Review: Let It Bleed (WVMP Radio, #3.5) by Jeri Smith-Ready

Let it Bleed by Jeri Smith-Ready

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a really fun novella and a significant piece of the WVMP puzzle, so if you're a fan of the series (and you should be!) make your way to the author's website and download the story, at very least before you read the 4th book in November 2012. It's free, so there's no reason not to do it. This is a big transition story, it's the one where Ciara deals with her new situation. And her friends deal with it too. Some well, some not so well. Plus they're all dealing with their normal levels of craziness too. Again, some well, some not so well. And some of the not so well hits the fan. And as usual, Ciara gets to help clean it up. It's a great story. Plus Dexter the vampire dog is in a lot. I love that dog.



View all my reviews

Read more...

Review: Nightshifted by Cassie Alexander

Nightshifted by Cassie Alexander

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


3.5 stars. Overall I liked this one, but it was a bit mixed for me. I liked the generally dark but not too dark tone. The darkness and dirtiness of the County hospital and the city came across well, as did these not so savory vampires. And it started off with a bang by going right into the story with Edie having to search for the girl, Anna. But it also felt kind of abrupt in the first section of the book too. There was a lot happening at all at once. And then Edie had a one night stand, which I didn't mind, it seemed to underscore her loneliness (and she did end up seeing the guy again anyway, sort of). But she invited the guy home before she even kissed him, what if he was no good? And more importantly, no condom, she's a nurse?! It became a point in the story when she got tested for STDs, but I didn't get the point of that at all, it wasn't done in a preachy-use-condoms way, it just felt weird. And all of this went on right near the beginning of the book, before we really got a handle on the characters or situation, it was just a bit odd.

Sometimes I found the amount of detail to be overwhelming, there were so many characters, details about the supernatural world, situations at work, and problems in Edie's life. But some of it was really charming, like the German ghost grandfather of one of her patients who talks through the old CD player that she basically adopted, it brought little moments of both levity and sweetness and depth as well.

I also really liked the situation with Edie's brother, Jake. In so many books I pull my hair out wondering why the silly heroines don't just walk away from the dangerous situations, they're just too brave to seem real. But Edie has a good reason to be in this mess, she's doing it for her addict brother, who the Shadows are helping in exchange for her working on the Y4 floor of the hospital where the supernatural people/creatures go.

I really liked the nursing aspects of the book. It reminded me of Diana Rowland's Kara Gillian and White Trash Zombie books only in that you can really tell that Rowland has been a cop, detective, and morgue assistant; there's a big difference between really knowing what you're writing about and in doing research about it, and it really showed here. The nursing and medical information wasn't heavy handed or overwhelming, it was just interesting and well layered throughout the book, giving everything a level of realism that added a lot to the fantasy story.

I think the one thing that really bugged me was that there was no explanation (that I saw, did I miss it?) for why Yuri was looking for Anna for so many years and couldn't find her, but Edie got some mysterious ghost message when she was in his apartment and was able to find her in minutes. It's pretty much the foundation for the whole book and it's a major unexplained coincidence, the kind of thing that just annoys the heck out of me. The rest of it's a pretty good start of a first time author. A bit overly complicated. Not a perfect romance, but OK. A strong heroine, if not perfect. But that just bugs me. But the intro for the next book was really good, and I'm definitely looking forward to trying it, and hoping that it's an even stronger book than this one was.



View all my reviews

Read more...

