Parenthetical.net

Things that are awesome about North World:

The world-building: it takes place in modern-day Canada, except that oh, btw, there’s demons and talking bears, and heroes whose job it is to protect everyone from them.
The hilarious dialogue. (When Conrad, the everyguy hero, attacks a shlubby guy in his house for supposedly being a demon-summoner, he [...]

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Ok, people, true fact: I read four of these nominated buggers today. That’s the kind of volume we’re talking about here. I committed to reviewing everything I read, and I intend to keep up with that — mostly because it’s good for me, as a writer and as a person who remembers stuff [...]

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Lonely Portia looks out her window one night and sees a giant purple monster shuffling into the woods near her house. So of course she goes out to investigate — and discovers the adorable, silent, hungry creature she eventually names Jellaby. She brings him home and feeds him tuna fish, and he becomes [...]

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Cute little older mouse Benny wants to play pirate. His cute little younger mouse sister Penny wants to play with him. He doesn’t want to let her, because sisters are a pain. So he hides from her, until he decides playing by himself is boring, and besides, she’s braver than he is [...]

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Babymouse loves Halloween. (I can relate. My front porch still looks like Halloween threw up on it.) She wants to dress up as something scary and have a party with her friends, most of whom seem to be boys. But her nemesis, Felicia Furrypaws, informs her that, “Everyone knows that girls [...]

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This is from a series called Twisted Journeys, which are Choose Your Own Adventures in comic form. The title pretty much says it all: you and your friend go to an island to help your friend’s aunt, a “world-famous explorer,” do some unspecified research on why a settlement disappeared. Turns out — spoiler [...]

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Magic Trixie is a cute little witch girl with a talking pet cat, a baby sister (Abby Cadabra), an older sister, parents, grandparents, and a Mimi (”a Gramma who thinks that if she is never called the G-word, no one will know she is a Gramma”). She goes to school with assorted other cute [...]

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Via Bookshelves of Doom:
Sherman Alexie is totally a match for Stephen Colbert. Hi-larious!

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It’s about time for a Cybils review of something I love unreservedly… and fortunately, here it is! Rapunzel’s Revenge has the somewhat unlikely premise of Rapunzel set in an alternate magical Wild West, but it totally works.

The wicked witch is a greedy landowner whose growth magic allows her to run a slave [...]

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My love of post-apocalyptic science fiction is no secret, so I was all kinds of excited to check out In the Small: a mysterious blue light covers Earth, reducing human beings to the size of… well, iPods, to judge by one of the panels. Collapse of civilization! Humanity stretched to the limit! [...]

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