This review is for the auidobook versions of the Jack McClure series by Eric Van Lustbader. It’s also really long, I’m sorry. There are five books in the series, which begins with First Daughter. Jack McClure, an agent with the ATF, always felt like an outsider because of his dyslexia until he learned that it gave him the ability to see the world in a way most people don’t. He used this side effect to help him in investigations, which he saw as puzzles. […]
The reward of true service, surely, is to be asked for more.
At long last, we reach the end of the “Temeraire” series. Hot dang, it’s been 9 books… where would our heroes travel? how would they encounter Napoleon? would Laurence have complicated feelings about women in the military? would Temeraire rake his giant claws into the ground in distress over something? where would they settle down for retirement? all these questions had to be answered, and more! It’s no secret that I’ve adored this series, even though it became deeply repetitive and predictable. And in a surprising […]
Magic all around.
4, 224 pages. 3 years, 3 months. And we’re done. If you’ve read my last Harry Potter review, you know that I’ve been reading the series aloud to my daughter. I decided when she was born to wait to read them until she was 8, and then we’d read them together. We started them the summer after she turned 8. We finished last night. She’s 11. Today was her first day of middle school. It would be absolutely impossible to write a review that would […]
Something a bit familiar about this one…
It’s time for the post-vacation reviews. I read (almost) 4 books and the details are getting a bit hazy a few days after my return. This was the first of the week and the least memorable for me. Darrow lives on Mars as a Red, the lowest in the intergalactic caste system. He’s a young married miner, special amongst his people, but oppressed by the powers that be. A tragedy propels him out of his subterranean bubble and into the world of the upper castes, […]
Choose: A quick death or a slow poison…
Rating: 5/5 Summary: Yelena is about to executed for murder. In Ixia when you commit a crime, your punishment is essentially the crime itself, kind of like an eye for an eye. There are no excuses. When the guards come to retrieve her, she is taken to Valek’s office, the Commander’s assassin and spymaster. He gives her a choice: be executed now or serve as the Commander’s food taster. As the food taster, Yelena could be poisoned at any meal and die anyway. Yelena is […]
A few recent disappointments
Let me just start off by saying that I thought, even though I saw it was only Part 1 of the story, that Tough Justice: Exposed was going to be a complete novella, and in actuality, it really only read like a 80 or so page prologue. It was an introduction to the characters and conflicts, but very little else, and it suffered for it. More than once I made a note to myself that the author was either rushing things or telling us things instead […]