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 As at the close of the Liveship Traders trilogy, the serpents have finally made it to Cassarick, where they are meant to hatch into dragons, but something is wrong. None of the serpents emerge as fully grown dragons, and none of them are capable of taking care of themselves. The dragons grow sick of waiting around, and the city grows sick of feeding them, so they agree to head north and try to find the ancient city of Kelsingra. With them goes Thymara, a girl heavily touched by the Rain Wilds and resented by her mother since birth, as well as other Rain Wilds children chosen to care for the dragons. Meanwhile, Alise, a Bingtown Trader’s wife deeply unhappy with her marriage, makes herself into a scholar of dragons and decides to go speak with them for herself.
Robin Hobb is one of my favorite fantasy authors and her worlds never cease to draw me in. We’re back in a familiar place here and I loved hearing more about it and the people in the Rain Wilds. She also draws fantastic characters. I felt so much for Alise and her struggles with her husband. There are many secrets floating around and she is clearly the most hurt by them. I wanted her to reassert her independence and remember who she was over the course of her journey. Thymara is hurt in different ways; she’s younger but has had to deal with parental and societal rejection throughout her entire life. Her father loves her and saved her from exposure as a baby, but her mother has always resented her for being so heavily touched by the Rain Wilds, unable to think of marriage or a normal life. As she embarks on this journey, she’s forced to confront the fact that her preconceptions about life may be wrong.
And there are the dragons, who have personalities of their own. Readers of previous series will be familiar with Tintaglia, but the stunted dragons are very interesting characters in their own right. They remember what it’s like to be dragons from their ancestral memories, but are incapable of behaving the way they know they should. That conflict is fantastically done.
The problem, however, is that not really all that much happens here. There is a whole lot of building up but not a lot of moving, and I fear fans of other fantasy novels might consider this one boring. Plus, it has no real plot of its own, no arc contained in this book, not even a cliffhanger at the end to mark the close. I can see why the second book is being released only a few months after, instead of the normal year, because to be honest readers would probably forget to buy the next one otherwise. It’s obviously only half a book for all its length and I have to admit that I hope the second volume will be a little more exciting. I’d suggest waiting and reading both of them together.
Robin Hobb is still an amazing author, though, and her works draw me in like almost nothing else. I’m very much looking forward to the next book in this duology. Fans of the series will love Dragon Keeper, but I think newcomers would be better starting off with her Six Duchies books.
I am an Amazon Associate. I received this book for free from the Amazon Vine program.
 In the Psy-changeling world, Psy attempt to deny themselves all emotions, becoming cold but completely logical. On the other hand, changelings turn into animals and are largely ruled by those emotions, accepting all of their people for who they are. Sascha Duncan has always struggled with being a Psy, unable to stop herself from feeling emotions. She has never come into her cardinal powers, either, and she knows she’s flawed, incapable of joining her mother in Psy government. When she launches a project with Lucas Hunter, a panther changeling, she realizes for the first time that there’s another world out there, and that perhaps it’s acceptable to feel. But with a changeling killer on the loose, how long will she have to feel?
I am of two minds about this book. Half of me loved it and the other half of me didn’t like it so much. Most importantly, I think, is the fact that I was really intrigued by the world. I tend to think that paranormal romance is mostly set in our world except the people in it are vampires/werewolves/fairies/whatever. This is totally different, it’s set in a completely different world. There are humans, but I don’t think there are any in this particular book. The Psy are all connected mentally, which I found to be quite an interesting concept and it worked extremely well within the context of the story. I definitely wanted to spend more time in this world. I liked the quest to catch the changeling killer. I didn’t think it took away from the romance at all even though it’s a fairly large part of the book. Rather, I enjoyed the way the storylines fit together.
It’s the romance that I didn’t like so much. While I didn’t particularly mind either of the main characters, I thought it moved way too fast and had far too many sexual scenes. It happens virtually every time the hero and heroine are alone. As we all know, I’m not really a fan of the lust = love romance, and so the first half of the book disappointed me in that way. By the end, though, I did think they’d grown past it and had been through enough together for me to “get over” the first half. Slave to Sensation definitely wasn’t as moving as it could have been.
