Two posts in one day. Wow.
I haven't done this in ages. And unlike last month, I'm actually doing my book post at the start of the month! Crazy!
The 13th Hour by Richard Doetsch. This was kind of like that movie Memento, because it went backwards. Sort of. The basic premise is this guy's wife is shot and killed in their home and he's the main suspect. The cops are about to convict him, despite his insistence that he didn't do it, thanks to some pretty convincing evidence. But then a mysterious guy shows up and gives him a watch and some instructions and tells him he was 12 hours to fix it. He then gets sent back in time, hour by hour. For example, when it hits 8:00 in his present time, he's whisked back to 7:00. He gets to live out that hour, and at 8, goes back to 8. Then at 7 goes back to 5, etc. So he lives the last 12 hours of his life in reverse, each time trying to find a way to stop his wife's murder and to find out who really killed her. It was pretty good, and had me guessing pretty much the whole way through. It would make you (and him) think one person was responsible and then turn everything around and suddenly they'd be the good guys. I really liked it.
Frostbite by Richelle Mead. I really like this series. I read the first one, Vampire Academy, last month, and finally got the second one. There's not much more to say about it without spoiling things, so I'll just say that I was just as anxious to get the third after reading this. Which I did, and now I'm even MORE anxious to get the 4th!
Black by Ted Dekker. After liking another of Dekker's books, I thought I'd see what this series was like. It's... weird. Essentially, the hero (I forget his name and am too lazy to look it up) develops a strange disorder, where he seems to be living his life in parallel worlds: whenever he's asleep in one world, he wakes up in the other. In our world, he's this guy hiding from a mob-like group he owes money to, living with his sister and generally down on his luck. But when he goes to sleep, he finds himself in a fantasy sort of world hundreds of years in our future, with multi-colored trees and talking bats. The bats tell him of Earth's troubled past, when a major virus kills most of the population. When he wakes up again in our world, he discovers this virus is very real, and is about to be unleashed. Trouble is, no one will believe him because of the way he came upon the information. The book follows him back and forth as he tries to make sense of his two lives and figure out which is real.
Dream Chaser by Sherrilyn Kenyon. This is part of her Dark Hunters series, which I love. Not much else to say about it, really. It's a romance series, so there's a guy and a girl who shouldn't really be together but fall in love anyway, blah blah. What can I say, I'm a sucker for that stuff, especially when you throw in the paranormal element (vampires, etc.)
The Girl From Legare Street by Karen White. This is the sequel to The House on Tradd Street, which I loved. This one, though, was a little disappointing. I still liked it, but I didn't find the story as compelling, and the main character started to get on my nerves. She's too stubborn about things, and it gets really frustrating. But then, if she wasn't so stubborn (about her family and the guy she's got the hots for), the book would have been about 50 pages long. Most of the mysteries in this story were pretty simple to figure out, and it was irritating how dense the characters were being about them. I hate when books do that. It's nice that the author wants to make the reader feel involved, but she makes things too obvious.
Black Dagger Brotherhood by J.R. Ward. This is a guide to the BDB book series (Dark Lover et al), which I mostly read just for the short story at the beginning (Father Mine). It was a cute little story, following Zsadist and Bella as they settled in to life as new parents. The rest of the book was bios and such on the brothers and other characters, mixed with interviews (done by the author) that creeped me out. I get that writers sometimes feel like their characters live in their head. I do it myself sometimes. But this woman wrote out whole conversations as though she was actually in their house, talking to and interacting with them. There's active imagination, and then there's crazy, and I think she was leaning a little too close to the crazy line.
The Book of Lost Things by John Connelly. I was kind of "meh" about this one. It wasn't bad or anything, it just didn't suck me in. It was kind of a fairy tale (despite being an adult book), about a kid living in London during WWII (I think that was the war), who gets sucked into an alternate world filled with fairy tale-like creatures (the scarier, Grimm version), and has to navigate through it, beating all the monsters in his quest to reach the King and ask for help getting home. The ending had a good twist, though, and it was a quick read.
