Cozette’s Corner, LMST 345 Fall 2020

 So I really liked the magic system and how Sanderson built the world of Warbreaker , and the political machinations between amnesiac deities was as interesting as it was hilarious. Lightsong, Stennimar, was a delight every time he made an appearance, Siri and Susebron were complete sweethearts, and I enjoyed the banter and common sense checks of Denth.  Vivenna, however, I could not stand  for the majority of this novel. She was the literal definition of sanctimonious and dependent. Which makes sense, since her journey is one of over coming arrogance, hypocrisy, and selfishness, but it was very frustrating to watch her have her bad behavior explained to her very clearly and then watch her deliberately twist it so that she’s not in the wrong. That’s a great setup for a character arc, even if Vivenna is insufferable in the meanwhile. She’s twenty-two, trained to be consort to a foreign king, basically taught how to navigate a treacherous, hostile environment with minimal s...

 My first thought about Akata Witch  is that Harry Potter walked so that it could run. It’s absolutely fascinating how changed our perception of ‘witches’ has changed in the time between these two series. Though I wasn’t around when the first Harry Potter book made it big, I’ve seen accounts of the protests pearl-clutching housewives gave of Rowling trying to convert their children to devil-worshippers through her burgeoning franchise. Extremely hard to believe now-a-days, given that  Harry Potter is still relevant enough 30 years later for it to be in two of my book reviews thus far off the top of my head. And Harry Potter  is tame  compared to the stuff that goes on in Akata Witch  by far. The most hilarious thing to me though, is how effortlessly and naturally Akata Witch  handles things older fans of Harry Potter  found lacking in Rowling’s work, culture and world building specifically. Specifically, in how Rowling should have gone farther in...

 So I never read The Golden Compass  as a child, nor any of the other book in the His Dark Materials  series by Phillip Pullman. Didn’t even see the movie. So going into this expecting nothing but the usual children’s fantasy fair, I was caught off guard by the teeth  of this story.  For example, even this book’s contemporary series, Harry Potter  doesn’t have a main character that’s anything more than a (sassy) neutral influence. Harry is not the most proactive main character, which is all well and fine, and in the later books there is even a time where he recognizes and resents what his blind faith and pacifism has lead to, in his life being manipulated and directed without his knowledge or consent. Until that point, Harry Potter  only really slightly indicates that adults have agendas of their own about and for children, and that unless outright mean and abusive  to the child, adults should implicitly be in charge. The most Harry usually does i...

 This book is like the intoxicated, eldritch love-child of a Dungeons and Dragons  campaign and an SCP Foundation log that rooted through Tolkien’s trash on a whim and satiated its munchies on the most rancid offering. I loved it. I find myself both surprised and unsurprised that there hasn’t been an adaptation of this  into a visual media, because there is so much there .  And at no point does Mieville ease you into anything, its just one intriguing sucker punch after another. I’ll also admit, if I didn’t already know that thaumaturgy was another way of saying ‘magic’ right off I’d have been horribly confused. How does someone try and conceptualize the slake-moths in a visual format? Or the space between perception and thought and dreams? I actually really want to see this in a graphic novel adaptation - it’d be far fetched to hope for an animated adaptation, given how parents generally treated Sausage Party ’s R rating. Which is a pity.  I think one of the thi...

This book was, to me, obviously written for a time when novels were the only form of entertainment. This took me way longer to get through than it really should have, but Dracula  was dense, and I am definitely out of practice in novel reading. As far as the novel itself goes, before it became more of a slough and less of a joy to get through, I really enjoyed the set up and anticipation, and how Stoker put breadcrumbs and foreshadowing into the very atmosphere of this novel. Even though Dracula  is renowned the world over and adapted into new media and pop culture even now, I found myself enjoying the tale as it was unfolding, and in fact wondering why modern horror doesn’t do what Dracula  does so well.  Modern horror has a habit of favoring the atmosphere more than the characters, making the piece a horror from how the audience has to experience and view horrible things, whereas in Dracula, the   horror comes from what horrible things the characters have to d...