“You may need two hands to fight someone, but only one to stab them in the back.”

by Grace Crawford

Every so often, I like to wander around Chapters until I find a book that strikes my fancy. These fancy-striking books are usually ones I’ve never heard of, because I like exploring new stories on the off-chance they’re something special.

When I started reading Joe Abercrombie’s Half a King, I was afraid I’d chosen… poorly. True, it was a rollicking fantasy yarn. True, the world was well established and extremely well thought out. True, there was a lot of detail that didn’t seem particularly important but helped add to the realism of it all. But the book wasn’t anything particularly new or special — at least until I reached page 300, at which point all the pieces snapped together.

It was at that point that I realized I’d been reading a completely different book than the one I bought. And it was glorious.

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by Grace Crawford

All Maze Runner images courtesy of Gotham Group, Temple Hill Entertainment, TSG Entertainment, and 20th Century Fox. Please note that I’m using them because the books have no pictures, which would have helped immensely.

“WICKED is good.”

Aside from also being a smashing Broadway musical, WICKED is the name of the main antagonist organization in the Maze Runner trilogy. The acronym stands for World In Catastrophe: Killzone Experiment Department, which sounds a lot cooler than the reality actually is.

Sometime in the future, solar flares scorch the Earth and render most of it uninhabitable. At the same time, a virus called the Flare (originally associated with the solar flares, but apparently no actual relation) is “accidentally” released into the world and is spreading like wildfire. In desperation, the world’s governments create an alliance, WICKED, and dedicate all their resources to finding a cure.

You probably think this still sounds pretty darn cool. And yeah, it had the potential to be. But when “let’s find a cure” somehow translates into “we should build a giant maze,” you’re gonna have a bad time.

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By Grace Crawford

The Hunger Games image courtesy of Scholastic Publishing

The problem with writing more than one review in a single day lies in the number of jokes one is capable of making in a single sitting.  More often than not, I bring out the big guns for the first article, leaving very little for the second.  However, the last one I wrote was a little light on the funny.  It actually wasn’t funny at all.  It was drier than a piece of month-old bread.  It was drier than all the jokes about bread I’m going to make in this article, because I can never resist puns about baked goods when I’m talking about The Hunger Games.

I’m writing about the book, not the film, and just the first book, not the whole series.  So I don’t want any grousing about how “you didn’t talk about the other two books, and everyone knows the last one is the best,” or “the movie was a ball of flaming crap and I fell asleep and so did my narcoleptic great-aunt who went and saw it with me.”  It’s your own fault for bringing an old woman with a sleep disorder to a movie that cost you $10.25 for the seniors’ ticket and $12.75 for the medium tub of popcorn that she can’t even chew anyway because she left her false teeth in the dishwasher again, and anyway I liked that movie.  But that’s beside the point.

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By Grace Crawford

Fifty Shades of Grey image courtesy of Vintage Books

Warning: due to the nature of this book, there is some strong language and mature content in the review that follows.

Against my better judgement, I recently finished reading the much-touted Fifty Shades of Grey series.  I’m serious; there is so much touting that I went against my better judgement and actually borrowed a friend’s Kindle so I could read in public without others knowing what I was up to (I have a very well-developed sense of shame).  Suppressing the urge to vomit pretty much non-stop for the last few days, I formed some very strong opinions about the books.  I will share these with you now, whether you like it or not.  Spoiler alert:  everybody has sex.

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