Month: July 2012

Review: Prepare by Geoffrey Germann

by Stefani

Prepare by Geoffrey Germann

Published on February 19th, 2012; Self Published

Book’s Website:http://www.preparenovel.com

Picture and Synopsis from the Goodreads book page.

Disclaimer: I received a free review copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest, thoughtful review.  No money or promises of a good review were exchanged in for the book.

Synopsis: As a small boy, Darren Kiel was witness to his father’s corruption and contemptible misconduct. As he grew, that experience gave rise to a seething need to atone for his father’s crimes, to set the world aright, to enforce order. Now an adult, Darren is thrust into a world far more horrific than he could ever have imagined: The Orchard, a region inundated by crime, violence, poverty, decay, and desperation. With swelling intolerance, hardening resolve, and miraculous technology, Darren sets upon an obsessive crusade to correct what has gone wrong in this society’s machine. As the campaign escalates, Darren sees the violence spread to every corner of his life and threaten or destroy everything he’s worked for and everyone he holds dear. But is this truly Darren’s war or is all this just a small part of a much larger design that he is only now beginning to glimpse?

Star Rating (out of 5):

Review:

This book was utterly fascinating!  Usually that is not a guarantee that it’s good but this is the excellent kind of fascinating.  In the beginning I was a bit skeptical of the plot, Darren Kiel is a brilliant young man and if the head of a multi-billion dollar science and technology company that is in the process of being bought out.  As a result Darren is forced to spend more time in the city in meetings and sees the corruption and crime in his city.  He has always had a burning desire to stamp out corruption since he saw it in his father as a small boy, and decides that he has the resources and the ability to make a difference in his city.  I kind of rolled my eyes at this point and thought, oh great another story where the poor just wallow in crime and filth until a rich boy comes along to save the day.  Oh, how I was wrong and I’m not too proud to admit that I was wrong.

I could not put the book down, there was something completely entrancing about the prose that just pulled me in and wouldn’t let me stop reading.  Germann shows a lot of skill in this novel because it’s a quick read but only because you can’t put it down long enough to give it some time to sit.  Darren is a great main character.  He’s very intelligent but doesn’t flaunt it and make the other characters seem less.  He reminded me of the Jack Reacher character in a way.  He cares only about right and wrong and intervening for the average citizen’s benefit.  He doesn’t go off on a rampage and try to take out all the criminals in one swoop.  Darren puts on his hero suit and looks for one, just one crime to be taking place, and prevent it from being completed.  This may not seem like a lot, but in a city littered with gangs, the constant attack on their money and business can lead to a big hit.  And make Darren a big target in the process too.

This whole story seemed very human to me.  It spoke to me on a human level and I think that is a result of not only the plot but the characters too.  They are people you can relate to.  So if they are having a dilemma, then you can empathize with that and understand what they are going through.  This is a quality in fictional characters that is difficult to get right, but this one gets it right.    I didn’t even mind the science aspects of the book even though they usually make my head spin.  This was described well and so I found that while I may not completely understand the complexities of it, I got the basic idea down.

However, there were a few things that kept this from being a complete five stars.  My first problem was that it only seemed like we were getting a partially fleshed out plot.  I loved everything that happened, but we know for a fact that this has been going on for at least 6 months, yet we only see a small portion of that time.  It was important to see the devolution of Darren’s plan, this could have been fleshed out more and I felt the book would have been better as a whole.

My second issue was with Darren’s loyalty to Corrine and her in general actually.  I didn’t get their relationship at all.  As far as the reader is concerned they’ve known each other for maybe a few weeks and actually seen each other a handful of times with a grand total of one kiss.  Yet when she discovers his secret she feels that she has a right to be angry, and berates him for almost being as bad as the criminals and she should call the cops.  A few minutes later when the cops show up, she resolutely refuses to give them any information at all and acts so loyal.  You weren’t a few minutes ago honey, you had the 9 and 1 typed on your cell phone right before they showed up!  Then when Corrine is used as a pawn to get Darren, she states that he’ll show up to rescue her and he does.  I just don’t understand it.  They hardly know each other, taking a stranger to get Darren’s attention should have worked just as well.

