Judith’s Journey by Susan Jo Lewis (Amazon, 2025)

I am not normally one for historical fiction, but the author is a friend who has been working on this story for a long time, and I am proud of her that she made it to publication.  As you can tell by the full subtitle of “Book One: Born with Wings”, Judith’s Journey is only the start of what may end up being the full life of a proto-English Queen who packs a lot of experiences in what stops here with her late teen years.

If there are anachronisms in the book I am not learned enough to have picked them out; I just went along with the story.  I will say that the amount of sex in the book surprised me, but it is logically placed if you’re telling the story of a woman ‘coming of age’.  In its own way it’s probably just as informative to a teen as Judy Blume’s Forever.

My main complaint with the Kindle edition I read  is that there were too many typos/errant punctuation.  I hope those can be fixed in a future edition.

I am looking forward to Book Two in this tale and hope it doesn’t take too long to be published.

Spirited (AppleTV, 2022)

Watched this last night, and it was perfectly suited for a ‘heartwarming’ Christmas movie.  Not a huge fan of Will Ferrell, and Ryan Reynolds is mostly tolerable because he makes fun of himself.

You can’t stop watching yet another take on A Christmas Carol, though, can you?  Even one that is a musical with only one good singer who doesn’t get much to do (for the record, the actress playing the Ghost of Christmas Past).

I will say the production numbers are really well done, even if the movie could have been a very enjoyable 90 minutes instead of bloated past two hours.

I might watch this again if it were on, but I’m not going to seek it out.  The best part of it was watching it with family.

Unrivaled (2023)

I picked this up as a part of my BookBale Kickstarter from Caezik Press.  With these four stories I figured I couldn’t go wrong. Four novellas that all won awards?

I’d only read one of them before–Nancy Kress’ “Beggars in Spain”. This one’s an interesting topic–what if people could be genetically engineered to not sleep, with no ill effects?

Mike Resnick’s “The Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge” was an interesting structure. I never would have read this on its own, I think.

Lois McMaster Bujold’s “The Mountains of Mourning” was probably my favorite in the collection. Even though I have never read a Vorkosigan novel, I think this is a prequel or early-set work so that I wasn’t lost in the world. It has me thinking I should probably reach out for the first novel proper as I think I’d like them.

Lastly (but first in the collection) is Joe Haldeman’s “The Hemingway Hoax”. I know of Joe’s interest in Hemingway, but thankfully this wasn’t too ‘inside baseball’ and it ended up with quite a SFnal bent to it. I enjoyed it a lot.

The only other comment I have on this edition is that the epub version I read had something strange where if characters were italicized on the right border of the page, the right edge, sometimes serif of the characters were cut off!  It didn’t stop me from figuring out text, but it was distracting and occurred through the whole book.

If you’ve buying from BookBale or Caezik, look this collection up. Well worth it.