I’m feeling trapped between my (entirely personal, self-made) commitment to review (almost) all the media I consume, and how thoroughly behind I am at doing so. Hence, my all-in-one micro-review roundup, in which I give my impressions of everything on my “to review” list since last June. It may take me a couple more days to transfer these into the various review sites.
Reviews: audio
Blog entry
I'm trying to make a push to get caught up with some casual reviewing as well as my review commitments. Since I'm currently still dazed from having dental work (new crown) I'll go for the casual side and more recently consumed.
* * *
Yesterday I thought I didn't have a review to post this week. But then, yesterday I didn't have one--not until I finished listening to the final episode of Serial Box's Season 2 of Tremontaine, based on Ellen Kushner's Riverside setting. The serial is released weekly in 13 episodes, both in print and semi-dramatized audio format. I consume it via the latter because that fits into my schedule better. As I noted in my review of season 1, this may have unknowable consequences for how I receive it.
The season of people posting their "top 10" or "10 favorite" for the past year is a bit fraught for authors. There's always the hope that maybe, just maybe, your work will have been among someone's favorites, or considered by someone to have been among the best of whatever category it is they're considering. For those of us whose work falls outside the popular categories, and when that work came out at the very end of the year when most people have already drawn up their lists, it's best just to close our hearts and move on.
Yes, it’s that time again when I’ve been binge-listening to the Podcastle audio fantasy fiction on my podcast feed and have decided to catch up with several months worth of reviews. As previously, my ability to remember what I thought of a story (or even what the story was about) fades the longer ago I listened to it.
What if Persephone had been an eager bride...and Hades was a woman?
That's the basic premise of this mythic re-telling of the "abduction" of Persephone as a same-sex romance. Persephone flees Olympus to escape Zeus's tyranny and sexual advances (and starting with a major grudge against him for having raped her childhood crush, one of Demeter's nymphs, and turned her into a bush). A passing encounter with the aloof, brooding, and therefore enticing Hades, Queen of Death at Persephone's Olympian coming-out makes her fixate on Hades as her best refuge.
I've been catching up with Podcastle audio fiction podcasts lately, so I thought I'd do some very brief reviews of everything (or at least everything I can remember listening to) since the last batch of Podcastle reviews. I tend to listen to this podcast fairly consistently, if often in clusters. Not all the stories hit anywhere near my sweet spot, but I'm usually listening on a drive or while working in the yard, so there's an incentive to finish them even if they aren't quite to my taste.