Library Loot: April 4-10

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries! 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -


Library Loot was the first internet meme that I participated in two years ago when I first started this blog and I'm very happy to resume the tradition now that I'm blogging again. Unlike a lot of book bloggers, In My Mailbox isn't a meme that applies to me very often, I don't get to buy books more than a few times a year and I don't get ARCs mailed to me from publishers (although I did just start getting some online from NetGalley). But I'm very lucky to have one of the best library systems in the nation at my disposal. There are 37 library systems across 10 counties in our library consortium, so it's very rare that a book that I want isn't available somewhere in the system. I reserve the books that I find out about on Goodreads, Twitter and from bloggers, and they just show up, it's like getting free gifts every week. When I saw this comic on Marg's blog I had to copy it too, I'm sure everyone is: 

OK, on to the loot! I only got 4 books this week, which is good because my shelf is still overflowing with new releases, several from an author I fell in love with recently (Sarah Zettel), a few mysteries and miscellaneous other books. Today I got:

A highly anticipated third (last) book in a series. The kid in this book is so hard to resist, the author really makes your heart break for the kid. Will he have a happy ending, despite all of the agony he's going through? I'll find out soon.

The newest book by Christoper Moore, bound to be entertaining. And bound to have a long list of people who've reserved it, so I have to get it back on time, no renewing it possible.

Another new release and third book in a series. I like but don't love this one. It's a mix of romance and urban fantasy and the mix doesn't always work well for me. I like the UF better than the romance. But it's fun.

I found out about this one from @BookaliciousPam. She wrote a column in her new blog bookalicious.org about an article in the the New York Times about Arizona removing books from the high school curriculum because they can be seen as anti-white. The article mentioned that Matt de la Peña gave up his speaking fee to buy 240 copies of his novel Mexican Whiteboy for the students of a school he visited. That made Pam really want to read his book and encourage others to do so as well, so she sponsored a reading-along on the blog. If you have a moment, please read Pam's blog and the NYT article, and consider reading the book with us as well.

So that's my haul for the week. As usual, it's an embarrassment of riches. I just love having the terribly difficult problem of deciding which terrific book to read first, don't you?

Read more...

Timing, reading and writing

Have you ever noticed that some books take longer to read than others? Sometimes I just blaze through a book in six to eight hours or two long reading sessions, and other books that are the same length take several days instead. And usually I can't tell any major obvious difference between them. The ones that go quickly tend to be more humorous, an urban fantasy book with a lot of banter perhaps. But not always. It certainly isn't a reflection of the quality of writing, some of my very favorite writers fall into the category just mentioned, skilled beyond my ability to describe, so the fact that I blaze through their books is both fun and frustrating because the joy is over way to quickly. Of course sometimes the shortness of the reading experience it is a reflection of one of my big pet peeves, when publishers these days sell a book with huge margins, blank pages between chapters and double spaced text, so a hardback book sold for full price is really the length of a novella, but that's an obvious problem. Does anyone have any ideas about this? What makes a book read quickly or slowly for you?

And how come some reviews are so easy to write, and others are such bears? Again, this isn't in any way a reflection on the quality of the book either, in fact sometimes it's the opposite. Sometimes the easiest reviews to write are the ones where the flaws in the book just jump out at me. Unfortunately, the ideas for the review seems to flow more easily that way. But when I've loved a book the ideas tend to be so much more complex and layered. There is so much that I want to say and I can never say it the way I want to, so I wrestle with the review and it never turns out quite the way I want it to. It can take hours to labor over these reviews, but it's still some of the most satisfying and rewarding time that I spend these days. I don't really enjoy pointing out the bad stuff in the books I read. I do it because I think I should; as a reviewer I think my friends and people who read my reviews are looking for honesty from me, so I try to tell it like I see it. I really try not to be mean, just as honest as possible. But I do really enjoy sharing the good stuff, especially when it's an author that I've been following for a long time, or a new author who's just starting out. It's a chance to express myself and my thoughts on the book, to support their careers a little bit, and to maybe turn a friend onto a super cool book that they might not have read otherwise. And the Internet and blogging gives me a chance to get feedback and to find out if I'm having a little bit of an impact, which is really rewarding. When a friend on Twitter says that she's going to read a book because I recommended it, it's just a really satisfying feeling. Or when I get an email that says that someone has "liked" one of my Goodreads reviews. Or when I see that I'm starting to get hits on this blog for my reviews. So thank you, everyone, for your support. And I'd love to see any comments you have about what makes reviews easy or hard for you to write, or what you think makes books read quickly or go really slowly.

