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January Book Reviews: Nicked by MT Anderson

Picked this book up because it was one of the titles on the site formerly known as tordotcom's best of 2024 list. In Nicked, incurably honest Benedictine Nicephorus has a dream of St Nicholas, making him the perfect pawn for the city's leadership. They want to steal the saint's body from its resting place in Myra, and Nicephorus is a perfect representative to send along on the heist in order to pretend the theft is divinely willed...

Do you know, this is the second book I've read in a month where a guy gets talked into stealing a corpse by his gay crush? Excellent concept, they should keep writing them. And as soon as I opened Nicked, I was struck by the excellent prose and solid grasp of the early medieval period and the Catholic saint fraud shenanigans (1087, to be precise). The overall setting is strictly historical and based on real accounts rather than fantastical--except for the author's mischievous decision to include a character who has the literal head of a dog, because cynocephales were mentioned in medieval geographic accounts.

The romance subplot is subtly done enough that I spent most of the novel wondering whether the author was aware that he'd written Nicephorus as attracted to their conman guide Tyun and commit to the bit. Spoiler, he does. It's clear that Anderson doesn't come from a romance background, but that unfamiliarity lends the romance a certain freshness and originality, rather than making it clunky.

A subtle and dryly funny gem of a novel with whip-sharp observations on a real historical event. Thoroughly deserves its inclusion on the best of 2024 list. Recommended.

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im so done with seeing articles about kids and screen time that doesnt mention parent behaviors even once. “kids are always on their phones” so are the parents! which the kids look to for how they should behave! ipad babies didn’t chose to only play on their ipads, thats what their parents gave them!

an anecdotal example: when i was a kid, all my parents would do in their minimal free time was watch tv and then they would be surprised when in my sister and i’s minimal free time we would also only watch tv/play video games. they scolded us for not reading books, but they never read books. they scolded us for not going outside but they never went outside.

“kids are always on their damn phones” my mom is in her 60s and opens up candy crush anytime she’s sitting — it isnt just the kids

Remember.

TumblrClan is no place for a fox-hearted Twittypet like Elon Musk. 

Friendly reminder that fan-made content (fanart, fanfic, fanvids, etc) are:

extremely time consuming. Remember someone actually took time out of their life to create that, time they could’ve used to, idk, sleep, for example

entertainment you’re consuming for free. I can’t stress this enough: you’re enjoying someone else’s craft for free. You paid exactly zero money to look at/read/watch it.

S H A R E D  with you, not made for you. This is the most important point: someone created that, put it online and you found it. No one forced you to consume that fanwork, you C H O S E  to do it. 

Whenever you feel like leaving a mean comment, anonymous hate or make a ~clever post about how ‘lol look at all of these overused tropes every fic writer crams into their fics’ remember you’re being a dick to someone who shared their work with you. You’re not being funny, you’re not being edgy, you’re not being brave for calling something out - you’re being a dick.

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