Books, finally!
It took me too long to get this done, but I've been especially lazy lately about doing things on the computer. Most weekends I don't even turn it on! (This is the first I've had it this weekend.)
I'm not aiming for any particular book count this year, but I'm still keeping track, so I thought I'd keep posting my books every month. Hopefully next month I won't take so long to get around to it. :)
The Darkest Kiss by Gena Showalter. I started this series a couple of years ago after spotting the first book on the library's new release shelf. I'd never heard of Showalter before, but the blurb got my attention (I'm a sucker for paranormal romance fiction). The book was pretty good, and I made a note to read the rest of the series, but at that time, the second book was checked out, and never came back in. After a while, it was gone completely from the catalog, until finally a month or so ago, it reappeared. I finally got my hands on it, but after so long after reading the previous book, I was a little lost. It took some time to remember what had happened and what was going on with the series. In the first, the featured character was a human woman who had a strange ability to hear the voices that had once spoken wherever she happens to be. Kind of like hearing ghosts, but not exactly. She runs into Maddox, one of the Lords of the Underworld (kind of like a vampire, only in this series the immortals are former Underworld guards who have been cursed with having demons inhabit their bodies). Maddox's demon is Violence, and it makes him, well, violent. But of course, they fall in love and she saves him from the demon somehow, with the help of his friends, the other Lords, and Anya, the goddess of anarchy. In the second book, Anya is the focus, and she falls for Lucien, who holds the demon of death. While Maddox couldn't stay sane without being violent, Lucian is cursed with the need to kill, though what he mostly does is shepherd the souls of the dead to Heaven or Hell, wherever it is they must go. He's ordered by the gods to kill Anya next, except he's falling in love with her, so naturally, this is a problem. Some of the book is romance cheese, but the basic pmeise of the world and the characters is interesting. Its' not my favorite supernatural series, but it's up there.
Another Chance to Dream by Lynn Kurland. I kind of read this part of Kurland's series backwards, ending with what was essentially the first book: the story of how Gwen and Rhys, the mother and father of the subsequent de Piagets, got their start. This one didn't have any time travel, but I still enjoyed it. Rhys and Gwen met as kids and fell in love, but Gwen was promised to another boy, the usual arranged marriage of the time to make two families more powerful. Naturally, she didn't like her intended (he was a jerk, really, but aren't they always in these books?), but being a woman in medieval times, didn't have much choice in the matter. Rhys stayed away so long knighting and trying to get land and a title to be worthy of her, and by the time he returned, she was wed. Again, typical. So their story was how they got her free from her husband and his murderous brother, so they could be together. It was pretty good, though I prefer the time travel books more. Plain historical romance isn't usually my thing.
Ruined by Paula Morris. I saw this book reviewed in a magazine when it came out and it looked like my kind of story. I love ghosts and New Orleans, and this had both. It's the story of a teenage girl (a New Yorker), sent to live with a friend of her father's for 6 months in New Orleans's Garden District. At first, she hates it and has trouble adjusting to life in a small Southern town, especially since the school she's sent to is an uptight private school where no one likes her. She makes a friend one night in Lafayette Cemetery across from her house, only to discover later that her new pal is a ghost. As she learns more about her new friend as well as some of her stuck-up rich-kid classmates (including the handsome rich boy who, as always in these books, seems to like her), she unravels a long-standing mystery that involves her much more than she originally thought. It's a young adult book, but I really liked it. Not only was it an intriguing ghost story, but the setting of the Garden District added to the mystery and creepiness of it all. Having visited the area myself a few years ago, and seeing the cemetery, I could really "see" everything as I read it, and it made me want to go back. And not just for the beignets!