Read more...

Review: Fool's War by Sarah Zettel

Fool's War by Sarah Zettel

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I really loved this book. I found it because the SciFi and Fantasy Book Club read When Gravity Fails and one of the discussions that came from it was a search for other science fiction books featurning Muslim and Arab characters. I really enjoy books with international or intercultural storylines and the descriptions of this one really caught my attention. A female Muslim captain certainly seemed like a different perspective that would be pretty fascinating if done well, it sure isn't something you see a lot of in fiction or non-fiction! And done well it was, I was really pleased with almost every aspect of this book.

The cultural aspects were quite interesting. Katmer Al Shei, the chief engineer and part owner of the Pasadena, basically the captain, is a very devout Muslim. She and her cousin, Resit, the ship's lawyer, wear kijabs (what we call hijabs, the head coverings many observant Muslim women wear), although Al Shai covers her mouth and Resit does not because she says that no one would trust a lawyer who doesn't show her face. The women are both very observant, attending prayers several times each day and following as many rules of their faith as possible while traveling in space. In addition, it was interesting to see the author's vision of how Muslims might be perceived in the future. In this version of the future there was a castastrophic event called the Slow Burn 300 years ago that the Muslims were blamed for. They scattered across the setteled space, along with other cultural and religious groups, but there is still a lot of negative feeling toward them. It's pretting upsetting that a book written in 1997 was already so prescient about so many people's inability to forgive and forget. But I have to say that it felt realistic, it wasn't written in dramatic way, or like it was trying to illustrate a lesson in any way other than in a way that good literature does. It just felt like a natureal part of the landscape as it was presented, a piece of the bigger puzzle.

Other than the Muslim religion, there wasn't a lot of other traditional Earth culture presented, but there were several other interesting cultures that were central to the story. The most interesting was the Fools. This was such a neat idea right from the start. People who are traveling around in tiny ships for months to years at a time are under a tremendous amount of stress, so they need pressure valves, entertainers, confidants, clowns - Fools. And of course these Fools have to be untouchable or the people who do will get blackballed, how else can the Fools have the freedom to do their jobs properly?

Other than the Fools there was also the Freers, people who think that true freedom can only come from humans living in space and building environments to suit their growing needs. If they had it there way human would never touch another planet again. They also think that AIs are born when they capture the souls of dying humans and do everything they can to fostor that happening, even though to this point no one has ever figured out what has caused an AI to become independent.

I found this book to be completely engaging from beginning to end. By the middle it got really tense and exciting, with a big twist that really surprised me and changed things around completely. But what made it work most of all was the characters. I can see why some of the reviews I saw compared it to Star Trek, both because of the multicultural cast and the well-rounded story, but it also has quite a bit of Firefly as well. These guys are more on the up-and-up (although Al Shei's partner certainy isn't!) but they're independent operators trying to make it in a system that isn't always so friendly.

All right, I can't say too much more without giving anything away. Read it, it's just a great novel all around, smart and entertaining.



View all my reviews

Read more...

Review: The Mortal Bone by Marjorie M. Liu

The Mortal Bone by Marjorie M. Liu

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I love the series. I might be a bit hesitant about all of the different pieces of Maxine's heritage that we keep finding out about, it's getting to seem a bit much. In addition to the major story about "the boys," and Maxine and her mother's line being their prison for over one thousand years, she also has some scary dark power inside her (a god?), Jack is her grandpa, and now there's this stuff with her dad. The stuff with her dad in this book is really interesting and it does explain a lot going right back to the beginning of the series with the labyrinth and the armor, it's fun to look back and see how the pieces fall into place. So far Liu does seem to be pulling it together in a way that makes sense and feels logical and very much planned and not like one of those authors that gets so caught up in having cool monsters and demons and gods and stuff that she just throws everything into the book whether it serves the story or not. Liu has always been thoughtful and masterful in her storytelling, so I'm going to trust that she's taking me somewhere terrific and just go with it.



