terriko

This is crossposted from Curiousity.ca, my personal maker blog. If you want to link to this post, please use the original link since the formatting there is usually better.

Library materials returned June 15, 2025. Lots of games & graphic novels this week!

Books returned June 15, 2025. Titles and reviews can be found in the associated post.

Board Games

Gravity Maze – a puzzle game where you drop a marble from a start point to an end point. Cards of different difficulties give you different setups. My kid really enjoyed the easy levels then got bored, which is about par for the course for him on these. We found it a bit finicky to use at first but once we got the hang of how the pieces went together it was pretty fun and didn’t require reading.

Nmbr9 – competitive puzzle game where you place down oddly shaped numbered tiles in order, gaining more points as you stack them such that they don’t have any gaps underneath. Pretty fun, didn’t require any reading.

Unlock – A set of 3 escape room games. We only actually finished the first one. I don’t like that they required an app to do some of the puzzles, but it did have hints in it for when the puzzles were decidedly non-obvious, so that was nice at least. Not bad but definitely the kind of game that I’m glad I can borrow from the library rather than own.

Books part 1

Hyrule Historia – I picked this up for the manga at the end but it’s the rest of it that turned out to be a huge hit with my kid: it’s full of beautiful concept art from the Zelda games up to Skyward Sword. He spent a lot of time pouring over the ideas and coming up with his own ideas about how unused enemies would work and stuff. Plus he generated a bunch of ideas for me to use in fanfic thanks in part to how much he enjoyed this book.

Slightly Exaggerated – kind of fantasy/Indiana Jones vibes. I liked it.

The Broken Elf King – romantasy in a “she’s got super special magic powers” way that absolutely echoes “the chosen one” type narratives in a fun way. Like, what if the author just leaned into the joy of a fantastic mary sue romance? It’s like someone took a teenage girl self-insert and turned it into a real book with better-than-teenage writing, and it just rejoices in it. I had a lot of fun and have already grabbed the next book.

Shifting Earth – A climate disaster/portal fiction book. Hit too close to home in a lot of ways so absolutely not escapism but it was good.

A Gentle Noble’s Vacation Recommendation – some kind of isekai thing. Beautiful art and character interactions but not enough plot to really keep me intrigued.

I got abducted by aliens and now I’m trapped in a rom com – funny but I didn’t finish it. Not really the fault of the book: I got excited about writing my own fiction which makes me read waaaay slow because I keep stopping to think about my writing. As a result, my library loan timed out and I decided to cut my losses since I didn’t think I was going to stop writing any time soon.

Bikes not Rockets: intersectional feminist bicycle science fiction stories – Who can resist a title like that? Some great stories in this collection, and I enjoyed the whole concept of having bicycles in everything.

Picture Books

Bark, George – hilarious. A bit hit with my kid.

What do you do with a voice like that – didn’t read. Neither kid nor I am big into biographies of congresswomen (this was from one of the library’s mystery book bags).

Beloved repeats picture books

MVP: most valuable puppy, Say Hello to Zorro, and Cat Says, Dog Says. I’m actually surprised kiddo chose the last one since I didn’t think he was that into it the first time, but we’ve ready MVP and all the Zorro books a lot of times.