Still, I think I’ll be reading more of Nalini Singh. I liked the world enough to continue this series and I think the author has a lot of potential. I also happen to have Angels’ Blood courtesy of Tasha at Heidenkind’s Hideaway, so I’ll be reading that next.
I am an Amazon Associate. I purchased this book.
 Nine-year-old Michele Amitrano and his friends have little to do one very hot summer besides explore the Italian countryside around them. When the leader of their little gang, Skull, forces Michele to go off on his own in an abandoned house after a forfeit, he makes a discovery that is destined to change his perception of his friends, family, and life itself.
The outside of this book promised that it would be scary, but it wasn’t at all in the way that I’d expected, and to be honest I vastly preferred what I got to what I expected. Rather than a scary book in superficial ways, this is a book about human nature, about a boy discovering what adults can do to other little boys just like him. Michele’s loss of his childhood innocence is totally heartbreaking, but riveting. I can understand why this book kept others up all night to find out what happens next. I myself read it in just one day. It’s a very absorbing read.
This is also a beautifully written book. I don’t know whether to give credit to the author or the translator, but I could feel the heat of that Italian summer, see the wheat fields and the abandoned farmhouse, just as I could see inside Michele’s realistically wrought child mind. Michele is almost unbelievably genuine, which of course only adds to the emotional impact of the book, especially the ending. He watches as the people he trusted turn out to be fallible, which everyone realizes eventually, but hardly in this way. And of course it isn’t only the adults he’s already wary of, but those he loves and trusts.
From the adults’ perspective, I think the novel shows the desperation people have to make their lives better. Apparently crimes of this type (I’m being vague, but I think it’s worth not knowing) are still commonplace, and that only makes it all sadder. They want to move to northern Italy, which is richer, but it seems they’ll do almost anything to achieve it. I was left wondering if it was worth the sacrifice, and perhaps glad that at least one of the adults may have finally realized the amount of harm he was doing.
I would definitely recommend I’m Not Scared to anyone with an interest in thoughtful thrillers. It’s a gripping read with strong emotional impact that will leave you considering what happened for days afterwards. I’m looking forward to my next book by Ammaniti.
I am an Amazon Associate. This book was sent to me for free by the publisher for review.
 The last white family on her street in Zimbabwe lives next to Lindiwe Bishop’s family. One night, the house catches on fire, killing one woman and badly injuring another. The culprit, teenager Ian McKenzie, is sent to prison for a year. Lindiwe is still fascinated by him, and astonished when, on his return a year later, he begins inviting her along for car rides. Spanning the 1980s and 90s, this is not only a book about Zimbabwe in transition, but about love that is surprisingly realistic.
At first, I found it surprisingly difficult to get into this book. I’m not very familiar with Zimbabwe’s history and apparently they just changed over from Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, and the characters carry a lot of angst about Independence and the fate of their country. I recognized the name of Robert Mugabe, but I couldn’t remember why. I was unfamiliar with all of the slang, too. So I had a few pages of wading through something I thought I was bound to dislike. But, of course, then I got used to the slang and figured out what everything meant, the characters stopped complaining so much about history and instead the history was described in the book so I could understand, and Lindiwe met Ian.
Typically the love story was what made this book for me. I don’t want to give too much away but it’s obvious that something is going to Happen between Lindiwe and Ian from the very start of the book when she keeps his picture from a newspaper clipping. It does, and it is really beautiful, but it’s also realistic. Sometimes love isn’t good enough, and they have struggles, but they had me cheering for them from the very beginning. Their relationship takes work, as does their relationship with another person who comes into the story a little later.
The transformation of Zimbabwe was also fascinating. Wikipedia told me what was going to happen in that respect, but seeing it through the characters’ eyes was totally different. The city of Lindiwe’s girlhood, with the rich houses well-kept and the main street full of delicious restaurants and places to play, becomes a poor ghost town by the time she becomes an adult. White people were once welcomed and then become scarce. Reading through the book gave me a real sense of the change that was happening and the frustration that the people of Zimbabwe felt.
I must also admit that I was quite pleased to see that Little, Brown chose to put Lindiwe on the cover instead of Ian. I know books for adults are probably less white-washed but it’s undeniably pleasing to see at least part of a gorgeous black woman when they could have chosen the white guy.
