A Librarian on Elm Street

 I was reading a blurb about Mao Volume 1 in the December 2021 edition of School Library Journal in an article by Brigid Alverson and Robin Brenner reviewing their best picks for school age kids of manga from 2021......and the summary of the plot left me shaking my head....."This is a damn Inuyasha rip-off....wait what was the author's na......ooooooh!" So the fabled Rumiko Takahashi returns, she of living legend status, writer and illustrator of Inuyahsa, Ranma 1/2 and many other works. Most authors of a manga series I like don't really catch fire with me with any other series, so the fact that Takahashi-Sama already has had two series I've enjoyed made me really hopeful she'll pull off a hat trick....which no other Mangaka has been able to achieve in my personal estimation.  So; having read the first volume of Mao, I'm definitely going to keep going with it. The story is interesting enough, and the sense of mystery surrounding the main character's fa...

 First of all, I have to begin by giving the Books in the Freezer podcast a shoutout for recommending this title on their recent episode covering "Found Footage" horror. As a person who grew up in the post-Blair Witch environment, I love good Found Footage horror stories...but finding the good ones is definitely a challenge sometimes. I'm going to have to check out some of the other books mentioned in that episode of the podcast, and you should definitely check out the rest of that series too, it's a lot of fun.  Which brings us to Into the Drowning Deep . The publication history is interesting, as this is a full novel that functions as a sequel to a preceding novelette available through Kindle, Audible, or an e-Book. Since the novelette was only electronically published as far as I can tell, most places online like Goodreads list the initial novelette, titled Rolling in the Deep , as book 0.5 in the series order and Into the Drowning Deep as the first book instead. ...