How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely. I really enjoyed The Ridiculous Race, the travel memoir Hely wrote with his friend Vali Chandrasekaren, so when I saw he had another book, I had to check it out. This one is kind of a satire/novel about literary fiction and how sometimes books become best-sellers despite being.... well, tedious and boring. He shares my opinion that a lot of literary fiction is nothing but purple prose and plots that have no purpose other than to be deep or meaningful, with authors that try to hard to make them so. Maybe I'm shallow, but I prefer books with action and interesting characters and an actual point. Anyway, in this book, Hely's protagonist is a man working by day as an essay writer (rich kids and/or their parents pay him to write college entrance essays for them) and after getting an invitation to his ex-girlfriend's wedding, decides he needs to become a famous novelist so he can rub his success in her face on the big day. He's not a very likable character, I'll admit, but it's funny how he goes about coming up with a formula for a literary best-seller. He parodies other authors in there as well, from Stephen King to Nora Roberts to James Patterson and Dan Brown. He takes everything he can think of that has been in other popular books and throws it all into his own, The Tornado Ashes Club, and to his surprise, it works! Thanks to a friend in the publishing business, his book gets published and becomes a huge hit. The aftermath and eventual downfall is amusing, but I think I enjoyed the earlier parts of the book better.
Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead. Another young adult series about vampires. I supposed at this point I'm getting a little burnt out on these, but I'd been wanting to check this one out for a while, so when it was finally available at my library, I decided to give it a shot. It's not my favoirte of the "vampire boarding schools" books (I prefer PC Cast's Marked series), but it isn't bad. The characters were interesting, and the plot and world-building had enough originality to keep my interest. One difference is that the heroine isn't a vampire herself, or some human that's falling in love with a beautiful vampire boy. Instead she's a Guardian - a kind of human, but with some supernatural abilities, born to guard vampires from Strigoi. Strigoi in this world are the typical evil vamps: blood-drinking immortal killers, etc. The "good" vampires still drink blood, but only from willing donors, and they aren't immortal. They become Strigoi once they take a life, and it's considered the worst thing a vampire can do. Strigoi are hunted, but they are also super-strong and hard to kill, so the Dhampir (guardians) are becoming almost endangered, especially since they have strict rules about who they can marry/have kids with. The heroine here, Rose, is a Dhampir and best friend/guardian-in-training to Lissa, vampire royalty. It had some good twists and turns, and the forbidden romance between Rose (the Dhampir heroine) and her Guardian mentor hooked me (I'm a sucker for the romance), so I've already checked out the next one, though I haven't started it yet.
Heat Wave by Richard Castle. Castle is one of my favorite shows right now, so I couldn't resist checking out the book ABC released to go along with it. This is supposedly the book he wrote on the show about Nikki Heat, though the one they wave around on TV is much thicker (this one isn't very long). It reads like fanfiction, though, and not very good fanfiction. I think the problem is that TV writers wrote it, and not a novelist, because the prose was kind of lame in places. The dialogue was fine, it was all the stuff in between that had me rolling my eyes quite a bit. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't as good as the show, either. Parts amused me, like how the hero here is named Jameson Rook (Rook... Castle... get it? Yeah, I groaned, too) and is about as narcissistic as Castle himself is. But other parts, like the weird way he would almost always call the two detectives "Roach" (a combo of their last names, a la Brangelina) bothered me. If it wasn't for the show, I probably wouldn't have even finished it, but there was enough parallel to the show to keep my interest. I just didn't think the writing was very good. Definitely not to the bestseller level the fictional Castle is supposed to be.
Grave Secret by Charlaine Harris. This was the last book in the Grave series, and I think it wrapped things up pretty nicely, though at times a little rushed. In this book, Harper and her stepbrother/lover (that still squicks me) end up back in Texas, where they grew up and where their sisters are being raised by their aunt and uncle. They start out working a job for a rich family, which follows them throughout the book and ends up being tied in with the biggest mystery of their lives: what happened to Harper's sister, who was kidnapped as a young teen and never seen again. Since it's the end of the series, they finally find out what happened to her, make a kind of peace with their aunt and uncle (who up until this book have kind of hated them), and plan to get married. It's a nice wrap-up, and I was a little sad to see it end, even if I wasn't totally on board with the romance.
