Month: October 2019

Werewolves and vampires and mummies are scary, okay?

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Jack had his first encounter with Halloween spookiness today, and he did not enjoy it.  The werewolf was happy and funny, Dracula was perfectly friendly, and, sure, the mummy had a frighteningly bad 1920s-ish, New York-ish accent, but she was only trying to be nice.

Jack was having none of it.  Every time one of them came near, he clutched at whichever of us was holding him and hid his face.  I swear he was shaking one time.

He was fine with the other people around us.  He was making faces and smiling and making friend with strangers he could see over our shoulders, like usual, but these costumed people really freaked him out.

Seems strange that they would – he has no frame of reference for costumes, but he also doesn’t really have any reason to think they’d be scary.  Would he be as scared of someone dressed as Superman?  Maybe it was the heavy face makeup.

We’ll have an opportunity to find out next weekend when we take him to Rhode Island Comic Con.  And on Halloween, I guess.

The Girl From Everywhere by Heidi Heilig

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Started: 10/9/19
Gave up: 10/12/19

In my calendar, I wrote that I put this book “on hold”, but who are we kidding?  I gave up.  I liked the idea of it – the protagonist is the daughter of a pirate captain who, with her help, can navigate to any place, real or imaginary, in any time, as long as the map is well-drawn and the mapmaker believed in it.  That’s a cool idea.  The issue I had was with the writing.  The author kept talking about maps, but ships use charts.  I can ignore the use of walls instead of bulkheads and floors instead of decks and doors instead of hatches, but for some reason, despite my near-total memory loss of everything I learned in the Navy, I can’t get past saying maps instead of charts.

Lock In by John Scalzi

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Started: 10/2/19
Finished: 10/9/19

I like John Scalzi’s books.  I haven’t read them all, but I’ve read most of them, and I’ve really liked the vast majority.  They’re not perfect – the problem I run into is that all of the characters sound the same way.  The dialogue, while on the one hand can be pretty realistic, is basically the same book to book.  It feels like every character is a stand-in for the author – smart, an essentially good person, heavy on the snark.  HEAVY on the snark.  It’s amusing, and his stories are all good, entertaining, fast-paced.  I like that his characters tend to have healthy and happy family relationships (it’s a nice change from all the death and orphans and drama I get in nearly everything else I read), but they all talk the same.

So I get stuck on that sometimes.

Failure to Communicate by Kaia Sønderby

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Started: 9/30/19
Gave up: 10/1/19

This book is supposed to be a) very good and b) a very good portrayal of an autistic person, from an autistic person’s point of view, written by an autistic person.  It may very well be both of those things (all of those things?), but I got lost in the science fiction parts of it.  Too many characters, too similar to each other (at least in the beginning), and WAY too many different aliens not differentiated from each other.  And you KNOW I’m all about aliens.  I gave up.