Category Archives: books/book review

Book Review of Wicked Good Witches, by Starla Silver

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Wicked Good WitchesHey-ho, choose a cover. I don’t know which is the new and which is the old, but neither of them fits the tone or content of the books, so, go with whichever you happen to like best.

I picked this bundle by Starla Silver up from Amazon while it was free in May of 2015. (I know, I sometimes hold on to books for ages before I get around to reading them.) I chose to read it today because I’ve set myself a challenge to read all the books on my To-Be-Read shelf that include the word Alpha and, of course, book two of this box set is titled Alpha Knows Best. And as other reviews mentioned that these books don’t stand alone, I’ve started from the beginning, with Demon Street Blues.

As an amusing aside, I asked my five-year-old to pick which of the Alpha books I would read first and this is the one she chose. Looking at the covers, I can kind of guess why.

Anyhow, series description: 
The Howard Witches, three siblings charged with protecting The Demon Isle… 

Charlie, the werewolf. 
Michael, the empathic death reader. 
Melinda, living under self-inflicted house arrest. Her gift: prophetic dreams of people about to die. 

Their mentor, the four-hundred year old Vampire, William Wakefield. Charming, ridiculously handsome, and walking a dangerous line between sinking into darkness and living in the light. In constant temptation to declare his love for the one woman that could be his undoing. 

The story begins with an unsolved murder. One that will change everything… 

Come stalk the streets of The Demon Isle… you’ll go up against witches, vampires, werewolves, demons, shapeshifters, ghosts, mermaids, faeries and a host of other devious supernatural creatures waiting to wreak havoc on The Demon Isle. Where fans of the paranormal come to vacation and immerse themselves in fantasy. Where magic comes to life, mysteries abound, and you might just find yourself laughing, crying, and most definitely, falling in love. 

Reviews

Demon Street Blues:
Things I found to be true about all three books I read: simplistic writing, stilted dialogue, names used too frequently to be natural, frequent drastic and disruptive shifts in POV (I don’t think the author actually payed any attention to POV consistency), schmaltziness, cheesy language used during sex scenes, and men tend toward action while girls primarily agonize over love/sex. Lastly, none of the books stand on their own. They are closer to long serial installments than books in a series.

I thought this was an OK read. Really that’s about it. As I noted above the writing seemed simplistic and stilted, but not that much more than many other books I’ve read.

Unfortunately, I found the main character, which I THINK was Melinda (and honestly, shouldn’t that be something I can be sure of) annoying. Her entire personality seems to be guilt, self-doubt and intrusive sexual thoughts.

I also thought her history inconsistent. She’s supposed to have been a recluse for four years, but she’s emotionally distraught because of a bad date and sexual experience. What recluse goes on dates? Where’d she even meet a guy to invite her out? She also acts like she doesn’t know anyone on the island because she’s been in the house for 4 years. But what about the previous 17 years she lived there? She doesn’t know anyone but the sheriff  from that time?

The book ended when what I thought of as a side character finally made a decision about a relationship. It felt very secondary to the plot and like a random place to end the book. It’s not a cliffhanger exactly, more like just a place to break one continuous story, which is what I sense this series is.

It’s not wholly without attractions. The idea of a magical island is an interesting one. The characters, though shallowly written, were engaging. There was some occasional humor. Maybe this is just a matter of taste. If you like schmaltzy books with a sort of (I think unintentional) innocence to them (like a virgin trying to talk dirty) this could be right up your alley.

Alpha KnowsBest:
To repeat, things I found to be true about all three books I read: simplistic writing, stilted dialogue, names used too frequently to be natural, frequent drastic and disruptive shifts in POV (I don’t think the author actually payed any attention to POV consistency), schmaltziness, cheesy language used during sex scenes, and men tend toward action while girls primarily agonize over love/sex. Lastly, none of the books stand on their own. They are closer to long serial installments than books in a series.

My opinion of Melinda did not improve in this book. She just keeps getting weaker and weaker in my mind. She’s had a mental breakdown, been a recluse for four years, trips and falls repeatedly (caught by man, of course), can’t decide on her love, lets one man’s mild possible criticism and poor sex destroy her sense of self-esteem and can’t have sex without felling ashamed and guilty. She’s just broken in a way her brothers aren’t, despite similar circumstances. She is a cliched romance heroine.

Here, in this book, we got much more of a sex scene than the last one and the use of descriptors like, “lusty flesh”(hers) and “lusty throb” (his) to describe genitalia just cheesed me out. Plus the lack of condoms was distracting. I’m not usually someone who insists on condom usage. Fantasy is fantasy, but here I kept getting distracted by, “Doesn’t anyone worry about getting pregnant?”

