Out (book) by Natsuo Kirino, translated by Stephen Snyder

Out is a Japanese thriller.

I've opted not to include any read-alikes, but my review does include a few spoilers. Read at your own risk.

Review:

Warning: This book includes on-page instances of rape, torture, murder, and corpse dismemberment. On the plus side, there is a cat, and it is neither hurt (at least not that I remember) nor killed. I spent the whole book worrying that something was going to happen to that cat.

Anyway, Out tells the story of four women who work the night shift at a boxed-lunch factory in Tokyo. Yayoi is the mother of two small children. Her husband goes out drinking and gambling every night and has started physically abusing her. Kuniko hides her lack of self-confidence under expensive makeup and clothes she can't afford. She's so buried in loans that she struggles just to pay the interest. Yoshie is a widow, mother, and caretaker for her elderly mother-in-law. She works at the factory seven nights a week and, even so, only barely makes enough to support herself, her mother-in-law, and her increasingly rebellious and distant teenage daughter. Masako is the most mysterious of them all. She used to have a job at a company somewhere, and she seems too cool and composed to be working the night shift at the factory.

While these four women aren't exactly friends, they make a good team at the factory. That's why, when Yayoi suddenly snaps and kills her husband, the first person she can think of to turn to is Masako. Masako agrees to take care of everything and enlists Yoshie's help. Due to a stroke of enormously bad luck, Kuniko also gets involved. With all these people in on the secret, will they really be able to avoid being found out by the police? Then there's the question they didn't consider, didn't even know they had to consider: will they be able to evade Satake, the man to whom Yayoi's husband owed money?

Flower in a Storm (manga, vol. 2) by Shigeyoshi Takagi, translated by HC Language Solutions, Inc.

Flower in a Storm is a 2-volume romantic comedy series, although this volume has a more serious tone. It's published by VIZ.

Warning: this review includes spoilers.

Review:

Riko acts like she doesn't care when Ran comes back from a trip with Rinko, the fiancee his dad picked out for him, in tow. However, she can't bring herself to just stand back when Rinko admits she wants to marry Ran for his money. Then Riko and Ran celebrate Christmas together at one of Ran's swanky parties. As Riko sees Ran schmoozing with all the rich people, she begins to doubt that their relationship will last. Her fears appear to be coming to pass when Ran begins acting distantly towards her during a cruise, but Riko finds the courage to fight for Ran and their relationship when he's kidnapped by some terrorists.

His Favorite (manga, vol. 6) by Suzuki Tanaka, translation by Ivana Bloom

His Favorite is a m/m romantic comedy. It's published by SuBLime.

I opted not to include any read-alikes in this post. Check out one of my past posts for this series if you'd like some.

This review includes slight spoilers.

Review:

In the first chapter, Sato tells Yoshida he wants Valentine's Day chocolate from him. He also enacts a plan to keep all the girls at school from giving him chocolate. Then Sato, Yoshida, and Yoshida's friends investigate the creepy rumors that have been going around the school, much to poor, easily frightened, ghost-fearing Yoshida's dismay. Finally, Sato, Yoshida, and friends “vacation” at Tsuyako's tropical island, leaving Yoshida with some intense memories.

The Bletchley Circle (live action TV series), via Netflix

The Bletchley Circle is a British historical mystery series set in the early 1950s.

I opted not to include any watch-alikes or read-alikes for this, although I should probably mention that David Leavitt's The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer was part of the reason why I was so excited to watch this. The Bletchley Park women interested me.

Review:

In Series 1, Susan, a former codebreaker at Bletchley Park, has mostly settled into a comfortable life as a mother and a wife. However, part of her can't help but look for patterns everywhere, and she's convinced she's found one in a series of murders. The problem is convincing the police that the pattern she sees exists, especially since her first tip turns out to be wrong. She enlists the help of Millie, Lucy, and Jean, other former Bletchley Park codebreakers.

Series 2 includes two different mysteries. In the first, Alice, a former colleague of Jean's at Bletchley, has confessed to a murder that Jean is convinced she didn't commit. Jean enlists Lucy and Millie's help in proving her innocence. Susan occasionally joins in, but the events that brought their previous investigation to a close frightened her very badly. She doesn't want to risk that harm might come to her, her children, or her husband. In the second mystery, Alice suspects that Millie has been kidnapped, possibly due to her involvement in the post-war black market.

The Goblin Emperor (e-book) by Katherine Addison

The Goblin Emperor is a fantasy novel set in an industrial steampunk world.