Kiss by Ted Dekker (and someone else, but I'm too lazy to look up her name right now). This book was a little weird. It focused on Shauna, a young woman who, after being in a serious car accident that left her comatose, wakes up to find the last 6 months of her life are a complete blank. She remembers everything else about her life, but can't bring back those months. She has a boyfriend she doesn't remember, is being kept from seeing her beloved brother, who was severely brain-damaged in the accident, and has developed a strange new ability that is making her doubt everything she does remember. When she touches people, sometimes she can take a memory from them. And as she starts to investigate her missing months, things become even more confusing, and more dangerous. It was a pretty good book, but the whole memory-stealing thing was a little odd. Still, I liked it enough to read another of his books, which was even weirder. :)
A Touch of Dead by Charlaine Harris. This is a compilation of all the short stories she's written in th Sookie Stackhouse universe. Some were a little silly, but others were good. It was a quick book, lots of filler, but it was a nice taste of Sookie outside of all the drama and danger that usually follows her. And there was some Eric, which I always like. :D
Bad Moon Rising by Sherrilyn Kenyon. I really like Kenyon's Dark Hunter series, so I've been wanting to read the more recent books. Finally, this one came in. It doesn't focus on the Dark-Hunters, though, but on the Were-Hunters: specifically, the Peltier family that runs Sanctuary. After seeing them pop up in all the past books, it was nice to get a closer look at them, though the end of the book was pretty depressing. This one followed Alice, the lone girl of the bunch (other than Mama, of course), who finds herself drawn to another were (but not a bear, even though her family is supposed to only mate with other bears). Naturally, they end up as bonded soulmates, despite the difference in their animal forms (he's a wolf, if I remember correctly). This makes for some trouble with her family, along with the trouble they already have with a were that's got a grudge against them and is working to destroy them all. A lot of it was the usual Kenyon stuff (after 20-some books, they have a formula), but for a were-focused book (I prefer the Dark-Hunters), I really liked it.
Return to Summerhouse by Jude Devereaux. I don't normally read regular romance, but I'd read the prequel to this, Summerhouse, and really liked it. They have a time travel element, which I always like to read. The basic plot is that three women who don't know one another are sent to spend a summer together in a Main summerhouse by their therapist. They each have things in their pasts they'd like to change, and are given that option by a local "witch," Madame Zoya. She has the ability to send someone back in time for a fixed number of days, to change anything they want and make their lives better. In the one, the main character, Amy, has a pretty good life (aside from the miscarriage that sent her to the therapist in the first place), and decides the past she wants to change isn't her own, but an ancestor. All three women go back in time to 18th century England, and each finds something there that changes their lives forever. It's a little sappy, as most romance novels are, but I enjoyed it.
The House on Tradd Street by Karen White. I've been meaning to read this for months, but never got around to the library branch that had it. Finally, I made the trip there and I'm glad I did. The book is a ghost story, set in Charleston, NC. The heroine, Melanie, is an uptight real estate agent who specializes in old, historical homes, yet doesn't understand why anyone would want to live in one. She has a twisty past - alcoholic father and a mother who abandoned her at age 7 - that makes her very closed to people, and a lot of times, I found her to be pretty annoying. That said, the rest of it was engrossing, and I'm a sucker for ghost stories. Melanie can see ghosts, something she doesn't want others to know for fear it will hurt her real estate business. But when a client suddenly leaves her his old home in his will, she inherits not only a house in need of renovations, but a murder mystery and a bunch of ghosts as well. One of which wants to hurt her. There's a romance element as well with a handsome mystery writer, Jack, who joins in the renovations in exchange for access to the home's attic (he's writing a book about the family that once owned it). But because Melanie is so stubborn and afraid to let herself fall for anyone, she won't act on her attraction to Jack. Sometimes that makes for a good book, but in this case, I think the author takes it a little too far, because I found that part of the storyline very frustrating. I hoped maybe their relationship would progress in the sequel, but it didn't. (I just finished it, so I'll have that in next month's book post). Anyway, I did like the book, despite my character gripes. Some of the twists were a little predictable, though.
