I’m keeping this review short because there’s really not much to say beyond: I highly recommend all the Murderbot Diaries books. Read them, read them now. And 2. For these bots not being “alive” they sure do have a lot of feelings and I love that for them! The way they hate feeling things and get absolutely panicked whenever someone says the “relationship” word in any context I absolutely live for.

“The Urban Boys” follows five friends in high school who, after one night in a preserve their families have forbidden them from going into, are gifted with heightened senses in order to protect a luminous supernatural race, and by proxy, all of mankind. But for such high stakes, the boys thankfully can save mankind by simply protecting their idyllic town from the evil-doers that have taken over a neighboring town. Stuck in a conflict that has been simmering for twenty years, it’s up to these five friends to keep strong, and save their town when no one else is capable of doing so. This is a story that attempts to cover a lot, especially with such a large cast of characters, and it’s a book I think is far better suited for middle-grade book lovers. If you go into it with that mindset, I think you’ll enjoy the “Urban Boys” a great deal.

I’m going to keep this review as brief as humanly possible, not because I don’t have thoughts on the final book in the Looking Glass Wars, but because this book is impossible to talk about if you haven’t read the first two books (and really, why are you reading reviews for this if you haven’t read the other two books?). But in “ArchEnemy” Alyss finds herself ruling over a queendom still suffering from a lack of imagination as the effects of book two are still being felt. There are factions of dissent Alyss never knew existed in Wonderland, and her enemies are still out there, waiting, and closing in… This book is almost non-stop action, which is what I expected given how things ended in the last book and what needed to happen this time around. But I also thought, given this was the final book in the series, that a lot of character work would be done as well and, unfortunately, there wasn’t.

I am so impressed with this series. Each time I read a Murderbot Diary I think: “THIS! This must be the pinnacle, no way can the next book top this one!” And I am always, joyously, proven wrong. Murderbot is once again hit with complex emotions over non-fictional humans as it rushes back to help MB’s first group of (favorite) humans before GreyCris can get Dr Mensah to shut up for good about their illegal, murderous activities. Honestly, I didn’t know how much I missed Murderbot interacting with this original crew until the reality of them reuniting was upon me. So many sounds of joy were uttered while reading this novella!

“Head On” is set in a near future world where a new disease (Haden’s) leaves some of the population completely unable to move, and yet they remain fully conscious in their minds. The solution? Those suffering from Haden’s can access a “threep” a type of robotic body that they control in order to interact with the world when they want to, and when they don’t? They hang out in a virtual world just for them. While “Head On” is the sequel to “Lock In” both books are their own entities in that, outside of the main character, FBI agents Chris Shane (a very, very wealthy Haden) and his partner Agent Vann, nothing from the two books overlap. They focus on totally different cases and Scalzi still explains the threeps and how Haden’s Syndrome works along with the prejudice those in their threeps face on a daily basis—both as micro aggressions and overt distrust. And while “Head On” is thoroughly enjoyable on its own, you’ll want to read “Lock In” first, trust me.