Review Day: Dragonfly Falling by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Dragonfly Falling is the second book in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt series. I loved where this chunk of the story ended up, but had trouble staying invested in the growing sprawl of the storyline across characters and Kinden.

War has come to the doorstep of the Lowlands, forcing the people of neighboring provinces to put aside their traditional enmity and fight back against the Wasp-Kinden. A multi-pronged assault begins with frontal assaults, sneaky alliances, or even just simple words of threatening diplomacy. The protagonists of Book 1 spread out across the Lowlands to sound the alarm and muster defenses. New locales and new types of people with different arthropod traits (the Kinden) are introduced, making it very clear that the story will end up existing at a much grander scale than what was shown in the first book.

I felt like a few of the characters were marking time in this outing. I loved Totho's story as a conflicted artificer and liked Salma's evolution into an unexpected leader, but I thought the rest of the characters had great moments rather than great plotlines.

My main problem with this book was the sheer amount of sprawl -- a few too many new characters to keep track of and not enough time spent in any point of view to form a connection. Every time I was intrigued by a scene, I was suddenly somewhere else in the world, and reading in e-book format made it hard to flip back to see where or if I had met a character previously. This dampened the impact of those characters' later scenes (and sometimes their demises).

I felt like an ant(-Kinden) rolling out pizza dough from the center of the pie. Every time I made progress in one direction, I had to turn around and roll in a different direction. And, while I knew the pizza would be delicious when complete, I lost momentum and incentive every time I switched directions! I had a similar problem reading Miles Cameron's The Red Knight and watching the 2nd season of Game of Thrones.

If you liked Book 1 and can read this one contiguously enough to keep everything fresh in your mind, there's a lot to enjoy here. I still plan to continue to Book 3, maybe just not right away!

Final Grade: B-

Pandemic Retrospective Day

I've bundled the 4 blog posts containing my Pandemic Retrospective into a standalone PDF for future preservation. This is a short essay on the pandemic, winter changing into spring, Ian's birth, and breaking out of self-imposed negative patterns.

Tree Day

An ancient, long-dead tree in the common area forest behind our house fell in a storm on Monday the 15th.

The tree fell perfectly to avoid all damage to surrounding structures, like the beautiful shed my Dad and I built in June 2015. First, the barkless trunk fell straight down the woodchip trail towards our house. On its way down, it hit something that cracked the trunk in half.

The bottom half from the base up landed harmlessly in the middle of the trail. The top half was caught in the branches of a too-resilient Japanese honeysuckle tree, pinwheeling it and driving the sharp, cracked end one foot deep into the ground inches away from the corner of the shed.

Two hours of chainsawing later, and we now have a fine new border along the edge of our trail.

Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

In the Heights:
The movie adaptation of this musical is pleasant, harmless fun. The music is Lin-Manuel Miranda's signature style of "safe" hip-hop that sounds a little too similar to what he's written elsewhere. The inclusion of a main character, Benny, who seems identical to the Benny in RENT seems like an odd creative choice.

Final Grade: B-

Death to 2021:
The sequel to Death to 2020 is just as enjoyable as the first, and is a great way to reminisce about this crazy year now that we aren't living it anymore. On Netflix.

Final Grade: B+

Hitman:
This was a fun one-off movie about a philosophy professor mistaken for a hit man, after which "hilarity ensues". It's better than the title card suggests, and thankfully doesn't fall into the trap of making things too serious in the climax. On Netflix.

Final Grade: B

Beverly Hills Cop Axel F:
The new Beverly Hills Cop sequel feels really obligatory. Eddie Murphy phones in his entire performance (his work in Dolemite is My Name was way better). There are a lot of talky scenes which make it seem like the director was hoping for some great ad-libbed banter but none of the actors have enough chemistry to say anything memorable. I laughed maybe twice during the whole movie. On Netflix.

Final Grade: C-

Memory Day: Snapshots

This picture was taken in the summer of 1983 in our backyard, when I was 3 years old (maybe 6 months older than Ian is now).

Clearly, finishing my Slurpee was more important than looking at the camera.

The wagon eventually rusted away, but it was often used to drag both kids down the Holmes Run bike trail to the nearest supermarket on Duke Street, called Magruder's. We'd tie it to a bike rack out front and do some quick grocery shopping. One time, we came out in the nick of time to find another family wandering away with the wagon, claiming it had been abandoned!