Yumi and the Nightmare Painter -- this was generally fun, with good worldbuilding and interesting portrayal of two young protagonists magical artistic professions and the challenges they face in it -- though also not everything is as it seems on the surface.
Twelfth Night, Shakespeare. Play readaloud. This is still very much the thing that it is! Fortuitously![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija recently posted skygiants's vid mashing up various versions of the play to Greensleeves, which is excellent.
Drunk on All Your Strange New Words, Eddie Robson. Futuristic murder mystery with telepathic aliens. I thought from the title that this was going to be about high-concept linguistic worldbuilding, but the SFnal focus is mostly about human society reacting to alien contact. The book's future is very much extrapolated from present-day worries -- fake news, what society is doing to us, global warming, student debt, precarity of employment and overwork -- in a way that makes the atmosphere unpleasant to spend time in. But the mystery itself is well-plotted!
The Shadow on the Dial, Anne Lindbergh. My mom read this aloud to me when I was 7-ish (and I think I reread on my own a bit later), and I remember it fondly.skygiants recently posted about one of Lindbergh's other books, which caused me to look this one up again, and I found that it was available on OpenLibrary, so I checked it out. The basic concept is charming -- bickering siblings Dawn and Marcus have acquired a coupon for One Heart's Desire, to be achieved via time travel, but they aren't allowed to use it on themselves -- so they team up to change the past so that their Uncle Doo will gain his lifelong wish of playing the flute. Along the way they run into another time traveler with a Heart's Desire of her own. It's well-if-predictably plotted (but when I was 7 I didn't see things coming!), in the way where it all hangs together if you don't think too hard about time travel changing the past. (I can definitely see the way that it influenced the time travel story I wrote when I was 13.)
It was written in 1986 -- and there's one memorable bit where the protagonists travel to their future in a bit of creative problem-solving. The description of 1999 as "like 1986, but with a bigger TV" is pretty spot-on, though the "oh no, young people are calling their parents by first names!!!" is not so much. Rereading as an adult I'm also raising some eyebrows about the subplot with the character who is using time travel to fix her love life -- she's very lucky that it works out.
Twelfth Night, Shakespeare. Play readaloud. This is still very much the thing that it is! Fortuitously
rachelmanija recently posted skygiants's vid mashing up various versions of the play to Greensleeves, which is excellent.Drunk on All Your Strange New Words, Eddie Robson. Futuristic murder mystery with telepathic aliens. I thought from the title that this was going to be about high-concept linguistic worldbuilding, but the SFnal focus is mostly about human society reacting to alien contact. The book's future is very much extrapolated from present-day worries -- fake news, what society is doing to us, global warming, student debt, precarity of employment and overwork -- in a way that makes the atmosphere unpleasant to spend time in. But the mystery itself is well-plotted!
The Shadow on the Dial, Anne Lindbergh. My mom read this aloud to me when I was 7-ish (and I think I reread on my own a bit later), and I remember it fondly.
skygiants recently posted about one of Lindbergh's other books, which caused me to look this one up again, and I found that it was available on OpenLibrary, so I checked it out. The basic concept is charming -- bickering siblings Dawn and Marcus have acquired a coupon for One Heart's Desire, to be achieved via time travel, but they aren't allowed to use it on themselves -- so they team up to change the past so that their Uncle Doo will gain his lifelong wish of playing the flute. Along the way they run into another time traveler with a Heart's Desire of her own. It's well-if-predictably plotted (but when I was 7 I didn't see things coming!), in the way where it all hangs together if you don't think too hard about time travel changing the past. (I can definitely see the way that it influenced the time travel story I wrote when I was 13.)It was written in 1986 -- and there's one memorable bit where the protagonists travel to their future in a bit of creative problem-solving. The description of 1999 as "like 1986, but with a bigger TV" is pretty spot-on, though the "oh no, young people are calling their parents by first names!!!" is not so much. Rereading as an adult I'm also raising some eyebrows about the subplot with the character who is using time travel to fix her love life -- she's very lucky that it works out.