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Friday Funday-Lets Get Ready To READ All Weekend

Friday Funday means:  I'm taking the weekend off from reading books I agreed to review; I'm hiding out from the July heat with books I just want to read for me.  My plan is to read Help For the Haunted by John Searles and The Outlaw Demon Wails by Kim Harrison.

Help For the Haunted has been on my TBR list for a while and it just came through at the library so, Yay!  It looks so creepy I can't wait to get started.  It is the story of Sylvie Mason and what happens after her parents disappear...parents who helped 'haunted souls' find peace.  Brrr, I shivered when I read the blurb so I have high hopes for leaving the lights on all night with this one!!

I'm less sure about The Outlaw Demon Wails.  I've read a couple in this series and thought, 'meh' but I keep hearing from other readers about this entry.  It supposedly wraps up loose ends in the series and is much better than a few that came before it.   So maybe yes/maybe no, I will give it a try and see how it goes.  If nothing else it was free at the library!

Life will no doubt intrude but I'm hopeful I will get through at least most of them by Monday (ugh, only 2 days away!)

Have a wonderful weekend and read something, please!!

Throwback Thursday

In honor of Throwback Thursday, I 'threw' back to the best book ever written and did a re-read of To Kill A Mockingbird.  Now available as an eBook so there is NO EXCUSE for not reading it immediately!!  

I didn't read Mockingbird in high school, in fact it was just two years ago that I picked up my first copy. It blew my mind.   How was this book out there and I had never read it?  Now I find myself willing to take more chances with books, I'm more open to reading "the classics" and I am reading not just more books but better books.  I hope you will read Mockingbird.  It may not change your life but it will be an enjoyable read.  This is the review I posted after I read it for the first time.  


To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
5 stars

The best book I've ever read. I finished it and turned to the first page and started reading it over again. I want to see the movie, read the Cliff's Notes, download the study guides and tell every person I see today to stop what they're doing and sit down and read this book! 

It's not a "coming-of-age" novel or a "crime" tale, "a civil rights" saga or "loaded with Southern charm from a bygone age"; except that it is-it's all that and more and I want to read it over & over until I can recite pages of it and go to Alabama again and try to find Maycomb in every little town. I want to walk up to a man and gently say, "hey, Boo". Oh my Lord, this book is good!! 

Stop what you are doing and read it, right now.

4 stars. I really liked this book. Jackson Stein has given readers a brand new take on the familiar Dracula legend with the continuing saga of young Prince Vlad. In Dracula Reigns, the King is gone and Vlad eagerly awaits the Council of Elders to appoint him to the throne. Of course nothing is ever that easy as Vlad begins a journey with his brother Radu to save the kingdom all the while hiding a powerful secret.

There are several familiar characters from the first book (Dracula Rising) and some really interesting new characters that add to the story in unexpected ways. This is not a gory/horror/bloody book with vampires leaping about biting people all the time. There is blood and violence but it's more the kind of creepy scary that sneaks up on you so you leave the lights on all night! Stein wraps up a few plot points but has left some tantalizing loose ends dangling for the next book and I can't wait to read more. I received a copy of the book-the review is my own.

The Quick by Lauren Owen

I'm really struggling with my writing.  My reviews are getting some 'likes' on Amazon but I go back and read them and think "Yikes, did I say that?!!"  So I did two reviews for The Quick by Lauren Owen. One is the way I've been writing and the other I used more of a template idea to give more depth.  I like the second one better!

meh, 2 stars. Parts were GOOD but most of it was slooooooow. Too many characters and the action jumped around from different viewpoints with other snippets of narrative thrown in willy nilly. I can see the authors reasoning as these bits & pieces were to build the plot and carry the story but she was too heavy handed and vague to make it work. There was some blood but no really scary stuff. One nice subplot about the vampire and his 'lover' that was unexpected-it was so good it should have been a stand alone book of its own. This is Lauren Owen's first novel and it shows. Great story idea but I wish her editor had taken her more in hand and tightened this up into the book it should have been. I wanted to love this book but just...meh.

This is the one I really like-it's getting closer to where I want to be.


TITLE:  The Quick
AUTHOR:  Lauren Owen
RATING:  2 stars

I'm always a sucker for a good vampire novel and one that weighs in at 544 pages seemed just the ticket.

Set in the late 1800's, The Quick begins as the story of James Norbury.  He leaves the family estate and moves to London to pursue his literary career.  James meets various supernatural folk in the hidden paranormal world hiding in plain sight, including the creepy “Doctor Knife” and  then...not much happens.  Various vampiric activities, secret societies, rituals, some blood, some biting, a few killings, traces of humanity show through the fangs, no trace of humanity remains, coffins, sunlight, etc etc...ho hum.

I wanted so badly to love this book-the premise and first few chapters were wonderful:  a totally different twist on vampires.  Reminiscent of Anne Rice as we are drawn into a richly detailed world.  Lauren Owen has done a massive amount of research and the attention to every period detail shows.   She is so good at creating memorable characters and the book is chock full of both the familiar and a few originals to the genre.

Therein lies the problem I had with The Quick:  Lauren Owen is so good at CREATING memorable characters that the book was full of so many people appearing and disappearing on the canvas that the plot became secondary to the overwhelming array of intriguing characters.  Too many players/not enough stage.  I wish Owen would have tightened her story focus onto a smaller group and really let us get to know them.

I felt like she had so much invested in these people that she just HAD to get them all into the book.  The issue then becomes a large cast that is unwieldy to manipulate through the storyline.  The narrative becomes disjointed and when Owen tried to break the story apart into bits and pieces of other characters' viewpoints it only became more confusing.

The reader only gets the broadest descriptions so the story keeps moving, but I wanted to know much much more about the secondary players.  Doctor Knife in particular could have been given so much more back story and page time-he had the potential to be one of the scariest characters in a novel not written by Stephen King and Owen missed the opportunity.

It wasn't all bad, I did enjoy 'most' of the book when I could keep track of who was doing what and why.  The one thing I really enjoyed was the totally unexpected romance for James.  So well written and definitely NOT what I expect of the usual vampire books.  This story would have made a wonderful book all by itself, just exploring that plot with those two characters.

This is the first novel by Lauren Owen and I would like to see how she and her editors handle her next book, she is definitely on my must read list, at least once more.