Monday, October 28, 2013


Boyfriend from Hell:
 
 

This book just didn’t live up to its competition in the urban fantasy genre.  I’m not going to lie, I’ve been in an urban fantasy mood lately so I thought this book would be perfect.  I have already kind of exhausted my favorite series and I needed something new.  But, that means that I had been reading books that I was guaranteed to love right before reading this one, so it had a lot to live up to. 

The story was okay – I think it was a bit convoluted and it just didn’t flow that well for me.  The concept itself, the daughters of Saturn having special powers, is great and I really enjoyed that.  Part of the problem was I wasn’t really sure what the author was going for.  Urban fantasies usually have a lot of humor, and it is often sarcastic or comes out of the absurd situations these characters find themselves in.  In my opinion, the best books allow humor to naturally appear in the banter of the characters.  In this book, the author was trying to add humor in the situations (examples: a woman who, when scared, spontaneously turns into a monkey, every time a daughter of Saturn sends someone to hell they get prettier) but it just came off as sad or confusing rather than funny to me. 

The characters were not particularly endearing to me, I liked ______ but that was pretty much it.  Even the main character didn’t speak to me (and I was really hoping to like her since there just aren’t that many books about law students out there). 

Overall, the book is okay.  I finished it with little trouble – but I was also able to put it down and forget about it for a couple of weeks with no problem.  If you are desperate for an urban fantasy series it will suffice, but there are much better books out there. 

 

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Books I am currently "reading":

Hush Hush (Becca Fitzpatrick)

Really not enjoying this one, but I am trying to force myself to finish it. 

Gravity (Melissa West)

I started it, got annoyed with less-than-intelligent characters and quite frankly was bored.  I'll finish it at some point, but I have zero legitimate desire to do so.  The hook is awesome though, I love the idea, but I wish the character's actions made more sense. 

Tiger's Curse (Colleen Houck)

I love the idea of the story (man cursed to be a tiger) but I wish the writing was better and less juvenile.  I realize that it is a YA book, but I still expected better writing quality, especially with such a beautiful cover!



Is anyone having better luck than me?  Please recommend something!  I need to break out of this reading funk. 

 

Partial Book Review: Hush Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick





I officially have a new least favorite book!  I actually haven’t even finished this one yet, but I wanted to start my review and list all the things that are really bugging me about this book.  If you haven’t heard of Hush Hush it may be because it is a bit of an older book, it was released in 2009 and the series has already concluded, but I normally prefer to read books once a series is over so I don’t have to deal with cliffhangers and waiting for the next book to be released.  I picked up Hush Hush because I first got the second in the series, Cresendo, at a used book sale and I ended up getting the actual book at Publix when it was the $5 copy released to celebrate the final book’s release, and it was 20% off. 

I didn’t know much about this book before I started reading.  I knew it had something to do with angels (after all, there is one on the cover), I knew it was a YA, and I knew it was immensely popular.  I am now more than half way through the book – I still have no idea what this book is about!

                There are so many things wrong with this book I don’t know where to start.  First off, the main character is Nora, she is defined as having all the characteristics that nice girls have.  Her best friend is Vee, and let’s just say that she is one of the worst best friends I have ever read about – and I read a lot of urban fantasy, best friends are very likely to stab you or try to eat you or often turn out to be demons in the books I read.  Vee essentially convinces Nora to do a lot of dumb things and at other times it feels as though Vee is just there to provide an alternate perspective. 

I really have so many issues with this book that I cannot think of any coherent way to describe them other than creating a list, so here we go: 

-          The story starts out with Nora getting a new lab partner – Patch.  Patch is annoying as heck and keeps annoying Nora in a way that would be considered sexual harassment in a working environment.  Despite the fact that he does this publically in front of the entire biology class, the teacher refuses Nora’s request to change partners . . . umm I’m pretty sure that if Patch were to attack Nora (which I’m sure we will see later on since I am currently reading the part where he chases her around a parking lot) that would mean that Nora (or her parents on her behalf) would be suing the school.  I love YA books, I understand that they have to work around the whole parents/teacher/authority figures thing sometimes to make the story work, but I feel that there are ways to do this realistically (see: Vampire Academy, Twilight, Percy Jackson, etc.).  