In the end, The Boy Next Door was a great book and I’m so glad I read it. I learned a little (the author grew up in Zimbabwe so I felt she probably knew what she was talking about) and I loved the story. I think knowing a little about Zimbabwe before starting is a good idea, though!
I am an Amazon Associate. I received this book from the publisher for free.
 Cassandra Mortmain wants to be a writer. She lives with her family in a castle, but they’re not rich. In fact, they’re desperately poor. Her father’s first novel, while critically acclaimed and taught at the most prestigious universities, was never followed by a second, and Cassandra is sure he doesn’t write any longer. Her beautiful sister Rose has no rich men around her to tempt into marriage. Her stepmother, Topaz, is loved by all of them, but is incredibly eccentric and rarely goes to London to be painted (her main way of earning money). As a writing exercise, Cassandra decides to write about her life in little journals, never suspecting that so soon after she begins, two men from America are to become their landlords and change their lives forever.
I’ve wanted to read this book for so long, since high school at least. I’m so glad I finally got the chance to read it, because it’s truly a charming book. Cassandra stands right out from the beginning as a fantastic narrator, drawing us in to her family’s life. Their poverty is distressing and does make the beginning of the book hard. The family is earning virtually negative money. Their servant of sorts, Stephen, who has never been paid wages, is the only employable person of all of them and thus takes a second job to support the people who are meant to be his employers. They eat mostly bread and tea, and can’t even afford real butter. I have to admit that I was worried the whole book was going to be like this, but it isn’t.
When Neil and Simon arrive, it becomes a coming-of-age story for Cassandra, who is only just growing up. It’s her slow awakening to adulthood – womanhood – that makes this book so poignant. While we’re not all poor, and we don’t all live in a castle (I doubt anyone reading this lives in a castle, although I wish I did), it is impossible for any woman to forget what it was to be a girl, when life was enchanting and new and simple. Cassandra emerges from the page as a person I’d have loved to be friends with. There is a point where games end and where adulthood begins, and Cassandra hits it here. Her narrative is sweet and honest and I’m so glad I read it. The ending wasn’t what I wanted, but I didn’t see anywhere else for it to go, not while remaining true to the characters.
I Capture the Castle is a book I know I will return to again and again in the future, and what higher recommendation can I give it than that?
I am an Amazon Associate. I purchased this book.
These are books 2, 3, and 4 in the Vampire Academy series. I reviewed the first one here.
I read all these right in a row, so it’s hard for me to differentiate them from each other. And it’s impossible to avoid spoilers. So I’m just mushing them all into one “thoughts” post, to remember what I thought about the series when the next one rolls around. For those who haven’t read them, I’ll just tell you that if you like YA boarding school stories with vampire romance, and don’t mind some diversions outside of the boarding school, this is a good series for you.
  
All of these books are from Rose’s viewpoint, with occasional peeks from her into Lissa’s head. I still liked Rose and I thought her relationship with the older Dimitri was sweet, but I have to admit that I thought her emotions were overwrought at times, especially in the last book, Blood Promise. She has loads of memories that we never saw in the first three books, except for the one time they had sex, and it kind of irritated me that we didn’t experience as much of their love story as I might have liked. If we had, maybe I wouldn’t have felt like she was being constantly dramatic, for all her talent as a master Strigoi killer. Her grief in Frostbite and the beginning of Shadow Kiss was more interesting.
I loved that Rose went to Russia and explored another part of the world that Mead created. I like the world and I felt like it became much more fully fleshed out in these three books. I liked that Rose’s mother showed up, and more than once, so we learn that there’s a reason behind this heroine’s absent-mother syndrome, and that her mother does love her. Rose and Lissa discover more about their shadow-kissed bond, and find other people who have it, too, as well as finding another spirit user. Since that’s been established, the fact that they might need to use spirit, as implied in the cliffhanger, doesn’t feel like a deus ex machina. The roots of all these problems were in the first book. Still, I had cause to wish the plots were tighter, especially in Shadow Kiss and Blood Promise. There is some purposeless rambling, and even more annoying one of the covers has a teaser line that isn’t answered until the last 100 pages of the book. I hate that, but it’s obviously not the author’s fault that the publisher is trying to make the book sound more exciting.
