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Summary: Thor has lost his hammer again and Magnus Chase and his friends have to find it before the giants know it is gone and decide to invade.

Rick Riordan and his Percy Jackson books exploded onto the middle grade book scene in 2005. And he has been churning out books since then. By my count, The Hammer of Thor is his 22nd novel since 2005 (he had 7 novels before that). As I said last year in my review of the first book in this series, I loved the initial Percy Jackson series. The follow up heroes of Olympus series declined as it went on. I did not like the first of the Kane Chronicle and did not read further. But with Magnus Chase was back to good again.

The Hammer of Thor follows soon after the end of the first book. Magnus Chase died early in the first book. He is now in Valhalla, a Norse afterlife for heroes that die saving others. He can come and go from there as he wants to. Being the son of Frey, a Norse god of healing, Magnus has some healing powers (similar to the way that Percy Jackson as a son of Neptune has powers over water).

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Summary: Ms Marvel is actually starting to grow into her role as a super hero. But fame doesn’t give her more time or energy to devote to what is important in life.

I am having problems finding time to write reviews, let alone actually read the books. I picked up the latest Ms Marvel collection, Super Famous, because the whole series is on sale for $3.99 each right now. Saturday night while I waiting to make sure my son was going to fall asleep before rejoining the rest of my family at my mother in law’s cabin I quickly read through the 100 pages of comics that are in the collection.

I like comics, but as much as I find the art interesting and love seeing the way that the comic method allows for a different type of story telling than just straight text, I still mostly read comics for the story.

In Super Famous, Ms Marvel is now a part of the Avengers (her work with them is mostly off screen). She is still in high school. She still has over protective parents (she is a second generation Pakistani Muslim immigrant, which is such an important thread to what makes this series so good.) She still is trying to figure out how to deal with the ramifications of her power and the weight of responsibility that comes with them.

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Summary: Stepping out of retirement, former Chief Inspector Gamache, has agreed to take over Surete (Quebec police) academy. 

A Great Reckoning is not a novel that you want to pickup if you are new to the series.  You could read it and I think enjoy it. But there is a lot of assumed back story. Gamache and his wife are retired in the small village of Three Pines. But Gamache still feels to pull to continue to root out the corruption inside the police force from the previous several books.

I really like this series and this is one of the best books in the series. It is not without its faults. The corruption angle I think has been problematic from the start. It is too big and too small at the same time. There is a timeline issue with one of the big reveals that just doesn’t make sense to me (the age of one of the characters and the secret relationship to Gamache’s history doesn’t really work.) But if you set aside the questionable reality of the police corruption and personal vendetta angles and just read them as a story, it rolls out nicely.

Gamache feels like the only way to solve the problem of the academy is to fire most of the bad teachers, but keep the one he thinks is the ringleader and then bring back the privately disgraced, but not incarcerated, former head of the Surete as one of the staff. He hopes he can use them to root one another’s corruption while keeping them under control.

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This review was written by Bookwi.se Contributor Vikki Huisman.

Ruth Jefferson is a labor and delivery nurse with over two decades of experience. During a normal checkup on a newborn boy, Ruth is abruptly reassigned to another patient. The baby’s parents are white supremacists who do not want Ruth touching their child. Ruth is African American.

The following day, the baby experiences a cardia event while Ruth is alone with him. Ruth is expressly forbidden from touching the child based on the parents strong wishes. After a hesitation, she springs into action performing CPR but the delay results with Ruth being charged with a crime.

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Reviewed by Bookwi.se Contributor Seth Simmons

The basic premise of The Emergency of Liberty in the Modern World is that the philosophical and theological seeds of a doctrine of religious liberty and its relationship with state power were developed first by John Calvin, and that his ideas so saturated and infiltrated the climate of Western thought that many today don’t even recognize his influence.
After discussing Calvin’s theological developments, the author describes how the French Huguenots in the late sixteenth century took Calvin’s ideas and expanded on them, recasting them in the language of natural secular rights. Running in parallel, Scotsman theologian John Knox expanded Calvin’s ideas further and developed a theology that practically obligated Christians to defy a government that oversteps its boundaries. Next, the history of medieval-to-modern England is a story of theological factions warring over the source and development of political authority and its relationship to the church. Eventually, the Puritans abandoned Europe (to a degree) and brought to a young America their views about state power.

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