 

-          Nora makes no sense as a character to me.  At the beginning we are essentially told she is the quintessential nice girl – gets good grades, has a few good friends, is really pretty but doesn’t care, etc.  Yet we find out later that she has been skipping her meetings with the school psychiatrist.  Umm, how does that fit in with her original characterization?  I can she her skipping those meetings after going through some of the weird stuff in her life, but this was just one of those random things that was out of character and was generally unnecessary to move the plot along. 

 

-          Speaking of school psychiatrists, how is Nora (who is basically supposed to be playing the part of Nancy Drew in this book) not curious as to how the new school psychiatrist knows that Patch drove her home one night – when no one else knows!  This doesn’t bother her, yet she manages to create crazy theories based on no real evidence throughout the book. 

 

-          At some point, Nora feels as though she is being followed.  Vee does not believe her but decides that an appropriate action would be to put on Nora’s jacket (even though the two girls were described as being very different sizes and Vee should probably not have been able to fit into Nora’s jacket) and walk outside the store.  Nora is sure that she sees a female following Vee and long story short Vee is attacked and ends up in the hospital.  Now, we hear a lot from Nora’s point of view of how the attacker looks female to her.  But, after Nora goes to the library and reads an article about this guy that she knows and how he was questioned in the suicide of one of his old classmates (he recently transferred to Nora’s school) she decides that he must be the one who attacked Vee.  Meanwhile, Vee, who has been adamantly pushing Nora towards Patch, says that the attacker was more Patch sized and colored – therefore it must be Patch!  Have either one of these girls ever heard of logic?!? 

 

-          Also, Nora’s mom is one of the worst parents ever.  At least in Twilight (yes, I am using Twilight as a positive example – that is how frustrated with this book I am!) Charlie had good reasons for being absent, and Forks was known as being a safe town.  Here, Nora’s best friend just had to have a surgery done because she was attacked, as far as Nora’s mom knows – mugged, and yet, Nora is expected to walk home alone, in the dark, to her farmhouse (which is previously described as being really far out of the way from everything) by herself at night.  I understand that people work late – but this is really just too far out of reality, Nora’s mom is clearly not in a super high powered position. 

 

-          When did teenagers become so selfish?  Nora refrains from informing her mother that she called 911 because she thought someone was breaking into her house (also, seriously, the police didn’t call her mom themselves?) because her mom is thinking about selling the farmhouse to move somewhere cheaper so that she can be home more often.  Umm, last I checked most teenagers have enough common sense to be able to think critically about these situations.  I know when my family moved right before high school, and while I was in the middle of high school, I may not have liked it, but I was more than capable of understanding that my life/comfort/love for my house were not the number one priorities. 

 

-          I am half way through this book, and I still have no idea what it is about, why I should care about any of these characters – heck I don’t think any one of them has any redeeming qualities whatsoever.  I understand the author is trying to make some characters mysterious and all that, but you have to at least get me to like Nora and Patch and right now I kind of wish I could throw both of them off a cliff and be done with it. 

 

Okay, I think I am done ranting for now – I will probably put up another post when I actually finish the book (I just hate giving up on books, even when I hate them).  Right now, I am not seeing any redeeming qualities in this book, I’m hoping something good happens but I really don’t have high hopes at this point. 

Off Topic Post: Treatsie Box Review (October, 2013)

                So I finally got my first Treatsie Box in the mail! [If you don’t know, Treatsie is a subscription service, for $15 a month they send you unique artisan candy] I was so excited for this, I got home at 10:00 pm (MBA program – we have a lot of late nights) and the first thing I did was run to the mail box.  Now of course, the lights by the mail boxes in my community were out, so I was trying to juggle the junk mail in my hand, my mail key, the key to the package locker, and my cell phone (being used as a flashlight) in an effort to get this package out of the package locker.  


                My first impression of the box – it is really tiny.  I did a lot of research into this before I subscribed, seeing other people’s pictures did not prepare me for how small the box actually was.  I am a huge discount shopper – I like to get the best bang for my buck, so spending $15 on candy already was a huge challenge for me.  Seeing the size of my box made me super nervous.  I already knew what I was getting thanks to the Treatsie website, but again – pictures are really deceiving. 



