incredible, but also incredibly confusing. I still have no real idea what a Lyctor is, what the other worlds are, or what's going on most of the time. Which I find enjoyable in fantasy, but also it was very alienating at first. I had no idea what the names of the other pairs were until I was very close to the end of the book. It was a lot to throw at the readers and I didn't have a ton of motivation to figure it out until I was most of the way through the book.

But Gideon is definitely the saving grace of the novel. She's absolutely hilarious, she doesn't care about becoming a Lyctor or anything like that. She mainly wants her freedom and to protect her friends. There's an additional level of humor where everyone thinks that she's a very serious Ninth House nun who doesn't speak and is very grim all the time, until she starts cracking sex jokes and bad puns. It's really entertaining getting her narration all through this book, and it's the main reason why I enjoyed it so much.

Another great aspect was the fact that this isn't a romance novel. No relationships spring up, despite the fact that we know from the beginning that Gideon is a lesbian, and figure out the others as we go along. It's a great model of how to make a character queer without focusing on relationships (since being queer is much more than that). Initially I thought that Harrow and Gideon would be an enemies-to-lovers situation, but even though it's clear by the end that they care very much about each other, they never get past hugging. It's so great that the book didn't have to rely on this to make you care about the characters.

I'm not sure if I'm going to read the sequel, Harrow the Ninth. Like I said, Gideon's voice was really what kept me going through this novel. If that isn't there, I'm not sure if I'll actually enjoy the rest of the series. But who knows, maybe the author figured out a way to make it work. Clearly Muir is immensely talented, and I do want to see what happens next.

This is Beautiful: Wisecrack's Hot Takes series

If you've been keeping track, I'm a huge fan of the YouTube channel Wisecrack. Literally since the very beginning, I watched every Thug Notes video when it came out and I've been thrilled to watch it grow over the years.

Recently the squad started filming a new series where one of the employees is assigned a hot take that they have to defend against a panel of other employees who are skeptical. A judge then declares one of the sides the winner: the person defending this hot take or the group trying to poke holes in it. And it's freaking hilarious, I knew going in that it'd be funny, it's a funny channel, but they really pulled out all of the stops with this one making it absurd and ridiculous.

Check it out for a good time! You can find it here on YouTube.