I wanted to like this book more than I did. Scott McCloud is undoubtedly and rightly one of the biggest names in comics academia. Understanding Comics was a foundational book for me as comics author and I recommend it to others regularly. Unfortunately The Sculptor has less heart, less wit and less originality than McCloud's non-fiction works.

The story follows a failed sculptor, David Smith, who strikes up a Faustian deal with Death: unlimited creative power but only 200 more days to live and to use it. Immediately thereafter he is visited by an angel, in actuality a quirky actress named Meg, who chose David for the center role in a massive street art project based on his hang-dog expression. In essence, this is yet another story about a whiny straight white male outsider whose life is redeemed by a manic pixie dream girl. Meg is literally bi-polar and appears regularly with wings.

I have an additional complaint that I would have been willing to overlook if the book overall had been stronger. McCloud is solidly competent artist- his pages are always clear and readable. However, the rendering and design of David Smith's supposedly remarkable sculptures is incredibly disappointing. Smith's body of work as it is portrayed by McCloud is juvenile and uninteresting. I was left completely unsurprised that Smith's art career had stalled and very skeptical that he could ever regain it- even with supernatural aid.

This is the most Neil-Gaiman-ish book I've ever read authored by someone who was not Neil Gaiman. It begins when a preserved giant squid, complete with a 9 meter glass tank and thousands of gallon of Formaldehyde, is stolen from the Darwin Center in London. Billy Harrow is the astonished scientist who discovers the theft and he is soon pulled into the bizarre magical criminal underworld of London only a few steps removed from the London of Neverwhere. I enjoyed this book but the plot took along time to develop to the point of an eventually satisfying twist.

Station Eleven opens in Toronto at a theater performance of King Lear. The middle-aged actor playing Lear collapses on stage of a heart attack; a paramedic student from the audience leaps up to perform CPR and an eight year old actress watches her idol die on stage. Within a few hours the killer flu that has been making its way across the globe reaches Toronto and within the next few months it kills off nine of every ten people on Earth. Twenty years later the young actress, Kristen, is now part of a Shakespeare Company which travels in horse-drawn carts between the scattered remains of civilization. The following story weaves in and out of flashback of the lives of the characters before the flu and the reality of life after the end of the world.

This book was stunning. My favorite post-world collapse book yet. (And that's saying something, because I really liked the Hunger Games). This book has a sweetness mixed in with the danger, trauma and tragedy that left me astonished.

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell was a gorgeous but punishing read. Erring much more on the side of fiction than science, this novel is set in the near future when a transmission of eerie music is picked up from Alpha Centauri. While the nations of Earth debate the meaning of this fragment of song the Jesuit Church quietly funds a manned expedition to travel through space to the music's source and bring the word of God to this new world. The crew contains eight people- eight wonderful human beings, some of the best and brightest, most compassionate, loving, funny and wise individuals that humanity has to offer. Only one of them makes it back to Earth, and by the time he is rescued he wishes he was dead.

The Magicians had been described to me as “Harry Potter with college age kids” but a slightly better description might be Diane Duane's Young Wizards series mixed with Narnia. The set up is very familiar: a teen boy with powers is offered a place at a mysterious magician's boarding school. But Grossman pushes the magic school genre into new and darker places. Drugs, post-college ennui, hookups, poor choices and heartless gods all destroy the illusion of magic as a path to happiness. I really enjoyed them but don't start them expecting the well-loved stairways of Hogwarts.