Title:

When a local boy is killed by wolves Grace’s small town becomes a place of fear and suspicioun. But Grace can’t help being fascinated by the pack, and by one yellow-eyed wolf in particular. There’s something about him — something almost human. 

Then she meets the yellow-eyed boy whose familiarity takes her breath away.

In all honesty the only reason I picked up this book was because of the review I  watched on youtube by one of my favourite booktubers. Normally I wouldn’t read something like this because — let’s face it — the blurb reads a little Twilight-like. To me that measures the impact of that horrendous series, I feel forever scarred by following Bella Swan’s exploits (or lack of exploits thanks to her almost purely reactionary nature) and I can’t help but look at other YA fiction with a sideways slant as I imagine co-dependant, poisonous relationships at every page turn. This book however? Completely laid my fears to rest. Stiefvater treats the relationship of the protagonists with honesty and heart and I grew to really like Grace’s pragmatism throughout the narrative; she’s practical, she knows her limitations and she does her best in any given situation. I just plain like Grace, she’s the type of person I could imagine myself being friends with back when I was a teenager.

Without giving too much away about the book, because I would recommend it in a heartbeat for a fast, easy summer read, there is a great new spin put on werewolves. The wolves in this series aren’t the size of horses with baseball sized tears (oh, S. Meyer, why?) but they are instead a pack of normal sized, normally behaved — for the most part — wolves. They don’t change because of the pull of the moon and they can be killed any number of ways including, but not exclusively, by silver bullets. I wish I could say more but I went into the series unspoiled and I want the same for anyone else thinking of picking these books up.

Instead of the plot I’ll use the general writing skill of the author as a selling point: Stiefvater is a good, sol;id writer. Her language is diverse enough that it stuck out but not so much so that it’s out of place, she has a good sense of rhythm and pacing and tension. I enjoyed her portrayals of the different characters, vastly different in some cases, from Grace’s flighty, artistic mother to Isabel Culpeper, cold, hard, intense. This, to me, is a great piece of YA literature; a female, teenaged protagonist who takes action, who is thoughtful but not narcissistic, supporting characters who have their own stories instead of being their to prop up the central cast. In short, the first novel of this series was a fun read, check it out.

Title: 

In this free Rizzoli & Isles short story from New York Times bestselling author Tess Gerritsen, author of The Silent Girl, a bizarre death comes with a supernatural twist. Homicide cop Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles have seen their fair share of mortal crimes, but the death of Kimberly Rayner may qualify as inhuman in more ways than one. When corpse of the emaciated seventeen-year-old girl is discovered next to an empty coffin in an abandoned church, mysterious bruises around the throat suggest foul play. Caught fleeing the scene is the victim’s closest friend, Lucas Henry, an equally skeletal, pale teenager who claims he’s guilty only of having a taste for blood-a craving he shared with Kimberly. But the victim’s distraught father doesn’t believe in vampires, only vengeance. And now, another life may be at risk unless Rizzoli and Isles can uncover the astonishing truth.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I am fairly biased when it comes to Tess Gerritsen. One of my favourite authors, I know without much shadow of doubt that I will enjoy one of her Rizzoli & Isles books and read it quickly and with fervour. With the exception of a couple that fell a little flatter on me than others, her stories captivate me easily and the twists almost always blind-side me.  That is in large part due to Rizzoli and Isles themselves and for me that’s what I enjoyed about this short story. I know it’s a bit of a campy departure from her usual fair, there’s no chilling human killer who gets under your skin as you read, no disturbing take on human nature or the psyche of a killer, there’s an element of supernatural in that the cops on the case get swept up in the symbology of the scene they’re working and the strange counter culture of human-vampirism that Gerritsen touches on but Rizzoli and Isles remain strong.

Here you get their personal and working relationship boiled down to its essentials for new readers; Jane and Maura trade a few witticisms, a few side ways looks at the weirdness of the case (and trust me that have had some weird cases before) and they even share some Chinese food together while mulling over the case, much to Jane’s disgust (really, Maura, discussing body parts over dinner? Gross).  Barry Frost makes a cameo, as usual shouting after Jane when she tears off after a perp, and it’s these things that I know and love about the characters, their behaviours, that made this an entertaining read for me. Perhaps not worth it if you don’t know the series, but a great little morsel to tide us over until this Autumn while we, the fans, wait for the next full length novel.