Review:

Maia is the unloved half-goblin son of the elven emperor, Varenechibel IV. He has spent his whole life essentially exiled to a remote manor, with only a couple servants and Setheris, his abusive drunkard of a cousin, for company. Then a courier arrives with a shocking announcement: the emperor and all his other heirs were killed in an airship explosion, with the result that Maia is now the new emperor.

Maia's education and training is spotty at best. His knowledge of court etiquette is good, for example, but polite conversation is difficult for him, because Setheris tended to punish him if he spoke too much. He knows too little about the court and is painfully aware of his shortcomings as an emperor. To make matters worse, the airship accident that killed Maia's father and brothers might not have been an accident after all.

Flower in a Storm (manga, vol. 1) by Shigeyoshi Takagi, translated by HC Language Solutions, Inc.

Flower in a Storm is a romantic comedy. It's licensed by VIZ.

My review doesn't include any spoilers for the main story, but it does for the unrelated short. As for read-alikes, I opted not to include any for this volume, but I might come up with some for volume 2.

Review:

I finally made myself finish reading this. Yay! Except I still have to get through volume 2...

Riko Kunimi wants nothing more than to be an ordinary high school girl. Unfortunately, her amazing physical abilities (super strength, ability to survive a three-story fall without injury, etc.) bring her to the attention of Ran Tachibana, the 17-year-old heir of one of the world's richest families. Ran is determined to marry her. He tells her he'll give up if she can evade him for the next 25 hours, but the deck is stacked against her. As Riko spends more time in Ran's world (because she has no choice), she learns that he's constantly in danger. And now that Riko is his fiancee, so is she.

Poseidon of the East, Vast Blue Seas of the West (e-book) by Fuyumi Ono, translated by Eugene Woodbury

Poseidon of the East, Vast Blue Seas of the West is Eugene Woodbury's fan translation of the book Tokyopop translated as The Vast Spread of the Seas. It takes place 500 or so years before Youko's books, although I'd still highly recommend at least reading Youko's first book before this one. Otherwise, you'd end up missing out on a lot of context.

Anyway, this book focuses primarily on an event 30 or so years into Shouryuu's rule as emperor of En. The kingdom is becoming more stable, although it still has a long way to go before it's as beautiful and prosperous as it is in Youko's time. Unfortunately, not everybody is happy with Shouryuu and his laid-back style of governance. Atsuyu, the son of a province lord, tries to seize power by having Rokuta kidnapped. Interspersed with all of that is the story of how Rokuta came to choose Shouryuu as the emperor of En.

Midnight Riot (audiobook) by Ben Aaronovitch, narrated by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith

Midnight Riot is urban fantasy.

My read-alikes/watch-alikes list is a lazy, slight edited version of what I included in my review of the paper version of this book.

Review:

Probationary Constable Peter Grant wants to become a murder cop but seems far more likely to become a paper pusher. That all changes after he speaks to a ghostly witness at a crime scene and his abilities and willingness to keep an open mind bring him to the attention of Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, the only member of the London Metropolitan Police who is also a magician. Peter becomes Nightingale's apprentice and tries to get a handle on magic and its rules, even as he investigates brutal murders and attempts to keep the peace between feuding river gods.

Dragonsong (book) by Anne McCaffrey

Dragonsong is technically a science fiction book, although it deals with a low-tech colony on a far-away planet and includes dragons, so it reads like fantasy. I don't know if it was marketed as YA when it was first released in 1976, but it certainly could be today.

Review:

I think this was the very first Pern book I ever read. A friend let me borrow it during our required reading hour in school (maybe middle school?), and I was hooked. No wonder: the Harper Hall trilogy had a lot of features that I tended to gravitate towards.

In this first book, Menolly is a nearly 15-year-old girl living is an isolated fishing village on the planet Pern. Harper Petiron, her friend, teacher, and the one who most understood her love of music, has just died. Her parents grudgingly allow her to continue teaching the village's children, at least until the new Harper arrives, but they absolutely forbid her to create or sing any of her own songs, fearing that she will disgrace the village and confuse the children into thinking they're real Harper-composed songs. Although Menolly has been told her whole life that girls can't be Harpers, music is so much a part of her that she can't bear to let it go, and life at Half-Circle Sea Hold starts to become more and more unbearable.

Zootopia: The Junior Novelization (book) adapted by Suzanne Francis

Zootopia: The Junior Novelization is just what it says, a novelization of the movie.