I do have to say that I really enjoyed this series. They were all very fast reads and I generally don’t mind cliffhangers when I have the next book right with me. I’m looking forward to the next one, but I’m not in a rush. I just hope that the series isn’t never-ending and doesn’t get longer and more dramatic with the next installment, but I will be reading it in May when it comes out.
I’m an Amazon Associate, I bought all these books.
 This is a collection of short stories set in Charles de Lint’s urban fantasy city of Newford. This city – I’ve always thought it was in Canada but I don’t recall ever actually reading that – has its fair share of the poor, the needy, and the ones who choose to take advantage of them, but it is also full of magic for those with the ability to embrace it, like artist Sophie who dreams another world into existence. Though these stories have all been published before and can be treated as separate entities, the book also works well as a collection with many of the same characters appearing over and over again.
My previous experience with Charles de Lint has been confined to The Onion Girl, which is set in this same city, and Moonheart, which is set elsewhere but still falls under an urban fantasy heading. I knew that Newford started out with short stories and I always wanted to start from the beginning. The Ivory and the Horn isn’t the beginning, but it was close enough for me when I got tired of waiting to be able to buy the first collection!
This is urban fantasy, but it’s a different kind of urban fantasy than the glut of books about badass heroines falling in love with/killing vampires/werewolves/etc which is currently dominating the market at the moment. Much as I do enjoy those books, I also really enjoy this, because I feel that Newford is very much a real city with a real city’s issues, even if its inhabitants transport themselves to other worlds on occasion. There is poverty here. There is murder that has nothing to do with blood-sucking. To me, this is more like real life with a fantasy edge, not a book that is fantasy with few touches of real life. The fantasy is so subtle in some of the stories that it could be explained away as a dream or delusion, until it’s confirmed by someone else.
De Lint’s fantasy has also always felt very natural to me. It’s bound up in what I imagine are Native American myths. Some of the characters transport themselves to a desert and speak with animal spirits, or perform magic that leaves behind bits of bone and grass. It always feels to me like it touches on what people actually believed was real at one point. It’s difficult to describe the essence of it, but I really like it.
I even liked the characters. Short stories are often a hard sell for me. I find it really hard to relate to anyone when they’re only around for thirty pages or so, and I don’t think the plot always can develop either. But here, because everyone pops up again and again, and similar issues are dealt with, and the city stays the same, I actually really appreciated the short story format. The stories kept my attention and I could get to know the characters as well as find out a new angle about their lives. It’s about a community.
I’m really anxious to read more Newford stories. I’m still not supposed to be buying books, but we’re halfway through February now and it’s almost March, when I can be a little freer with my purchases. So, recommendations – I fully intend to read Dreams Underfoot, but what else is excellent by de Lint? Let me know!
I am an Amazon Associate. I purchased this book, and I’m sorry I waited so long to read it!
 Laura thought she was destined for spinsterhood until Henry McAllan chose to make her his wife. What she didn’t bargain on was his desire to own land, and their move to a cotton farm a few years later with two small girls. Laura hates the farm, which she and her daughters christen Mudbound, and hates her father-in-law, who has no place to live but with them. When World War II ends, Henry’s brother Jamie comes to stay with the family, and so does Ronsel Jackson, the son of the sharecroppers nearby. Sharing the common bond of fighting men, Ronsel and Jamie become friends of a sort, in a way that no one in the South will tolerate for very long.
It’s hard to say I liked this book, but it was compelling and completely horrifying in parts. This is particularly so because most of the characters in the book are very racist. I know people genuinely thought like this when and where this book is set, but it bothers me and I can’t understand it (which, I suppose, is a good thing). I wanted all the characters to stop being close-minded, to think more like Jamie, who sees Ronsel as a person despite the color of his skin and respects the military achievements that he made.
The book rotates between viewpoints, giving us insight into all of the characters’ heads. We can witness Laura’s unhappiness, Henry’s land-lust, Jamie’s jitters and bad memories. Ronsel’s memories of war in Europe were for me the most affecting. He describes the difference it made in Europe when he was defined as a man, not as a black man; the wonder of having a white woman fall in love with him and everyone make him feel like he was valued. He had to be my favorite character and my heart broke for him over and over again, stuck in a racist town working on a farm where he’d never be appreciated the way he should have been.
