Sea Lord by Virginia Kantra (Children of the Sea, Book 3)
Conn ap Llyr is the prince of the Selkies, children of the sea with supernatural powers. Conn’s people are dying. They have not had children in a long time, and they are under attack from the children of fire, demons that come from under the earth, who are surreptitiously trying to destroy their civilisation. Conn believes that the key to saving them lies in a prophecy that claims that the daughter of one of their witches Atargatis would have enough power to defeat the demons and bring their civilisation back from the brink of extinction.
Lucy Hunter is the daughter of the selkie Atargatis and a human. Her father fell in love with her mother and took away her pelt, without which she is unable to transform and return to the sea in her selkie form (that of a seal). They had three children, of which Lucy was the youngest, until one day she found her pelt and returned to the sea with Lucy’s middle brother, Dylan (see Sea Fever, the book before this one). Lucy is afraid of the water, but at the same time cannot be too far away from it without knowing why. She was raised by her eldest brother, Caleb (see Sea Witch, the first book in this series), and neither of them knew of their mother’s heritage.
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Lover Avenged by J. R. Ward (Black Dagger Brotherhood, Book 7)
Rants
1. Does the amount of hip-hop lingo use correspond to the amount of increased emotionality expressed by romantic profusions that make these alpha males sound like chicks? ‘Cause the thuggier they got the more effusive they were.
2. It felt a little cluttered. Like a messy desk where you kind of knew where everything was but in some cases you still had to stick your hand in and wade about in the murkiness. Perhaps better organisation/editing was called for.
3. Too many side stories. While they all meant something, they kind of detracted from the point of the story. Whether it’s an urban fantasy or a romance, there’s usually a main storyline, as is the case with every book. Trying to run several plotlines at the same time made everything look equal, even when they’re not. And if that was the intention, it detracted from the overall clarity and flow of the story.
4. Two words: Golden Retriever.
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Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri is a Pulitzer prize-winning British-American novelist of Bengali (Indian) descent whom I discovered one day when, while wandering through Borders, I picked up The Namesake and started reading the first paragraph. I was immediately hooked and had to buy it. I think it took me a day at the most to finish it, and it has since been made into a movie (that I haven’t seen).
Lahiri writes books few and far between. While The Namesake was written in 2004, Unaccustomed Earth came out last year and languished a bit on my TBR pile before I finally picked it up—and like her other books, I read it straight without putting it down. I’m not fond of reading books without happy endings, and Lahiri is probably one of the few exceptions. It’s not that the endings are depressing, it is just that they are more bittersweet, more real.
Most of the stories in Unaccustomed Earth have human relationships at their core. Lahiri does an excellent job of making the characters’ underlying emotions flow through the story. Universal themes of community, family, togetherness, and love pull you in, and you feel a sense of connection with the characters.
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Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
I was so excited to get this book, I made sure that my name was down for an order at the bookstore. When I went over yesterday I was so happy to find that I had a copy, because they had run out of copies for anyone who hadn’t ordered. I read the first paragraph and laughed and laughed—it was a promising beginning.
And then I got bored.
Let me say, first, that I have seen Pride and Prejudice on film in its many forms. I quite love the story, and I’ve seen the BBC miniseries—the last time possibly within the last year—the Bollywood version, and I own the Keira Knightley DVD and I watch that for feel-good fuzzies quite a bit. Like a lot of people, I know what’s going to happen. And therein lies the problem. I have seen so much of it, so many times, that while this is supposed to be a more original, fresh retelling, the essential elements are still the same. So knowing what was going to happen, even the lines that they were going to say, at some point, just bored
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Mysteria (Anthology)
This book contains four short stories set in the land of Mysteria by popular paranormal writers MaryJanice Davidson, Susan Grant, P. C. Cast, and Gena Showalter.
Mysteria is a small town in Colorado that was literally created by a very random act of kindness. It’s a haven for the supernatural, where anything and everything can come and live without fear, where “magic has coexisted with the mundane world”.
MaryJanice Davidson’s story, Alone Wolf, was my favorite. It’s about a lone werewolf who ends up in Mysteria, buys a house, and falls for the short, busty real estate agent. I like how it’s done mostly from the guy’s point of view, and how you can really hear him thinking. It was quite funny.
Susan Grant’s story, Mortal in Mysteria, is about the demon who created Mysteria by mistake, and how he ends up with a preacher proves that the devil has a sense of humor. The Witches of Mysteria and the Dead Who Love Them by Gena Showalter involves three witch sisters, mainly focusing on the middle one and how she’s been obsessed with this one man for most of her life
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Mr Impossible by Loretta Chase (Carsington Quartet, Book 2)
To start off, I will say this will be an incredibly biased review because this is one of my favourite books of all time, and Loretta Chase is one of my favourite authors ever.