My last problem was with the deaths in the book.  Characters die, but no one that we really know that well nor care about.  Everyone who we actually care about stays perfectly safe and sound through the whole book.  While this didn’t necessarily have to happen, the violence and death in the ending of the book was lessened in emotional impact because these weren’t characters that we cared much about.  This could have been resolved by fleshing out the plot a bit and telling us more about who these characters are.

None of these things affected my overall enjoyment of the book however and I only found myself considering those things after the book had finished.  At the turn of the last page I was interesting in what would come next even though the story was wrapped up nicely, it still left the door open for more story later.  I, for one, would be interested in finding out what is to come.

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Review of Glow by Amy Kathleen Ryan

by Stefani

Glow by Amy Kathleen Ryan

Published September 13th, 2011 by St. Martins Press

Author’s website: http://www.amykathleenryan.com/

Synopsis from Goodreads: If a violent battle destroyed the only world you’ve ever known, would you be brave enough to save who was left? Would love be strong enough to survive the fight? Either way, there’s no turning back.

The Empyrean is the only home 15-year-old Waverly has ever known. Part of the first generation to be successfully conceived in deep space, she and her boyfriend Kieran will be pioneers of New Earth. Waverly knows she must marry young in order to have children who can carry on the mission, and Kieran, the handsome captain-to-be, has everything Waverly could want in a husband. Everyone is sure he’s the best choice. Still, there’s a part of Waverly that wants more from life than marriage, and she is secretly intrigued by the shy, darkly brilliant Seth.

Suddenly, Waverly’s dreams are interrupted by the inconceivable – a violent betrayal by the Empyrean’s sister ship, the New Horizon. The New Horizon’s leaders are desperate to populate the new planet first, and will do anything to get what they need: young girls. In one pivotal moment, Waverly and Kieran are separated, and find themselves at the helm of dangerous missions, where every move has potentially devastating consequences, and decisions of the heart may lead to disaster.

Rating: 

Review:

This was another book that I REALLY wanted to like.  It sounded interesting, I liked the synopsis, I liked the cover, and the characters caught my interest.  But then it quickly turned sour and I found myself wondering why I wanted to read it in the first place.  However, we will start with the good things!
I liked Keiran.  He was by far the best character in the whole book.  Some of the other characters, and even him at times, seemed a bit two-dimensional and boring.  I just couldn’t not like him though.  He is honest and loyal and says what he thinks even if it could get him in trouble.  I expected him to be the typical “golden boy” character since that’s how he was introduced but it seemed like it was a mantle that was put on him simply because of the circumstances of his birth and he accepted it grudgingly.

The plot started out really intriguing and I wanted to see where it would go.  The New Horizon suddenly appears on radar and no one knows why.  Now, I admit that it bothered me that everyone on the Empyrean’s first reaction was suspicion.  These are supposed to be your counterparts, your allies, the people who you are going to forge a new world with!  But you are suspicious instead of concerned that it appears they just stopped in the middle of their mission years earlier and you caught up to them.  I didn’t like that and I started to get suspicious that the author was setting us up for a book long rant about something.  At the time I suspected it was either something to do with women and children or religion, but I wasn’t sure which.

I also really liked the dynamics of the two ships, since both were different but in a way it was the same and equally as weird and creepy.  On the Empyrean the  men had a tendency to look at the girls in an appraising manner, like meat at a slaughter-house.  On the New Horizon the weirdness was the same with people constantly wondered and inquiring about their menstrual cycles but there was a different vibe to the weirdness.