I haven’t seen the TNT show based on the series and I’m not much interested in it, honestly, but  whether or not this is meant as a fun little introduction for watchers of that show into the world of the books or not, I enjoyed it, I read it in bed, and I’m glad I did.

Title: 

Avry’s power to heal the sick should earn her respect in the plague-torn land of Kazan. Instead she is feared. Her kind are blamed for the horrifying disease that has taken hold of her nation. 

When Avry uses her forbidden magic to save a dying child she faces the guillotine. Until a dark, mysterious man rescues her from her prison cell. His people need Avry’s magic to save their dying prince. The very prince who first unleashed the plague on Kazan.

Saving the prince is certain to kill Avry — yet she already faces a violent death. Now she must choose — use her healing touch to show the ultimate mercy or die a martyr to a lost cause.

Prefacing this with a warning that I will be discussing the ending of this novel, so if you want to remain spoiler free and read it for yourself (please do!) I would stop reading… now.

I like this novel fine. Like most of the reviews I have read of Snyder’s other works I would still consider Poison Study to be her most accomplished novel and even then it’s not without problems. This book is a quick, easy read, the story is uncomplicated (though the prose has a tendency to get confusing at times) and the characters are… fine. That’s my problem with it ultimately. It’s just fine. There is a lot of room for depth in the world that Snyder has created in this freshman book of what I assume will be another trilogy, and she even achieved some success in making the magic of this world different from that of the Study and Glass series which I imagine took a lot of work. I much prefer the basis of this magic, there’s no “blanket” of magic covering the world that magicians pull their power from, no “flame outs” which I always found something of a contrived way of setting limitations and implying added danger. However, I have to say, I didn’t really warm to these eleven different types of magician, they seemed random and childish in a way. There’s healing, life, death, moon, forest, rock… I can’t remember them all but to be honest the only ones we really get much of a look into are healing and forest magic with a cursory glance given to the life and death magics.

My main problem with this book was that I knew Avry wasn’t going to die healing the prince like the back of the book suggests. I knew that through some magical mcguffin she would survive and (SPOILERS) she does. This is exactly what happens. There’s a lot of nonsense with the Peace and Death Lilys and that is probably the cheesiest plot of the book so I wasn’t that surprised when it played a massive role in the conclusion of the story.

Now I probably seem uncharitable here; I knew what I was getting into when I picked up this book, I know Snyder’s style by now, but I can’t help feeling that I’m reading her books in the hope that they’ll surprise me or that her writing will get better because I do like them but there’s not really enough depth for me to fall in love with them. There’s not enough depth of character or world, there’s not a deep enough explanation of… well anything really. Snyder writes humour fairly well, and as usual I did find myself enjoying the supporting characters for their witty one-liners but is that enough to carry a book? No, not in my opinion. From reading the blurb I knew who the love interest would be, and while I frequently say I would be disappointed in some ways if books like this didn’t follow through on the romance subplots just once I would like something to happen to upset the formula.

For me that’s what Snyder’s books are becoming: formulaic.

These are not hardcore fantasy books, nor do I think they are meant to be, but I can’t help feeling that she can do better, that she could write better, she could certainly stand to learn how to use punctuation correctly (something I was focusing on a lot more than the actual plot of the story quite frequently) but that’s another problem for another post entirely.

To sum up I give this book something like a ‘meh’ out of ‘sigh’. It’s a few hundred pages of retread, it seems, but if you like light fantasy and you don’t like fearing for your favourite characters at every page turn then this is a book for you.

Onwards with 2012! Thirty books this time, and I’m making my start with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. A book I have been desperate to read for months.

Good luck if you’re attempting the Goodreads challenge yourself and if you’re not? Why not give it a shot! You might stumble on some gems this year that you wouldn’t otherwise!

Title:

And she must face the truth about the Forest of Hands and Teeth. Could there be life outside a world surrounded by so much death?

