Books 17 & 18
Prose and Cons by Amanda Flower
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
For the most part I really enjoyed it but there are some of the cozy standards in this that are starting to annoy me (and that's more a me thing and maybe I need a bit of a break from cozies). Violet is helping her grandmother Daisy with their bookstore in New York's wine country not all that far from Niagra Falls. It's a 'magic' bookstore inside a Victorian house with a birch tree living inside it watered by a healing spring and it selects books for people who need it and reading material for Violet that help her to solve cases. Oddly that's not the problem for me. I'm good with that paranormal aspect. I think it's fun.
One of the things that does bug me is the inevitable love triangle. I'm pretty much over that in any fiction genre you care to name. Make them polyamorous or stop bugging me with this nonsense. The two warring love interests for Violet are town mayor Nathan (former boyfriend growing up from a very snooty family) and town sheriff David Rainwater (who is a better match and doesn't treat her as high handedly as Nathan does).
David is a Red Inker, a local writers group member, and they meet at the book store. It's wine festival time and in the Red Inkers Poe reading, one of their number, the nasty-tempered Anastasia is killed within the book store and another of their number, Violet's friend, Sadie, is suspected. Naturally Violet has to try to prove Sadie innocent.
For the most part that was good. But here's where some of the annoying cozy standards come in, like breaking and entering (that goes unpunished even when caught), stupid risk taking (and others calling it stupid in the book doesn't make it better) withholding stuff from the police. It's just part of the genre it seems and it really bugs me.
Overall I do like Violet and her world and this was for the most part a fun read. I'd read more.
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空挺ドラゴンズ 1 [Kuutei Dragons 1] by Taku Kuwabara
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I struggled with rating this. For me it was more like a two but it's a me thing and I try to rate on the quality of the story. Also part of my issue was I very obviously didn't read the blurb very carefully. I bought this at Books-a-million and apparently my brain shortcircuited when I saw steampunk + dragons + Netflix adaptation or I would have read the blurb better because everything I didn't like was right there in it.
Mika is a draker and our main point of view character (him and Takita, a young recruit). Well let's just leave it with what's actually in the blurb. Dragon's are the whales of the sky and they provide food/leather/building materials etc. Don't get me wrong. I grew up in farm country. I'm very aware of what happens with cows, pigs and so on. That said I don't want to read about watching them being hunted, slaughtered, butchered and consumed.
And that's ninety percent of what this is. It's like Moby Dick without the white whale (yet). I have no desire to read (or watch an anime) about whaling (substitute dragons for whale) and the weirdest part of this was there's a hint that dragons might be sentient (which makes it worse) and that the towns want all the dragon-products but are absolutely awful to the drakers.
There are five chapters in this. Four of them are about Mika and company killing and eating dragons and the last one is about them fighting off airship pirates (I could hear Abney Park in my head reading this one). That chapter was fun because it gave Mika something more than his insatiable desire for dragon meat.
The storyline, is however, well done (hence the third star) and the art is very good. But this just isn't the story for me. I came away very disappointed (and had I read the blurb I could have avoided that so that's all one me).
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