Get ready for a 3-pack of Ilona Andrews reviews, folks! #81 Magic Bites by Ilona Andrews Okay, finally made it back to the beginning of the series, and it’s great. Kate meets Curran the Beast Lord, and all the right sparks fly. Kate also meets Derek before his “christening by fire” later in the series, and he is a young smart-alecky teenaged werewolf with a quick wit, sharp insights and an appealing personality. Kate is still a mercenary and a loner, who nonetheless builds the […]
Curtsies, corsets, tea parties and spies
Sophronia Temminnick is not all a proper young lady should be. She’d much rather be climbing trees, spying on conversations in the dumb-waiter and dismantle machinery than converse politely over tea. So her mother sends her off to boarding school, more specifically Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality. Sophronia makes new friends on her way there. Miss Dimity Plumleigh-Teignmott and her brother Pillover are both being sent away to school (Pillover is to go to a boy’s academy, naturally) and discover that […]
Photographing Fairies by Steve Szilagyi
The only reason I rated this two stars instead of one is that the author had the courtesy to kill off the obnoxious main character in the end. Set in 1920s London, Photographing Fairies opens with photographer Charles Castle, locked in a jail cell on the night before his execution. He starts telling his story, which involves fairies, a murder, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Should have been a winner, but it really fell short due to a crappy writer and, like I said, a main character […]
Written in My Own Heart’s Blood by Diana Gabaldon
Fair warning, this is the eighth book in a series. Please don’t read this review if you want to spoil anything. Instead, leave your computer right now and get caught up in the Outlander series. “…but Sassenach—I am the true home of your heart, and I know that.” So, Written in My Own Heart’s Blood picks up exactly where the last book ended. Jamie’s not dead, William has just found out that he is Jamie’s bastard son, and the American Revolution is in full swing. In […]
A Dance with Dullness
Wow. And I thought A Clash of Kings was rough going. This… was a slog. (Warning: there will be spoilers for books 1-4, or roughly seasons 1-4 of the show, but none for this particular book.) I could write, here, a plot summary, itself a thousand pages long, of how we ended up here and some of the precise things that happened in A Dance with Dragons, but when I really sit back to think, “What happened?” in this book, I am frankly not sure. […]
Welcome to the next installment of WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST READ. Pull up a chair, and have a seat.
So before we get to the explication of weirdness, a couple of things of note that might lend context to this review: 1. With the exception of 2013, I’ve read one of these books a year. I can’t handle more than one in a 365 day period. I think I skipped last year because I ran out of time and also I didn’t care. 2. I spent all of last weekend finally watching season one of Legend of the Seeker, the TV show made by Rob […]