Books 104-107
A Shrouded Spark by Breshea Anglen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The story opens soon after Noni's near-death in a car accident with her cousin who is more like a sister. Noni's parents are long gone and her cousin's mother has raised her so the girls are close. That doesn't stop Noni from planning to go to school in California instead of staying in Ohio. She wants to go into nursing to honor her parents who were in healthcare.
The accident however has gotten Noni off track. She's having intention tremors when she tries to draw, art being her passion, and she's having night terrors, not surprising with the PTSD the accident left her with. She gets the idea that she needs to meet the man who saved her life the day of the accident.
Once she meets him, things get very wild. Magic, portals to other realms, old gods, It all mixes to make an interesting story that Noni is swept up in. She's a very likeable character, easy to root for. It did have an open ending that isn't my favorite way to end a book. The surprise secondary character that I really liked was Eli. His arc was a good one, from creepy kid to why people see him as such and his importance to Noni and her journey. I'm looking forward to the next book.
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Demon Ex Machina by Julie Kenner
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This reminds me of Buffy the Vampire Slayer had we dropped in on her in her 30s. That's a good thing for me. The bad thing was I got this second hand so I didn't have any idea it was book 5. I could figure things out but obviously I was missing a lot of the nuances.
Kate is training her current husband to at least help her fight demons while her 15 year old daughter can't wait to be out there slaying demons. To top it all off, her toddler son (to husband #2) is entering tantrum phase and her resurrected first husband, love of her life, is back in her life and a demon inside him is threatening to kill him and her.
It becomes a race to determine what demon is inside of Eric and can they extract it before it kills him, binding him to the demon forever or will they have to kill him (again) to kill the demon. It was a fun story in the sense of the action adventure part of it. There are many more serious moments (like being tempted to cheat, and almost non-con encounter when the demon started getting more control. )
The one thing I didn't like was there was no poofing into dust of the demons. There was a lot of them trying to hide bodies that were once people who died and were hosting a demon. I don't know why but that really bothered me.
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Gumption & Gumshoes by Alex Kidwell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I really wanted to love this one. A chinchilla shifter sounded cute and it was good story but not great. It started out on a sour note for me with how we first see August, a geeky, overweight chinchilla shifter who was close to his grandfather. It opens with his grandfather's passing and August inheriting money. We have the 'take this job and shove it' moment as he quits and we join back up later when he's a private investigator and upset he can barely afford rent. I'm like you thought you could make it far on 50k? Asked a few of my fellow author/reader types what they thought of that plot detail and they said what I was thinking: the character isn't very bright, so that's not a good place to start.
Sam is August's landlord and after a few awkward encounters over late rent, he gets swept up in August's case, stealing money from a nearby laundromat. (is it weird that I can accept the shifter aspect of the story but am rolling my eyes at how impossibly fast August got a private investigator license?) After accidentally exposing his shape shifter secret to Sam and encountering a few bruisers tied up in the laundromat mess, he and Sam grow closer.
There is a definite sweetness to their brief romance. The one thing is, however, is all their self doubts leads to a lot of body negativity and age negativity directed at themselves. As for the mystery they're working on solving, that went really well and I enjoyed it. Overall it was a fun story. However, there was one thing I wished wasn't in the story, August referring to his kind as Skinwalkers. That's not what they are and the Indigenous people for whom that term has meaning have repeatedly asked people to stop using the word Skinwalker and especially stop trying to make it into something cutesy
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Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas by Megan Shepherd
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
What can I say? When I saw this booktok trender on the shelf I had to have it. I loved the movie and I'm a little horrified that this movie novelization was released for it's 30th anniversary (because how could it be so long).
It's exactly what you'd expect of a movie novelization. There's not much depth to it beyond what was on the screen. It's written in omniscient point of view so there's plenty of head hopping. Jack, the pumpkin king, stumbles on a tree that lets him peek into another magical realm: Christmas. He sees this as the very thing he needs to shake off his ennui. He wants to be 'Sandy Claws' But Jack is a thing of horror, not cut out for this. Sally, the rag doll who loves him, sees this clearly even if Jack and the rest of the Hinterlands doesn't.
I wonder what I can't possibly know: would I have enjoyed this if I hadn't seen the movie a hundred times? I think it was better in visual medium than in book form but it was nice to drop in to see Jack and Sally again in a new format.
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