Category Archives: Challenges

Blood Moons

Book Review of Blood Moons (The Blood Series #1), by Alianne Donnelly

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Blood MoonsI picked up a copy of Blood Moons, by Alianne Donnelly, from Amazon when it was free. I read it as the first in my Blood Moon Reading Challenge.

Description from Goodreads:
They say no good deed ever goes unpunished, a sentiment Dara understands fully now that she is paying for a crime she didn’t commit. It was stupid to call in a murder she didn’t really see. But how could Dara have kept silent? Now a stunning—scratch that, a dangerous—man with a frightening secret of his own is telling her he can help. Yeah, right. A telepath knows better than to trust mere words. 

The last decade of Tristan’s life has been penance. All that time spent among the worst dregs of society might have made him begin to question his humanity, but he’s never felt so much like an animal as he does around this timid, delicate female. Her very presence stirs the beast within him; Tristan can feel it growing stronger every day. Any more time with Dara, and it might overpower him completely. But without her, he stands no chance at all…

Review:
I had problems with this book. It wasn’t the writing. That was fine. It wasn’t the idea behind the plot. That was fine. It wasn’t the dialogue. That too was fine. It was the fact that the first third is basically just ‘let’s protect the fragile heroine from being raped in this unbelievably vile, but oddly sterile prison with a gender ration of 4 women to 200 evil, evil men that the reader never sees or feels the threat of’ and the last two-thirds rambles on and on forever. This book needed an editor. Not for typos and grammar mistakes, I never noticed any, but for someone to tell the author to cut a third of the length and tighten the plot a lot.

I also thought the characters, Dara especially, were very shallow and did things that were not only too stupid to believe, but often out of character. Like volunteering for maximum security prison with the most violent offenders (because you usually get to choose your level, apparently) despite being innocent and as fragile as glass or leaving the person you are so protective of that you literally guard her from passer-bys on the street alone when there have been legitimate threats against her.

Close, but no cigar for me.

Blood Moon challenge

Blood Moon(s) Reading Challenge

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You know I often stumble into little self-imposed reading challenges. The habit started a couple years ago, when I discovered I had a number of books with the same title. Since then, done it again, read all my books with Omega in the title, and I’m currently slowly reading all the alphas.  I even did one where I had several books using the same stock photo on the cover and another where I just read books by people I’d met online. Sometimes it’s the little things that keep me amused. Plus, I have so many books, it’s often a relief to find some way to ease the what-to-read question.

Well, I started reading Blood Moons, last night. Then, as I had everything ordered roughly alphabetically, I noticed I had six books with almost identical titles. There is some variation, a plural moon or Blood Moon being in the series title versus a book title, but it’s enough. ‘Imma read em,’ I thought, and thus was born the Blood Moon Challenge.

Blood Moon challenge

Part of what makes a challenge a challenge for me, is  the intentionality of it. Declaring what I intend to do, so that I can accomplish it. You know, kind of like making a to-do list so that you can mark each item off. So, that’s what this first post is, my I-plan-to post. And I plan to read six books with Blood Moon(s) on the cover (that way I’m including both titles and series).

Here is a list of the books (most were free at the time of posting):

*Edit: There were initially 7 titles. But I found that, though I had one more marked as owned, I couldn’t actually find it. So, I removed it, leaving 6 for the challenge.

alpha reading challenge

Alpha review challenge

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Sooooo, I recently completed a mini challenge based on Omegas. I basically searched out all the books I had with Omega in the title and read them over a weekend. It was a random idea that I ran with.

Well, here’s another one. Alphas. They’re a pair, Alpha and Omega, especially in shifter books, which is most of what I read in the Omega challenge. By the end of the challenge I was pretty firmly convinced that apparently Omegas are only allowed to mate with Alphas. It’s ridiculous, obviously, but seemed to be the theme of the day for the books I had my hands on.

So, here I am, having read all my Omega books……..but I have all these Alpha books too…and they’re so often paired…and now the Alphas feel abandoned on my To-Be-Read shelf…

Alpha Challenge

What’s an obsessive reader to do? Well, read them of course. But I think this challenge is going to be over a longer period of time, between other books and editing (lots and lots of editing of my own work). I bought them all (free probably) because they interested me at the time, but none of them light me on fire right now, just the idea of clustering them. (I know, I’m weird like that.) So, I’m going to take it slow.

A couple notes though: That last one is a bundle, so it’ll include three books. Though I don’t think any of them are overly long. Alpha Knows Best is a sequel that, as I understand it, doesn’t stand alone, so I’ll need to read book one. I dropped one book from the search results for being the first in a rather long series. It was the series name, not the title, that included the word Alpha anyway, and I can count at least a further ten Alpha books I’ve already read; quite a lot of Patricia Briggs, for example.

It’ll be interesting to see how (if at all) the books differ when the focus is on the ‘strong’ half of the pairing rather than the ‘weaker.’ Which is, of course, already utilizing and expecting some of the same stereotypical Alpha/Omega mythology—that the Alpha is the strong leader and the Omega is the weakest member of the pack. This obviously isn’t a universal to shifter novels and I’m REALLY hoping to find a little variation here.

If You’d like further information on any of the books, here are some links.

Alpha’s Baby
Alpha Girl
Alpha’s Surprise Baby
Alpha Moon (possibly followed by Silver Moon)
Alpha Mine
Wolf Creek Alpha
Trust: Running With Alphas
The Alpha Meets his Match
Malcom (Alpha, #1)
Alpha Knows Best (preceded by Demon Street Blues)
Sizzling Hot Alpha Male Paranormal Romance Box Set

So, that’s a fairly hefty list to read, between 11 and 14 books depending on if I include any of the sequels some of them have and I happen to already own (and that’s pending no new ones pop up). That aught to keep me occupied for a while. Yeah?