DNF: When The Sun Falls From The Sky

Just couldn't finish it:




I need to just stick to Kristen Ashley's contemps. I made it to almost 70% before I decided that I just didn't care anymore. I hated Leah. I hated Lucien. The worldbuilding sucked. There were no redeeming qualities that I could find.

Just my opinion. For what's it worth.

Discount Armageddon by Seanan McGuire

I flippin' loved this book!




Spoiler-free plot summary of the awesomeness:

It is hard to do a plot summary of such awesomeness, because it will not do justice to McGuire's voice and cleverness. Essentially, the heroine, Verity Price, is a ballroom dancer slash cryptozoologist in modern New York City. The Price family is notorious amongst cryptozoologists (McGuire speak for monster hunter) because they abandoned The Covenant of St. George generations earlier, leaving behind their monster killing roots in favor of a more, shall we say, nuanced approach. The Price family doesn't kill on sight. They wait until the cryptid demonstrates that it is actively dangerous to humans before they exercise extreme prejudice in dealing with the threat.

Verity is living in New York City, under cover, in an effort to further her secret career in ballroom dancing. At the same time that a member of The Covenant, Dominic de Luca, appears in "her" city, and seems bent upon extinguishing as much sentient cryptid life as possible, female cryptids begin disappearing. And no one knows why. This central mystery requires Verity and Dominick to set aside their historic animosity to piece it all together.

Review:

I loved this book. I give very few five-star reviews -- the last one was The Fault in Our Stars by John Green -- but dang it, I loved this book. It is lighter than a lot of urban fantasy, and has certain qualities that feel almost manga-esque. When it comes out as a graphic novel, I will buy it. Please, Daw, release it as a graphic novel. Please.

The characters are great. Verity is smart, sassy and well-armed. She also has fantastic one liners, like:

"My name is Verity Price. I'm a cryptozoologist. And this is why I never get a goddamn date on a Saturday night."

and

"[m]y mother raised me never to contradict anyone who regularly carries grenades."

The voice is breezy, articulate and fun. There are lots of fun allusions to work out, and little pop culture references, like wikipedia and The Land of the Lost, that are a delight. It is well-written and well-edited. I laughed out loud reading this book, and cannot wait, absolutely cannot wait for the next book featuring Verity. This is the urban fantasy version of the Gilmore Girls. To me, that is high praise. I read a lot, and I am seldom this enthusiastic about a book. There was nothing I didn't love.

P.S.: I want to mack on Dominic. Seriously. He's hot.

Forged In Fire by Trish McCallan

I don't exactly know what to say about this book:



This was my KOLL book of the month for March. There were some things I really enjoyed about the book, and some things that left me disappointed.

Plot summary:

Beth Brown is not the kind of woman who is particularly spontaneous, and she's not the sort of woman who attracts badass, hardbodied warriors. Nonetheless, when Beth has a disturbing dream that appears to be coming true, and that includes the hijacking and slaughter of an entire airplane full of passengers, Beth gets into her car and drives to the airport just to assure herself that there isn't anything to worry about. Once she arrives at the gate, she catches the eye of Zane Winter, the above-mentioned badass, hardbodied Navy SEAL warrior.

Zane Winter is one of the men in her dream who has been slaughtered by the hijackers. Zane Winter also has some special abilities of foresight himself, and he knows that something bad is going to happen -- something that he, with the help of Beth, needs to stop. The fact that he is convinced that Beth is his soul mate is supremely inconvenient timing. It's up to Zane to get he and Beth through a day that is steeped in violence and death to the otherside, where he can make her his.

Review:

What did I like about this book? Well, it is a fast-paced read. I finished it in about two hours, and it definitely sucked me in and kept me turning the pages. The romance is on the back burner for most of the book, however, because there is alot, and I mean alot, of crazy, violent, kidnapping, terrorist drama in this book. It felt a lot like a season of 24, with a very romantic subplot.

There were two areas that left me disappointed, though. First, this book holds itself out as a paranormal romance. It's not really PNR. The paranormal aspect of the book is extremely limited, and doesn't add much to the plot at all. I would consider this book to be a straight contemporary romance, and the "paranormal" stuff could be removed without losing much of the story. Beth's "dream" does pay a very important part in the book, but it would have been possible for the author to put Beth in the same position of knowledge without having to go through the whole "dream" aspect. Fundamentally, I thought that the paranormal aspects actually weakened the story.

The second thing that I have a major problem with was the ending. This book ended with the cliffhanger to end all cliffhangers, and frankly it pissed me off. There is an important character who's life is literally hanging by a thread and that storyline is left unresolved and unanswered. Going back to my 24 analogy, if the book started at 7:00 a.m., Jack Bauer time, it ended at 8:30 p.m. I absolutely hate it when authors do this. It is a cheap, skeevy way to ensure that readers will buy your next book. I would've bought the next book anyway, because I liked the story, I enjoyed the characters, and I was sucked in. It wasn't necessary to leave one of the characters in surgery to entice me. And now, because I hate to reward what I consider to be bad behavior, I am considering giving up on the series. Because I have no confidence that she won't do the same thing with the next book, and what's going to happen if she gets bored with the books and decides not to finish them at all.