View all my reviews

Read more...

Linking Goodreads Reviews

Well it looks like I'm going to have to start linking my Goodreads reviews. I didn't realize that NetGalley lets you download their ARCs to your nook (or kindle, iPhone, etc.), and that they have ARCs from great authors like Stacia Kane, and publishers like Angry Robots, and now I really want to work with them! So I'm going to start linking all of my reviews to my blog so they can see that I read and publish a lot, and do have quite a few followers. Plus I read and reviewed 231 books last year, that's probably quite a few more than most reviewers and bloggers. Most of my friends usually see my reviews either directly from Goodreads or by following a link from Twitter, so I haven't really focused on the blog too much, but I have had some ideas for posts that I haven't pursued as well, so maybe it's a good time to do that as well. In fact, I had something that I wanted to say yesterday that I wrote on Tumblr because it was easier to do it on the iphone, so I'll try to figure out what the mobile updates option for the blog is that I saw suggested when I signed in and then keep everything centralized through this location from now on. Thanks for the inspiration, NetGalley!

Read more...

Why I Got a Nook

One of the my rotten fibromyalgia symptoms is very sore hands. It's gotten so that holding a book is often very painful. I've tried various bookstands, but what worked best, much to my everlasting surprise, was reading ebooks on my iPhone. I tried it out of curisoity and got hooked! My favorite feature is being able to adjust the print font and size, a feature that I really miss  when reading print books now. Plus the instant gratification of being able to get the next book in a series immediately, at any hour of the day or night, is pretty addictive. I was shocked at how much I enjoyed reading on my iPhone and how much more comfortable it was for me. Except when I had a migraine or felt like one might be coming on. The backlighting did become a problem under those (all too frequent) circumstances.

This combination of circumstances made me start researching ebook readers. My primary goals were having easy-on-the-eyes e-Ink and supported formats that would give me the ability to borrow from my local library. I tried the Sony reader with the touch screen and really didn't like it. It was really clunky in both software and hardware. But worst of all, the reports I'd read about the glare off of the touch screen were totally correct. Since my main reason for wanting an e-Ink reader was to prevent causing migraines, this just wasn't acceptable. I was lucky enough to be able to return it without paying a restocking fee because the battery on the device was also defective.

Moving on and being unwilling to wait months for any then-hypothetical options (very much pre-CES), that pretty much left me with Kindle or Nook. Kindle would not let me read library books and would primarily limit me to their proprietary DRM, which really bothered me. Nook seemed like the best option. After checking it out online (the only way at the time) it seemed more and more likely to be terrific for me. And it turned out to also support the .pdb format of most of the books I'd purchased for the iPhone! Based on the best information available at the time and willing to risk a 10% restocking fee on non-defective returns, I pre-ordered the nook just in time for a deliver date of December 24.

After using the nook for several weeks now, I'm nothing but happy with my decision. It's comfortable to hold and intuitive to use. B&N had already released the first software update by the time mine arrived, so the initial complaints about slow page turns never bothered me. And I expect even more software updates in the future to add even better functionality and prehaps even some Android apps. So count me in as one satisfied nook customer.

Read more...

2010 Library Reading Challenge

I had been thinking about starting a blog for a while, but the opportunity to participate in reading challenges was the last straw. So here I go, off and running with my first challenge. Which actually might be a challenge, as I recently got a nook to help make reading easier with my bad hands and occasional migraines. I've always been a huge library user and supporter. I honestly would be insane without my books! I'm very lucky to live in an area with top-ranked libraries with inter-library loan access to another 14 library systems. I have a link to the internet request page on Firefox bookmarks bar and my Home screen on my iPhone and use them often. In fact, one of the main reasons I chose the nook is because I can continue to borrow from out libraries using their growing ebook collection.  Check out how I'm doing at Goodreads on my "challenge-library-borrowed-2010" shelf. Thank you to J. Kaye's Book Blog for organizing this challenge.