Once again, I opted not to include read-alikes.

Review:

The first thing I did when I finished watching Zootopia for the second time was buy this. The story and characters were still in my system, and I wanted more. I knew that this book was aimed at kids and would probably only be a shadow of what I really wanted. Still, it seemed to be the best I could get as far as official fiction went. What with Zootopia being a kids' movie, there are no novelizations aimed at older teens or adults.

What I tend to hope for from novelizations is at least a little of whatever it was that made me love the original, plus extra stuff that couldn't be in the original for whatever reason – new scenes, info about the characters' thoughts and feelings, or expanded versions of events. Slight differences and alternative versions of scenes can be fun too. More often than not, this junior novelization felt like little more than a slightly more detailed version of the script.

Zootopia (CGI animated movie), via the movie theater

Zootopia is children's cop/mystery movie.

I opted not to include watch-alikes or read-alikes, although I'm now on the lookout for 1) decent furry (anthropomorphized animals) fiction that I haven't read before and that doesn't cost an arm and a leg and 2) fiction with prominent cross-gender friendships that don't become romantic (harder to find than I expected, especially since I'd prefer stuff written for older teens or adults). Feel free to recommend some in a comment, if you'd like.

Review:

I probably wouldn't have gone to see Zootopia if it hadn't seen all the positive viewer comments about it. People whose opinions I usually trusted said it was far better than they'd expected. Of course, some of those same people also said that Star Wars: The Force Awakens was the best movie ever, so I tried to take their recommendations with a grain of salt.

Most of what I knew about Zootopia was based on the one theatrical trailer I'd seen, the clip of Nick, the fox, and Judy, the rabbit, at the DMV. This clip was okay the first time around, but it was almost painful to watch the second and third time. It also left me with the impression that Zootopia didn't really have much of a plot. Thankfully, the movie was much better than that clip led me to believe. In fact, I loved it so much that I went to see it a second time.

I'll keep my synopsis as spoiler-free as possible, but keep in mind that that means I have to leave out a lot. Basically, in the world of Zootopia, mammals have evolved to the point where they've become sentient. Predators and prey now live in peace, although prejudice is still a problem – animals who were traditionally prey are sometimes fearful of animals who were traditionally predators, and foxes, in particular, are looked down upon (why foxes and not tigers, lions, or any number of other predators? I have no idea).

Judy is a rabbit living in the rural town of Bunnyburrow. Although her parents would love it if she became a carrot farmer like them, Judy's greatest dream is to become a police officer, the very first bunny cop. She accomplishes her dream and is even assigned to Zootopia, the big city she's always wanted to visit, but reality isn't quite like she imagined. While doing her job and trying to keep her spirits up, Judy meets Nick, a cynical and street smart con artist fox. After Judy makes a rash promise, Nick becomes her best bet for finding the missing predators and keeping her job.

Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within (book) by Jane Jensen

Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within is a paranormal mystery based on a computer game.

I'm not including any read-alikes for this. Also, be warned, this review includes spoilers.

Review:

The events of the previous book/game left Gabriel Knight somewhat wealthy and in possession of a drafty castle in Germany. His writing career has finally taken off, but he's having trouble with his latest book, so the werewolf case that the local villagers bring him is a welcome distraction. The police think the killings are being done by wolves that escaped from the zoo. Gabriel, who found a giant paw print at one of the crime scenes, feels differently. His investigation gets him involved in a private hunting club whose members appear to have a lot of secrets.

Meanwhile, Grace has gotten tired of being Gabriel's shopkeeper. She put off getting her PhD for Gabriel and his supernatural investigations, so she's darn well going to make him involve her in his latest case. She flies off to Germany and, since Gabriel's off doing his own thing, devotes herself to the research she's so good at. She discovers that Gabriel's current case may have its roots in the events surrounding King Ludwig II's apparent descent into madness and his mysterious death.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles (audiobook) by Agatha Christie, narrated by Hugh Fraser

The Mysterious Affair at Styles is a mystery.

I've decided not to include any read-alikes for this.

Review:

This is the first Hercule Poirot mystery. I finished listening to it a few weeks ago and should have reviewed it sooner. I'll do the best I can.

This is set during World War I. Hastings is a wounded soldier visiting a friend in Styles. He thinks he'd make a good detective, and he gets an opportunity to prove that (or not) when Mrs. Inglethorp is found dead, apparently due to strychnine poisoning. Hasting enlists the help of Hercule Poirot, a Belgian refugee who was a famous detective in his home country, and in the end it's mostly Poirot figuring things out while Hastings occasionally assists and desperately tries to figure out what Poirot has deduced but won't tell him.