So far all of this is relatively positive right?  That’s what I thought too!  Then I hit the halfway point and it all went downhill from there.  I hated the POV changes.  This author split the book into 5 parts, each part contains a handful of chapters.  Each part is told from the POV of one ship and then it switches to the other ship for the next part, and so on.  Now, there is a good way and a bad way to do POV changes.  This was a bad way.  I got so involved in the POV we were currently in that I didn’t care about the second plot, then suddenly I was in the other plot and by the time it finished I didn’t care about the first anymore.  It made me feel disconnected from the plot and I didn’t really care much about the characters as a result.  Plus, I had a hard time tracking the timeline for the book.  Since we spent so long in one POV weeks or months would have taken place, then we were thrust into the other ship and these were events that were going on at the same time as the bit I just read.  By the end I felt like I’d read years and years of timeline when it was only a few months.  It was confusing and I didn’t like it.  A chapter by chapter breakdown would have been better.

By the end I couldn’t stand Waverly.  I did appreciate the fact that she was not a Mary Sue idiotic twit who was too stupid to ensure her own survival.  That kind of “heroine” has been cropping up in YA fiction way too much lately.  Waverly tried to be a strong, tough, kick ass heroine and succeeded to a small degree.  But then she goes and ruins it all by being completely willing to distrust her FUTURE HUSBAND in favor of the guy who tried to starve him to death!  I mean, really?  That bothered me so much that I wanted to reach through my eReader and slap Waverly in the face for her stupidity.

The author tried really hard to push her own agenda in this one, and it made the ending and large portions of the plot feel forced.  We are informed very early on that the New Horizon was a ship of religious people while the Empyrean was a ship of non-religious people.  When I read that my first thought was, uh oh we’re revving up for an author rant against religion!  And I was correct!  The author takes every opportunity to portray the religious individuals as bad, cultish, evil, and manipulative.  While the non-religious people are logical people who can see through the bullshit of the evil religious cult.  I rolled my eyes at this and was prepared to overlook it until the author decided to put Keiran into the role of the next evil, religious cult leader.  And Waverly just skips right along with that idea and goes to the boy who tried to kill her future husband to plot with him about how to save him from himself.  Oh, also the author made a point of making sure Keiran was hallucinating about hearing God’s voice, because all religious people are nutcases right?  This just angered me so much that I was tempted to throw my eReader across the room in disgust.  Stupid, stupid and more stupid.  I will definitely not be reading the next book because I could hardly stomach the first.

Upcoming Blog Tour!

by Stefani

Note:  This post was edited today because one of the stops on the blog tour was accidentally left off.  The below image is correct.

Hey everyone!  We’ve got some exciting goings on at the blog in the near future that I wanted to share with you!  I am going to be part of a blog tour for a book that has really piqued my interest…and I haven’t even started it yet.  I mean, look at the cover art…

Interested yet?  Then head on over to these other blogs and see what they’ve got going on for this blog tour.  Just don’t forget to come back here to see what I’ve got on the 11th.

 

Archangel’s Kiss by Nalini Singh

by Stefani

Archangel’s Kiss by Nalini Singh

Published February 2nd 2010 by Berkeley Press

Author’s Website: http://www.nalinisingh.com

Synopsis from Goodreads:

Vampire hunter Elena Deveraux wakes from a year-long coma to find that she has become an angel-and that her lover, the stunningly dangerous archangel Raphael, likes having her under his control. But almost immediately, Raphael must ready Elena for a flight to Beijing, to attend a ball thrown by the archangel Lijuan. Ancient and without conscience, Lijuan’s power lies with the dead. And she has organized the most perfect and most vicious of welcomes for Elena…

Rating:

4 out of 5 stars

Review:

Another winner in the Guild Hunter series for me!  This is quite possibly the most inventive and well put together fantasy world that I’ve read in quite a long time.  There were a few things that kept me from being able to rate this a solid 5 stars however, but nothing major and I still am going through withdrawal symptoms waiting for the next book.  I have so many ideas of what I’d like to see and what story I want to see next that I can hardly help myself from picking up the next book right now!