The Characters
Rupert Carsington is a bit of a loveable disaster. Wherever he goes, trouble follows. He’s a bit of a bumbling idiot, but he is smarter than he appears to be, it’s just that he seems to find himself in one scrape or another no matter what he does. He’s the kind of man that would have anyone in the family throw their hands up in despair and look up at the heavens wondering why they were forced to have such a child, even if he’s so earnest, and by God, he really tries, so they love him anyway. However, as the fourth son of an earl who is pretty much tired of dealing with him, he’s been sent to Egypt to “assist the consul” in diplomatic matters so that he can prove himself useful. Somehow.
Daphne Pembroke is the widow of a rich (presumably fat) old man whom she married at 19 because he was a scholar and she wanted to explore her scholarly passions.
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My Favorite Earthling by Susan Grant (Otherworldly Men, Book 2)
Jared Jasper is from a very close knit California political family on Earth. In the previous book, Your Planet or Mine (which you don’t have to read to get what’s happening), he helped his sister Jana and her man Calvin of Far Star, from the Coalition, saving the earth from invasion.
The Coalition consists of a vast political entity that rules a whole lot of planets. They are peaceful, and they worship the goddess, who descends directly from a line of goddess/rulers, unbroken from the very beginning of their history. Their goddesses do not live above them, literally or figuratively, but instead live with the people and are symbols of benevolence and of what they have.
The Coalition is perpetually at war with the Drakken horde, an evil and equally vast political entity—think the Empire in Star Wars—that is basically a military dictatorship which outlaws religious worship and has a fondness for going around killing things.
Earth is a very small part of this universe—it barely registers a bleep, and it’s not advanced enough to keep up, but somehow it gets swept up in all of it,
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Dawnkeepers by Jessica Andersen (Final Prophecy, Book 2)
Once upon a time in Central America, an ancient people known as the Mayans ruled this part of the earth. They were a highly sophisticated civilisation, with a keen interest in astrology/astronomy and prophecy. The Mayans predicted that the world would end approximately December 21, 2012, and this is the central focus of the Final Prophecy series.
Dawnkeepers, the second book in the series, focuses on Nate Blackhawk and Alexis Gray, two descendants of the original Nightkeepers, or protectors of the barrier that is meant to stop evil from being unleashed on the world and ultimately destroying it on the prophesied date. Prior to the first book, where they were brought together, most of the Nightkeepers had no awareness of their true purpose in life. Dawnkeepers focuses not only on Nate and Alexis’s relationship, but on how the Nightkeepers begin coming into their own and how they grow stronger as a group.
This is part of what I liked about this series—the continuity is quite clear, they don’t suddenly develop all their superpowers overnight, and it’s not easy for them to defeat the baddies.
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Angel's Pawn (Guild Hunter, Companion Novella)
Nalini Singh is evil, evil, evil.
First, she writes a new series with a fresh spin on the whole angel thing that immediately sucks you into her world—there’s no warm and fuzzy touched by an angel huggy stuff here. In Angels’ Pawn, angels run different districts where they offer immortality in the form of vampirism in exchange for a century of service. Vampires that violate the conditions of their contract are hunted down by guild members like Ashwani, the heroine of the novel.
Ashwani has a love-hate relationship with Janvier, a 200-year old vampire she occasionally has to hunt only to find, mid-hunt, that he’s made up with whichever vampire he’s pissed off. Ashwani approaches Janvier for assistance as she investigates and eventually conducts a rescue for a kidnapped vampire. The action is tightly written and fits well within the bounds of the novella. Click here to read an excerpt.
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Sherrilyn Kenyon with Wandergurl at Galaxy Bookshop (24/2/09)
Tuesday was the Kenyon booksigning at Galaxy books, which I live tweeted. I was quite lucky that my shift ended at 4.30pm that day, so I didn’t end up there too late. When I got there, Sofia who organised it all for Galaxy and was at ARRC, hugged me and said, “Where have you been!?!” There was a line that reached the back of the store and sort of curled a little. I went to register at the front and found out that if we had actually gone by number, I would have been number 5. Kat would have been something like number 8 because I registered five of us together.
I didn’t go straight to the back of the line, but ended up chatting with Decadence and Lami, who had been there since 4pm and had already gotten stuff signed. I had a nice chat with Dianna Love, and I got her to sign Phantom In The Night, which I later forgot to get Sherrilyn to sign.
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