Books read in January: 12
Favorite book this month: The House on Tradd Street, despite my gripes about the main character.
I'm not aiming for any particular book count this year, but I'm still keeping track, so I thought I'd keep posting my books every month. Hopefully next month I won't take so long to get around to it. :)
The Darkest Kiss by Gena Showalter. I started this series a couple of years ago after spotting the first book on the library's new release shelf. I'd never heard of Showalter before, but the blurb got my attention (I'm a sucker for paranormal romance fiction). The book was pretty good, and I made a note to read the rest of the series, but at that time, the second book was checked out, and never came back in. After a while, it was gone completely from the catalog, until finally a month or so ago, it reappeared. I finally got my hands on it, but after so long after reading the previous book, I was a little lost. It took some time to remember what had happened and what was going on with the series. In the first, the featured character was a human woman who had a strange ability to hear the voices that had once spoken wherever she happens to be. Kind of like hearing ghosts, but not exactly. She runs into Maddox, one of the Lords of the Underworld (kind of like a vampire, only in this series the immortals are former Underworld guards who have been cursed with having demons inhabit their bodies). Maddox's demon is Violence, and it makes him, well, violent. But of course, they fall in love and she saves him from the demon somehow, with the help of his friends, the other Lords, and Anya, the goddess of anarchy. In the second book, Anya is the focus, and she falls for Lucien, who holds the demon of death. While Maddox couldn't stay sane without being violent, Lucian is cursed with the need to kill, though what he mostly does is shepherd the souls of the dead to Heaven or Hell, wherever it is they must go. He's ordered by the gods to kill Anya next, except he's falling in love with her, so naturally, this is a problem. Some of the book is romance cheese, but the basic pmeise of the world and the characters is interesting. Its' not my favorite supernatural series, but it's up there.
Another Chance to Dream by Lynn Kurland. I kind of read this part of Kurland's series backwards, ending with what was essentially the first book: the story of how Gwen and Rhys, the mother and father of the subsequent de Piagets, got their start. This one didn't have any time travel, but I still enjoyed it. Rhys and Gwen met as kids and fell in love, but Gwen was promised to another boy, the usual arranged marriage of the time to make two families more powerful. Naturally, she didn't like her intended (he was a jerk, really, but aren't they always in these books?), but being a woman in medieval times, didn't have much choice in the matter. Rhys stayed away so long knighting and trying to get land and a title to be worthy of her, and by the time he returned, she was wed. Again, typical. So their story was how they got her free from her husband and his murderous brother, so they could be together. It was pretty good, though I prefer the time travel books more. Plain historical romance isn't usually my thing.
Ruined by Paula Morris. I saw this book reviewed in a magazine when it came out and it looked like my kind of story. I love ghosts and New Orleans, and this had both. It's the story of a teenage girl (a New Yorker), sent to live with a friend of her father's for 6 months in New Orleans's Garden District. At first, she hates it and has trouble adjusting to life in a small Southern town, especially since the school she's sent to is an uptight private school where no one likes her. She makes a friend one night in Lafayette Cemetery across from her house, only to discover later that her new pal is a ghost. As she learns more about her new friend as well as some of her stuck-up rich-kid classmates (including the handsome rich boy who, as always in these books, seems to like her), she unravels a long-standing mystery that involves her much more than she originally thought. It's a young adult book, but I really liked it. Not only was it an intriguing ghost story, but the setting of the Garden District added to the mystery and creepiness of it all. Having visited the area myself a few years ago, and seeing the cemetery, I could really "see" everything as I read it, and it made me want to go back. And not just for the beignets!