The beginning of this novel was quite difficult for me to get into, and I had a hard time pinpointing why that was.  In the end I think it was a few factors that led to my disconnect from the first half of this book.  First, there was enough jumping around in the storylines to make my head spin!  One paragraph we were in the present, then suddenly in the past 20 years for a few sentences, then just as suddenly we were in a conversation from last night, then we were back in the present, then in the past by a year, then back to the present.  All of this within a few pages and it make my head hurt trying to keep up with it.  I felt like we weren’t sticking with one thing long enough for me to really be invested in it.  In addition we had 2 very different and distinct stories going on that were intertwining within all the timeline jumping.  I was interested in both of the plots, but they were so quickly presented and then passed onto the next thing I didn’t know quite how to feel about either of them.  In addition we add in things like flight training and weapons training and side stories with the other archangels and I felt like I needed a really strong drink.

Now, I know that all of this sounds very negative, and to a certain extent it was.  But the world and characters were still compelling enough for me to want to continue and I wanted to see how the two plots would come together and how everything would work out.  And I was certainly not disappointed.  Once the two stories really got going they couldn’t be stopped and I was glued to the page.   Both of these distinctly different plots came together in a way I hadn’t expected.  I vaguely suspected that something was off about the character who was ultimately the bad guy, but I wasn’t sure what it was and didn’t really see the ending coming.  Then right in the middle of the main plot, this secondary plot exploded into action and I was stunned and exhilarated!  I loved every minute of it.  And just as soon as we had resolution on that secondary plot the main plot burst into its finale.   That was even more exciting and thrilling than the first.  I felt like I couldn’t catch my breath and I couldn’t have been happier about it.  There were several times I found myself just staring at the page with an open mouth thinking to myself, “No way!  How did I miss that!?”  The ending made this book and bumped it from a 2 star to a 4 star book.

On a final note, I have to say one thing about Nalini Singh.  She is a skilled writer when it comes to a series.  Too often an author thinks that a series has to have a big cliffhanger in order to keep someone interested from book to book.  Sometimes this is the right approach, but not always.  And it’s gotten so prevalent in series that it’s almost predictable, what’s the cliffhanger going to be?  Ms. Singh doesn’t really give you a cliffhanger.  All the main plots are wrapped up and reach a resolution within that story.  But because the world and characters are so developed as soon as the plot ends you’re left wondering what the next story will be.  A series doesn’t always need a cliffhanger ending and this series is the perfect example of how to do it correctly.

Seed By Rob Ziegler

by Stefani

Published on November 8th, 2011 by Night Shade Books

Author’s Website: http://zieglerstories.com/

Synopsis from Goodreads website:

It’s the dawn of the 22nd century, and the world has fallen apart. Decades of war and resource depletion have toppled governments. The ecosystem has collapsed. A new dust bowl sweeps the American West. The United States has become a nation of migrants—starving masses of nomads roaming across wastelands and encamped outside government seed distribution warehouses.

In this new world, there is a new power: Satori. More than just a corporation, Satori is an intelligent, living city risen from the ruins of the heartland. She manufactures climate-resistant seed to feed humanity, and bio-engineers her own perfected castes of post-humans Designers, Advocates and Laborers. What remains of the United States government now exists solely to distribute Satori product; a defeated American military doles out bar-coded, single-use seed to the nation’s hungry citizens.

Secret Service Agent Sienna Doss has watched her world collapse. Once an Army Ranger fighting wars across the globe, she now spends her days protecting glorified warlords and gangsters. As her country slides further into chaos, Doss feels her own life slipping into ruin.

When a Satori Designer goes rogue, Doss is tasked with hunting down the scientist-savant—a chance to break Satori’s stranglehold on seed production and undo its dominance. In a race against Satori’s genetically honed assassins, Doss’s best chance at success lies in an unlikely alliance with Brood—orphan, scavenger and small-time thief—scraping by on the fringes of the wasteland, whose young brother may possess the key to unlocking Satori’s power.

