I wish I had read this finale more slowly. I like it, but I’m not sure I follow exactly what Remender is going for at each step. This series is worth rereading in the future.

I don’t love the wild shift in premise at the end of this volume, but I do enjoy seeing Grant and Sara work through stuff in a way that feels earned, so it gets credit for that.

Same as the last volume, there are bits of this that I like (including the framing device), but the ramping up of stakes and driving forward of plot are more “meh.”

As promised, I’m starting to blur the lines between volumes—I think some of the things I’m penalizing this review for were actually in the last volume. Oops.

Anyway, I love the art and the premise of this series too much to ever rate it below a four out of five, and there are bits of this volume that I really enjoy, but I like the premise and exploration of this series more than I like its main plot arc, and its efforts to move that plot forward in this story (especially by ramping up the stakes) aren’t super interesting to me.

This series takes more turns in this volume, introducing a major villain who will continue longer than expected and further shifting the premise and main ideas of the series.

I think it works! Grant and Pia get some time to explore their identities and relationship, and playing with bonkers ideas usually works for me.

Okay, so let’s get one thing out of the way up front: After a long break from this series, I spedread the remaining five volumes in the course of a few days. My ability to distinguish the volumes is being pushed to its limits, so these reviews may not be super helpful.

I do remember liking this one, though. I’m a bit annoyed at the timeskip, but this volume signals a real shift in the series where Remender introduces some exploration of his characters alongside the bonkers sci-fi premise. That’s cool, and I appreciated getting to know Grant better here.

Reviewing reference works that I largely skimmed always feels silly, but it’s my website, and no one can stop me.

I’m not a historian, but this historical context was really useful for me for a paper I’m writing on Ellulian perspectives on “media events” in early Mormon history. I appreciated having easy access to documents related to events I was writing about, and as I eventually expand the paper, I expect that I will come back to this volume.

I’m being hard on this book, so I want to emphasize that: I think it’s important, I pre-ordered it and have been looking forward to read it for a long time, there are parts of it that I deeply enjoyed, and it is likely to get cited in a couple of papers I’m working on.

That said, while I think there are a lot of good ideas and bits in here, it feels more like a collection of ideas than a cohesive book. I think a stronger throughline and more aggressive structure would have made it even better. I know it started off as essays/blog posts, and I think the individual components are great, but I’m not sure it’s more than the sum of its parts.

The Incomparable has once again clued me in to a fun series, and I was delighted to listen to this over a couple of days. It’s a fun premise, and if the podcast I listened to was any indication, it will only get more fun with time.

Still good! Interesting themes, great art, fascinating take on a familiar premise, and compelling characters. You can see more of the seams on this volume, but I plan to keep reading, reading, reading.

This series isn’t perfect—the shaman character has enough vague stereotype surrounding him to raise a concerned eyebrow—but it’s good. What’s more, I’m so happy to be returning to it after a month-long semi-accidental break that I’m giving this volume full marks.

It’s very weird, with beautiful art to back it up. It’s fast-paced in a way that could be annoying but is justified by the story in a way that works. The characters aren’t always sympathetic, but that usually works to the advantage of the story being told.

I backed this book on Kickstarter, intrigued by the idea of a graphic novel that documents and collects difficult experiences on Mormon missions.

When it arrived, I knew that actually reading it would be either healing or triggering for me, and I was happy to find that it was the former. There are a few improvements that could be made, but it met my hopes of being something that captured the Mormon mission experience as I know it (though there were a lot of COVID-19 stories, and how are these RMs so young!) but also spoke to the complex feelings that I and so many others have about those experiences.

I first tried reading this in 2024 and kind of stalled out after a while. It’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer, though! The guy who was executed for resisting Nazis! I felt like I really needed to give this another go, and so I did.

I like what the book is going for: The idea of radical devotion to Christ is something that speaks to me on a deep level. However, for me to be fully comfortable with that, I need “devotion to Christ” to be defined (and mapped onto other values) in a clear, specific way, and I don’t know that this book does that.

Like the last Tony-authored book I reviewed, I want to concede that there’s a bit of unfairness coming into my review. In some ways, I think it’s an important work that just isn’t what I’m looking for right now. What’s more, it’s kind of a reference work that I tried to read cover to cover, and that affects my thinking, too. However, I also have some grumps about it that I think are valid.

I like blending the mundane and the fantastical (Jedi should absolutely be sent to negotiate trade disputes), so I ought to like this story about the fae and influencers (especially since it has some pro-co-op vibes), but it just didn’t land as well as I’d have liked.

Eh, it felt like this was a continuation of some of my least favorite parts of Autonomous. I am also struggling to enjoy “robots’ rights” stories in our LLM era, which is dumb, but that’s how it is.

The story itself didn’t captivate me much. I felt like there were sudden developments for the sake of the plot moving forward, and even an twist that comes partway through the book felt like [insert sudden development here] rather than the surprise it was supposed to be. I also didn’t catch some of the character connections and payoffs at first, though I suspect that’s due in part to my own inattention.

Finally getting back to the Newitz and Anders Humble Bundle collection I recently came into! This was a fun, cozy, quick read, and its throwaway reference to a David Graeber book and last-minute praise of platform independence to avoid Apple-style skimming off the top made me smile.

I’m still struggling a bit more with these story arcs than I did with earlier ones, but I can’t put my finger on why, and I don’t think it’s because they’re any less good.

It is also very interesting to be reading these books at a time where I’m digitizing journals from my college years, worrying a lot about grades and relationships.

Still good, but I’m still ready to wrap up this reread and turn my attention to some other things.

This review is slightly more negative, and I don’t know if that’s because I’m ready to move on to something else to read, because I don’t like all of the subplots in this part of the story, or something else. It’s still good, though!

Post-timeskip Dumbing of Age is good; some parts feel rockier, some parts feel even better.

Part of me thinks that I shouldn’t enjoy this particularly dramatic, action-packed sequence, but Willis does an excellent job of it—and of making it fit within the broader world and story he’s built.

Still enjoying this! I really appreciate Willis’s charitable, nuanced take on non-fundamentalist religion that comes out here while Joyce is wrestling with her faith.

I really ought to scan back through each volume as I read it so that I can give it a more thorough review, but these go fast, blend together, and just make a generally good impression. I’d like to wrap up the reread so that I can turn my attention to other stuff, but sometimes you also just need a quick, easy rebinge of a high quality webcomic.