(You can kind of see my coasters there for size reference)

                Inside I have two packages of toffee (almond toffee with milk chocolate and caramel corn toffee with milk chocolate) – both from Craftmade Toffee, a salted lavender caramel and a Thai peanut butter cup from Alma Chocolates, and a mini crispy crunch organic chocolate bar from Taza Chocolates.  Thus far I have tried the caramel corn toffee and the salted lavender caramel and they are both amazing – the toffee especially.  I usually don’t go for toffee in the candy aisle, but oh my gosh this stuff is amazing.  I know this company specializes in corporate gifts, and I can guarantee that anyone who receives these would be impressed.  The salted lavender caramel is also good, to me it has a really interesting after taste (not great, not bad – just interesting).  The first tastes I got were definitely a salted caramel, so I think the lavender really comes out more in the aftertaste.                 

                I was really nervous about the Thai peanut butter cup – I read the flavors online and I know there is coconut in it, I hate coconut in pretty much every form.  Just sniffing the cup, I could only really smell the dark chocolate.  After taking a bite, I really felt like I was eating a Thai curry, I know the coconut was there, but it was really a minor flavor.  The salty notes kind of took over and that really saved the chocolate for me.  The crispy crunch chocolate bar tastes great.  I’m not a huge organic eater, so I don’t know if organic chocolate really makes a difference, but I love darker chocolates (the darker the better as far as I am concerned), so this did taste great to me, the texture however was a bit grainy to me.  The almond crunch toffee had more ‘traditional’ toffee flavors to me, and it was also great – but not as much of a stand out at the caramel corn was. 

                Overall, I love what I received, but I am not sure that this box is really worth the $15 a month to me personally.  I love artisan candy – and I acknowledge that it is expensive.  But I am more used to boxes like Ipsy (www.ipsy.com) where you pay a certain amount, but the retail value of what you get is a lot higher than the price tag.  That makes it worth the monthly gamble for me.  In this case, what came in the box was (according to retail value)

-          Salted Lavender Caramel – $2.25 ($22.50 for ten)

-          Thai peanut butter cup - $2.25 ($22.50 for ten)

-          Crispy crunch bar - $2 ($10 for five mini bars)

-          Caramel corn toffee 2 oz package - $1.60 ($13 for an 8 oz. package)

-          Almond Toffee with milk chocolate 2 oz package - $1.60 ($13 for an 8.oz package)

Total retail value - $9.70

        Of course with this, particularly with candy you can take into account shipping.  I will say that they did a great job – we were told that boxes would ship out on Monday and I got mine by Wednesday.  Usually my Ipsy bag takes almost over a week and a half to get to me once it is shipped, but then again make up is less time sensitive in comparison to candy.  They were smart in their shipping though, I live in Florida so even though it is mid-October, we still hit the 80s during the day, and they did include cold packs in their package to keep the chocolate cool. 

          Overall, I think I will try this for one more month.  I’m not really sure if I received ‘my money’s worth’ this month (and I had super high hopes because Halloween is literally a holiday to celebrate candy!), but the products are great.  I’m not sure I can sustain this one for a long time, it is pricey for candy, and I am still in grad school.  But after I graduate this will probably become more of a monthly thing for me.  The nice thing is that there is no wait list and you can cancel online easily enough, so I think that it would be pretty easy to skip months by canceling and re-subscribing when I am ready. 

Sunday, July 1, 2012

Review: The Demon Lover




Goodreads Summary:
I gasped . . . or tried to. My mouth opened, but I couldn’t draw breath. . . . His lips, pearly wet, parted and he blew into my mouth. My lungs expanded beneath his weight. When I exhaled he sucked in my breath and his weight turned from cold marble into warm living flesh.

Since accepting a teaching position at remote Fairwick College in upstate New York, Callie McFay has experienced the same disturbingly erotic dream every night: A mist enters her bedroom, then takes the shape of a virile, seductive stranger who proceeds to ravish her in the most toe-curling, wholly satisfying ways possible. Perhaps these dreams are the result of writing her bestselling book, The Sex Lives of Demon Lovers. After all, Callie’s lifelong passion is the intersection of lurid fairy tales and Gothic literature—which is why she finds herself at Fairwick’s renowned folklore department, living in a once-stately Victorian house that, at first sight, seemed to call her name.

