Run for Cover

 By Ankita Bhargava Some of you may know that in the early 2010's there was a huge boom in stories that featured classic fairy tales (like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, etc.) but with a twist. For example, Cinder, a sci-fi book loosely based on Cinderella, was published in 2012. The School For Good and Evil, about children of famous fairy tales, 2013.  Land of Stories, about children who get transported to a land where fairy tale characters live through a book. Sisters Grimm, about two sisters who keep a town full of amnesiac fairy tale characters safe from the world. Heartless, a prequel to Alice in Wonderland, focusing on the Queen of Hearts, published in 2016. Of course, this trend didn't only affect books; some people might remember Disney's Descendants, about the children of Disney characters (many of whom are retellings of  classic fairy tales themselves). In 2014, the movie Into the Woods was released, also by Disney, based on the Broadway musical, which f...

Tiamat's Wrath Contains spoilers for The Expanse series By - Karl Vu Tiamat's Wrath  is the 8th book in the The Expanse series. A few years after the events of Persepolis Rising , the crew of the Rocinante  has split up once again. Holden is a prisoner of Laconia and Amos is undercover on it. Alex, Bobbie, and Naomi are running missions for the resistance. Elvi Okoye, who was a main character in Cibola Burn , is researching uninhabited systems in the rings which might house protomolecule artifacts. Winston Duarte, leader of Laconia runs a test on the ring gates to discover what is causing some ships to disappear when travelling through the gates. A bomb is detonated in one of the gates leading to an uninhabitable system. Whatever people or things that were controlling the gates have been provoked and cause a neutron star on the other side of a gate to collapse, sending a massive energy burst into ring space. Everything in ring space is destroyed, and Elvi's crew just bare...

By Rose Benjamin Illustrations in books, especially novels, can either be useful visual aid or unnecessary. Sometimes, the charm of the story is how the reader can envision the characters and setting themselves. When a character's physical appearance has little do with the story or the mood of the book, vague verbal descriptions (or none at all) are enough. Other times, however, visuals can help set the mood of the story and give characters personality. When the text already provides extensive description or properties of the environment are written to be vague, illustrations break the intent of the text, providing detail that should have been imagined by the reader. Unnecessarily showing how characters look can also ruin the reader's unique experience and make it more similar to everyone else's. People may have in their heads a certain design for a character, and be set on it. An illustration of said character would ruin their perception of the character, especially if the...

By Andrea Li Pen names, also known as a pseudonym, literary double, or nom de plume, are made-up names adopted by an author that they use on their works in place of their real name.  A simple Google search reveals that a surprising amount of well-known authors use pen names, including J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, Lewis Carroll, and Dr. Seuss. Daisy Meadows, from the childhood-favorite and never-ending Rainbow Magic series, is disappointingly a collective pen name for the four different authors that wrote the books (it was too perfect to be true). Then for the opposite effect, you hear the name Rainbow Rowell and are inversely betrayed to hear that Rainbow Rowell, is in fact her real name. The next time you are wondering why famous people all have cool names, the answer is that they might not!  Pen names may seem like a surface level change and simply for aesthetic purposes, but pen names have existed for centuries and have historical significance. In earlier times, when women w...

  By Ankita Bhargava (Spoilers for the first two chapters of The School for Good and Evil) The School for Good and Evil by Soman Chainani   revolves around two girls named Sophie and Agatha. They live in a small town, where every four years, two children are kidnapped by the School Master. Those children (one good, one evil) later show up in storybooks that mysteriously arrive in the village, after being taken to twin schools of good and evil. Sophie's dream is to be a Good princess, while Agatha is the perfect candidate for and Evil witch. However, when they are finally taken to the school, Sophie is taken to the School for Evil, while Agatha is taken to the School for Good.  I really liked this book because of the way that it immediately introduces the character's personalities, their flaws and their relationships with other characters. In the first page, we learn that Sophie wants to marry a prince and that she is a little conceited. It also introduces Agatha as her po...

  Persepolis Rising Contains minor spoilers for The Expanse series By - Karl Vu Persepolis Rising is the 7th book in The Expanse series, and the start of the Laconia arc in the story. 28 years after the events of Babylon's Ashes .   Since the end of the Free Navy conflict, the Transport Union was founded unify the various factions of people living in the asteroid belt and give the lower class citizens of the belt a purpose. The Transport Union has established itself as a superpower in the Sol system, controlling most trade within the Sol system, and all trade between every ring system. Earth has fully recovered from the Free Navy's attacks, and the Sol system's economy has been re-stabilized. The crew of the Rocinante are contracted by the Transport Union to deal with the people of the Freehold system, who have been violating Transport Union regulations. After the crew finishes up and goes through the Freehold ring to start heading back to Sol, the Laconia system broadcas...

By Rose Benjamin In the popular Sherlock Holmes books, the narrator is Holmes's friend Dr. Watson, who accompanies him on many of his adventures. It is sometimes mentioned in the stories how Watson documents the adventures of his friend, and the two characters occasionally get into arguments about Watson's style of writing them. Watson wants to write the stories to show the observant and clever qualities of his friend, while Holmes would rather they be more educational to the reader. I believe he once commented that he should start documenting some of his adventures himself, in a more educational way. So, what would a story be like if Holmes had written it instead of Watson? For one thing, Holmes tends to be concise with his words, so he would probably go on fewer tangents than Watson tends to do, especially at the beginning of stories. Watson tends to disclose quite a bit of somewhat unnecessary information at the beginning, including, in many instances, the fact that he canno...