Mudbound is a powerful and affecting book, but it won’t leave you happy. It will leave you unsettled and anxious to change the world, correct anyone who might still feel this way. It’s an evocative and moving picture of the American South, but I hope it has changed very much.
I am an Amazon Associate. I purchased this book.
 Melinda Sordino has a shameful secret that has changed her life. In one stroke, she lost her friends, her interests, and her sense of security. Going back to school after the fateful party when she called the cops is difficult. Melinda hardly speaks to anyone, not even her parents, and everyone in school judges her except a new girl that Melinda doesn’t even like all that much. Telling the truth about that night takes courage, and for that Melinda knows she will eventually have to speak.
This book was so affecting. It’s fairly easy to figure out what happened to Melinda, but that doesn’t make its impact any less heartbreaking. I’m only six years removed from high school and this book brought back just how painfully mean teenagers are to one another. Melinda’s friends disdain her simply because it isn’t cool to be seen with her anymore, not offering even the smallest kindnesses to her as a fellow human being. And her encounters with one person in particular made me very scared for her. Through it all, though, she retains a sardonic humor which made me hope that she would be okay, and see why people were her friends in the first place. I genuinely liked her, so when people reject her over and over I really hurt for her.
Something else I really liked about this YA novel was that Melinda’s parents were present. I didn’t know why they didn’t ask more often about why she didn’t speak to them, but they did at least notice her and had their place in her life. I feel like a lot of YA titles simply skip over parents and it was nice that Melinda’s actually existed.
I also enjoyed Anderson’s writing; I hadn’t read any books by her, but this one has persuaded me that I should get to more of them. The narrative covers an entire school year and since it’s just 200 pages, some time is skipped, but I never felt like I was missing anything. It all flowed naturally. The writing was occasionally choppy but fit well since we were in Melinda’s head.
I thought Speak was a great read. It brings to mind the difficulty many teens – and even older women – have when they are targeted like this. My heart broke for Melinda and I suspect yours will too.
I am an Amazon Associate. I purchased this book.
 Miss Beatrice Corning has lived a very proper life in the household of her uncle, the Earl of Blanchard. That is until a sick, crazy man bursts into their home, demanding to see his father. This man is Reynaud St. Aubin, the true Earl of Blanchard, long thought dead. Even though he is determined to take his inheritance back from her uncle, who has always loved her, Beatrice can’t help but be attracted to Reynaud, particularly since his youthful portrait has ensnared her imagination every time she walks by it. The man she discovers now is no longer a carefree youth but a hardened man who has suffered through unimaginable atrocities, yet her heart is captured before she even knows it.
I really enjoyed the first book I read by Elizabeth Hoyt, To Beguile a Beast. I liked that it was different, that the hero and heroine weren’t what I expected. Unfortunately I found the opposite in To Desire a Devil, and am left wondering just what happened here.
This quartet of novels centers around a massacre that happened while all four of the heroes were fighting in the Colonies. The one who betrayed them all supposedly had a French mother, and the only man there with a French mother was Reynaud. They know he didn’t do it, but they have to figure out who did. And that’s all wrapped up in this installment, as it’s the last of the quartet. It’s clear that this overarching story is secondary to the romance plot, but they do fit together, so that part worked out well. I also still really liked the fairy tale excerpts at the beginning and how the concept was woven into the rest of the story. And I loved that Beatrice was a bookbinder, even if she seemed a little too bland the rest of the time.
Honestly, it was the romance that bugged me about this book. This is, for me, a classic case of the lust = love problem. I can’t figure out anything that the hero and heroine have really in common and I didn’t believe in them. Maybe men fall in love with their nurses, but most of their interaction in the book seemed to consist of Beatrice asking Reynaud to tell her about how he was tortured, and the intimate parts. There were too many intimate parts for my liking, let me just say that. Outside of those, there wasn’t really any chemistry in their conversation and nothing to indicate that they were going to last. I just felt disappointed, which is sad, because there was a lot of potential here.
I have another book in this series and I do intend to read and review it, but let’s just say my expectations are very, very lowered.
I am an Amazon Associate. This book was sent to me for free by the publisher for review.
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