Graceling by Kristin Cashore. Another YA book, which I really enjoyed. It's another "magical world" sort of book, where you have a branch of humans born as more than just human: they're "Graced" with a power of some sort. And because they're different, most people fear them. The heroine (again, I forget her name) is Graced with the power to kill, and is one of the more feared Gracelings, for obvious reasons. Her uncle (one of the Kingdom's princes) uses her for his own means, sending her out to scare people into doing what he wants. But she's also doing her own thing, behind his back, in a secret group, and it's on one of those secret missions that she meets another Graceling, this one with the power to fight. They become friends, then lovers, but he has a secret that could get him killed, and they both end up on the run from one of the other Kings, who has a pretty serious secret of his own. It was a good book, and I was excited to learn there was a sequel. Only problem is the sequel is a prequel kind of thing, so won't have any of these characters in it. Bummer.
Shadow Kiss by Richelle Mead. Again, I love this series. But the end of this book made me Very Sad. :( I'm dying to get the next, in the hopes that she finds some way to make things happy again.
Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin. YA book again. In this one, "Elsewhere" is basically Heaven. When people die, they go there on a boat and live out their lives (deaths/) in a kind of reverse, getting younger every year, until they become babies again and are sent back to Earth to start a new life. It's a cute premise. The heroine (I suck with names) is only 15 when she dies, so she doesn't take too well to the news at first, and spends a good portion of her first year watching her friends and family rather than getting on with her own life. But then she starts to get to know the other dead people around her (including her grandmother, who died before she was born and is now in her 30s). It's a little bittersweet towards the end, but I liked it.
Look Again by Linda Scottoline. This isn't my usual kind of book. There are no vampires, no ghosts, no romance, no magic. It's just a normal book for a change! (Though I suppose there is a bit of romance, but it's not the main focus). Anyway, the basic plot is a women gets one of those "have you seen me?" cards in the mail, and the boy on it looks like a dead ringer for her own son. Her son, who isn't missing at all. Turns out, she adopted him when he was 1 1/2 years old, and while it was a legal adoption, she's a reporter and can't seem to help herself from looking into it. As she does, she starts to think more and more than her son may actually be the kidnapped boy in the card. Which leaves her with the painful dilemma of what to do: say nothing and keep the son she loves, or tell the authorities and risk losing him forever? I'm not a mother (and don't ever plan to be - I didn't get the maternal gene like most girls do), but I could see how horribly painful that kind of decision would be. It was a really moving book, and had me on edge for the whole thing - so much that I read the entire book in one sitting.
Books read this month: 12
Books read this year: 24
Favorite book this month: Frostbite, because I'm loving that series so much, and that one had a happier ending than Shadow Kiss.
The 13th Hour by Richard Doetsch. This was kind of like that movie Memento, because it went backwards. Sort of. The basic premise is this guy's wife is shot and killed in their home and he's the main suspect. The cops are about to convict him, despite his insistence that he didn't do it, thanks to some pretty convincing evidence. But then a mysterious guy shows up and gives him a watch and some instructions and tells him he was 12 hours to fix it. He then gets sent back in time, hour by hour. For example, when it hits 8:00 in his present time, he's whisked back to 7:00. He gets to live out that hour, and at 8, goes back to 8. Then at 7 goes back to 5, etc. So he lives the last 12 hours of his life in reverse, each time trying to find a way to stop his wife's murder and to find out who really killed her. It was pretty good, and had me guessing pretty much the whole way through. It would make you (and him) think one person was responsible and then turn everything around and suddenly they'd be the good guys. I really liked it.
Frostbite by Richelle Mead. I really like this series. I read the first one, Vampire Academy, last month, and finally got the second one. There's not much more to say about it without spoiling things, so I'll just say that I was just as anxious to get the third after reading this. Which I did, and now I'm even MORE anxious to get the 4th!
Black by Ted Dekker. After liking another of Dekker's books, I thought I'd see what this series was like. It's... weird. Essentially, the hero (I forget his name and am too lazy to look it up) develops a strange disorder, where he seems to be living his life in parallel worlds: whenever he's asleep in one world, he wakes up in the other. In our world, he's this guy hiding from a mob-like group he owes money to, living with his sister and generally down on his luck. But when he goes to sleep, he finds himself in a fantasy sort of world hundreds of years in our future, with multi-colored trees and talking bats. The bats tell him of Earth's troubled past, when a major virus kills most of the population. When he wakes up again in our world, he discovers this virus is very real, and is about to be unleashed. Trouble is, no one will believe him because of the way he came upon the information. The book follows him back and forth as he tries to make sense of his two lives and figure out which is real.
Dream Chaser by Sherrilyn Kenyon. This is part of her Dark Hunters series, which I love. Not much else to say about it, really. It's a romance series, so there's a guy and a girl who shouldn't really be together but fall in love anyway, blah blah. What can I say, I'm a sucker for that stuff, especially when you throw in the paranormal element (vampires, etc.)