As events spin out of control, Sienna Doss and Brood find themselves at the heart of Satori, where an explosive finale promises to reshape the future of the world.

Review:

I don’t know quite how to put this best so I’ll just come right out and say it, full disclosure, I could not stand this book.  I prayed that it would be over practically from the beginning.  Okay, maybe not the beginning but definitely page fifty for sure.  I have had good success with Night Shade publications in the past and the cover and synopsis of this drew me in and made me want to see what it was all about.  Being a huge fan of sci-fi and dystopian fiction I thought this would be a slam dunk.  Oh, how I was wrong.

Let us start with the good things.  Mr. Ziegler is very imaginative.  I found myself struck several times at the level of creativity shown in the characters and some of the action scenes.  I also really loved Sienna Doss.  She is a kick ass woman and I loved her in every scene even when she seemed to be doing nothing more important than picking her nose. I also really enjoyed her cohorts Jake and Casanova.  They provided some real laughs and probably were some of the most memorable moments in the book.

My first issue with this book was the complexity of the plot.  I don’t mind complex plots as long as everything makes sense and I can keep track of it all.  Now, I don’t consider myself a stupid person (though I know one author for certain who may disagree, but it’s not Mr. Ziegler), and I can track a lot of information that might leave other readers scratching their head.  But this book flipped between different stories and different characters so fast I had a hard time keeping up.  In addition, none of the narrations really seemed to be going anywhere so I had zero comprehension of what the actual plot was.  I probably read the synopsis of this book twenty times over the course of this book because I honestly couldn’t remember what the point was supposed to be.  I’d read the synopsis and think, “Oh yeah, that’s who that Doss woman is and why she’s important.  Well when is she going to do that?!”  I wanted to like this plot and the characters but I just couldn’t.

Issue number two is the fact that half the book seems to be written in Spanish.  Now, I do not speak Spanish but this book was supposed to be in English.  Half the characters seem fluent in Spanish and use that to my disadvantage.  I wouldn’t have cared if the Spanish being used is the typical Spanish phrases and words that most people are familiar with and so they are easily comprehended.  I couldn’t follow what several of the characters were even talking about without getting a Spanish-English dictionary or becoming fluent in Spanish before reading.  Neither of those things was I willing to do just for this book.  So instead I spent my time wondering just what the hell these people were talking about and just tuning it out and deciding it wasn’t important enough to find out.

Issue number three was the world building.  I had no idea how the world got this way, just that it did.  I had no idea how Satori came into existence or why, just that it did.  It was never revealed what exactly the Fathers were planning or trying to do or anything regarding their motivations.  Basically you are just thrown into this world without being given any details about it at all.  I didn’t need to know everything down to a hour by hour breakdown, but at least give me the broad strokes!

Next was the big problem I had with the descriptions of Satori.  I don’t consider myself squeamish by any means, but these parts just grossed me out. Satori is a semi-sentient city that produces the seed that the rest of the world lives on and its Designers care for her and the Fathers who created her.  So basically we have a whole city of flesh and muscle and bone.  If someone wanted to sit, a lump of flesh appeared.  If they needed a door then an orifice appeared for you to walk through.  Sex was presented between these Designers in quite possibly the most unsexy way possible.  “The Designer decided he wanted to connect with her and stuck it in her.”  That isn’t an exact quote but it’s pretty close!  Not sexy or enticing at all, just more discomfort on top of the city’s orifices.

My last problem with this book was the lack of emotion I had for any of it.  I couldn’t feel empathy for the characters because I couldn’t understand them most of the time.  I couldn’t have feelings about the plot because I kept forgetting what it was.  The only real emotion I had toward the book was, “When will this be over!”.  It is a worthy attempt at a first novel, but falls woefully short of being audience ready.

Rating: 1.5 of 5 stars.

Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi

by Stefani

Published by Harper Collins on November 15th, 2011

Author’s Website: http://taherehmafi.com/

Synopsis from Goodreads website:

Juliette hasn’t touched anyone in exactly 264 days.

The last time she did, it was an accident, but The Reestablishment locked her up for murder. No one knows why Juliette’s touch is fatal. As long as she doesn’t hurt anyone else, no one really cares. The world is too busy crumbling to pieces to pay attention to a 17-year-old girl. Diseases are destroying the population, food is hard to find, birds don’t fly anymore, and the clouds are the wrong color.

The Reestablishment said their way was the only way to fix things, so they threw Juliette in a cell. Now so many people are dead that the survivors are whispering war– and The Reestablishment has changed its mind. Maybe Juliette is more than a tortured soul stuffed into a poisonous body. Maybe she’s exactly what they need right now.

Juliette has to make a choice: Be a weapon. Or be a warrior.

In this electrifying debut, Tahereh Mafi presents a world as riveting as The Hunger Games and a superhero story as thrilling as The X-Men. Full of pulse-pounding romance, intoxicating villainy, and high-stakes choices, Shatter Me is a fresh and original dystopian novel—with a paranormal twist—that will leave readers anxiously awaiting its sequel.

Review:

I have had a really hard time figuring out how to rate and review this book.   Mostly because I am so conflicted about it in general.  I think the synopsis is entirely accurate with its X-Men reference, but not in the way they are suggesting.  This was an interesting concept.  This girl has been locked away in an asylum after touching a young child (in an attempt to protect him) and he ended up dying because Juliette’s touch is lethal.  She gets a roommate in the asylum with Adam and the two are then promptly removed from the asylum because the overlord of the world wants her to be his head torturer. So far this was all excellent.  I loved the character of Warner and Adam was mildly interesting as well.  I read the first 130 pages or so without stopping and read well into the middle of the night without realizing it.

The writing was unique with the author putting in strikeouts over certain thoughts or feelings that the main character didn’t like.  It was interesting and made the book feel like reading the journal of a very troubled young woman.  But some of the writing made the story seem abrupt and choppy and it didn’t flow very well in places.  I can’t really put my finger on what made it feel that way but it took away from the story a little.

When this story really hit the brakes was with Juliette being Warner’s prisoner.  The plot really came to a screeching halt and never even started to recover.  At points it seemed like we were about to get answers to the questions of the book only to have it just drop and never get answered.  I also started to really tire of Juliette being the ultimate Mary Sue character.  She’s pretty, she’s sweet, she’s gentle, even when she did something awful like killing a boy it was only with good intentions, and every single male character in the book fell all over themselves drooling while she sat back in complete ignorance of what the big deal was.  This made me want to scream!  You would think that being able to kill people just by touching them would be a great flaw, except it isn’t because Juliette is basically Mother Teresa!

There isn’t even another significant female character in the entire book, just a bunch of males alternately drooling or being afraid of Juliette.  I believe “Benny” may have been female but we don’t actually meet her, only hear about her in a few sentences.  And there are female twins at the very end, but again they only make an appearance for about three sentences.  I really hated the X-Men thing too.  The resistance is rounding up people with “abilities” and turning them into superheroes who are going to save the world.  I saw that a few times, at the movie theater, and it was done a lot more completely.

The world building was also lacking by a great deal in this book.  We only get glimpses of the world as Juliette remembers it and a few brief glimpses of life in one city.  That’s it, there was no more world building and it made me feel disconnected from the story.  The closest we got to explaining this world was a rant about how we humans did this to ourselves.  We sprayed all these icky pesticides on food and made it inedible, we caged animals in inhumane conditions and so they died, we regulated food for profit and made others go hungry, we manipulated the climate with our man-made junk and polluted the world.  Okay!  We get it!  Now, go away treehugger and leave the condemning of modern life to someone not writing a work of fiction.  I don’t mind an author having an explanation for the end of the world that involves these kinds of things, but stop preaching to me about it already.  I read this book to enjoy it not get a lecture on all the bad things we’re doing to the earth.