This was a complicated story made extra confusing by the fact that I couldn't keep any of the characters and their relationships straight. In that respect, this didn't really make for a good work-time audiobook – it needed a little more attention than I could give it. However, the narration was so good that I didn't mind.

I bought this during an Audible sale, not knowing that the narrator, Hugh Fraser, was the same person who played Hastings in the TV series. I remember thinking that the narrator seemed to be channeling TV series Hasting and was doing an excellent job of it, so it was a little embarrassing when I realized who he was.

At any rate, if you liked the TV series, Hugh Fraser's narration will probably appeal to you. Not only will his Hastings sound familiar (ha!), he does a wonderful job of imitating David Suchet's Poirot speech patterns. I need to remember to keep an eye out for Fraser's Poirot narrations in future Audible sales, or maybe even spend one of my precious credits on one.

March Skoshbox

March's Skoshbox was a little skimpier than usual, because several of the snacks were larger. The box included: 1 resealable bag of High-Chew Premium: Japanese Grape (premium candy coated hichew); 1 package of Yogurt-Sour Tabs (tangy yogurt candy); 1 tray of Puchi Ichigo Cookie (mini strawberry chookies with chocolate chips); 1 Doraemon Monaka (Doraemon shaped chocolate monaka); and 1 bag of Yuki No Yado Senbei (lightly frosted senbei (Hokkaido milk)).

Hi-Chew Premium: Japanese Grape:

These were like grape-flavored Ao-Be Soda Gum in terms of taste and texture - chewy and a little bit fizzy (but not tongue-staining) - so I thought they might be gum. However, they were more like Starburst candies, because they did eventually dissolve.

Like I mentioned in my post for the February Skoshbox, I'm not a fan of grape-flavored things. Still, this wasn't bad, and I liked that the package was resealable.

Yogurt-Sour Tabs:

These were chalky, slightly sour-sweet candies. Not bad, although not my favorite thing in the box. I could probably find an American equivalent (similar to SweeTarts, but not as sour, or maybe Smarties?), but it would comes in a variety of flavors, while this candy package only contained one. I wouldn't have guessed that the flavor was yogurt if the name of the candy hadn't said so.

Puchi Ichigo Cookie:

These were very similar to chocolate chip cookies, except they were slightly pink and tasted a little like strawberries. They were very crunchy.

These weren't bad, but given a choice between strawberry-flavored chocolate chip cookies and regular ones, I'd choose regular ones.

Doraemon Monaka:

This was yummy, and gone too quickly. It was basically aerated chocolate sandwiched in a Doraemon-shaped sugar cone-like shell. A little googling tells me that the stuff I thought was sugar cone might have actually been made from mochi. It's not specifically mentioned in the ingredients, so I'm not sure.

Whatever it was, it was good. Taste and texture-wise, it was basically like eating one of the Mini Caplico Cones from the December 2015 Skoshbox.

Yuki No Yado Senbei:

These were very crunchy, with an overall flavor like toasted rice and sugar. Their flavor was layered, salty at first, and then sweeter milk-and-sugar.

Robot Evolution (e-anthology) by Ann Christy

Robot Evolution is a collection of five science fiction stories.

Warning: this review is littered with spoilers. I can't use spoiler tags here, so if you don't like them I'd recommend checking out my review in one of the other places I post, such as Booklikes or LibraryThing.

Review:

I first became aware of this collection when I read Shaykitteh's review of it. I was disappointed when I realized that the only one of the five stories I'd be able to get via Kobo was “PePr, Inc.” (which has since disappeared from Kobo - sorry, fellow EPUB users!). However, Shaykitteh put me in touch with the author, who, hoping I would review it, gave me the book for free.

This review covers each of the five stories individually and is therefore very long. For those who'd like the shorter version, I felt that the first story, “Corrections,” was the worst (maybe 2 stars?), the last story, “Posthumous,” was the best (4.5 to 5 stars), and the others were somewhere in between. None of the stories overlapped in terms of characters, but each one took place in the same world. The author arranged them chronologically rather than in publication order, so that each story was like zooming in on individuals existing at different points on a timeline. Overall, Robot Evolution should work well for those who prefer reading about robots that aren't killing machines bent on the destruction of all humanity.