(How many comma-splices are there in this blurb? IT’S LIKE A GAME).

It shouldn’t take a lot to keep my interest up when a book has zombies in it; I love me some zombies. I really loved this book to start off with too, unfortunately about a hundred pages from the end my enjoyment took a dramatic dive off a cliff. It starts out well written and thought provoking (in as much as thinking about the zombie apocalypse and I think about that more than is probably normal anyway), I liked the setting, I liked the style and I was interested to see where the story was going and what the significance of the fences and paths was. Mary was the undoing of this novel for me, her selfish behaviour and her inability to to satisfied with anything she had (even when it was something she had supposedly been desiring passionately for weeks if not months) reached the point where I could find nothing redeeming about her and the excuse of her being a teenager wore completely thin. For me there needs to be some growth of character in these types of novels, the protagonist should discover something about themselves as they discover the world around them or through their interactions with the characters around them, but Mary stagnates and it truly hits home that she has not changed or grown a single bit about two-hundred and fifty pages in.

From then on I just wanted to finish the book and find out what happened and sadly I was disappointed again. The end is vague and boring, the novels goes out with a whimper rather than a scream and in a zombie book? You expect a scream. It was the right place to end the novel in my opinion but not at all the right way. It was handled lazily. The moment where I ought to have been feeling a rush of relief and hopefulness for Mary was overshadowed by the fact that she had sold everyone up the river to get to that point. All I could think about was what an awful person she had become, how the journey through the novel instead of building her up and making her into a strong, brave young woman had only reduced her to a selfish little girl and someone I would have gladly seen eaten by the Unconsecrated.

There were moments where I teared up while reading this, though. Most of the emotion came from secondary characters, namely Jed and his wife Beth, and Travis, one of Mary’s love interests. Jed was perhaps the most defined character for me, even Travis’ characteristics were wishy-washy for most of the novel and now that I think about it I could not tell you much about anyone’s appearance; Cass has blonde hair, Mary brown and Travis has green eyes. That’s all I’ve got. The depth was missing for the characters for me and I wouldn’t have minded that so much if the story had propelled itself in a different direction, a better direction. I would have been able to enjoy the ride but all I can think about having finished the novel is how much I dislike Mary and how much I wish the other characters had been given more time to shine.

Notice that I mentioned love interests, plural. That’s right, we’re entering Twilight territory here, folks. I would usually never be so cruel as to compare a novel to Twilight and I don’t draw these parallels lightly. Marys is, in many ways, like Bella Swan; she is self-serving and unable to think of other people’s emotions most of the time let alone place them before her own. However because this book is infinitely better written I was willing to forgive those traits early on; she’s a teenager after all, of course she’s a bit selfish. It’s the lack of growth that turns her into Bella Swan 2.0 for me, she doesn’t learn from her mistakes and she never ever takes the high road, placing the feelings and safety of her brother and the man she loves above her own. Then we have the fact that two men fall in love with her. That’s fine, I don’t mind a good love triangle but I do place my emphasis on the good part. Much like Jacob/Bella/Edward I cannot fathom why it is these boys fall for Mary. In the end they both pay for it in their own ways which I will admit is an improvement on the way things turn out for Jacob and Edward (full body shudder as I recall Breaking Dawn).

It would take me too long to list all the unfinished plot-lines, too. There are many, many things that Ryan never fully explains and that definitely becomes frustrating. What I think she was trying to do was hint at the answers and let the reader take the final jump but she’s much too vague about it and while I could take a stab at a guess and probably be right, I don’t think there are quite enough nudges in the right direction to make it comfortable to do so. This is a very unfortunate thing, as I think had she followed through on these things the story would have been a lot more rich and full.

All that said I would be tempted to pick up the second novel in the series: The Dead-Tossed Waves. Partly because it has a cool name and partly because I would love for Ryan to redeem the ending of the first novel with a killer encore. Of course I have a habit of inflicting terrible books on myself out of stubbornness, so we’ll see how that goes.