But Callie soon realizes that her dreams are alarmingly real. She has a demon lover—an incubus—and he will seduce her, pleasure her, and eventually suck the very life from her. Then Callie makes another startling discovery: He’s not the only mythical creature in Fairwick. As the tenured witches of the college and the resident fairies in the surrounding woods prepare to cast out the incubus, Callie must accomplish something infinitely more difficult—banishing this demon lover from her heart.

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My Review:

     I walked into this book expecting an urban fantasy with demon lore; it turned out to be more about fairies.  I really did like the beginning, but the story quickly began to lag.  The plot twists (who was draining the students, who Liam was) were all so obvious that it was hard for me to believe that the heroine didn’t see it coming.  The secondary characters were not fleshed out enough for me to really care about them.  Plus the plot seemed to disappear someone around the middle and I don’t feel as though there was a satisfactory conclusion.  

     There were a lot of little things that just did not make sense to me (like how a professor, even one who had a successful book, could afford several pairs of Christian Louboutin shoes, or how she knew that only a descendent of the witch who created a curse could remove it and yet she went straight to her grandmother to ask her to remove the curse even though she knew that she had magic and that she was a descendent of the original witch – she could have asked one of the other witches in Fairwick and been saved the trouble).  I also did not really understand why the character could love the incubus in his shadow form but not love him when he was a man made of flesh and blood.  

     I think that there were just too many side characters, even those who we did learn more about were not very compelling because we didn’t hear much more about them than where they came from.  The main character started to irritate me after a while because she started out as this calm, logical academic and then she turned into this woman who was just reacting to everything rather than taking action herself and her actions made very little sense to me.  Plus, I really don’t see how she could not realize that there was something wrong with Mara.  

     The ending was really unsatisfying, I understand that authors want to leave cliffhangers (and there are some who do it beautifully) but here I just felt as though a large portion of the book was spent setting up for the next book.  I understand that sometimes series need to have a transition book that will lead up to the next but this was the first in the series, it should have spent some time making me care about the overarching plotline and about the characters in the book.  I have no interest in reading the next book because I don’t care that much about the characters, and the plot was barely there and then was basically forced to continue by the last chapter.  (Also, as a side note, the book spent forever discussing Nikki’s curse, and then in the end she finds out that all she has to do is say a few words to Nikki and we don’t even get to see her remove the curse . . . what was the point in this?) 


P.S. – Regardless of how I felt about the actual book, I still love the cover – it is so pretty!

Friday, June 22, 2012

Review: Charade by Cambria Hebert

Goodreads Summary:
Dying at the hands of a psycho was a shock. Having my life returned to me by an angel was incredible. Being named a Supernatural Treasure and being given Sam as my guard was pretty darn awesome. Acquiring a debt for it all - well, I should have seen it coming. Now here we are, fighting demons from hell, caring for a boy that I just don't trust and traveling to faraway places to return a treasure to its rightful place. Nothing is as it seems. Everyone wears a mask, everyone puts on a charade. It's up to us to separate the truth from the lies and reality from fiction. A hard task when my new reality involves fallen angels, witches and dragons...and did I mention hell? Anchoring me down through it all is Sam. Sam who must face tragedies of his own and is put to the test again and again. If we fail in our task, life as we know it - life as you know it - will end. Forever.

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My review: 
4.5 stars

Charade was a really nice sequel, the characters were pretty well developed, I love the dynamic between Cole and Sam – especially now that Gemma has come around. I never liked Kimber so I was slightly annoyed by how much Heven wanted to trust her even though that was obviously not a good idea. The main characters were just flawed enough to be realistic and still likeable, I love that Sam wasn’t always Mr. Perfect, he screwed up sometimes and he was able to admit it and Heven was able to forgive him – often with minimal drama considering they had some other life or death situations to worry about at the time. Cole and Gemma were amazing secondary characters and they were honestly some of the best parts of the book for me.

Overall, the book was really good, it was not an oh-my-goodness-I-must-finish-reading-this-or-I-will-die book, but it was a great sequel and I honestly think that the author’s writing has improved. There is obviously going to be another book in the series and I cannot wait to find out what happens, I really do hope the characters get a well deserved happily ever after – I just wish I didn’t have to wait so long to read about it.