Plus, we have the establishment of a love triangle. Why? Isn’t it bad enough that the female character is too wrapped up in her own head and thoughts of sex to be concerned with the safety of her brother? Do we have to make her incapable of deciding on a man too? Do we have to add the unnecessary angst of a triangle too?

Then there are the brothers. One is extraneous to the plot, never really doing much of anything and the other seems to be an idiot. The villain is so obvious it felt like the characters had to be being purposefully obtuse not to see it.

Like in the first book though, it manages to skirt by without ever falling into truly bad territory, annoying and trite, but not all out bad. I think there are those who like this sort of writing and story-line and I did really appreciate that Charlie was into full-figured women and it wasn’t made out to be anything special.

Bye Bye Bloodsucker
Things I found to be true about all three books I read: simplistic writing, stilted dialogue, names used too frequently to be natural, frequent drastic and disruptive shifts in POV (I don’t think the author actually payed any attention to POV consistency), schmaltziness, cheesy language used during sex scenes, and men tend toward action while girls primarily agonize over love/sex. Lastly, none of the books stand on their own. They are closer to long serial installments than books in a series.

I’ve said in the review of each book in this series I read that the language around sex was cheesy. I never knew so very many things could be described as lusty—‘lusty breaths,”lust steps,’ ‘flesh,’ ‘throb,’ ‘fire,’ ‘pants,’ ‘shiver,’ ‘sting.’ I could go on. It’s used a lot. But Bye Bye Bloodsucker also included what I’m convinced is the worst line (in a long line of lines involving too many occurrences of peaches, peaks and fuzzy) I’ve ever read in a sex scene.

He groaned, the limp worm swimming in her hot peach, tickling her insides with sudden girth.

On man, that is SO bad. Not just because it’s CHEESY, like disturbingly so, but also because when read in context, I’m pretty sure the POV shifts within that one sentence.  Most the scenes seemed to be of the same sort of tone. I read it to my husband and he just stared at me until the moment stretched so long and we both burst out laughing.

While with the previous two books I was kind of so-so, but never really put off, this one never made the grade for me. I was just reading it to have finished the box set. It even ended on a twist you can see coming from the first chapter. It stayed with the women are klutzy, trouble magnets with little intelligence theme (the mermaids were the worst). There was too much happening and not enough tension allowed to build, such that I never really cared and again, the book ended with most the threads still open. We were just basically given the same happy ending as we’d been given at the conclusion of book one.

Edit: Ha, I have to laugh. I couldn’t decide which cover to use for these books when I posted this review. I happened to be scrolling through my review page on Amazon, just now, and noted they have new covers AGAIN. So, I did a quick Google search. Is this a new things, changing up covers frequently to catch peoples eye or something? I bet I’d find more if I really went searching. 

Authors, obviously this is just my opinion, but as a reader who recognizes book mostly by the cover, this constant change up is really annoying. It means, if it’s eye-catching, which I understand you want it to be. But I end up checking it out over and over, only to discover it’s something I already have/read. And you know what that is? As I said, really, REALLY annoying and a waste of my time. It means I’m likely to avoid putting myself in the same position in the future, by not bothering with your books in the first place. That’s just me, but it’s something to think about. 

Edit #2: Look, they all have new covers AGAIN. I just happened across it, this morning. I wonder how many I’ve missed. 

Edit #3: Look, they have a whole new set of covers again, again, again, again… 

Book Review of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs

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Miss Peregrine's I borrowed a copy of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (by Ransom Riggs) from my local library.

Description from Goodreads:
A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. A strange collection of curious photographs.

A horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. As Jacob explores its abandoned bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that the children were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They may have been quarantined on a deserted island for good reason. And somehow—impossible though it seems—they may still be alive.

Review:
This book has been on my TBR list for a long time, so I’m thrilled to have finally read it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t wholly thrilled with the book itself. I liked it, but that’s about it. I thought it started off really well with its introduction to the self-absorbed, wealthy Jacob, his ‘other side of the tracks’ best friend and eccentric grandfather but kind of just petered out to unexceptional by the end of the book.

The romantic element seemed to come out of nowhere and felt awkward and unsupported. All but one character from the beginning of the book is abandoned and never seen again. Defeating the immediate foe felt almost accidental and, of course, since it’s a first in a series, it was essentially meaningless to the bigger picture.

I did like some of the characters and occasionally a passage would really strike me as well written, but only occasionally. For the most part it felt a little choppy, like each scene didn’t quite fit together as a smooth flowing whole. I’m happy to have read it, but I’m not rushing out for the sequel.

Review Request Novellas

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You know, for someone who says they don’t tend toward reading short stories I sure read a lot of them. This year especially, since I’ve set myself a goal of clearing them off my shelves.