Title: 

At first, Lyle House seems a pretty okay place, except for Chloe’s small problem of fearing she might be facing a lifetime of mental illness. But as she gradually gets to know the other kids at the home–charming Simon and his ominous, unsmiling brother Derek, obnoxious Tori, and Rae, who has a “thing” for fire–Chloe begins to realize that there is something that binds them all together, and it isn’t your usual “problem kid” behaviour. And together they discover that Lyle House is not your usual group home either…

I don’t actually read YA fiction usually but since a good friend of mine is going through a part of her library course where she has to read them I decided to join in to see what’s out there. This, of course, precludes the fact that I have read the Twilight series, that was out of a mix of spite and curiosity and with the knowledge that I was torturing myself by reading something terrible, not out of an interest in YA fiction. This book is the opposite end of the scale to those atrocious books.

Obviously it’s not an instant classic of anything but I genuinely enjoyed this book; it was quick to read, it more or less got straight to the point, and having read the adult Otherworld books I knew what was going on before the protagonist. The fact that her YA novels take place in the same universe as the main series is really interesting to me; I was continuously thinking “Aw, kids! I know who can help you with this stuff.” There are two more books and I sincerely hope there will be cameos from the adult characters at some point in them, but I will have to read them to find out and judging by how much I enjoyed this book I think it’ll be worth it.

If I had to criticise one thing it would be the ending which was incredibly abrupt and such a cliffhanger I was practically in conniptions wanting to know what would happen next. That is probably the point, however. Hats off to you, Kelley Armstrong.

Title:

Page Count/Book Type: Paperback, 228 pages.

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

“Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

“I’m a panda,” he says, at the door. “Look it up.”

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

“Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

So punctuation really does matter, even if it is only occasionally a matter of life and death.

This book you guys. This book. It was like finding a soul mate or something, everything in it (more or less, but let’s stick with the more) spoke to me so much. I never really thought of myself as what Truss terms a “stickler” before but having read this and realised that all these things really do annoy me; when I see signs with little to no punctuation, or terrible grammar (Customer Toilet, anyone? WHAT DOES THIS EVEN MEAN?), I now know that there is a term for my obsessive compulsive need to add semi-colons and apostrophes. I always knew these things bothered me but apparently now I have a bible to refer to and the knowledge that there are people out there just like me; we’re not crazy, just picky! I know people eye-roll about punctuation an awful lot, they say that it doesn’t really matter and wonder why people like me get all hair tear-y about possessive apostrophes and the like, but I really do think it’s important; as Lynne Truss points out, punctuation acts as road signs for the reader of a text. Punctuation does half the work in a paragraph, it tell the reader when to pause for a beat and when to stop completely, it can provide or add impact to words, it’s one of the most important tool in a writer’s kit, and only a madman doesn’t use all the tools of the trade.

It has certainly made me aware of how often I accidentally comma-splice my way around. Sadly I’m in the habit of placing a comma in a sentence when I pause to think! Honestly everyone should read this book, it’s just fantastic and I cannot sing its praises enough. Long live punctuation.

Title:

After years of struggle, Elena Michaels – journalist, investigator, werewolf – has finally come to terms with her strange fate, and learned how to control her wild side. At least, that’s what she believes when she sets off to Alaska with her partner Clay. A series of gruesome maulings and murders outside Anchorage seem to implicate a rogue band of werewolves. But the truth is more complicated. Trapped in a frozen, unforgiving terrain, they are forced to confront a deadly secret, and their own, untamed nature…Gripping, intense and deeply satisfying, Frostbitten is a brilliant novel of suspense with a supernatural twist.

This is an excellent addition to the Otherworld series. I know I’m not alone in finding the novels about the Pack my favourites in the Otherworld series. Armstrng has their dynamic down pat by now and it’s nice to go into these books already knowing all the characters and how they interact with each other. it’s comfortable and just a lot of fun to delve into what they’re up to now. I enjoy how time passes between novels in this series; the characters are a couple of years older since the last novel about them, they’ve changed a little as a result of their lives moving on and I think that’s a great device for not only for moving the plot along but for bringing new aspects of the characters out in each book and keeping them interesting, it makes the characters jump off the page much more. I liked this book so much that I don’t have a lot to say about it, the dialogue, action and pacing are great as usual, the plot chugs along at a good speed.

