Grenouille’s olfactory abilities fit the trope of the defining superhero trait, as does his tragic backstory, his painful and challenging training arc, and his inability to fit into normal society, but he is no hero, protecting eighteenth century Paris from crimes with his beyond-bloodhound sniffer as some manner of odor-based vigilante.
Metropolitan Strata Release Post and Author’s Note
This story is closer to a classic time travel story, despite there being no time travel, and it’s written differently from how I usually write stories.
The Forme of Cury Review
After being forced to scroll past dozens of nearly identical, overly sappy stories on various food blogs in order to reach anything relevant about the recipe, I decided to go old school and instead picked up a cookbook from the fourteenth century.
Counting Languages
Far from being a modern phenomenon, the declining diversity of language owes more to broad, civilizational factors, like the onset of agriculture and settlement of large city-states, than it does to the dominance of English in the current international system.
Ezra Review
The Persian kings are depicted as rescuers of the Jewish people from their Babylonian captivity, and Ezra-Nehemiah include multiple letters and other documents, supposedly based on actual writings, in which the Persian rulers support, encourage, and fund the restoration of the Jewish people and the rebuilding of the temple.
The Valkyrie Review
The story seems set up as a quest/mystery, but the narrative voice is more concerned with the rather forced romance between the two viewpoint characters.
Chronicles Review
Chronicles is to Kings what The Lord of the Rings books are to the movies - different interpretations with different emphases, but ultimately telling the same story.
The Maya Myths Review
Matsumoto's retellings of Maya mythological stories are more like plot summaries than any effort to really capture the feel and emotional context of the myths and stories involved. If writing down an oral story robs it of life, she gives us only the bones, not even the full corpse.
Avtandil’s Quest Review
If you were intrigued by my review for The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, but struggled with reading English translations of Rustavelian quatrains, Buell’s retelling is an excellent opportunity to approach the story in a different way.
The Wayfinder Review
What many people might consider to be reasons to put the book on their reading list were reasons I hesitated to put Adam Johnson’s The Wayfinder on mine, and I hesitated again before picking up the book to read. I was not entirely wrong.
IGC Publishing 