How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely. I really enjoyed The Ridiculous Race, the travel memoir Hely wrote with his friend Vali Chandrasekaren, so when I saw he had another book, I had to check it out. This one is kind of a satire/novel about literary fiction and how sometimes books become best-sellers despite being.... well, tedious and boring. He shares my opinion that a lot of literary fiction is nothing but purple prose and plots that have no purpose other than to be deep or meaningful, with authors that try to hard to make them so. Maybe I'm shallow, but I prefer books with action and interesting characters and an actual point. Anyway, in this book, Hely's protagonist is a man working by day as an essay writer (rich kids and/or their parents pay him to write college entrance essays for them) and after getting an invitation to his ex-girlfriend's wedding, decides he needs to become a famous novelist so he can rub his success in her face on the big day. He's not a very likable character, I'll admit, but it's funny how he goes about coming up with a formula for a literary best-seller. He parodies other authors in there as well, from Stephen King to Nora Roberts to James Patterson and Dan Brown. He takes everything he can think of that has been in other popular books and throws it all into his own, The Tornado Ashes Club, and to his surprise, it works! Thanks to a friend in the publishing business, his book gets published and becomes a huge hit. The aftermath and eventual downfall is amusing, but I think I enjoyed the earlier parts of the book better.
Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead. Another young adult series about vampires. I supposed at this point I'm getting a little burnt out on these, but I'd been wanting to check this one out for a while, so when it was finally available at my library, I decided to give it a shot. It's not my favoirte of the "vampire boarding schools" books (I prefer PC Cast's Marked series), but it isn't bad. The characters were interesting, and the plot and world-building had enough originality to keep my interest. One difference is that the heroine isn't a vampire herself, or some human that's falling in love with a beautiful vampire boy. Instead she's a Guardian - a kind of human, but with some supernatural abilities, born to guard vampires from Strigoi. Strigoi in this world are the typical evil vamps: blood-drinking immortal killers, etc. The "good" vampires still drink blood, but only from willing donors, and they aren't immortal. They become Strigoi once they take a life, and it's considered the worst thing a vampire can do. Strigoi are hunted, but they are also super-strong and hard to kill, so the Dhampir (guardians) are becoming almost endangered, especially since they have strict rules about who they can marry/have kids with. The heroine here, Rose, is a Dhampir and best friend/guardian-in-training to Lissa, vampire royalty. It had some good twists and turns, and the forbidden romance between Rose (the Dhampir heroine) and her Guardian mentor hooked me (I'm a sucker for the romance), so I've already checked out the next one, though I haven't started it yet.
Heat Wave by Richard Castle. Castle is one of my favorite shows right now, so I couldn't resist checking out the book ABC released to go along with it. This is supposedly the book he wrote on the show about Nikki Heat, though the one they wave around on TV is much thicker (this one isn't very long). It reads like fanfiction, though, and not very good fanfiction. I think the problem is that TV writers wrote it, and not a novelist, because the prose was kind of lame in places. The dialogue was fine, it was all the stuff in between that had me rolling my eyes quite a bit. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't as good as the show, either. Parts amused me, like how the hero here is named Jameson Rook (Rook... Castle... get it? Yeah, I groaned, too) and is about as narcissistic as Castle himself is. But other parts, like the weird way he would almost always call the two detectives "Roach" (a combo of their last names, a la Brangelina) bothered me. If it wasn't for the show, I probably wouldn't have even finished it, but there was enough parallel to the show to keep my interest. I just didn't think the writing was very good. Definitely not to the bestseller level the fictional Castle is supposed to be.
Grave Secret by Charlaine Harris. This was the last book in the Grave series, and I think it wrapped things up pretty nicely, though at times a little rushed. In this book, Harper and her stepbrother/lover (that still squicks me) end up back in Texas, where they grew up and where their sisters are being raised by their aunt and uncle. They start out working a job for a rich family, which follows them throughout the book and ends up being tied in with the biggest mystery of their lives: what happened to Harper's sister, who was kidnapped as a young teen and never seen again. Since it's the end of the series, they finally find out what happened to her, make a kind of peace with their aunt and uncle (who up until this book have kind of hated them), and plan to get married. It's a nice wrap-up, and I was a little sad to see it end, even if I wasn't totally on board with the romance.