The Girl From Legare Street by Karen White. This is the sequel to The House on Tradd Street, which I loved. This one, though, was a little disappointing. I still liked it, but I didn't find the story as compelling, and the main character started to get on my nerves. She's too stubborn about things, and it gets really frustrating. But then, if she wasn't so stubborn (about her family and the guy she's got the hots for), the book would have been about 50 pages long. Most of the mysteries in this story were pretty simple to figure out, and it was irritating how dense the characters were being about them. I hate when books do that. It's nice that the author wants to make the reader feel involved, but she makes things too obvious.
Black Dagger Brotherhood by J.R. Ward. This is a guide to the BDB book series (Dark Lover et al), which I mostly read just for the short story at the beginning (Father Mine). It was a cute little story, following Zsadist and Bella as they settled in to life as new parents. The rest of the book was bios and such on the brothers and other characters, mixed with interviews (done by the author) that creeped me out. I get that writers sometimes feel like their characters live in their head. I do it myself sometimes. But this woman wrote out whole conversations as though she was actually in their house, talking to and interacting with them. There's active imagination, and then there's crazy, and I think she was leaning a little too close to the crazy line.
The Book of Lost Things by John Connelly. I was kind of "meh" about this one. It wasn't bad or anything, it just didn't suck me in. It was kind of a fairy tale (despite being an adult book), about a kid living in London during WWII (I think that was the war), who gets sucked into an alternate world filled with fairy tale-like creatures (the scarier, Grimm version), and has to navigate through it, beating all the monsters in his quest to reach the King and ask for help getting home. The ending had a good twist, though, and it was a quick read.
Graceling by Kristin Cashore. Another YA book, which I really enjoyed. It's another "magical world" sort of book, where you have a branch of humans born as more than just human: they're "Graced" with a power of some sort. And because they're different, most people fear them. The heroine (again, I forget her name) is Graced with the power to kill, and is one of the more feared Gracelings, for obvious reasons. Her uncle (one of the Kingdom's princes) uses her for his own means, sending her out to scare people into doing what he wants. But she's also doing her own thing, behind his back, in a secret group, and it's on one of those secret missions that she meets another Graceling, this one with the power to fight. They become friends, then lovers, but he has a secret that could get him killed, and they both end up on the run from one of the other Kings, who has a pretty serious secret of his own. It was a good book, and I was excited to learn there was a sequel. Only problem is the sequel is a prequel kind of thing, so won't have any of these characters in it. Bummer.
Shadow Kiss by Richelle Mead. Again, I love this series. But the end of this book made me Very Sad. :( I'm dying to get the next, in the hopes that she finds some way to make things happy again.
Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin. YA book again. In this one, "Elsewhere" is basically Heaven. When people die, they go there on a boat and live out their lives (deaths/) in a kind of reverse, getting younger every year, until they become babies again and are sent back to Earth to start a new life. It's a cute premise. The heroine (I suck with names) is only 15 when she dies, so she doesn't take too well to the news at first, and spends a good portion of her first year watching her friends and family rather than getting on with her own life. But then she starts to get to know the other dead people around her (including her grandmother, who died before she was born and is now in her 30s). It's a little bittersweet towards the end, but I liked it.
Look Again by Linda Scottoline. This isn't my usual kind of book. There are no vampires, no ghosts, no romance, no magic. It's just a normal book for a change! (Though I suppose there is a bit of romance, but it's not the main focus). Anyway, the basic plot is a women gets one of those "have you seen me?" cards in the mail, and the boy on it looks like a dead ringer for her own son. Her son, who isn't missing at all. Turns out, she adopted him when he was 1 1/2 years old, and while it was a legal adoption, she's a reporter and can't seem to help herself from looking into it. As she does, she starts to think more and more than her son may actually be the kidnapped boy in the card. Which leaves her with the painful dilemma of what to do: say nothing and keep the son she loves, or tell the authorities and risk losing him forever? I'm not a mother (and don't ever plan to be - I didn't get the maternal gene like most girls do), but I could see how horribly painful that kind of decision would be. It was a really moving book, and had me on edge for the whole thing - so much that I read the entire book in one sitting.
Books read this month: 12
Books read this year: 24
Favorite book this month: Frostbite, because I'm loving that series so much, and that one had a happier ending than Shadow Kiss.