Elena and Clay are, as usual, my favourite part of the Pack novels (with Jeremy and Jaime, when she pops up, running a close second) so a whole novel focusing on them and their relationship was really awesome. Elena reminds me of Buffy a little bit, she can take care of herself but she has vulnerable moments, it’s really the mark of a great heroine. I really loved the setting of this book too, seeing the wolves in a more natural environment in contrast to the urban setting we usually find them in is a nice changed. Great read, check it out if you like urban fantasy and supernatural books.

Title:

There are few things that I ask for from a book, with the very least being good grammar and punctuation, two things that His Secret Little Wife: A Novel does not have. I’m not a staunch prescrivtivist in the least, I like grammar to be generally correct if only for the fluidity of reading and understand what an author is trying to get across, semi-colons and full stops were invented for a reason after all, but this novel is tipped so far in favour of descriptive language that I found it hard to follow and tiring to read. The egregious use of ellipses was both irritating and incorrect. Most of the time, in fact, I was simply correcting the poor punctuation in my mind, adding paragraphs and defining clauses as I went along. In that way, once you get into the habit of it, the book is easier to read. That, sadly, doesn’t make it much more enjoyable, and it shouldn’t be the work of the reader to have to impress structure onto a book.

When the book makes an insidious and voyeuristic turn it’s a little easier to swallow the pervasive ellipses (though not by much, it’s still wrong). Suddenly the sexual overtones are treated with what I found to be a genuine amount of detachment and mild disgust from the narrator. It seems unfair to pick on the subject matter of the novel considering that I made the choice to pick the book up and read it, but the execution of the plot is just plain odd and when you have this strange childlike voice with an adult perspective, ill defined writing to slog through on top of a downright creepy story about destroying this poor girls’ innocence it’s just too much.

I found the characters archetypical, unrealistic marionettes who were only present to serve as justification of the plot, accommodating the notion that no one would notice Ochsenstein or Hannah’s tryst, her parents set up not to care that a seventy year old man is molesting their twelve year old daughter and no characteristics given to Ochsenstein to give even a clue as to why he does the things he does. In a way this reminds me of The Extra Large Medium in its vagueness. That said I did find myself feeling for the protagonist by the end, but I also found myself feeling quite ill. I would not recommend this book, nor would I pick up any of the author’s other works for fear of seeing another block of text with only ellipses and commas for punctuation. No matter how good the story could have been the only thing I will really remember are those damn dots.

Title:

So I actually just read this last night for the hell of it; I needed to take a break from Warprize because I’m finding it really hard to slog through because it’s just so bad and I could start listing why it’s terrible here but I’ll save that for when I actually finish it (ugh). I actually picked this up after watching a review citing how bad of a movie the Matilda adaptation was, and that it was too dark for kids which started me thinking about how this reviewer must never have had Roald Dahl read to him as a child because all his books are dark in one way or another. The Witches is terrifying — it actually gave me this phobia of being trapped in a painting like the poor little girl, that still creeps me out to this day — and I never liked The Twits personally, that was just gross. The BFG, though and The Magic Finger, Fantastic Mr. Fox and this book are all just so great and they all have that element of darkness to them, and fear. I think that’s what makes them timeless, in this case I remembered the story so well from when I was a child I barely needed to read it actually, and the same goes for the ones my mum used to read to me. I think children like Roald Dahl because he doesn’t baby them and he doesn’t recoil from using creepy or scary imagery. It’s not a case of giving them a happy ending to redeem whatever has been done in the book either, because the end of Matilda, I thought, was very sad. I cried when she lost her powers, I thought it was a tragedy but she got to live with Miss Honey, so it was a bittersweet sort of ending for me, an ovet the years it’s matured into a happy ending as I think back on it. This book ends with Grandma shrinking down until she’s so tiny that no one can see her which is awful, but at the same time she does deserve almost anything they throw her way at that stage. Anyway, this is a great book, I love Roald Dahl, I was raised on his stories and I’m glad I decided to go into the attic to find this one because it’s great.