Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, by David Benedictus - While it's a little odd to commission an official sequel this long after the original author's death, I have to say this was very much in the spirit of A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh stories. It's very much character driven, and the characters are consistent with how Milne wrote them. Pooh is still making up songs, Eeyore is gloomy, Owl puts on an act of knowing a lot more than he really does, Tigger is bouncy, and Rabbit tries to take charge of everything. While I can't say that the new character, Lottie the Otter, adds all that much to the stories, I had no problem with her either. Like the familiar characters, she's quite definitely characterized, and doesn't take much time fitting in with Forest society. I kind of wonder if she was added in because of how predominantly male the old cast is. The context of the tales is that Christopher Robin is back from boarding school for the holidays, and incorporates much of what he's learned in his interaction with the basically unchanging Forest denizens. I have to say that I like the idea that Christopher Robin is growing up, but still makes time for Pooh and the others whenever he can, which strikes me as a happier conclusion than the one Milne originally wrote for
The House at Pooh Corner.
The Sword of Shannara, by Terry Brooks - I know Brooks is a well-regarded fantasy author, but this is the first book I've read by him, and I can't say I liked it too much. It's not that it was bad, just really generic. The only real twist to the rather typical fantasy world, that it's actually a post-apocalyptic Earth, was seriously underplayed. Maybe Brooks does more with it in the sequels, but I doubt I'll be reading them. Maybe I should have read this when I was younger.
Three-Headed Elvis Clone Found in Flying Saucer Over Oz, by Chris Dulabone - This rather absurd title was suggested by Eric Gjovaag as a joke, but Chris decided he could make it into an actual Oz story. I was somewhat disappointed that, while said Elvis clone does make an appearance, he isn't really that significant to the plot. Instead, the story centers around an Ozian dog named Spot, who travels to various extraterrestrial locations from previous Oz-related works. He visits the Man in the Moon from L. Frank Baum's
Mother Goose in Prose, helps to save a planet that apparently featured in one of the Russian Magic Land books (I still need to read these), and explores the old home of Planetty from
The Silver Princess in Oz. I do think it's weird that, when Planetty herself said that her fellow Nuthers were quite solitary, more recent works involving Anuther Planet (including this, Atticus Gannaway's
Sinister Gases in Oz, and Marcus Mebes's updated edition of
Lurline and the White Ravens of Oz) present the inhabitants as rather sociable. But anyway, while there isn't much of a strong unifying plot to
Elvis Clone, it's a fun and light-hearted adventure with callbacks to a lot of previous Oz works.
Age of Bronze: Betrayal, Part One, by Eric Shanower - I first became interested in Eric through his Oz work (of which there is quite a lot), and figured I should check out this comic series based on the Trojan War as well. I wasn't disappointed, as the art and scripting are both excellent. In this volume, the Achaeans conquer the island of Tenemos, intending to use it as a base to strike against Troy. When negotiations between the two sides fail, the Trojans prepare for battle. There are a lot more intricacies to the story than that, however, often so many I tend to forget about some of the subplots and individual motivations. It looks like there have been three more issues of the comic since this collection was released, but I think I'll just wait for the next collection.
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