I’ve been clustering them into individual posts, mostly by page lengths but occasionally other themes like duologies or shorts I’ve received as review requests. That’s what this post is. ‘Books’ fewer than 100 pages (most of which are technically novellas, but I still call them short stories in my head) that have come to me from authors with a request for review.

review request novellas

I won’t lie, none of these really grabbed my attention before reading them. I mean, three are children’s stories, one is a third in a series and one is ‘spiritual,’ which I suspected meant religious (a no-go in my reading preferences). So, they started with a little bit of a challenge. But I promised to give them a fair chance at impressing me, judging them on quality not necessarily my own enjoyment.

This turned out to be harder than I expected. Perhaps it’s just coincidence, but I seemed to encounter more problems than normal among this particular selections of texts—everything from poor editing to incomplete files—so much so that at one point I considered scrapping the whole post. Unfortunately, I’m not the sort who likes to give up on something once started.

Nadia’s Heart (Evergreen Series), by Wendy Altshuler: I’m afraid I gave up on this at 37%. And while I wouldn’t normally include a DNF here on the blog, I am now since it was part of a preselected cluster. I had numerous problems with this, but the most important of which was that things happened out of the blue with no explanation and I was simply lost for the vast majority of the time I was reading.

Secondarily, I never felt I connected with Nadia or anyone else. While I’m not someone who holds that the show-don’t-tell dictum is a universal, this story is almost wholly tell and I think this was to its detriment. Tell is difficult to engage a character through and that just exacerbated the fact that the reader doesn’t get to know Nadia before she goes on her trek. The story starts with an info-dump about her. We learn she’s 12, she’s inquisitive, she’s a tomboy, she thinks she has no heart, and she lives with an old man and old woman. We learn about her, but we don’t get to know her. All of which makes it hard to care about the mysterious journey she goes on.

In the course of that mysterious mission, I often didn’t know who people were, characters reacted to events we weren’t told happened, groups of people were so poorly differentiated that I didn’t immediately recognize that there were two, let alone which was doing what, and shadow characters were presented and disappear without explanation.

None of this is helped by the total dearth of world-building. It’s so scarce that I couldn’t even decide on what type of world it was. Modern, Steam, Victorian, Medieval, something new?  I was also utterly baffled by the anachronisms, both in language and in the world itself. They knew about electricity, detailed human anatomy and astronomy to a degree that would require fairly modern technology but didn’t have running water. I sensed that this was all a case of simply not having been considered.

Mechanically the writing is fine, but structurally the story is a mess.

Come Along With Me (Gracie series #1), by Linda Lee Schell: I was sent this book for review…or I thought I was. Turns out I was sent the first chapter. Based on that I’d give this a two out of five stars. The problem I see is that it doesn’t seem to know what age range it wants to aim for. It says it’s or 8-12 year olds, but I have an 8yo and she would struggle with some of the language of the book and be disturbed by some of the events. But anyone older would likely be put off by how fluffy it is.

Soul Exchange, by Laura Haynes: Perhaps I have an old, uncorrected copy (though nothing identifies it as such) but the best I can say for this is that it’s an interesting idea that needs quite a lot more development and editing before it’s ready for publication and consumption by the public.

The Silent Years: Mother, by Jennifer R. Povey: This was a really good character-driven zombie apocalypse story…or at least zombie-like. Dorothy is a bit of a Scarlet O’Hara, eminently dislikable but with a strength and fortitude that you just have to appreciate. You may not like her, may not even want to know her, but when the shit hits the fan you want her on your side. Not because she’s some tough as nails bad-ass bitch, which is the way so many authors think they have to write a woman to make her “strong.” No, it’s because she’s practical to a fault, practical to the point of survival, despite herself. And it seems to me that in the face of the end of the civilized world, this is what we’ll need. Also, to be fair, a lot of what makes her so dislikable she does grow out of by the end of the book. All-in-all, a full on success, I’ll be looking for more of Povey’s writing.

The Clockwork Mechanical, by Peter R. Stone: Fairly simplistic, but passable as it is intended for elementary aged children. I’d have been more pleased with it if the gendered characterization of the characters wasn’t so painfully clichéd, the girl especially. I’d intended to pass this to my kids when I finished, but I’d rather they not have to read the reinforcement that girls are silly, unintelligent, distractible, talk too much, and need constant rescue from disasters of their own making. The larger cultural script this plays into is of course, “See boys, this is what happens when you let silly little women have too much independence. Thy just can’t help themselves and it falls to you to rescue them in the end. Best to just keep them under thumb from the beginning.” Ugh, we can do so much better. The boy of course, is honorable, smart beyond his years, heroic and brave.

Not Just a Friend (Toronto), by Laura Jardine: This was a cute little contemporary romance. I liked Liam. He was a refreshingly non-alpha-A-hole hero. I appreciated that Maya was allowed a sex life without being painted as a slut. But I also thought the story was repetitive, her bad dates were over-played and the whole thing seemed to go on longer than necessary.