Kiss by Ted Dekker (and someone else, but I'm too lazy to look up her name right now). This book was a little weird. It focused on Shauna, a young woman who, after being in a serious car accident that left her comatose, wakes up to find the last 6 months of her life are a complete blank. She remembers everything else about her life, but can't bring back those months. She has a boyfriend she doesn't remember, is being kept from seeing her beloved brother, who was severely brain-damaged in the accident, and has developed a strange new ability that is making her doubt everything she does remember. When she touches people, sometimes she can take a memory from them. And as she starts to investigate her missing months, things become even more confusing, and more dangerous. It was a pretty good book, but the whole memory-stealing thing was a little odd. Still, I liked it enough to read another of his books, which was even weirder. :)
A Touch of Dead by Charlaine Harris. This is a compilation of all the short stories she's written in th Sookie Stackhouse universe. Some were a little silly, but others were good. It was a quick book, lots of filler, but it was a nice taste of Sookie outside of all the drama and danger that usually follows her. And there was some Eric, which I always like. :D
Bad Moon Rising by Sherrilyn Kenyon. I really like Kenyon's Dark Hunter series, so I've been wanting to read the more recent books. Finally, this one came in. It doesn't focus on the Dark-Hunters, though, but on the Were-Hunters: specifically, the Peltier family that runs Sanctuary. After seeing them pop up in all the past books, it was nice to get a closer look at them, though the end of the book was pretty depressing. This one followed Alice, the lone girl of the bunch (other than Mama, of course), who finds herself drawn to another were (but not a bear, even though her family is supposed to only mate with other bears). Naturally, they end up as bonded soulmates, despite the difference in their animal forms (he's a wolf, if I remember correctly). This makes for some trouble with her family, along with the trouble they already have with a were that's got a grudge against them and is working to destroy them all. A lot of it was the usual Kenyon stuff (after 20-some books, they have a formula), but for a were-focused book (I prefer the Dark-Hunters), I really liked it.
Return to Summerhouse by Jude Devereaux. I don't normally read regular romance, but I'd read the prequel to this, Summerhouse, and really liked it. They have a time travel element, which I always like to read. The basic plot is that three women who don't know one another are sent to spend a summer together in a Main summerhouse by their therapist. They each have things in their pasts they'd like to change, and are given that option by a local "witch," Madame Zoya. She has the ability to send someone back in time for a fixed number of days, to change anything they want and make their lives better. In the one, the main character, Amy, has a pretty good life (aside from the miscarriage that sent her to the therapist in the first place), and decides the past she wants to change isn't her own, but an ancestor. All three women go back in time to 18th century England, and each finds something there that changes their lives forever. It's a little sappy, as most romance novels are, but I enjoyed it.
The House on Tradd Street by Karen White. I've been meaning to read this for months, but never got around to the library branch that had it. Finally, I made the trip there and I'm glad I did. The book is a ghost story, set in Charleston, NC. The heroine, Melanie, is an uptight real estate agent who specializes in old, historical homes, yet doesn't understand why anyone would want to live in one. She has a twisty past - alcoholic father and a mother who abandoned her at age 7 - that makes her very closed to people, and a lot of times, I found her to be pretty annoying. That said, the rest of it was engrossing, and I'm a sucker for ghost stories. Melanie can see ghosts, something she doesn't want others to know for fear it will hurt her real estate business. But when a client suddenly leaves her his old home in his will, she inherits not only a house in need of renovations, but a murder mystery and a bunch of ghosts as well. One of which wants to hurt her. There's a romance element as well with a handsome mystery writer, Jack, who joins in the renovations in exchange for access to the home's attic (he's writing a book about the family that once owned it). But because Melanie is so stubborn and afraid to let herself fall for anyone, she won't act on her attraction to Jack. Sometimes that makes for a good book, but in this case, I think the author takes it a little too far, because I found that part of the storyline very frustrating. I hoped maybe their relationship would progress in the sequel, but it didn't. (I just finished it, so I'll have that in next month's book post). Anyway, I did like the book, despite my character gripes. Some of the twists were a little predictable, though.
Books read in January: 12
Favorite book this month: The House on Tradd Street, despite my gripes about the main character.