BookOwl

  3/5 stars *Spoiler alert!* Naturally, because I had read and enjoyed “The Maze Runner” series, I had to pick this one up from the library. However, the first entry in a new series taking place 70+ years after the events of Death Cure , The Maze Cutter is an intriguing, yet ultimately disorganized story. Perhaps it is my nostalgia from reading “The Maze Runner” series influencing my lower rating of The Maze Cutter , but I felt that this story had set up too many threads and introduced us to too many characters much too soon. So much so that the character development was comparably shallow. I could see the author maybe not being confident about the direction of this new series, instead relying on cameo appearances of characters like Frypan from the earlier series to shore things up. Not to mention that Newt’s secret journal—the Book of Newt—is required reading on the island Thomas and his friends first settled some 70 years previously when escaping WICKD. “They say that some ...

  There is a whole universe of feminist scholarship and literature out there, but to get you started, I’ll recommend five titles from a variety of authorly voices. Featuring both fiction and nonfiction—some titles you may be expecting and some not—you’ll be sure to find your next good read! Women and Power by Mary Beard A bit on the shorter side and with a powerful message, Women and Power is a jaunt through history to explore the early origins of misogyny. Beard explores the traditional frameworks of power patriarchal societies run on, whether they were in Ancient Greece and Rome to those adapted to the present day. Throughout Women and Power is not only a history lesson on how we got to where we are today, but a provocative question about the nature of power: Can the very definition of power be changed when a group is excluded from the powers-that-be? Read it—it’s worth your while! The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood This may be the book that you were expecting to b...

  4/5 stars *Spoiler alert!* Rubicon is the latest science fiction read by J.S. Dewes. I really enjoyed The Last Watch and The Exiled Fleet , so I knew I had to check out Rubicon ! Similar to her previous works of military science fiction, Rubicon introduces readers to a humanity at war, this time with a species of sentient robots known as the Mechan. The Mechan have steadily been confining humanity to a home system whose star is dying. Humanity has fought fiercely against the Mechan but hasn’t been able to take offensive actions until the invention of “rezoning” technology. Meaning that when a soldier dies in battle, their consciousness is transferred into a synthetic body grown with their DNA. Our protagonist is one of these soldiers on the frontlines, Adriene Valero. She has died and been brought back a total of 96 times (earning her the nickname “Ninety-Six”) when she is transferred to a branch of humanity’s fleet known as Forward Recon. She is quickly taken under the wing of M...