So, overall, I would've given this book 4 stars. It was a 4 star read for me right up to the end. The end was worth about 2 stars. Therefore, I am going to settle on 3 stars, and take some time to make up my mind and decide if I'm willing to give this series an opportunity to redeem itself.

Skinwalker (Jane Yellowrock) by Faith Hunter

I actually read this one before the beginning of March Magic & Mayhem, but I'm just now getting around to reviewing it.



Brief (No spoilers) Plot Summary:

Jane Yellowrock is a skinwalker who specializes in taking care of, permanently and with extreme prejudice, rogue vampires. This is a UF in which vampires have gone public, but other magical creatures remain under the radar. So far as Jane knows, she is the only skinwalker in existence. She is capable of shifting into various creatures, including creatures where she needs to drop mass or gain mass, but her natural shape when shifting is some form of big cat. Jane has been hired by the vampires of New Orleans to take down a rogue vampire who is on a rampage and has placed at risk their position in New Orleans. Her job is to take care of their problem.

Strengths and Weaknesses:

This is a pretty good, if somewhat uninspired, entry in the rather crowded UF genre. Faith Hunter is a competent writer. There are similarities to the Sookie Stackhouse series (less humor, but the requisite sexy vamps) as well as even more significant similarities to the Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs. I prefer Mercy Thompson to Jane Yellowrock.

Nonetheless, I enjoyed Skinwalker. I am a sucker for stories set in New Orleans -- there is something very atmospheric about New Orleans, with its voodoo history, and this prediliction of mine extends all the way back to Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire. If vampires exist anywhere outside of Transylvania, New Orleans is the place.

I really liked Jane Yellowrock. She is a badass tough girl, and is a fully capable heroine. There is almost no romance in this installment, although there are a couple of male characters introduced who will likely fill that role in later books.

This one isn't as unique as the Downside Ghosts series referenced below. Faith Hunter is treading ground that has been well-trod by other authors before her. Nonetheless, for fans of UF, this is a solid effort, and is well worth a read. 3 1/2 stars.

Review: Unholy Ghosts by Stacia Kane

So, I finished




by Stacia Kane. This one definitely qualifies as Urban Fantasy, not PNR.

Brief Plot Summary:

Chess (Cesaria) is a Debunker for the Church of Truth. This series is a bit of a twist on the post-apocalyptic/dystopian book that is very popular right now, and focuses on ghosts, not zombies. Zombie fiction has become fairly ubiquitous, and I am not really a zombie fan, so it was nice to read dark fantasy that didn't involve zombies. The apocalypse occurred in the form of Haunting Week -- when all of the ghosts escaped the bounds that had been placed upon them, churches and religion had failed, and approximately 66% of the population died. This caused the rise of the Church of Truth, which is not based upon any of the major religions, but is, rather, based upon magic and its ability to contain the ghosts. Not surprisingly, the ghosts don't particularly want to be contained, and, of course, there are other groups that want to overthrow the power of the Church of Truth.

Strengths and Weaknesses:

I thought that Stacia Kane's worldbuilding was excellent. It was interesting, and internally consistent. This is a dark world, and, in keeping with that darkness, the main character, Chess is a dark heroine. She is a moderately promiscuous drug addict, not to put too fine a point on it, but in spite of those failings, Chess has integrity. More integrity than a lot of the characters who don't have her moral failings.

I also enjoyed the writing. The dialogue is a little weird, with the characters occasionally breaking into a form of pidgin pirate -- lots of Ayes, and a few thous. Sort of weird, but not out of keeping with the general theme of the book. The character names are also extremely descriptive. Most characters have only one name -- Bump, Chess's drug dealer, Brain, a homeless child, Lex, enforcer for Bump's primary rival, Slobag, and then, of course, Terrible. And Terrible is a great character. Huge, violent, not nearly as dumb as he initially appears, and obviously attracted to our girl Chess.

This is dark fantasy, and I loved it. So, a great beginning to March Magic & Mayhem. Heavy on the Magic and on the Mayhem.

4 stars

Welcome to March!

As I mentioned in a prior post, I'm planning on doing a theme month this month, which means that I will be reading books in a specific genre. Since I've been reading so much romance, I'm going to deviate from that theme only a little bit, & will be reading UF & PNR. These two genres are quite similar. Typically, the UF genre has less romance, and each book does not necessarily have an HEA. PNR series tend to focus on different couples in each book, with an HEA for each book, and the series will be set in the same world.

I have a long list of books that I will be reading, and at some point in the next couple of days, I'll set up a widget on the right side of the blog to identify them. Right now I am reading:



This is the first in the series, and seems to lean UF over PNR.

I've also finished:




and



The Kresley Cole series, Immortals After Dark, is definitely PNR. I've read 5 of them, and have one more ready to read on my kindle. I'll probably do a separate IAD post to discuss all of them, with mini-reviews about the series as a whole.