A few opening notes: I'm not a Rick Riordan completist. I've read a few of the Percy Jackson books, the 1st Magnus Chase book, and the 1st Kane Chronicles book, and I've really enjoyed them, but haven't finished any of the series, just because...there are so many of them, and so much to read!

But I picked this one up because I'd heard good things, and also it's marked BOOK ONE of a new series. But it seems like it's building pretty heavily on the events of the Percy Jackson series and also the Roman gods one? Most kids picking this up are probably RR superfans who have already read all of those, but just a heads-up. I still enjoyed the book and I got enough out of it, but it was referring back to events that I had not read about PRETTY FREQUENTLY for an ostensible series opener.

ANYWAY that said, I still followed the plot and really enjoyed this. I think it's awesome that Apollo is casually, openly bisexual and there are happy queer teens in this book (and I guess elsewhere in the series?) I also thought it had a pretty complex approach to children who have grown up with abuse (even/especially if your parent is a god), without being all Child Called It about it. Also it's funny!

FOUR FOR YOU, RICK RIORDAN. YOU GO, RICK RIORDAN.

THIS WAS COOL AND SCARY, I couldn't read it in the night time

Spoiler

I read another review that compared this to Scooby Doo and that's pretty on point actually, there aren't any ghosts it's literally just meddling kids/adults in masks. But also I liked that? I think this is a good one for middle grade readers. Who also tend to like Scooby Doo.

Anyway it's very atmospheric and haunting; scary without being like, murdery.

I loved this and couldn't put it down, which is a little strange since it's not exactly a page-turning mystery. (There is a slight mystery aspect, but that's not what kept me reading.) I've read reviews about how this isn't exactly realistic, and in the author's note Johnston herself notes that this is sadly a bit of a fantasy in that after Hermione is raped, she's met with near-universal belief and support from friends, family, school, police, etc and that sadly is not the norm. On some level it reminds me of [b:Boy Meets Boy|23228|Boy Meets Boy|David Levithan|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1356335082s/23228.jpg|1118789] and how David Levitan wanted to write a super happy book where queer teens can be out and happy with no societal issue, even though that was deffo not the norm when it was written (and isn't now even though progress has been made).

Spoiler

the ease with which Hermione gets an abortion is I think more Canadian than just fantasy life, but also, whew.

So with that in mind I think this is a great book to exist and perhaps provide a model for how people should respond to rape victims rather than a brutally realistic read. (I think there's a place for brutally realistic survival stories too but that doesn't have to be every story.)

That aside, I just loved Hermione's voice in this so much and I was really rooting for her. She has a really wry self-aware sense of humo(u)r (she's Canadian), and I love her friendships with Polly and the rest of her team too.

I picked this up while tidying the children's department, skimmed it, and ended up reading the whole thing on my desk shift. It's very funny and has some good information too. It's definitely the kind of thing I would have eaten up as a nerdy child. (While it does have an air of whimsical disrespect, it is a fairly whitewashy upbeat look at the presidents--like there's a pop-up about all the different things that George Washington's fake teeth were made out of but it doesn't mention the teeth of slaves as one. Which is probably OK because that's horrifying and kids can maybe wait a minute to learn that?).

I'm glad I read this with my awesome lady bookclub so we could get together and all be like "...oh good we ALL thought this was kind of overrated, whew".

IDK, it was fine? I do like the importance of the girl friendship at the center, and the obsessive/competitive/consuming nature of that I thought was well done. And there was a sort of satisfying, Little House on the Prairie-ish satisfaction to just the kind of detailed monotony of household doings and routines?

Also one intrepid member of our book club read Wikipedia summaries of all the other books and told us what happens to all the other characters, which was sort of interesting. Seems like this book is setup/backstory for the series and more things happen later? But ultimately I'm not invested enough to read any more of these books.

I wonder if some of why this is getting attention because it's relatively rare for ~literary fiction~ to be about female friendship and it's refreshing in that way? But I read so much YA fiction about girl friendship that I'm like, okay what else?

eh this wasn't really my cup of tea and that's kind of on me--I mistakenly thought this was about the history of the national parks, which it is a liiittle bit, but it's mostly about big game hunting, which I just don't really enjoy reading about. I KNOW it's linked to conservation/museums, especially back in the day, but I don't want to read about the president killing a bunch of lions for funsies. I did like reading some of the parts about the history of museums, but mostly this was a combination of things I already knew or things I didn't care to learn about, SORRY.

the writing/research are fine but not the kind of extraordinary nonfiction prose that can make me care about things I wouldn't normally care about. (eg Susan Orlean). IT WAS FINE, if you're really into the history of big game hunting this would probably be your jam.

I loved the art and concept of this so much! So fun and I think will have a lot of appeal to teens. The plot is a little bit bananas but, you know, comics.

IDK, I like the art and look of this a lot, and it kept me reading...it's a flavor of story I'm not especially into, the man driven by REVENGE for his PREGNANT WIFE'S DEATH. I did think it was doing some interesting subversion of that--like I thought Jack admitting that, given the choice, he wasn't sure if he'd rather save his wife's life OR get revenge on the killer? I mean that's dark but also speaks to the way these kinds of stories tend not to be about the woman at all. Patience herself mostly seemed like a series of things that had happened to her.

Also

Spoiler

I tend not to be a huge fan of time travel stories.

just not my cup of tea overall, but it's well done for what it is, I guess.

I mean...it does a fine job of expanding on a nonsense movie.

http://www.frowl.org/worstbestsellers/episode-50-x-men-3-the-last-stand/

I enjoy Deadpool in theory but I'm not a regular reader of Deadpool comics. But I picked this volume up because some of my fave comedians/podcasters (Paul Scheer, Jason Mantzoukas, Scott Aukerman, Ben Acker/Blacker) wrote one-off issues that are collected here. As I suspected--I really enjoyed all of those issues, as well as the Roast of Deadpool at the end. The actual like, plot-related part of this...well, I mean, if I'm picking up volume 8 of a series without having read volumes 2-7, it's only fair that I should be a little confused, but it was fine.