Read more...

I'm not a book blogger

Although this blog will probably end up having a lot to do with books and reading, it is not a book blog. I use Goodreads extensively. It started as a place to help me find books to read beyond just browsing the shelves at the library or bookstores. I'm lucky to live in a suburban city that has some of the top-rated libraries in the nation. Our little libraries are terrific for browsing, they have a really extensive collection. I read primarily science-fiction and fantasy and these collections are by no means less cared for and updated than more "mainstream" books. But there is still only so much that one library can hold. I read a lot, and sometimes it feels like I've already read everything of the shelves that really excites me. In addition, due to my health situation, going and browsing can be exhausting. Finally, I love a series and when I get one book, I usually immediately or soon after want the rest of the series. All of this leads to placing requests for books. An additional benefit our wonderful local libraries is that they are linked in a consortium of 31 library systems across 9 counties. This gives me access to more than ten million items. Very nearly any book I want will be delivered to my local branch, often within days, and held for me to pick up at my convenience. But there is one catch. I have to know what to ask for.


Which leads back to Goodreads. I started by browsing, and seeing which books people who'd read a book I liked also liked. Which lead to entering in all of the books I'd ever read into "shelves" on the site for easy access. I loved the idea of having a record of what I've read. As much as I love owning books and have many (many), most of my reading over my lifetime has been through the library or borrowing books from friends. It can be hard to remember which authors or series I want to follow, or to make recommendations to friends. And it's just plain satisfying to see it all of the information gathered in one place.

Then as I began to enter new books as I was reading them, I was getting better and better recommendations popping up and a long to-read list was forming. Yay! I get anxious when I don't have a pile of books waiting to be read. What if I'm in sick for a while, or it snows, or the world is ending, what would I do without a stack of books? I'd go insane! My to-read list is a great comfort to me, it helps prepare me for the worst disasters imaginable.


When I started with Goodreads I had no intention of writing reviews. I thought of that as something for the pros or for people who were so interested that they make book blogging a major part of their lives. I was wrong (not for the first time). I really enjoyed seeing the reviews of books I was contemplating reading, all written by regular people, users of the site. It gave an insight into the books that was very personal and fresh, just the kind of info I wanted. And if I liked reading what they had to write, maybe they'd like reading my thoughts as well. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of reporting on my opinions of the books I was reading. It's satisfying. It's fun. Sometimes it starts a conversation. And it might encourage other people to read books and authors that I thought were great.


So voilà, I was a book reviewer. I also ended up using Goodreads for groups discussions of books by genre or topic, making friends, entering contests, etc. But finding, reading and reviewing books is the heart of the site for me. Therefore, why would I need to post reviews to another site? I like Goodreads centralized reviews, being able to quickly scroll down a number of reviews about a book I'm interested in. Although I enjoy reading reviews posted by friends on their own sites, I don't necessarily want to spend hours a day browsing through hundreds of sites to find the books I'm interested in. I also don't have the energy or interest in writing full-out book reviews with proper structure or content. I like just making comments on what interested me. Finally, although I like the idea of getting free books, I don't want to have to read a book that isn't on my already extensive to-read list and I want the freedom to read in whatever order I like. If I start a series and want to keep reading the rest of it, I don't want to feel pressure to stop and read the advanced copies a publisher gave me in order to get info about those books out there before its release. So book blogging isn't for me. But talking about books on this blog, that's a guarantee.

Read more...

A blog? Who'd a thunk it?

No one is more surprised than I to find out that I’m now a blogger. It’s amazing what loving to read has gotten me into. First Goodreads, then Twitter, now blogging! The Internet is an amazing tool for making connections. I started this blog because I wanted to participate in a readathon. I needed a place to make reports where other participants could also make comments. Then I wanted to participate in a few reading challenges. And one thing just lead to another... And now I'm a blogger!

Read more...