After Adam and Juliette escape Warner the plot never really restarted and by the time I got to the last page I felt like I had gotten half of a story, not a complete story with a sequel coming out soon.  There were some interesting moments that made me ask some questions, but those questions never got resolved and neither did the story.  Even in a series each novel needs to be a complete story with a beginning, middle, and an end.  We got the beginning and we got the middle, but there was no decent ending.  While I was completely enthralled with the beginning of the book the ending left me with no interest in reading about this world any further.

To put an ending to my review, I will rate this 2.5 stars out of 5.

Angels’ Blood by Nalini Singh

by Stefani

Angels’ Blood by Nalini Singh

Published March 3rd, 2009 by Berkley Sensation

Author’s Website: http://www.nalinisingh.com/

Synopsis from the author’s website:

Vampire hunter Elena Deveraux knows she’s the best—but she doesn’t know if she’s good enough for this job. Hired by the dangerously beautiful Archangel Raphael, a being so lethal that no mortal wants his attention, only one thing is clear—failure is not an option…even if the task is impossible.

Because this time, it’s not a wayward vamp she has to track. It’s an archangel gone bad.

The job will put Elena in the midst of a killing spree like no other…and pull her to the razor’s edge of passion. Even if the hunt doesn’t destroy her, succumbing to Raphael’s seductive touch just may. For when archangels play, mortals break…

Review:

I loved this book!  I could not put it down!  I found myself reading through meals, reading while brushing my teeth, reading in parking lots, and reading late into the night long after I should have been asleep.  I have been looking for a paranormal romance/urban fantasy series to take the place of the Anita Blake series in my life…but that disaster is a story for a different day.  I think I may have found that series with the Guild Hunter Series.

First we have our two main characters, archangel Raphael and guild hunter Elena.  I liked them both.  Raphael has this air about him that is dark, scary, and dangerous.  But at the same time it is so enticing.  I wanted to know about him and I wanted to know what he was capable of.  Elena is similarly dark, scary, and dangerous.  But that was interesting and enticing too.  What really amused me was that through the entire book Elena keeps insisting about how different they are, when they are actually strikingly similar.  The sexual tension between the two of them was a constant tease through this entire book.  After awhile I wanted to just scream at them, “seriously just do it already!”  When they did it was passionate and sensual and such a relief.  It was about time and it was a great scene.

The idea behind this plot was simply fascinating.  It was something that I never would have thought of, and I found that refreshing.  Angels are the ones creating vampires, very unique.  Angels have the ability to turn into blood sucking monsters and kill hundreds, also unique and fascinating.  So many elements of this story were unique for this genre and it was so excellent to read.  I have been craving something I’ve never read before in the paranormal realm and I finally found it.

The only complaint I could possibly make is that there was so much going on that, at times, I had trouble keeping track of everything.  So many things were left unexplained until the very end that they melded together in mind and occasionally I found myself confused.  But this was a minor setback and ultimately didn’t diminish my enjoyment of the story at all.  I cannot wait to move on to the next in the series, and I look forward to finding out what’s going on with Elena next.  The hole in my paranormal fantasy shelf is filled and I couldn’t be more excited to watch it evolve.

Rating: A solid 4.5 out of 5.

Happy 4th!

by Stefani
Used under a Creative Commons Attribution License from original artist Tambja,

First of all, Happy 4th of July to all my fellow Americans!  Today will be a busy day, you will get two posts from me today.  The first post is this update from my Helium works.  This article is regarding the hunting habits of the thresher shark.  I wrote this article as part of a competition, at the time it was purchased for an incentive payment and then promptly got voted down to 2 out of 2.  Frustrating, but all part of the world of Helium since for 3 days it sat at number 1.  But things can always change and I am hoping this makes it way back to the top soon. Regardless, hopefully you can take a few seconds to give it a click and let me know if you found it interesting and informative.